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Charm took everything I gave her and demanded more.

Her nails dragged down my back. Her hips met mine, destroying any illusion that I was using her as somewhere to put my pain. She was here because she had chosen this—and for the first time since I met her, she wasn’t apologizing for how much she wanted.

“You still fit me,” I said against her mouth.

“I always did.”

“It’s biology not romance.”

“You’re the one who noticed.”

I silenced her with a kiss and drove deeper. Charm’s laugh broke into a cry against my lips, the sound raw enough to tear through me. I tightened my hold beneath her thighs, keeping her secure against the door even as the rhythm became harder.

Every movement carried something I had refused to say. Every time she met me, she answered with something of her own.

The loneliness remained. The betrayal remained. I still remembered her lowered eyes inside the study and what it cost to walk away.

None of it changed the way we moved together or how badly I wanted her still.

That was the answer I had come here to find, and experiencing it felt nothing like closure.

Charm’s breathing fractured. I knew the signs, knew the tension gathering through her body and the way her thighs tightened when she was about to come.

“You’re close.”

“Yes.”

I shifted my hand between us, stroking her clit with the precision memory had preserved. Her body jolted.

“Ryan.”

“I’ve got you.”

The words came automatically.

Her gaze locked with mine, and something inside her expression nearly destroyed the distance I had tried to preserve. She wasn’t merely giving herself to the pleasure. She trusted me to hold her through it as completely as she always had.

“Let go, mami.”

Charm came apart against me, her cry muffled against my shoulder while her body tightened around mine. I held her through every tremor and kept moving until the force of her release pulled mine from somewhere too deep to remain detached.

I buried my face against her neck and held her tighter as the climax tore through me. It carried none of the bitterness I wanted to blame for its intensity. It was hunger, relief, and the unwanted recognition of finally being inside the only woman my body had ever treated like home.

For several breaths, I remained there with Charm pinned safely between my body and the door. Our chests rose together while the room settled around us.

I had expected anger to protect me from what came afterward.

It didn’t.

Charm’s fingers moved into my hair. The touch was gentle enough to reach every place the sex hadn’t silenced.

I lifted my head. Her cheeks were flushed, her lips swollen, and the confidence she had carried downstairs remained in her eyes. She didn’t look used or broken.

She looked like herself.

The version I had spent fifteen months wondering whether we might have become.

I lowered her carefully until her feet met the floor, keeping one arm around her waist until I knew her legs would hold. Charm leaned into my chest for a moment before reaching toward the dress pooled beside us.