I stood on my tiptoes and kissed him, opening my mouth and seeking his tongue with my own. Owen kissed me back, holding me tight. My fingers started to roam down his chest, but he caught my hands, brought them up to his lips, and kissed the spider rune scar branded into each of my palms.
“No funny business,” he teased. “Not yet anyway. I spent way too much time cooking dinner for it to go to waste.”
I peeked around his broad shoulder at the take-out containers stacked by the trash can in the corner. “Really? Because those containers make it look like the fine folks at Underwood’s spent way too much time cooking dinner.”
Owen laughed. “Okay, okay, you got me. But I did painstakingly reheat everything.”
I clasped his hands to my heart and batted my eyelashes at him. “My hero.”
He laughed again and pulled me over to the table. We sat down on the pillows on the floor and dug into our meal. Underwood’s was the most expensive restaurant in the city, and the food matched its excellent reputation. The steak, mashed potatoes, and garden salad might have been simple dishes, but they’d been made with the very best ingredients, elevating them to new heights. And the cheesecake was a chocolate dream, melting in my mouth bite after sinfully rich bite, along with the tart, refreshing bursts of the raspberries.
After dinner, we lay down on the pillows on the floor, Owen with his arm around my shoulder and me with my head on his chest, and I told him everything that had happened at the Rivera estate, including Damian’s dig at Tucker about his feelings for my mother. I’d gotten over my initial shock and denial, and Owen was the perfect person, the perfect sounding board, to help me work through all my turbulent feelings about the startling revelation.
“Hugh Tucker and your mother?” Owen asked. “You really think they were an item way back when?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember Eira ever mentioning him, not even in passing. The only memory I have of them together is when Tucker threatened her in her office the night of her last Christmas party.”
Ever since I’d found out about the Circle, I’d been desperately trying to remember every single thing I could about my mother, searching my mind for the smallest, faintest images of her face, smile, laugh, words. The memory of Tucker threatening Eira had bubbled up to the surface of my brain a few weeks ago when I was sleeping, dreaming, as did so many of the bad things in my past.
“Maybe you’ll remember more about them,” Owen said. “Or at least about your mom.”
“I hope so. I still don’t know what she did for the Circle or why they had her killed.”
My gray gaze drifted up to a series of framed drawings behind the candles on the mantel. I focused on the first drawing, of a snowflake, my mother Eira Snow’s rune, the symbol for icy calm. Her matching pendant was draped over the frame, and the flickering candlelight made the silverstone snowflake necklace gleam as though it had just been freshly minted. The pain of her loss knifed through my heart, as it had a thousand times before, still as sharp and bright as her rune pendant, along with equally strong stabs of cold rage and icy determination.
“If my mother and Tucker were involved at some point . . .” My voice trailed off for a moment. “Well, that just makes me even more determined to kill him.”
“Why is that?”
I propped myself up on my elbow so that I could look at Owen. “Let’s say that Tucker had feelings for my mom, cared about her in some way, like Rivera claimed. Let’s say that Tucker even loved her at one point.”
“Okay . . .” Owen said, not quite sure where I was going with this.
“Then why didn’t he help her? Why didn’t he warn her that his boss wanted her dead and was sending Mab Monroe to do the job? Why didn’t he fucking save her?”
My voice cracked on the last few words, and I had to blink back the tears suddenly stinging my eyes. My heart ached and ached, each beat bringing a fresh wave of loss and longing with it, as though I were stabbing myself in the chest over and over again with one of my own knives.
“Oh, Gin,” Owen whispered, sympathy filling his face. “I’m sorry. So sorry.”
I shook my head. “It’s not your fault. It’s his fault. And I’m going to make him pay for it—all of it.”
“I know you will,” he whispered again. “I know you will.”
Owen pressed his lips to mine in a sweet, comforting kiss, and I slowly lost myself in him. I couldn’t do anything about Hugh Tucker tonight, and I didn’t want to waste another second of my time with Owen thinking about the past.
So I focused on the man I loved, on the feel of his lips against mine, the warm brush of his breath on my face, the faint taste of chocolate and raspberries that lingered on his tongue from the cheesecake we’d eaten. I concentrated on each sensation, along with the slow slide of his hands up and down my back, until my heartache and rage faded away, melted by the growing heat between us.
We finally broke apart, and I nuzzled my nose up against his. “So . . . think we can finally get down to that funny business now?”
Owen laughed, his violet eyes gleaming with anticipation. “Oh, I think that can be arranged.”
Our lips met again, and the familiar fire ignited between us. We kissed again, and again, and again, each meeting of our tongues longer and more intense than the last. We rolled around on the pillows, scattering them all over the floor, our hands roaming up and down each other’s body.
And that’s when we met the first bits of resistance.
“Stupid winter clothes,” I grumbled, yanking at the buttons on his jeans, trying to get them open. “Why are you wearing so many of them?”
“I could say the same thing about you,” Owen muttered, fumbling with my turtleneck, trying to shove it up out of the way.
We stopped, looked at each other, and started laughing. Our chuckles rang out through the den, growing louder and louder, and we collapsed onto the pillows again, both of us laughing as hard as we could.
“Okay, okay,” I said, when the last of our chuckles had faded away. “Take two.”
This time, we were far more sensible about things. We both stripped off our clothes, then came together in the middle of the floor again. But our laughter was gone now, and we were ready—hungry—for a different kind of teasing.
Owen grabbed a condom from his wallet and put it on, since we always used extra protection in addition to the little white pills that I took. I admired the rippling of muscle in his arms and shoulders, the sprinkling of dark hair that arrowed down his abs, and especially the hot, fierce light in his eyes as he turned toward me.