Chapter 4

Gwen:

"You look like you're going to war," Riley said from the chair by Josie's bed.

"Maybe I am." I checked the mirror one more time.

This was one of the small merits of the private ward that it had an actual mirror. I turned slightly to check the back of the dress. Black lace over a nude slip, the lace doing the work of covering what it wanted to cover and suggesting everything it didn't.

I had bought it two years ago for a work dinner which Cole made me cancel at the last minute. It had been hanging in the back of the closet ever since, still in the bag.

I figured today was appropriate.

"Mama looks pretty," Josie said seriously, from the bed.

"Mama looks dangerous," Riley corrected, and grinned at me.

Riley had been my best friend since we were eighteen and she always told me the truth whether it was convenient or not.

"Which is exactly right. Go."

I picked up my coat and the folder from the bedside table.

"I'll be back before you notice."

Riley waved me off while Josie didn't look up from the bear.

Holt Holdings occupied the top four floors of a building with black marble floors that swallowed sound. Ceilings high enough to make the air feel different. A reception desk that was less a desk than a declaration.

The woman behind it looked up when I approached and clocked me in the practiced way receptionists measured, sorting and deciding.

"I'm here for Mr. Holt," I said.

"Do you have an appointment?"

"No."

She was already reaching for a practiced smile, the kind designed to redirect without engaging.

"Mr. Holt's schedule is, "

"Tell him Gwendolyn Rivers is here." I said it pleasantly, my hands loose at my sides.

My voice carried just enough that the two people nearest to us glanced over.

"He'll want to know."

She paused and then decided to pick up the phone.

I watched her face while she spoke into it and also saw the slight shift, the adjustment, something she hadn't expected coming down the line from the other end. She set the phone down and looked at me with a different expression than the one she'd started with.

"He'll be right out."

He was.

The office doors opened and Xavier walked through them. The air in the lobby went slightly still, the way it did near something like a black hole.

Six years had not reduced him. If anything they had done the opposite.

He saw me, paused for exactly one second. Then he came forward and without a word lifted my coat off my shoulders and handed it to the secretary ehind me, before his hand came to the small of my back and stayed there, warm and certain. Then he walked me through the doors.

I kept my chin level and made sure he did not feel me adjust to the touch.

His office was floor-to-ceiling glass on two sides with the city sitting behind it like something he owned, which perhaps he did, who knows or maybe close enough to make no difference.

There was a long couch in black leather, a desk that held almost nothing on it and the space looked like it was designed by someone who understood that emptiness communicated power more effectively than abundance.

He gestured to the couch but I decided not to sit.

Since I didn't sit, he decided to walk to the windows instead, hands clasped behind his back, looking out at the skyline the way men like him looked at cities not as places people lived, but as systems to be understood and moved within.

The type of billionaire brooding you would see on TV shows.

"Why are you here, Gwen?" His voice was even and stern, not unfriendly.

I crossed the room, walking slowly, straight and surely not looking away from the line of his shoulders as I covered the distance between us.

When I reached him I put two fingers lightly against his back, a tap, barely anything and he turned.

I held out the folder for him to take. He opened it and read, his face giving nothing away, not even surprise or satisfaction, nothing that would tell me what was happening behind those eyes.

But I knew what was in the folder. The signed final decree. The judge's stamp. My name, free from Cole Holt printed in clean black ink on government paper.

The divorce was done.

We were close enough that I could feel the warmth of him, could see the exact moment his eyes finished the last line and lifted to mine.

"It's done," I said quietly.

"I'm all yours." I said warmly, making something move through his expression.

It was fast, contained, but there. His jaw shifted once.

"Do you want this?" he asked.

I answered him the way the question deserved to be answered.

I reached up, curled my fingers into the lapel of his jacket, rose onto my toes, and let my lips lock unto his, tasting his lips.

For one beat he was still, a single second of perfect stillness and then his hands found me and he kissed me back like a man who had been patient for a very long time and had just decided he was finished being patient.

His tongue swirled around mine, invading the back of my throat, coming back out, wrestling my tongue and his lips sucking on mine.

His arm came around my waist and pulled me flush against him and the kiss turned into something with weight and heat and an edge that made my brain go briefly, blessedly quiet.

When I pulled back, his hands stayed.

"We should get married." My fingers were in his hair.

I could feel his chest moving, the controlled rhythm of it, the effort of that control.

"Properly. Not just an announcement."

He looked at me. His thumb traced a slow line along my waist and I felt it through the lace like it was moving against skin.

Then he bent and lifted me and my legs went around him without being asked and he kissed me again even harder this time, the kind of kiss that was also a conversation about what came next. A wet sloppy kiss that almost mirrored the kind of pool that was forming in between my legs.

And when he broke it, his mouth was at my ear and his voice was low enough that it seemed to come from inside my own chest.

"After today," he said,

"There is no going back on your word."

I pulled back just enough to look at him.

"Take me here," I begged.

He carried me to the couch.

He set me down and reached somewhere behind him and the floor-to-ceiling windows went dark.

frosted glass, a remote on the side table, the city disappearing behind a wall of white and then his hands came to my shoulders and he began to peel the lace from my skin with a deliberateness that was almost unbearable, making sure the lace grazed every part of my body sensitively from my breasts to my erect nipples, my hips and finally off my legs.

He took his time.

Six years of marriage to Cole had taught me what it felt like to be a body that someone was using. A thing to be gotten through.

I had learned to go somewhere else in my head, somewhere quieter and further away, and wait for it to be finished.

Xavier did not let me go anywhere.

Every time my focus drifted he found me again, hands caressed my breasts like they had memorized a map and were making sure the territory still matched.

His mouth, warm against my collarbone, my neck and earlobes and his voice low and unhurried asking questions.

“Do you like that I am pressing your nipples?”

“Yes!” I moaned through the pleasure.

“I want them harder!”

“I have something else for you.”

He removed his shirt and pants all the while locking eyes with me. His pants dropped freeing his hard throbbing erection.

he moved over me and began to use his dick to stroke my pussy in a circular motion.

I had forgotten what that felt like. The simple, devastating thing of being seen.

Then he gently let his dick fill up my pussy until he couldn't go any further. I whimpered.

“Easy, you will need your strength when I am done.”

Then he started to move, slowly at first, thrust after thrust then he built up speed and started ramming the entrance of my womb.

“Fuck! Fuck! I am close!”

I felt it come apart, something I had held braced inside myself for years.

“Fuck! Fuck!” The sound I made surprised me, surprised both of us.

I squirted heavily, pouring all over his dick and the floor.

His forehead came down to rest against mine and he slowed and kept going slowly until I felt his dick throb and release inside me. He groaned and finally stopped plunging into me.

I felt tears catch behind my eyes from something that had nothing to do with sadness.

Afterward I lay against his chest in the dim quiet of the office, the city invisible behind frosted glass, his heartbeat steady under my ear.

His hand moved through my hair, slowly.

"Gwen."

"Don't." I closed my eyes.

"Not yet. Give me a minute."

He did.

In here there was only the sound of him breathing and the warmth of his skin and the folder sitting on the desk with its government stamp and my name, clean and unattached and finally, finally only mine.

I walked into this office today as Gwen Rivers.

I was leaving as something else.

Something I had been before Cole, before the forced vows, before five years of being a wound aimed at another man.

Xavier's thumb traced my temple gentle.

I let it.