Crash into Me (Heart of Stone #1)(27)
Author: K.M. Scott

His arm rested across my collarbone, and I bent my head to place a kiss on his wrist. I hoped he understood how much I loved hearing that I made him feel something good or special. Closing my eyes, I let myself enjoy his body pressed against mine and his strong arms around me. We sat so still the water stopped moving, as if we both wanted to stop time and just revel in this one moment. Finally, he sighed deeply and a tiny ripple slowly moved the water forward until it lapped against the front of the tub and the tops of our feet.

"I could sit here for the rest of time," he whispered in a faraway voice.

I brought his fingers to my mouth and kissed the fingertip of his forefinger, which had begun to wrinkle in the water. "I think you’d get all pruney."

He chuckled and kissed the top of my head again. "Then we’d be pruney together."

No matter how I tried to make the situation light and easy, he always brought it back right to center, right to the core of who he was. Either he said little and indicated less, or he spoke and made me want to forget everything else in the world but him.

He’d been right about the duck. It was delicious, and I did love it. I wondered if things happened the way he wanted them to simply out of his sheer desire to have them happen that way. Some people seemed to be able to manifest their desires like that. In the short time I’d known him, it had merely taken him expressing his wish for something to make it occur. Over and over, I’d seen him get what he wanted, but I couldn’t say it was due to power or manipulation.

Life just seemed to give him what he desired.

And what he desired that night was me. We’d barely pushed aside the plates when his mouth was on mine, urging me to meet his passion with my own. My body was thrilled, but my mind found his changeable ways confusing. As we’d eaten, he’d said no more than five words, acting more like my boss than my lover. When I expressed how much I liked the duck, he merely smiled, saying nothing in return and continuing to eat. Then, like someone had turned on a light inside him, he looked over at me and he was that man who couldn’t get enough of me again.

He led me over to stand in front of the floor to ceiling windows in the living room, and the view of the city below took my breath away. I stood just inches away from the wall of glass, my usual fear of heights pushed aside by the beauty of what lay before my eyes. High above Manhattan, the entire city seemed to be laid out in all its glory. "It’s gorgeous, Tristan. It must be impossible to get to sleep knowing this is here all for you to see every night."

His arms held me tight, and he looked up from kissing my neck. "I never look at it, to be honest."

Turning in his hold, I said, "How can you not? It’s so stunning."

He kissed me on the lips and pushed my hair behind my ear. "I don’t have the artistic eye like you do. It just seems like a million little ants scurrying around to me."

I traced a line from his Adam’s Apple to the hollow right above his sternum, drawing circles in that place where his skin was so soft. His pulse beat lightly under the skin, and I stared at the gentle throbbing against my fingertip. "Everyone has the ability to see beauty. It’s just a matter of letting it in. There’s beauty in everything. That’s art."

"I doubt that."

I looked up, intent on proving I was right. "Do you see where my finger is? Just under the skin is evidence of your heart beating. It’s just a tiny pulsation, but it’s beautiful."

"And this is art?" he asked, not convinced.

"What’s more beautiful than the beating of the human heart?"

He took my finger from his neck and kissed it. "I knew it from the first time I saw you. There’s something special in you, something light and good that drew me to you."

His words made me blush, and I felt my cheeks warm. No one had ever spoken to me like this before, and to have someone who could have anyone in the world as he could say this to me was thrilling and overwhelming at the same time. My emotions became jumbled again, and before I knew it, words were spilling out of my mouth letting him know everything in my heart.

"When you talk like this, I think that you might truly care for me. Do you know that? Then I let myself believe it and you turn off your feelings as quickly as they came on. I’m not like that. My feelings don’t turn off, even when I wish they would."

"I love that you don’t try to censor how you feel, Nina. It’s one of the things that makes you so incredible."

His compliment was genuine, but it didn’t help.

"I want to be able to censor them, though. I want to be able to do what you do. I want to be able to stand next to you and not want to touch you, like you can do with me."

A tiny look of sadness crossed his face for just a moment and then it was gone.

"You wouldn’t be who you are if you repressed your feelings."

"How do you do it, Tristan? How do you control what your emotions do to you?"

He leaned down and kissed me softly on the lips. "I told you. This is how I must be. It’s who I am. Can you live with that?"

"Can you promise me I’ll always know what’s in your heart, no matter what?" I asked, laying bare my fears for the first time.

Cradling my face in his hands, he pressed his forehead to mine and whispered, "No matter what you see on the outside, no matter what I say, what’s in my heart will always be just what’s there at this moment. You."

He took me there, in front of those windows—in front of the entire city—my body pressed up against the glass as he thrust into me again and again. I clung to him, first to calm my fears that I’d fall through the glass and plummet to the street below and then for the very happiness only he could give me. His hands held me to him, protecting me as he invaded my body with his cock and my heart with his words so passionate I would have believed them even if they were blatant lies.

We laid on the floor near where we’d made love, his hands worshipping my body as I tried to force my heart to harden over for the next time he shut off his feelings. I’d accepted who he was. Now I needed to accept who I’d have to become to love him.

Chapter Ten

I was sorry to see our time at Tristan’s penthouse end. We hadn’t done much except make love and eat, and I couldn’t remember a weekend I’d enjoyed more. We’d talked about so many things, yet I didn’t believe I knew him any better after all those words between us. In truth, he’d gotten me to speak more than he had, but as he’d hung on every word, I felt safe and opened up about my past. My tales of life in a small Pennsylvania town seemed to enchant him, so I’d told him likely more than anyone would like to know about growing up as the younger daughter of a father who was a writer. By Sunday night we were back in the country, me in my part of the house and him in his until night when I once again slept next to him. As always, he was gone when I awoke the next morning, and there was a note waiting for me.