For the length of one breath, standing at that window, I had everything.
I didn't go up alone.
I felt him before I heard him, the specific weight Ronan brought into a room, and then his reflection settled into the dark glass beside mine, big and still, watching me watch the sea.
"Your calls," I said.
"They'll keep." His voice dropped into the register he kept for when it was only us. "I came back and you were standing here looking like a woman who'd decided something."
"Maybe I have."
He turned me by the shoulder, slowly, leaving me every inch of room to stop it. I didn't stop him. On the worst night of my life he'd laid me out on his mother's rug and taken me apart with his mouth, then pulled my clothes back up my legs and refused the rest of me, because the first time he had me, he'd said, I was going to be clear. Clear enough to choose it with the whole of my mind. Not an escape from one.
"I'm clear," I said. "No grief tonight. No ghost behind my eyes. I know exactly what this is and exactly who you are." I flattened my hand on his chest, over the place where the thing he buried refused to stay buried. "So stop waiting. You've done a lifetime of it."
He kissed me like a man who'd held his breath since Chicago and was finally told he could let it out. There was none of the study's restraint in it, just his hand cradling the back of my skull and the other spread wide and certain at the base of my spine, walking me into him until there was no room left between us. I got both fists in his shirt and pulled, heard a seam give, didn't care.
"Upstairs," I said against his mouth.
"Upstairs."
We weren't quiet on the way, and I was done apologizing for noise. So when Tiernan looked up from the bottom of the stairs, tea towel still slung over his shoulder, and took in the pair of us, Ronan's hand fisted in the back of my dress and my mouth gone soft from his, he didn't pretend to misunderstand it.
He just grinned, slow and warm, the one that went all the way to his eyes.
"Well," he said. "Took the two of you long enough."
A week ago I'd have felt the old arithmetic kick in, the lifelong certainty that there was a catch, a cost, a line you weren't allowed to want past. It didn't come. What came instead was the thing he'd named over the eggs, the plain animal fact of awoman who'd gone hungry a long time looking at a full table and deciding, finally, to sit down.
"Are you coming up," I said, "or are you going to stand there being smug about it?"
"Pretty girl." He dropped the towel. "I can do both."
My room was warm from the fire Cormac kept laying in it like a habit he wouldn't put a name to, and the low gray light off the water came in across the bed. I had about three seconds of taking it in before there were hands on me from two directions and the last of my careful management went out of me for good.
Ronan got my dress off slowly, like he meant to keep the memory. Tiernan got it the rest of the way off fast, because that was Tiernan, and then there were two mouths on me at once, his at the back of my neck and working down my spine, Ronan's moving from my throat to my breasts. When Ronan closed his mouth over one nipple and drew on it while Tiernan's hand claimed the other, the sound that came out of me wasn't one I'd have admitted to in daylight. I felt them both go still for half a beat at it, the particular stillness of men who'd just heard a thing they intended to hear again, and again, until they had the whole map of it.
They took me apart between them, and I didn't reach for dignified.
Ronan laid me back and put his shoulders under my thighs and his mouth where he'd had it on the rug, except this time he didn't stop and draw my clothes back up. He licked into me slowly and deeply, no hurry in it, that same terrible patience he brought to everything, until my hips rolled up to meet him and my heels found the muscle of his back. Tiernan stretched out alongside me, propped on one elbow, watching my face like it was the only thing in the room worth watching. I turned to him blind and open-mouthed, and he kissed me through it, one handfisted in my hair and the other at my breast, working me in time with whatever Ronan was doing.
"There you are," he said against my jaw. "There's the one she keeps locked up under all the rest."
I reached for him without deciding to, got my hand around the hard length of him, and the rough sound he made was worth every guarded year. I stroked him slow while Ronan worked me. For a while there was nothing in the world but the two of them, my hand on one and my whole body arching into the other, the heat of being wanted from two directions at once burning through years of careful like it was paper.
I was climbing, close, when the door opened.
I knew it was Cormac before I lifted my head. The room changed temperature the way it did when he came into it. I expected him to leave. He didn't. I turned my face and found him just inside the door, one shoulder to the frame, taking in all of it. I was laid open between the other two with my hand around Tiernan and Ronan's mouth on me, and he didn't look away and he didn't come closer.
"Don't stop on my account," he said. Flat. Low. The most dangerous quiet in the house.
"Wasn't going to," Ronan said against me, and I felt the rumble of it everywhere.
So Cormac watched. He crossed to the chair by the fire and sat, forearms on his knees, every line of him strung tight around a want he'd decided one more time not to spend. Knowing he was there, that he wanted this and was holding the line by his fingernails, lit me up in a way I didn't expect and didn't question.
Ronan chose that second to close his lips around my clit and slide two thick fingers into me and curl them, and I broke, hard, my back coming off the bed, a cry tearing out of me that I didn't bother to swallow, because there was no one in this room I needed to hide from anymore.
"That's my girl," Tiernan murmured, riding me through it, his hand gentling on my breast. "That's it. Let them hear you."