Page 34 of Reckless Bratva Daddy

"Everyone's a little nervous. Even the terrifying ones."

"I've spent half my life learning not to let anyone see it when I am." He caught my hand before it reached the second button and pressed it flat against his chest instead, where I could feel exactly how fast his heart was actually going, nothing at all like his voice. "So no. I'm terrified. I'd just rather you find out through my pulse than my face."

That undid something in me faster than anything he could have said out loud.

He laughed, low and real, the kind of laugh I felt more than heard, and then his mouth was on mine and every clever thing I might have said next dissolved somewhere behind my ribs. My apartment, in the dark, was a familiar shape around us, the bins on the shelf color-coded by category and somehow still spilling their contents onto the floor, three seating charts taped to the wall in a color scheme only I understood, a stack of mail I had been meaning to sort since the week I met him. None of it mattered. He walked me backward through it like he'd already memorized the layout, one hand at my waist, taking his time in a way that made the patience itself feel like the point.

"Bedroom," I managed, somewhere between a direction and a plea.

"I'm following your lead."

"You say that like you're not currently the one doing all the leading."

"I like watching you decide things." He said it against my jaw, quiet, like it cost him something to admit. "You do it so fast most of the time. I wanted to see what it looked like when you slowed down."

We made it to the bedroom eventually, though eventually turned out to mean several detours, a lamp I nearly knocked off the hallway table, a moment of us both laughing into each other's mouths when my shoulder caught the doorframe, one truly undignified stumble over a pair of shoes I had absolutely meant to put away days ago. Nothing about it was smooth or practiced, and that was somehow the best part, two people who usually had a plan for everything, discovering in real time that neither of us had one for this.

His shirt came off first, then mine, neither of us in any rush, his hands mapping me like he intended to remember every inch of it later, like he was building a file he planned to keep. I had spent three years being the most composed person in every room I walked into, the one who never lost her place on a checklist, and here I was losing every single thread of thought the moment his mouth found my collarbone.

"You've gone quiet," he said, echoing my own line back at me from the plane, and I felt the smile against my skin before I heard it in his voice.

"I'm processing."

"Take your time."

"That is exactly the problem. I don't currently have access to time. Or words. You've taken both."

"Good," he said, and meant it, and kissed me again until neither of us needed words for a while.

We fell onto the bed in a tangle of limbs and half-laughter, and for a long stretch after that there was no more banter, just his hands finding the places I hadn't known were waiting to be found, just the slow, deliberate honesty of two people finally done circling each other. He kissed me like the ballroom, like the kitchen table, like every careful, patient thing he had done since the morning he first set down a folding table exactly where I told him to, except now there was nothing careful left in it, only certainty. I gave him the same honesty back, every reflex I usually reached for, the joke, the deflection, the fast clever line, set down somewhere on the floor with the rest of our clothes.

It was somewhere in the middle of all that, his hand braced beside my head, mine tangled in his hair, that he went suddenly, comically still.

"What is a Worst Case notebook?"

I opened my eyes. He was looking past me at the nightstand, at the battered spiral notebook I kept there, fallen open to a page with WORST CASE written across the top in block letters, underlined twice, because a woman in my profession needed somewhere to write down every catastrophic scenario a wedding could produce before it produced one.

"Now? You're asking me this now?"

"I read labels. It's a compulsion."

"It's a notebook. For work. Every disaster I've ever imagined happening at an event, written down so my brain will stop imagining it at three in the morning." I pulled his face back down to mine, laughing despite myself, despite the fact that I was currently half undressed underneath the most powerful man in Chicago while he interrogated my stationery. "This is possibly the least romantic question anyone has ever asked me during a moment like this one."

"I disagree. I think it's an extremely important question."

"Dmitri."

"I need to know if I'm in it."

"You were the entire first chapter."

That got a real laugh out of him, rare and unguarded, his forehead dropping to my shoulder while his whole body shook with it, and something in me went soft and warm at the sound of it, at having been the one to put it there. "Good," he said again, once he'd recovered, his mouth finding my jaw, my throat, working steadily lower. "I'd hate to be a footnote."

"You're not a footnote. You're the whole appendix."

"That's oddly flattering, considering the source material."

"Everything I do is oddly flattering if you look at it from the right angle."