“I like to be spanked, Commander,” she says. “So you can try.”
This woman.
This impossible, infuriating, brilliant, reckless, brave, drunk, beautiful woman who stood in the crosshairs of a gun and smirked and sent me a selfie and danced while the world tried to kill her and is now sitting on a cold metal counter in a back room of a bar telling me she likes to be spanked.
I’m never going to survive her.
And I’m never going to want to survive anything else.
I huff.
Throw my gun to the side.
The weapon clattering onto the adjacent counter with the careless, function-served discard of a tool that has completed itspurpose and is no longer needed. I reach for the tactical vest—the body armor that I’ve been wearing beneath my jacket for the last four hours, the equipment that distinguishes “commander attending a bar opening” from “commander running an undercover operation at a bar opening”—and strip it.
The Velcro tears with the ripping, aggressive sound of a man who is removing barriers between himself and the woman on the counter with the specific urgency that three weeks of operational distance and one near-death experience have produced.
The vest hits the floor.
And my hands find her face.
Both of them. Palms against her cheeks, fingers threading into the icy blue hair that has come loose from its arrangement and is framing her face in the wild, tousled chaos that several hours of dancing and kissing and nearly dying have created. I cradle her jaw. Hold her still. And I kiss her.
Senseless.
This isn’t the hospital kiss—the desperate, decade-of-longing, forehead-to-forehead reunion of two people who had just survived an explosion. This is different. This is the kiss of a man who watched a gun point at the woman he loves and fired a bullet through the arm holding it and carried her through a crime scene and locked a door behind them and is now holding her face in his hands and putting everything—every sleepless night, every surveillance shift, every hour spent tracking the network that wanted her dead—into the contact between their mouths.
“I fucking missed your drunk crazy ass,” I say against her lips.
She kisses me back.
Hard. Hungry. Her hands finding the collar of my jacket and pulling me closer with the strength that people underestimatebecause she’s an Omega and because they haven’t been pulled by Hazel Martinez when she wants something.
“Well, maybe if you didn’t abandon m?—”
I don’t let her finish.
Picking her up off the counter. My hands under her thighs, lifting her weight with the ease of a man whose physical training regimen was designed for tactical operations and is currently being applied to the superior purpose of repositioning his Omega. She wraps around me—arms around my neck, legs around my waist, the cocktail dress riding up with the indifferent physics of fabric that was not designed for this specific activity.
I spin.
Press her against the door.
The impact is controlled—firm enough to pin, gentle enough to not hurt, the specific, practiced application of force that communicatesyou’re not going anywherewithout communicatingI’m hurting you. Her back against the metal. My body against her front. The frozen pine of my scent flooding the small room and mixing with her lavender-and-vanilla in a combination that is ours—the specific, blended chemistry of two people whose individual signatures have been learning to coexist for three weeks and have just found their frequency.
We’re lip-locked.
And the kissing is different now—not the angry, post-gunshot hunger of the dance floor. Something deeper. Slower. The kissing of two people who have survived something and are confirming, through the sustained, thorough contact of their mouths, that the other person is real and present and alive.
We’re panting.
Crazy.
The shared respiration of two people whose cardiovascular systems are responding to the combined stimulus of adrenalineand desire and the specific, tequila-enhanced absence of restraint. My forehead against hers. Her breath on my lips. The space between our mouths measured in millimeters.
I lift her higher.
Adjusting my grip. Sliding her up the door until her legs tighten around my upper waist, the new elevation freeing my hands from their structural role and making them available for other purposes.
