Chapter Seventeen: Midnight Mischief & Awakenings
The room was a deep, velvety blue, the kind of dark that felt alive with silence. The city outside had finally stilled, its heartbeat a distant, low hum beyond the glass. The only sounds were the soft sigh of the central heating and the quiet, steady rhythm of his breathing beside me.
I was pretending to be asleep.
It was a ridiculous, transparent charade, but I clung to it like a life raft. The sheer, overwhelming heat of him was the problem. Not the temperature of the room—the air was cool against my face—but the radiant, sleep-warmed reality of Adrian Madden, my husband, lying less than an inch away.
Our first night had been a tender, stumbling map drawn in the dark. A journey of whispered questions and clumsy, breathtaking discoveries. We were, as we'd silently acknowledged, virgin fools. Poets in theory, fumbling apprentices in practice. It had been beautiful in its raw honesty, a fusion that left us breathless and clinging to each other in the aftershocks.
Now, in the deep quiet, the memory of that closeness was a live wire under my skin. And he was a furnace. The fine linen sheets did nothing to mute the warmth pouring from his body. I lay rigid on my side, facing away from him, every nerve ending screamingly aware of the dip of the mattress behind me, the faint scent of his skin on the pillow, the way his exhales stirred the hair at my nape.
I had mastered the art of the deep, even sleeper's breath. In… and out… slow… don't flutter your eyelids…
A shift in the darkness. The whisper of sheets.
His breath hitched, just slightly. He was awake too.
My heart, traitorous thing, began to pound a frantic tattoo against my ribs. I prayed he couldn't hear it. I prayed the bed wasn't shaking.
Then, the lightest touch. A single fingertip, tracing the line of my spine from the base of my neck, down over the thin cotton of my nightdress, to the dip of my waist. It was a feather's stroke, a question mark written on my skin.
I didn't move. Asleep, I am asleep.
He stilled. I could feel his gaze on the back of my head, a tangible weight in the dark.
The touch came again, bolder now. His whole hand, palm warm and slightly rough, smoothing over the curve of my hip. He shifted closer. The heat of his chest pressed against my shoulder blades, and a small, helpless sound caught in my throat. I disguised it as a sleepy sigh, burrowing my face deeper into the pillow.
A low, soft chuckle vibrated against my back. He'd heard. He knew.
"Arisha," he murmured, his voice thick with sleep and something else, something warm and intent.
I didn't answer. Asleep, asleep, asleep.
His lips found the sensitive spot where my neck met my shoulder. Not a kiss, but a press, warm and damp. Then another, along the slope. His hand on my hip slid around, his fingers splaying possessively over the flat of my stomach, pulling me back firmly against him. I felt every hard, heated line of him through the layers of fabric, and the last vestige of my pretended sleep shattered into a gasp.
"You're awake," he accused softly, his lips moving against my skin.
"You're… you're very warm," I whispered, my voice embarrassingly shaky.
"You're very soft," he countered, his hand flexing gently on my stomach. "And you were pretending. Badly."
"I wasn't—"
He silenced me by turning me onto my back, his body a welcome, heavy blanket as he settled over me, propped on his elbows. In the faint light from the window, I could see the glint of his eyes, the playful, mischievous curve of his mouth. He looked like a boy who'd found a secret cache of sweets.
"You're a terrible liar, Mrs. Madden. It's one of my favorite things about you."
"I was trying to be considerate," I breathed, my hands coming up to rest on his bare shoulders. His skin was hot silk over steel. "You need your rest."
"What I need," he said, lowering his head to brush his nose against mine, "is to kiss my wife. And I think she needs it, too." He dropped a soft, closed-mouth kiss on my lips. "Even if she's shy about admitting it."
He was doing it again—translating my flustered silence into a language he understood. And he wasn't wrong. The ache I'd been trying to ignore was a steady, throbbing pulse between my hips, a mirror to the reckless beat of my heart.
"I'm not shy," I whispered, the lie making me brave. I arched my back, just a little, pressing up into him.
He groaned, the sound pure, unadulterated male satisfaction. "Liar," he breathed, and then he kissed me properly.
This kiss was different from the slow exploration of our first night. This was hunger, pure and simple. It was midnight cravings and stolen confections. It was the movies we'd never seen together, the scenes we'd only imagined—all crashing into this dark, warm room. His tongue swept into my mouth, tasting of sleep and mint and him, and I met him with a boldness that surprised us both, my fingers tangling in his hair.
He broke the kiss, breathing heavily, and trailed his mouth down my jaw, my throat. "Tell me what you want," he rasped against my collarbone, his hands sliding the straps of my nightdress down my shoulders. "I'm new at this. I need a map."
"I don't have a map," I gasped as his mouth found a tender spot. "I just… I just know it's you."
He went utterly still for a moment, then lifted his head. In the dim light, his expression was devastatingly serious, all mischief gone. "It will always be me," he vowed, his voice raw. Then the smirk returned, softer now. "But tonight, let me be the one who… figures out the machinery."
What followed was a lesson in attentive, fumbling discovery. He was a quick study, fueled by a mix of instinct, whispered cues from my body, and what I suspect were hazy recollections from films he'd probably claimed to never watch. His touches were sometimes clumsy, sometimes breathtakingly precise. He'd pause, ask "Here?" in a ragged whisper, and when I'd nod or gasp, he'd commit the spot to a memory I knew was already being etched in stone.
When he finally slid my nightdress away and his own pajama bottoms joined it on the floor, there was no pretense of sleep, no shyness left. There was only dark and heat and him, moving over me, into me, with a reverence that belied our inexperience. It was less a rhythm and more a shared, breathless climb, a clumsy, perfect dance where we both led and followed.
After, as we lay tangled and spent, sweat cooling on our skin, he nuzzled into the curve of my neck. "I think," he panted, his voice filled with a dazed, triumphant wonder, "we're getting better at that."
A giddy laugh bubbled out of me, the sound foreign and free in the quiet room. I turned my head, finding his lips for a soft, lingering kiss. "We have a lifetime of practice ahead of us."
He grinned against my mouth, the mischievous spark back in his eyes. "Starting now?"
I shoved at his shoulder, but I was laughing, and I was already pulling him closer. Outside, the world was dark and still. Inside, we were two virgin fools, no longer fumbling in the dark, but joyfully, greedily, painting our own masterpiece on the canvas of the night.