Chapter 5 - The Emerald Wrap Dress
Adrian didn't need to be told twice.
He lifted her effortlessly, her legs wrapping instinctively around his waist as he carried her through the dim penthouse toward his master suite—a room Emily had cleaned a hundred times, but had never entered like this.
The master bedroom was vast, dominated by a massive king-sized bed facing a glass wall that looked out over the sparkling expanse of Lake Michigan.
Adrian set her down gently on the edge of the mattress, stepping back just enough to look at her. The moonlight filtering through the windows caught the rich green of her dress and the flushed, radiant glow of her skin.
"You have no idea how beautiful you are, do you?" Adrian murmured, his hands moving to his tie, yanking it free and tossing it to the floor.
"I spent a long time thinking I wasn't," Emily admitted softly, sitting on the edge of the bed, her fingers tracing the seam of her dress. "People... men... they always made me feel like I took up too much space."
Adrian froze, his shirt half-unbuttoned. His eyes hardened with an intense, protective rage.
"Then those men were blind fools," Adrian said, his voice thick with absolute conviction. He dropped to his knees in front of her, resting his large hands on her knees, looking up into her eyes. "Every curve of your body is absolute perfection, Emily. You don't take up too much space. You take up exactly as much space as a queen should."
Tears pricked at the corners of Emily's eyes, but this time, they weren't tears of hurt. They were tears of liberation.
Adrian reached up, his fingers finding the silk tie at the waist of her wrap dress. Slowly, deliberately, he pulled the knot loose.
The emerald fabric parted, revealing the smooth, soft expanse of her skin, her lace bra, and the full, breathtaking curves she had spent years trying to hide.
Adrian’s breath hitched. He didn't rush. He leaned forward, pressing a warm, reverent kiss against the soft skin of her stomach, making Emily gasp and arch her back into his touch.
"Beautiful," Adrian whispered against her skin, moving his lips higher, tracing the curve of her ribs, her waist, her hips. "Flawless."
He stood up, finishing off his shirt and discarding it, exposing his broad, heavily muscled chest, covered in faint silver scars from a life lived on the razor's edge of danger.
Emily reached up, her hands sliding over the hard planes of his chest, feeling the raw, masculine power beneath her fingertips.
"You're not a monster, Adrian," she whispered as he leaned over her, pushing the emerald dress completely off her shoulders.
"Tonight, I'm whatever you want me to be," Adrian rasped, bringing his lips down onto hers in a deep, consuming kiss that swept away every remaining doubt, every fear, and every ghost of the past.
The world outside the glass windows—the city, the mob wars, the dangerous men in Detroit—faded into nothingness. Inside the room, there was only the heat of their skin, the desperate urgency of their touch, and the breathtaking realization that they had both finally found the one person who truly understood them.
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When their bodies finally joined, it was not a quiet, gentle thing. It was a fierce, passionate collision of two souls who had been starving for each other in the dark for eleven long months. Adrian worshipped every inch of her body, his hands tracing every curve with a possessive, reverent intensity that made Emily cry out his name into the quiet night.
And as the moon drifted across the sky, painting the room in silver, Emily fell asleep wrapped in the arms of the most dangerous man in Chicago—feeling safer than she had ever felt in her entire life.
