Page 93 of Vow to Claim You

“I tried not to want you.” My eyes drop to her mouth and stay there. “I’m done trying. Now I’ll ruin anyone who tries to take you from me.”

Something gives way behind her eyes—the last wall, the one she’s kept between us longer than any of the others. The wind moves through the arches. The lanterns sway. The music plays on somewhere a hundred miles behind us. None of it reaches me. There’s only her, and the way she’s looking at me like she’s just understood something there’s no turning back from.

I lift my hand to her jaw and tilt her face up to mine. Her mouth is a breath from mine now.

“If I kiss you,” I murmur, “this stops being an arrangement.”

Her eyes darken with the want she’s fought for weeks to keep buried. “Good.”

That’s all the permission I need, and the chain breaks.

I take her mouth like I have weeks to answer for, because I do. There’s nothing careful left in me—the restraint I’ve worn since the altar, the nights I lay rigid on my side of the bed listening to her breathe and refusing to move. All of it goes at once, snapped clean as that heel.

She gasps against my lips, and I swallow the sound. Then her fingers fist in my jacket, hauling me closer instead of holding me off, and that—that—undoes whatever was left.

My hand slides from her jaw into her hair, cradling the back of her skull, angling her face toward mine so I can kiss her deeper. She gives it back with that same fire—heat and weeks of denial collapsing between us. My other arm bands around her waist and lifts her flush against me, off the cold stone. She comes willingly, a soft, broken sound catching in her throat. She tastes like champagne and something warmer underneath, something that’s only her.

I am a man who has spent his whole life controlling every breath he takes, and I cannot find a single reason to control this. Her hands climb to my jaw, my neck, into my hair, holding me to her like she’s afraid I’ll remember myself and pull back.

I won’t. I’m past it. Past the contract, past the cold, past every lesson my father ever beat into me about what caring costs a man.

Let it cost. I’ll pay it.

I kiss her until the music and the sea and the whole dangerous, gilded world of them goes silent, until there’s nothing in Palermo but her mouth on mine and her heart slamming against my chest—and only when she’s breathless, only when I feel her knees buckle and my arm catches her weight without either of us acknowledging it, do I finally, barely, ease back.

Just far enough to rest my forehead against hers. Both of us breathing as if we’ve run for our lives.

“Still think it’s an arrangement?” My voice is wrecked, but I don’t care.

Her eyes flutter open, dark and dazed and furious and wanting, all at once.

“Shut up, Aric,” she breathes.

And pulls me back down.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Ayanna

For a moment after he pulls away, I genuinely don’t know where we are. The music, the reception—all of it blurs to nothing. Like the world took a step back and left only the two of us on this terrace.

Aric Vold just kissed me.

Deliberately and unapologetically.

And the worst part is that I kissed him back.

My lips still hum where his were. My fingers are still curled into the front of his jacket, and I have to make myself uncurl them one at a time, as though that might somehow undo the rest of it.

It won’t. Some lines, once crossed, disappear behind you. There’s no turning back. I knew it the second his hand slid into my hair. I know it now, standing here trying to remember how to breathe like a woman who hasn’t just been thoroughly undone in front of half the criminal aristocracy of Europe.

“You’re speechless. That’s new,” Aric murmurs. He’s infuriatingly calm, as though he didn’t just dismantle the entire fragile architecture of our marriage with his mouth.

I drag my gaze up to his.

That’s a mistake, too. Up close, he’s all the things he’s always been—cold, controlled, those pale eyes steady on me. Except now I can see the strain in it. The control is still there, but something underneath has broken through, something hot and hungry that he can’t quite hide anymore.

“You kissed me,” I say.