Six months. That photo had been sitting in my archive all along. I'd had it. Whatever Walsh was handing that man, I'd captured it without knowing it mattered. And he might have known that. Might have been tearing my life apart because of a photo I'd never even noticed.
"Hey." Dominic's hand on my knee. Grounding. "June will call when she has a match."
"I know." I closed the laptop. "I just hate waiting."
"I've noticed."
JUNE DIDN'T CALL BACKthat afternoon.
We left Morty's around two, drove back to my apartment, and I spent three hours pacing while Dominic did the eerily calm thing people did when they were waiting for intelligence. He cleaned his gun. Reorganized his go-bag. Made dinner from the meager contents of my refrigerator -—which turned out to be pasta with garlic and whatever vegetables hadn't gone bad yet.
It was annoyingly good.
"You cook," I said, twirling spaghetti around my fork.
"Marines learn to work with limited resources."
"This isn't limited resources. This is a miracle. I had wilted spinach and half an onion."
"And garlic. Garlic fixes everything."
I almost smiled. Almost let the evening feel normal. Two people eating dinner, the city dimming outside the windows, streetlights catching the rain on the glass.
But nothing was normal. Someone had tried to kill me yesterday. A stranger's photo was sitting in June's inbox. And the man across from me had wrapped himself around me while I fell apart, and I kept circling back to what that meant.
Not the threats. I'd been handling threats my whole career. What scared me was him. How fast this had happened. How much I'd let him in. Last night he'd stopped me instead of taking what I offered, and that had terrified me more than the car.
Because sex I could compartmentalize. Sex was bodies and friction and endorphins. What he'd done last night -—refusingme, holding me instead -—that was care. And care was the one thing I'd never learned to defend against.
I set down my fork.
"This is really inconvenient timing."
Dominic looked up from his plate. Waited.
"You. This." I gestured between us, frustrated, unable to find better words because there weren't better words for the feeling of falling off a cliff you'd walked toward voluntarily. "Someone's trying to kill me. I have a federal conspiracy maybe sitting in my photo archive. Valentine's week is my biggest money season. And I'm sitting here eating your stupid delicious pasta and I can't stop thinking about the fact that you held me last night instead of—-" I stopped. Swallowed. "I'm falling for you. Which is insane. And really, really bad timing."
He was quiet for a moment. Then he laughed. Quiet, real, the kind of laugh that crinkled the corners of his eyes and made him look ten years younger.
"The worst," he said. And just like that I was back in the Conservatory -—glass walls, orchids, his mouth on mine for the first time. Both of us knowing better. Neither of us stopping.
"I'm serious," I said.
"I know you are." He reached across the table and took my hand. His thumb ran across my knuckles. "You think I'm not?"
"I think you're a professional who's breaking every rule in his handbook."
"Seven rules. I stopped counting after the Conservatory." His grip tightened. "Charlie. I've been falling since you looked me in the eye and told me where to shove my protection detail."
"That was ten minutes after you walked in."
"Yeah." He brought my hand to his mouth. Pressed his lips to my knuckles. "It was."
I stared at him across my kitchen table, dirty plates between us, the dark pressing at the windows, and felt the ground tilt. Nota crash. Not an explosion. Something slower and impossible to take back.
I stood up. Walked around the table. Took his face in my hands and kissed him.
Slow. Deliberate. Not the desperate hunger or the panic from before. This was a choice. My choice. Made with open eyes and a full understanding of what this could cost me.
