She kisses me back.
With equal hunger. Equal intensity. The specific, unrestrained, five-shots-of-tequila-enhanced kissing of a woman who has no inhibitions left and is directing all of the adrenaline and the defiance and the joy that she was feeling on the dance floor into the contact between our mouths. Her fingers dig into the back of my neck. Her body arches against mine. She makes a sound against my lips that is half moan and half laugh and entirely Hazel.
I forgot.
I forgot how needy my girl is when she’s drunk.
At the academy. The nights when we’d argue ourselves into a bar and drink ourselves past the argument and she’d transform from competitive and combative to this—this warm, demanding, hungry version of herself that kissed like she’d dieif she stopped and touched like my body was the only solid thing in a spinning world.
She hasn’t changed.
Still needy. Still hungry. Still the woman who uses intoxication the way other people use darkness—as permission to want things she won’t let herself want when the lights are on.
I force the kiss to break.
It takes effort. Physical effort. The effort of a man pulling his mouth from the mouth of a woman who is actively trying to prevent the separation with the specific, focused determination that drunk Hazel applies to everything she decides she wants.
I lower my gun.
The weapon that I haven’t holstered because my left arm hasn’t released her waist and my priorities have been, in order: secure Hazel, kiss Hazel, deal with the rest of the universe at a time to be determined.
“You’re in so much fucking trouble.”
My voice comes out rough. Wrecked. Carrying the vocal damage of a man who has spent the last twelve hours on phone calls and operational briefings and has now added “kissing aggressively on a dance floor” to the list of demands on his larynx.
She grins.
From ear to ear.
The full, devastating, completely-unrepentant grin of a woman who has been told she’s in trouble and considers the information delightful.
“Why?” she says, her voice carrying the innocent, tequila-bright cadence of a woman who knows exactly why and is performing ignorance for the specific purpose of driving me insane. “I was simply dancing.”
I’m trying not to let my eye twitch.
In agitation. The specific, involuntary muscular tic that my left eye produces when I am experiencing a level of frustration that my composure cannot fully absorb. It’s a tell. She knows it’s a tell. She has known it’s a tell since we were twenty years old and she first discovered that she could make it happen by scoring one point higher than me on a tactical assessment.
I bet money it’s twitching right now.
And she’s only more excited by my obvious anger at her endangering herself, and shefucking knows it. She has always known it. Has always understood that Roman Kade’s fury is the clearest evidence of Roman Kade’s love, and that making me angry is her preferred method of confirming that the love is still operational.
She grins wider.
“How would I possibly catch the obvious stalker trying to end my life,” she says, the words delivered with the reasonable, measured logic of a woman presenting a closing argument that happens to be insane, “if I moved out of the way? That’s just silly.”
She’s such a smart, sexy, infuriating, brilliant, reckless, cunning Omega.
Fucking hell.
Because she’s right.
She’s right and I know she’s right because I know exactly what she did and how she did it and the tactical architecture of her improvised operation is so clean that I’d be impressed if I weren’t still processing the image of a gun barrel pointed at her sternum.
She noticed him.
In the crowd. At some point during the evening—maybe when she first entered the second room, maybe earlier, maybe on the dance floor when her Omega receptors identified a scent signature that her limbic system had filed underthreatyears ago. She noticed the stalker following them through the bar, tracking her movements, maintaining the surveillance that had been documented at the bookshop and at the station and at every other point where someone had been watching and waiting.
And she decided.
