Bonus Chapter: The Silver Gown
An exclusive scene from Her Bodyguard Wears Heels
by Aurora North
⚠️ This bonus chapter takes place after the epilogue and contains major spoilers. Read the full novel first.
The Silver Gown
Celeste POV — One year later
The award was on the nightstand. Aria’s name engraved on the base. Best Actress. The words caught the bedroom lamplight every time I moved, flashing gold across the ceiling like a signal I couldn’t stop reading.
My silver gown was on the floor. Her burgundy dress was somewhere between the hallway and the bedroom door — a trail of silk and intent that started at the foyer where she’d kissed me and ended at the threshold where she’d pushed me through. One of her heels had made it to the dresser. The other was missing entirely. Twelve hundred dollars, abandoned under furniture, because a woman in a silver gown had looked at her during an acceptance speech with an expression that short-circuited every civilized instinct she possessed.
Her words. Not mine. She’d said them against my mouth in the foyer while her hands worked the zipper on my gown with the focused urgency of a woman who had spent four hours in a ballroom performing composure and was finished.
We hadn’t made it past the front door before she kissed me.
Not the public kiss — the one in the ballroom, the quick press of mouth on mouth before she climbed the stage, the one that would be in every photograph tomorrow morning. This was the private version. Hard. Open-mouthed. Her tongue against mine before her hand even found the light switch, and the taste of champagne and adrenaline and the specific, devastating knowledge that the woman I loved had just won a major award and I had cried in my seat watching her accept it.
“You cried,” she said against my mouth.
“I did not cry.”
“Celeste. I could see you from the stage. Your face was doing the thing.”
“My face does not do a thing.”
“Your face absolutely does a thing. The jaw clenches. The eyes go bright. You press your lips together. And then one tear escapes from the left eye specifically, because even your tear ducts have a preferred exit strategy.”
I laughed. She swallowed the sound with her mouth and pushed me backward toward the bedroom. I went — willingly, my hands already working the clasp at the back of her dress, my fingers finding the hidden hook beneath the draping and releasing it with the muscle memory of a woman who had undressed this particular body enough times to know its architecture in the dark.
The burgundy gown fell. She stepped out of it without looking down.
My silver gown followed. She unzipped it from behind — her mouth on the back of my neck, her breath hot against my nape, her fingers dragging the zipper down my spine with a slowness that contradicted every other signal her body was sending. The gown pooled at my feet like liquid metal.
She turned me around. Looked at me.
I was wearing the thigh holster.
Empty tonight. No weapon, no assignment, no operational justification. I’d worn it out of habit — the way I checked exits and counted heads and positioned myself between Aria and every door in every room. The straps sat against my bare thigh, black leather against dark brown skin, functional and beautiful and completely unnecessary.
Aria stared at it. Her pupils dilated so fast I could track the expansion in real time.
“That’s new,” she said. Her voice had dropped half an octave.
“That is not new. I’ve worn it to every event for a year.”
“I’ve never seen it without a gown over it.” She reached out. Hooked one finger under the top strap. Ran it along the leather where it pressed into my skin. “I have wanted to fuck you while you’re wearing this since the first time I watched you adjust it in my dressing room.”
“The premiere.”
“The premiere. You were in the black gown and you reached under the fabric to check the draw and your hand moved against your thigh and I thought about dropping to my knees right there. Before the red carpet. Before the cameras. Before any of it.”
My breath caught. Not because the confession was surprising — I’d known since the premiere that Aria watched me with more than professional interest. Because hearing her say it — the specific fantasy, the specific moment, the specific image of her on her knees in a dressing room while I was armed and dressed for a public event — sent a pulse of heat through me so sharp it registered as pain.
“Then do it,” I said.
She dropped to her knees.
The height difference was extreme from this angle. I was six feet tall in bare feet, and she was on the bedroom floor looking up at me with dark eyes and parted lips and the particular expression of a woman who had won the most important award of her career two hours ago and was now kneeling naked in front of a woman wearing nothing but a thigh holster. The visual was obscene. The visual was everything.
She kissed the inside of my thigh. Above the top strap. Her lips were warm and soft and the contact made my quadricep twitch. She kissed lower — below the strap, where leather met skin, where the edge of the holster pressed a faint line into the muscle. She traced her tongue along that line. Slowly. Following the boundary between tactical and tender, between the woman who carried weapons and the woman who carried nothing in this room except the willingness to be undone.
The sound I made was not dignified. It was not controlled. It was the sound of a woman who had spent a year learning to stay and was now standing in her bedroom while the woman she’d stayed for ran her tongue along the inside of her thigh.
Aria’s hands gripped my hips. She pulled me forward — gently, repositioning, guiding my stance wider. I braced one hand against the wall behind me because my knees were already unreliable and she hadn’t even touched me where I needed her yet.
She looked up at me. Made eye contact. Held it.
Then she put her mouth on me.
The first stroke of her tongue was broad and slow and covered everything — from my entrance to my clit in one long, devastating pass that made my hips jerk forward and my hand fist against the wall. She did it again. And again. Building a rhythm that was unhurried and thorough and designed to drive me out of my mind before she gave me what I actually needed.
I was soaked. Had been since the ballroom — since she’d kissed me before climbing the stage, since she’d said my name from the podium, since she’d walked back to her seat and caught my eye and the look on her face had said we are leaving this ceremony the moment it ends and I am going to take you apart.
She’d been right. She was taking me apart.
Her tongue found my clit and focused. Circling. Pressing. The precise, rhythmic pressure she’d learned drove me fastest — not hard, not soft, the exact midpoint that made my thighs tremble and my breathing fracture into sharp, staccato bursts I couldn’t control.
Her hand slid up my thigh. Found the holster strap. Hooked two fingers under it and pulled — not to remove it but to use it as leverage, tightening the leather against my skin while her mouth worked me. The pressure of the strap combined with the pressure of her tongue created a sensation that was simultaneously grounding and destabilizing, the tactical mixed with the erotic in a way that was so specifically, outrageously us that I moaned loud enough to echo off the bedroom walls.
“Aria — fuck — I’m —”
She didn’t stop. She sped up. Her free hand gripped my ass and pulled me harder against her mouth and her tongue flattened against my clit with a pressure that was relentless, punishing, the focused intensity of a woman who had decided I was going to come standing up and was not interested in negotiation.
I came with my hand against the wall and the holster strap biting into my thigh and Aria’s name in my mouth like something torn from me. The orgasm ripped through my core and radiated outward — my back arching, my thighs clamping around her head, my knees buckling so badly that only the wall and her grip on my hips kept me upright.
She stayed with me through every wave. Her mouth gentle now, easing the pressure, her tongue soft against the aftershocks. Her hands moved from my hips to my thighs, holding me steady, her thumbs tracing circles on my skin while my breathing came in ragged, broken gasps that didn’t sound like me. Didn’t sound like the controlled, composed, professionally steady woman I was in every other context of my life.
She stood. Slowly. Kissed her way up my body — my hip, my stomach, the space between my breasts, my throat. When she reached my mouth, she kissed me deeply and I tasted myself on her tongue and the intimacy of it — the evidence, the proof, the flavor of what she’d just done to me — made something hot and tight coil in my stomach even though I’d just come hard enough to lose my balance.
“Bed,” I said. My voice was wrecked. “Now. I genuinely cannot stand.”
She walked me backward. I unbuckled the holster on the way — dropped it on the floor, the leather hitting hardwood with a sound that belonged in both bedrooms and armories. I sat on the edge of the bed. She climbed over me, one knee on either side of my hips, straddling my lap.
I pulled her down onto me. Kissed her collarbone. Her shoulder. The curve of her breast. I took her nipple in my mouth and sucked — gently first, then harder when she arched into me and gripped the back of my head and made a sound that I catalogued the way I catalogued every sound she made: precisely, possessively, with the intention of hearing it again.
My hands mapped her body. The waist. The hips. The soft fullness of her thighs bracketing mine. She was wet against my lap — I could feel her, slick and hot, leaving a trail on my skin every time she shifted. The sensation made me bold.
I slid my hand between us. Found her.
She gasped. Her hips rolled forward, pressing herself against my fingers. I circled her clit — slow, teasing, the same deliberate patience she’d used on me against the wall. She tried to grind harder. I held her hip with my free hand and set the pace myself.
“Celeste — please —”
“No.” I kissed her jaw. “You made me wait. Your turn.”
I teased her until she was trembling. Until her thighs were shaking on either side of my hips and her hands were fisted in my hair and the sounds she was making had crossed from words into pure, desperate, incoherent need.
Then I slid two fingers inside her.
She sank down onto my hand with a moan that came from somewhere deep and raw and completely unperformed. I felt her stretch around me — hot, tight, clenching — and the sensation of being inside her while she sat on my lap and looked down at me with those dark, blown eyes was so intimate it bordered on sacred.
She rode my hand. Her hips moving in a rhythm she controlled — slow rolls that took my fingers deep, then shallow lifts that dragged against the curl. I matched her with my thumb on her clit, circling in time with her movement, reading her body the way I read every room she entered: comprehensively, attentively, with the focused devotion of a woman who had decided that knowing this person was the most important operational objective of her life.
“Look at me,” I said.
She opened her eyes. Brown. Blown dark with arousal. Beautiful in the way she was always beautiful, but stripped now of the performance, the composure, the camera-ready surface. This was the Aria who existed only in this room, with me, when every mask was down and every wall was behind us.
“You won tonight,” I said. I curled my fingers. She gasped. “You won, and I watched you, and I have never been prouder of anyone in my life.”
“Celeste —”
“You built this.” Another curl. Her hips stuttered. “Your company. Your film. Your career. You took back every piece of yourself that was ever managed or controlled or owned by someone else, and you turned it into something that belongs only to you.”
I added a third finger. She cried out — the stretch, the fullness, the sudden escalation — and her hands gripped my shoulders hard enough to leave marks.
“Come for me,” I said. My voice steady. My hand relentless. “Because you’re brilliant. Because you earned every moment of tonight. Because I am staying, and I am yours, and I want to feel you come apart in my hands.”
She shattered.
The orgasm was seismic. I felt it begin as a deep, rhythmic clenching around my fingers that tightened until her entire body locked — thighs rigid, back arched, her forehead dropping to mine as the first wave hit. She came with my name in her mouth, broken across two syllables, repeated like she couldn’t stop saying it. Her hips ground against my hand through every contraction, taking my fingers as deep as they could go, and I stayed exactly where I was — inside her, against her, holding her with my free arm while she shook apart on my lap.
The aftershocks lasted a long time. She trembled against me in diminishing waves, her breathing ragged, her face pressed into my neck. I gentled my hand — slower, softer, easing her down. When I finally withdrew my fingers, she made a small sound of loss that I felt in my chest.
I held my hand up. Glistening. She watched me bring my fingers to my mouth. I tasted her — slowly, deliberately, maintaining eye contact — and the sound she made at the sight was a sound I intended to replay every time I closed my eyes for the foreseeable future.
“You cannot do that and expect me to recover,” she said.
“I don’t expect you to recover. I expect you to lie down.”
She lay down.
I moved over her. Between her thighs. Settled my weight onto her body — chest to chest, hips to hips, the full length of me covering the full length of her. The height difference meant my mouth was at her ear, and I used it. Told her things. Specific things. What she’d looked like on stage tonight. What I’d thought about during every speech I sat through while she was two seats away in a gown I wanted to tear off. What I planned to do to her for the rest of the night, described in the calm, precise, operationally detailed voice I used for threat assessments and also for this, because Aria Monroe had a voice kink she’d admitted to in Malibu and I had spent a year weaponizing it.
She was wet again. Or still. I could feel her against my hip, slick and swollen, and when I shifted my thigh between hers, she moaned and ground against me with a desperation that told me she was already building again.
I pressed my thigh harder against her. Gave her the friction she was chasing. She rode me — her hips rolling, her hands gripping my back, her nails dragging lines down my spine that I would feel in the shower tomorrow and smile about.
I slid down her body. She protested — grabbed for me, tried to pull me back up — but I settled between her thighs and put my mouth on her before she could finish the sentence she was forming.
She was sensitive from the first orgasm. Every touch registered at twice the intensity. I used that. Kept my tongue soft, my pressure light, letting the sensitivity do the work. I licked her slowly — long, flat strokes from her entrance to her clit that made her hips lift off the bed and her hand fist in the sheet.
I slid one finger inside her. Just one. Barely moving. Letting her feel the presence while my tongue worked her clit in lazy circles. She was clenching around me already — the rhythmic, involuntary contractions of a body that was building toward another orgasm faster than her mind could process.
“I can’t — it’s too — Celeste, I can’t again —”
“You can.” I curled my finger. Found the spot. Pressed. “You absolutely can.”
She came a second time with her thighs clamped around my head and both hands in my hair and a sound that was half scream and half sob and entirely, devastatingly real. No performance. No choreography. Just a woman experiencing pleasure that exceeded her ability to contain it, delivered by a woman who had learned every response her body produced and used them with the precision of someone who believed that making Aria Monroe come was the highest-value application of her professional skill set.
I kissed my way back up her body. She was boneless. Wrecked. Her eyes were glazed and half-closed and she was smiling — the real smile, the one without angles or calculations, the one that existed only when every filter was gone.
“Your turn,” she murmured.
“I already had my turn. Against the wall.”
“That was an hour ago. I’m issuing a new turn.”
She pushed me onto my back with more strength than her post-orgasm state should have allowed and climbed over me and put her mouth between my legs before I could form a coherent objection. Her tongue found me still wet from the wall, still sensitive, still humming with the residual arousal of making her come twice, and the sensation of her mouth on me — warm, eager, slightly sloppy with the carelessness of a woman who was too satisfied to be precise — made my back arch off the bed.
She slid two fingers inside me. Curled them. Found the spot that made my vision white out and stayed there, stroking in a steady rhythm while her tongue circled my clit with the focused, relentless attention she brought to every task she committed to.
I came fast. Faster than I expected. The orgasm hit like a wave breaking — sudden, total, crashing through me with a force that made me grab the headboard and hold on while my body clenched around her fingers and my hips bucked against her mouth and I said her name like a prayer, like a fact, like the only word that existed in any language.
She didn’t stop.
She kept her fingers inside me, kept her mouth on me, kept the pressure steady through the aftershocks and into the next build. I tried to pull away — the sensitivity was overwhelming, every nerve ending firing at maximum — but she held my hip with her free hand and kept going, and the second orgasm built on the first like a fire catching tinder, and I came again within a minute, harder, louder, with my thighs shaking and my hand in her hair and the particular, exquisite agony of pleasure that crossed the threshold into too much and came out the other side as transcendent.
She withdrew gently. Kissed the inside of my thigh. Crawled up beside me and collapsed.
We lay in the wreckage. Sheets twisted. Pillows displaced. The award glinting on the nightstand. The gowns on the floor. Two women in their late thirties and mid-forties, breathing hard, covered in each other, smelling like sex and champagne and the particular, specific, irreplaceable scent of a person you love.
Later. Much later. The room dark except for the lamp she’d left on because she knew I checked the exits better with some light. Room-service fries ordered and eaten in bed, naked, dropping crumbs on sheets we’d already destroyed.
“I checked the exits when we got home,” I said.
“I know. I watched you do it while I was taking off my shoes.”
“Does it bother you?”
“It’s the sexiest thing about you, and you once wore a concealed weapon under a couture gown on a red carpet, so the bar is absurdly high.”
I laughed. The private laugh. The one she’d been collecting for a year.
“I’m going to check the locks,” I said.
“Check the locks. Then come back.”
I got up. Naked. Walked through our house in the dark, checking doors and windows with the methodical precision of a woman whose body would never fully stand down from alert. Front door. Side gate. Kitchen window. The sliding door to the terrace where we’d eaten breakfast this morning and would eat breakfast tomorrow morning and every morning after that, because I had learned to stay, and staying meant mornings, and mornings meant this house, and this house meant her.
I came back to bed. Slid under the sheets. Found her hip with my hand.
“All clear,” I said.
“Occupational habit.”
“Permanent condition.”
She pressed her mouth to my shoulder. Settled against my chest. Her breathing slowed.
The award caught the lamplight one more time. Gold flash across the ceiling. Her name. Best Actress.
She was the best everything. The best person I’d ever protected. The best person I’d ever stopped protecting and started loving instead.
I closed my eyes. Fell asleep in a house with locked doors and a woman who let me check them and welcomed me back every time.
Every single time.