ONE NIGHT OF FIRE

(Daniel’s POV)

I had rules.

No unnecessary attachments. No emotional entanglements. No situations I couldn't control and exit cleanly.

I had broken every single one of them in the last three hours.

The elevator doors opened directly into my penthouse suite, and Rosa stepped inside ahead of me. She stopped at the windows. The entire Vegas Strip spread out below us, and she stood in the middle of it looking like something that didn't belong in my world at all.

She was still half-wearing her wedding dress under the borrowed jacket. The woman had married two men today. One who ran. One who should have.

She turned around.

"This is really happening," she whispered.

Something about the way she said it cut through the last layer of whiskey and logic I had left.

I crossed the room and framed her face in my hands. Her skin was warm. Her brown eyes were steady, burning, completely unafraid despite everything they'd seen today.

"Do you want it to?" I asked.

"Yes." No pause. No performance. Just yes.

I kissed her.

Slow at first. Careful. Tasting tequila and something underneath it, something sweeter, something that had no business being there. Rosa made a small sound against my mouth and pressed into me, and the careful part lasted about four more seconds before it didn't.

My control, maintained at considerable cost for thirty-four years, started coming apart.

Her fingers found my suit jacket, pushed at it. I helped, shrugging it off, letting it hit the floor without caring where it landed.

I worked my shirt buttons while Rosa watched with her lips parted, and something about being watched by her felt different from anything I'd experienced before.

When my shirt joined the jacket, she put her hands on my chest. Exploring.

"You're so controlled," she murmured. "Even now."

"Not for long." My voice came out rougher than I intended.

I turned her gently, found the zipper at the back of her dress. I slid the zipper down slowly, feeling the fabric loosen, watching it pool around her feet like a surrender.

She stood with her back to me in white lace, and my breath left my body.

I pressed my lips to her shoulder. Trailed up along the curve of her neck. Rosa's head fell back against my chest and she exhaled like she'd been holding that breath all day.

"Daniel—"

"Tell me what you want," I said against her skin.

She turned in my arms. Her eyes met mine, and whatever she found there must have been enough because she didn't hesitate.

"I want to forget today," she said. "I want to stop feeling like something people throw away." Her hand pressed flat against my chest, right over my heart. "Make me feel real. Make me feel like I matter."

I had never wanted to give anyone anything as much as I wanted to give her that.

I lifted her. She was light in a way that made something protective twist in my chest, and I carried her to the bed and laid her down on black silk sheets and just looked at her for a moment, this chaotic, warm, furious, broken, beautiful stranger who was, by every legal definition, my wife.

Rosa reached up and pulled me down.

After that, there was no more thinking.

Her kisses turned urgent. My hands learned her, the curve of her waist, the softness of her thighs, the way she shivered when I found the places that made her gasp.

When I unhooked her bra and took her into my mouth she arched off the bed hard, fingers twisting into my hair.

"Don't stop," she breathed. "Please don't stop."

I had no intention of stopping.

I had been with women before.

But this was different.

Every sound Rosa made felt like it was happening inside my chest. Every time her body responded to my hands, my mouth, my name on her lips.

When I settled between her thighs and tasted her, she came apart completely. Loud and unguarded and completely unashamed of it.

She pulled me back up, kissed me deep, and her hands worked my belt with more coordination than she had any right to after that much tequila.

"Condom," she whispered.

I knew. I knew I needed to get one. My wallet was fifteen feet away and my brain was aware of that fact.

But Rosa was pulling me closer. Her legs wrapped around my hips, warm and deliberate.

"We shouldn't—" I started.

"I don't care." Her eyes held mine. Dark and certain. "I want to feel everything tonight. No barriers. Just this." Her hand pressed my jaw, turning my face fully toward her. "Please, Daniel."

I was lost.

I had built thirty-four years of walls and she had walked through all of them in four hours while wearing a wedding dress and smelling like tequila and I was completely, catastrophically lost.

When I pushed inside her, the world went quiet.

She was perfect. She fit against me like something I hadn't known I was missing.

"Oh God," she breathed, and her nails raked down my back, and I moved.

We found a rhythm that built and built, her body meeting mine, her voice breaking on my name, and for the first time in my life I understood what people meant when they said they lost themselves in someone.

I pressed my face into her neck and breathed her in. This warmth, this connection, this woman who asked for nothing but realness and somehow got it out of me in a single night when no one had managed it in thirty-four years.

When she came the second time she cried out so completely that I followed without meaning to, the release hitting me like a train on full speed.

We collapsed together, breathing hard, tangled in silk.

Rosa traced patterns on my chest with one finger. Lazy circles. Like she was drawing something only she could see.

"That was—" She stopped.

"Yeah," I said.

I had no other words either.

She yawned. Her eyes fluttered. The tequila and the exhaustion and the full devastating weight of her day were pulling her under, and I watched it happen, the moment her face let everything go and went soft and unguarded and at peace.

I should have moved. Should have put the distance back between us.

I didn't move. I tucked her closer and she settled against me like she'd always slept there, and I stared at the ceiling while the Vegas lights shifted slowly across the room.

At some point I found my sketchbook. I had carried one since I was twelve years old, the one habit my father had never managed to beat out of me. I sat beside her sleeping form and I drew her, the line of her jaw, her hand relaxed against the pillow, the way her hair fell across her face. I drew for hours. I didn't question it.

Dawn came in gray and quiet.

I looked at what I'd drawn. Page after page of her, this woman I had known for one night.

This could not continue. She was a stranger. Last night was tequila and recklessness and one night of feeling something real, and real things were exactly what I could not afford.

I knew what happened to people who loved someone in my world. I had watched it happen to my mother.

I found hotel stationery.

Annulment papers will be couriered. – D. Gosling.

I set it on the nightstand beside the cheap chapel ring and her phone.

I dressed in silence. Picked up my sketchbook. Took one last look at her sleeping, her chest rising and falling, one hand still reaching toward the space where I had been.

I'm sorry, I thought. For what, I couldn't have said exactly.

For last night. For leaving. For the fact that I already knew the sketchbook pages I'd filled were going into my safe the moment I got back to New York. That I would take them out and look at them in weak moments and hate myself for it.

I closed the door quietly behind me.

I walked to the elevator, pressed the button, and stood very still while it descended.

I had done the right thing. The logical thing.

So why did it feel like I had just left something in that room that I was never going to get back?