For one heartbeat—maybe two—I was sure he was going to kiss me.
Instead, he stopped.
The restraint in him snapped into place like a lock engaging.
“Good night, Mallory,” he said softly.
The sound of my name in his voice—low, deliberate—stroked over my senses like it was the most erotic thing I’d ever heard. He straightened, stepped back, and the pressure vanished so abruptly it left me dizzy.
Just like that, the spell broke.
He turned away, already composed, and crossed the room without looking back. The door opened and stayed that way, the soft hush of his shoes against the wood fading down the hall.
I didn’t move.
My pulse was still racing. My skin still humming. The absence he left behind felt deliberate—placed with the same care as everything else he did.
He hadn’t kissed me.
Yet, we both damn well knew he could have.
And he’d left me there with the wanting.
Chapter
Twenty-One
MALLORY
My FBI babysitter was gone when I woke up. The house still ran. Agents still rotated. The locks still clicked with mechanical reassurance. Coffee still appeared on the counter like a small, impersonal miracle.
It just wasn’this.
The mug was wrong. Too light. The coffee was slightly weaker. Whoever had made it hadn’t noticed how I took it, or maybe he had and simply didn’t care to remember.
That was when I noticed the man standing by the window.
“Morning ma’am,” he said, turning with the kind of careful neutrality that came from training. “Agent Sterling. I’ll be covering until Agent Brewster returns.”
Returns.
The word implied temporary absence. Not a departure from routine. It also suggested pre-planned. Which meant hecouldhave told me, he justdidn’t.
There was also no note, just the professionally distant Agent Sterling. I suppose he was his own kind of note. Still, didn’t feelnormal, not when Brewster had basically been attached at the hip since I got to this place.
It also didn’t feel accidental, either. Particularly not after he indicated we were going to be a team and we made a plan just the night before.
As for Sterling, he looked all of twenty-five if he was a day, and I was pretty sure I was being generous. If he’d said he was in his freshman year of college, I would have believed him—with that baby face and boyish haircut emphasizing what was missing: weight, history, the lived-in edges Brewster carried without trying.
I nodded. “How long?”
“Unclear, ma’am,” he said. “He’s tied up downtown.”
No explanation. No reassurance.
Of course he was.
I spent the morning executing the plan Brewster and I had built together—emails to marketing, a carefully worded request to Brandon that sounded bored, mildly concerned,perfectly normal. Sterling observed from a distance, logging times, tracking contacts, never commenting.
