It started with a glance.
Not the kind that brushes past, fleeting and polite — no, this one lingered. Smoldered. It caught her mid-step, breath snagged in her throat, as though some invisible tether had cinched itself around her waist and pulled.
He stood across the room, a shadow in a suit, impossibly still amid the chaos of laughter and clinking glasses. His gaze stripped away the chatter, the lights, the music. All that remained was the friction of air between them.
Amelia wasn’t the kind of woman who blushed easily. She knew her worth. She knew the rules. But when he approached, silent and certain, something ancient stirred in her — something primal, defiant, and curious.
“I’ve been waiting,” he said, his voice low, velvet over steel.
She tilted her head, challenging. “You don’t know me.”
“I know enough.”
And she let him buy her a drink, not because he asked — he didn’t — but because the way he looked at her made her feel like the only real thing in the room.
They met in private the next evening.
His apartment was a cathedral of shadows and stone, clean lines and obsidian glass. Minimalist, restrained. Like him. Every move he made was calculated, patient, as though he were constantly waiting for her to flinch — and savoring the fact that she never did.
“I don’t take,” he murmured, brushing a strand of hair from her face. “I invite. You walk through the door, or you don’t.”
And walk she did.
He undressed her with reverence, not haste. No frenzy, no groping hands — only fingers like whispers, tracing every line of her as though memorizing a map. As though she was a poem he refused to read too quickly.
When he bound her wrists in soft silk — not rope, not cuffs, but silk — her breath hitched, not in fear, but anticipation. There was no pain, only pressure. No force, only guidance. He didn’t dominate her — he worshipped her, in a way that made her feel invincible.
His mouth was a prayer, and she, the altar.
And when she came undone beneath his hands, it wasn’t a surrender. It was a coronation.
Later, tangled in sheets scented with cedar and musk, she whispered, “What do you want from me?”
He looked at her like a storm trapped in glass.
“Everything,” he said. “But only if you give it.”
And she smiled — because for the first time, she wanted to.