Silence. His body still pressed against mine, still inside me, the intimacy of the position suddenly electric in a way it hadn't been thirty seconds ago. Not shame. Not regret. A new voltage. The awareness that we hadn't been alone. That the thin walls we'd been so careful about for two weeks had been rendered irrelevant by a door that hadn't latched and a man who'd left the gym earlier than expected.
"How much did he see?" I whispered.
"Enough." Dec’s voice was flat. Controlled. But I knew him. I knew every frequency of that voice, and underneath the control: heat. Not embarrassment. Not anger. Heat.
My pulse kicked. Because the heat in his voice matched the heat in my chest, and the heat in my chest wasn't just the residual glow of the orgasm. It was the image that had triggered it—Nolan in front of me, Nolan watching, Nolanseeing—and the realization that the thought of him knowing what we sounded like, what we looked like, what we did to each other, didn't fill me with dread.
It filled me with want.
Dec pulled out of me slowly, carefully, and rolled onto his back beside me. We stared at the ceiling. The fan turned. The desert hummed its single note outside the windows.
"He knows," I said.
"He knows."
The silence stretched. Two men in a wrecked bed, the evidence of what they'd done cooling between them, the evidence of what they hadn't said hanging in the air like smoke.
I turned my head and looked at Dec’s profile. The hard jaw. The dark eyes fixed on the ceiling. The flush still visible across his chest.
"Are you worried?" I asked.
He took his time. Dec always took his time.
"No," he said. And said nothing else.
I looked back at the ceiling. My heart was doing something complicated. My body was doing something simple: wanting. Still wanting, even now, even wrecked and spent and lying in the aftermath. The want had two directions now, and both of them lived under the same roof, and the thought of that was either the most terrifying thing that had ever happened to me or the most inevitable.
Down the hall, behind a closed door, Nolan Mercer was alone with whatever he'd seen.
I closed my eyes and thought about his footsteps. The haste. The failure to be quiet. The sound of a man who'd seen something that had shaken him enough to forget how to be careful.
6
ATTRITION
DECLAN
Ifound Nolan in the kitchen at dawn.
He was standing at the counter with his back to the hallway, both hands wrapped around a coffee mug, his shoulders carrying a tension I could read from six feet away. The posture of a man who'd been awake for hours and was dreading what came next.
I poured coffee. Set the pot back on the burner. Let the silence hold for ten seconds because silence was a tool and this particular silence needed to do its work before I spoke.
"Nolan."
He turned. His face was flushed. Not the surface heat of embarrassment—deeper than that, a color that started at the collar of his T-shirt and climbed to his ears. His eyes met mine and held, and to his credit, he didn't look away.
"I owe you an apology," His voice was steady. Controlled. The flush told a different story than the voice, and I noted both. "I heard noises. From your room. I wasn't sure what—I thoughtsomething might be wrong, and I came to check, and the door was—" He stopped. Reset. The glasses came off, got cleaned on the hem of his shirt, went back on. "I saw. I'm sorry. It won't happen again."
I studied him. Twenty years of reading men under pressure had taught me what guilt looked like, what disgust looked like, what discomfort looked like. Nolan's face held none of those things. The flush wasn't shame. The steadiness in his voice wasn't forced politeness. And his eyes, when they'd met mine, hadn't flinched.
A man who was disgusted would have avoided me this morning. A man who was uncomfortable would have buried it under professionalism and pretended nothing happened. Nolan was standing in the kitchen at dawn, facing me directly, apologizing not for what he'd seen but for the intrusion.
"You don't need to apologize." I kept my voice level. "The door should have been shut."
"Still. Your privacy?—"
"Is fine." I took a drink of the coffee. Held his gaze over the rim. "We good?"
