Halfway to the storage room, I stopped. Leaned against the wall. Pressed the heel of my hand into my sternum where the ache was building, and closed my eyes.
We'd done this before, Dec and me. Brought someone into our bed. A handful of times over the years. It was fun. Hot. Uncomplicated—because it was only ever skin. A night, maybe two. The door opened, everyone enjoyed themselves, and when it closed, we were still us, unchanged, the foundation untouched.
What I felt for Nolan wasn't skin.
It was bone.
And the difference between skin and bone was that bone breaks, and when it breaks, it doesn't heal the same.
Our room was at the end of the officers' hallway. Small. A bed that Dec had made with hospital corners because the man couldn't leave a sheet untucked without his military training staging an intervention. A lamp. Our bags stacked neatly against the wall. The room smelled like gun oil and his soap and the faint cedar of the closet, layered underneath with the warm, woody sweetness of the sandalwood candle he always lit on the nightstand. The combined scent hit me the way it always did, every single time: a slow warmth that started behind my ribs and spread outward.
Eight years. Nearly eight years of walking into rooms that smelled like him and feeling the same thing.
He was packing the go-bag. Methodical. Each item considered, placed, secured. Extra magazines. Water purification tabs. A compact med kit. Binoculars. The matte-black Sig he'd cleaned twice today—his hands moving with the precise economy that defined him, no wasted motion, every gesture serving a purpose, the tendons in his forearms shifting under the skin with each movement.
I sat on the bed and watched him the way I'd been watching everything lately. Hungrily. Terrified.
"Ghost is solid," I said. Trying for conversational. Landing somewhere in the vicinity. "Kid's got good instincts. Just needs someone steady next to him."
"He'll be fine." Dec's voice was low, focused on the bag. He folded a dark shirt and placed it in the bottom with the care of a man packing for a mission he intended to come back from. "His fieldcraft is better than he thinks."
"Runs in the family, apparently. The whole stepping-up-under-pressure thing."
Dec looked up. Those dark eyes found mine, and the room compressed to the space between us, the way it always did when he actually looked at me. Not glanced. Not assessed. Looked.
"You're worried," he said. Quiet. Not a question.
"I'm always worried when you're in the field without me." The grin. Muscle memory—nearly involuntary. "Who's going to watch your six? Ghost? The kid can barely watch a movie without fidgeting."
Dec held my gaze. He wasn't buying the grin and we both knew it.
The truth sat in my throat like a coal. Hot. Getting hotter.Dec, I think I'm falling for Nolan. Not the way I wanted Marcus in Portland or the bartender in Flagstaff. Those were gravity, attraction with a clean arc up and a clean arc down. What I feel for Nolan doesn't arc. It just keeps climbing. And I'm terrified because what if you don't feel the same and what if this is just me and what if telling you changes what we are?—
"Be careful out there," I said instead.
He crossed the room. Sat beside me on the bed. His thigh pressed against mine, warm and solid, and his hand found the back of my neck in the grip that had been his since the beginning. Firm. Grounding. His thumb traced the tendonbelow my ear, slow and deliberate, and the touch sent a current down my spine that pooled in my gut and stayed.
"Always," he said.
I kissed him. Leaned in and caught his mouth and poured everything I couldn't say into the pressure of it. His lips were warm and he tasted like the coffee he'd been drinking all afternoon, bitter and familiar, and his hand tightened on my neck, pulling me closer. His stubble scraped against my jaw. I pressed deeper, and the sound he made was low and quiet and meant only for me, and I held onto it the way a drowning man holds onto wood.
I held on one beat too long. I felt him notice. The fractional pause, the slight tilt of his head when I pulled back, the question forming behind those dark eyes.
He didn't ask.
I didn't answer.
"Come back with everything we need," I said. My voice was steady. My hands were not. "Nolan and I will have the case file ready to match your photographs by the time you're back."
He studied my face for three more seconds. Reading me the way he read terrain. Then he nodded, squeezed my neck once, and went back to the bag.
I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. My leg was throbbing. My chest was worse. The truth I hadn't said filled the room like smoke, invisible and acrid, changing the texture of every breath.
Dec left at 5:00 AM.
I stood in the lot and watched him straddle the Harley, the leather of the seat creaking under his weight, his hands settling on the grips with the easy familiarity of a man who'd been riding longer than he'd been doing almost anything else. Ghost swung onto his bike beside him, bouncing once on the seat, rolling his neck, his whole body vibrating with the coiled energy of a kid on Christmas morning who'd been told he could open the presents.
"Two days in the dirt with binoculars and protein bars." Ghost grinned at me, teeth white in the dark. "Best vacation I've had all year."
