Unscripted Seduction - Chapter 16
We were discussing your amateur psychoanalysis,’ he said.
Ama’s mouth curved. ‘No. We were discussing your masterpiece and your distressingly stubborn refusal to finish it.’
He almost smiled despite himself.
Almost.
Hours passed like that.
The storm never eased. It shifted and breathed and threw itself at the coast in waves, rattling the glass now and then, muttering through the dark while they talked through the script beat by beat. They moved from the emotional architecture to the turning points, from posthumous legacy to the son at the centre of it, that impossible man who kept pretending preserving the soul of his father’s work was practical when the real battle was always with memory and belonging and his
dead father’s shadow.
Ama was good.
That was putting it mildly.
She was incisive without preening, intelligent without performance, ruthless about emotional dishonesty but never careless with the material itself. She understood that the heroine wasn’t there to redeem the man but to force him into confrontation with himself. She understood that the love story couldn’t work unless the hero’s desire for the woman became tangled up with his fear of
what she represented.
Rootedness. Memory. Home. Claim.
At one point she stood by the windows, script in hand, watching the rain lash down in hard bright lines under the exterior lights.
‘It’s relentless,’ she murmured.
Damian, sprawled on the sofa with his shirt unbuttoned at the throat and a lowball glass turning slowly in his hand, looked over. ‘The storm?’
She glanced back at him. ‘This. All of it.’ Then her eyes moved to the pages. ‘The weather, the script…whatever this is between us tonight. It keeps circling the same pressure point. Why do I feel it won’t break until something gives?’
Something in his chest tightened.
Because she was right.
The script had been doing exactly that for weeks, worrying the same buried place, refusing to move forward until he admitted what it was really about. Grief. Anger. The humiliation of still wanting something from the dead. The brutal hope that love might reframe belonging instead of just exposing the lack of it.
And the storm outside had the same obstinacy.
As, increasingly, did whatever was happening with her.
He stood abruptly. ‘You need food.’
Ama blinked. ‘That sounded almost nurturing.’
‘Don’t be absurd. I’d just rather not contend with a fainting female, is all,’ he growled, already heading back towards the kitchen, and she followed because by then it seemed neither of them was capable of not following the other.
The midnight snack began as a practical gesture and turned, like everything else between them, into something charged and unnecessary and impossible to keep neat. He sliced bread, assembled prosciutto and sharp cheese and pungent guava with the exacting concentration of a man pretending he wasn’t aware of the woman leaning against his counter in his shirt-sleeves-softened kitchen, watching him with too much heat and too much understanding.
She stole a piece of fruit.
He caught her wrist, eyes glinting dangerously. Her breath caught. He released her. She took another anyway, defiance in the tilt of her chin.
The room was suddenly too small.
‘So that’s your strategy?’ he asked, voice low. ‘Eat my food and insult my process until I surrender?’
Ama took a bite, licked her lips slow enough to make his blood heat. ‘It’s worked rather well so far.’
He set the knife down and the sound against the board was very quiet. ‘Careful.’
She looked at him over the last bite. ‘There’s that word again.’
Neither of them moved for one stretched beat.
Then two.
Then she licked another trace of juice from her thumb and everything inside himt ightened to the point of insultingly needful pain.
When he crossed the space between them this time, there was no pretence left.
His hand fisted in the fabric at her waist and dragged her into him. Her breath left her in a soft, startled sound that went straight to his head and his cock. He kissed her before she could say anything maddening and she met him without hesitation, one hand flattening against his chest, the other sliding up into his hair as though she had been waiting for permission she had no business
wanting.
The kiss was worse than the first.
Or better.
Slower at first, almost drugging in its intensity, then hungrier as the restraint he had been clinging to all night fractured. He tasted whisky and coffee and the faint sweetness of fruit on her mouth. Felt the shift in her when she opened for him. Heard the small unguarded sound she made when his hand moved more possessively at her waist.
He broke away only long enough to look at her.
At her bruised and flushed lips, her breathing ragged, her eyes dark with a want that answered his too perfectly.
‘Tell me to stop,’ he said. It came out as a gruff command. The barest hint of a plea.
Her fingers tightened in his shirt. ‘No.’