His shirt goes first. I yank at the hem with hands that have forgotten grace, forgotten every rational argument I've built over seven years. He pulls it over his head and I get my palms on his skin for the first time since I was twenty-one and stupid enough to believe in summer promises.
Hot. Solid. The body underneath the cashmere and the boardroom armor — mine to touch now, and my nails drag down his chest before my brain can file an objection. The sound he makes, low and cracked in his throat, shoots straight through me and lands somewhere I've been pretending doesn't exist.
His mouth finds that spot behind my ear. The one he mapped seven years ago, the one that turns my spine to liquid and my knees to suggestions. After seven years his body still knows the geography of mine better than I do. I should find that infuriating. My back hits the wall and I stop caring about should.
"Tell me to stop." Wrecked. Barely recognizable as the voice that commands boardrooms and negotiates eight-figure deals. "Mira. Tell me and I will."
"If you stop now, I will end you." My fingers dig into his shoulders. "And I mean that literally. They will find the body."
His laugh is dark and ragged against my neck. "Noted."
He lifts me. My legs wrap around his waist because my body has apparently been rehearsing this moment without my knowledge — muscle memory from a lifetime ago. His hands grip my thighs, my back leaves the wall, and we're moving toward the bed in a graceless stumble that knocks my stack of graded essays off the nightstand.
Midterm papers scatter across the floor. An entire semester's worth of Roman Empire analysis, fanning out under the bed where I am about to make the worst decision of my adult life with the man who ruined me for every other man on the planet.
The irony is not lost on me. The timing is just terrible.
My back hits the mattress and he follows me down — settling between my thighs, and the weight of him there, the pressure exactly where seven years of deprivation has made me desperate — my hips arch before I can stop them.
His fingers find my buttons. They're shaking.
This man who built a company from nothing. Who stares down hostile boards without blinking. Whose hands have never trembled signing contracts worth more than this house. His fingers can't manage a button because he's trying to undress me.
Seven years ago that tremor made me feel powerful. Tonight it cracks something open that I've spent years sealing shut.
"Having trouble?" My voice comes out steadier than I deserve.
"Your buttons are —" He fumbles the third one. "— deliberately antagonistic."
"It's a cotton shirt from Target. Not a safe."
"Then stop looking at me like that while I'm trying to —" The fourth button surrenders. His hands part the fabric and his breath catches so hard the room hears it.
Those mismatched eyes track down my body — one green, one amber in the moonlight — and the way he looks at me. Not like he's unwrapping something. Like he's standing in front of a door he never thought would open again, terrified it'll close.
"Don't." I pull him down before words can ruin this. "Don't say anything."
He doesn't. His mouth says it instead — tracing my collarbone, the curve of my breast, the dip of my stomach. A slow path that rewrites seven years of absence across my skin. When his mouth reaches my hip and his teeth graze the bone, my hand twists into his hair hard enough to hurt.
"I thought about this." His breath against my navel. "Every night. Building spreadsheets at two in the morning, restructuring deals, and all I could think about was this. You."
"Dominic —"
"Let me." His voice cracks on it. "Please. Let me."
When his mouth finds me — the real destination of that agonizing path — I stop thinking in any language I know. My body bows off the mattress, fingers in his hair, and the sounds I make should mortify me but mortification requires higher brain function and mine has officially clocked out.
He knows exactly what he's doing. Remembers exactly what I need — the pressure, the rhythm, that devastating thing with his tongue that I forgot existed and am now furious at the universe for letting me forget. I shatter fast, embarrassingly fast, my spine arching and his name tearing out of me in a voice I don't recognize.
He kisses his way back up. My skin vibrates under his mouth, aftershocks still rippling. When he settles over me again and I feel him — hard, insistent, exactly where I need him — my hips tilt in a language that doesn't require translation.
He pushes inside and we both stop breathing.
Seven years. Seven years of nothing, of no one. And now him — filling me completely, looking down at me with those cracked-open eyes while the moonlight turns us both into something the daylight won't recognize.
"Move." My fingernails leave half-moons in his shoulders. "Please, Dominic. Move."
He does. Slow at first — deep, devastating strokes that steal the air from the room. His forehead drops against mine and we share the same breath, the same desperate sounds. He pulls almost all the way out and slides back and I feel every inch of it, every nerve ending firing like I've been numb for seven years and this is what wakes the dead.
Then slow stops being enough. For either of us.
The headboard finds the wall. Neither of us cares. My nails drag down his back hard enough to mark and the sound he makes — my name, bitten off, pressed into my throat — is the sound of a man who's been holding everything together for seven years and just let go.
"Look at me." His hand cups my face. "Mira. Look at me."
I open my eyes. His are wild — not the CEO, not the golden boy, not the man who hides behind charm and expensive suits. Just him. Raw and terrified and wanting this so badly his whole body shakes with it.
I come apart with his eyes on mine. His name on my mouth like something I'm giving back after stealing it years ago. He follows — forehead pressed to mine, both of us shuddering, breathing each other in while the aftershocks roll through us in waves.
Silence. Just our breathing and the house settling its old bones around us.
His fingers trace my shoulder. My pulse slowly remembers its regular schedule. The midterm essays lie scattered on the floor — Hadrian's Wall and the Fall of Rome, spread beneath a bed where I just did the most reckless thing I've done since I was twenty-one.
"I forgot." My voice comes out raw. "How it could feel like that."
"I didn't." His mouth brushes my shoulder. "I never forgot a single thing about you."
Quiet stretches. His hand moves to my hip, drawing patterns I can't decode. When he speaks again his voice has shifted — that rough, post-sex openness that used to make me believe anything.
"I'm going to fix this." His thumb traces my jaw. "The debt. The house. All of it."
"Dominic —"
"I'm selling the car. The watches. Everything I own that I bought to prove something to people who don't matter." He holds my gaze with those mismatched eyes that my son inherited without permission. "I'll get us time with the bank. I'll find a way."
I want to dismantle the promise. Examine it for structural weaknesses, test it against his track record, do the due diligence my profession demands.
Instead I press my mouth against his chest, where his heart hammers against my lips.
"Okay." Barely a whisper. "I believe you."
In the dark, in his arms, with my graded essays on the floor and his heartbeat under my mouth — I let myself want it to be true. Just for tonight. Tomorrow I'll rebuild the walls.
Tomorrow he'll be gone before I wake up. A note on the pillow in his terrible handwriting, and the cold sheets will tell me everything his promises didn't.