“Everything’s stable,” he said. “Cameras are holding, signal’s clean, and their network traffic is exactly as messy as I hoped it would be.” He glanced toward me. “You can stop glaring at the monitors.”
I hadn’t realized how still I had been standing.
“I’m not glaring,” I said.
Caleb’s mouth twitched slightly. “You absolutely are.”
Silence settled between us again. The cabin was small enough that the sound of every movement carried—the quiet hum of the laptop fan, the faint rustle of wind against the walls, the slow rhythm of Caleb’s breathing as he watched me across the room.
Proximity. Opportunity. Timing.
The variables were still present, and testing a theory was rarely a mistake.
I pushed away from the counter and crossed the room in a few steps, and Caleb didn’t react or shift when I stopped in front of him, as if settling in to see what I was going to do next.
“You’re doing it again,” he said.
“Doing what?”
“Looking at me as if you’re solving something.” His eyes narrowed. “Am I a problem you’re trying to figure out, Novak?”
“Possibly.”
That answer earned a short, disbelieving laugh. “Jesus,” he muttered. “You’re unbelievable.”
I touched his face, and his gaze snapped back to mine.
“You keep doing that,” he whispered.
“You keep letting me,” I replied.
I felt the subtle shift in his posture before he reached out and caught the front of my shirt.
The pull was sudden, but for a fraction of a second, Caleb hesitated, gripping my shirt. His gaze flicked to my mouth, then back to my eyes, the question there—one last chance to stop.
The distance between us disappeared.
The kiss wasn’t hesitant this time. Caleb closed the last inch with the same decisiveness he had shown earlier, his mouth crashing into mine as if the argument between us had already been settled somewhere in his head and this was the conclusion. The impact pushed me half a step back, his hand still gripping the front of my shirt as though he had no intention of letting me retreat.
For a brief second, I did nothing except register the shock of contact and the sharp rush of adrenaline following it, the quiet, dangerous awareness that this had crossed the line from curiosity into something far harder to step away from.
Caleb exhaled against my mouth, a rough breath that sounded more like frustration than hesitation, and the sound snapped the last thread of restraint I still had in place.
My hand tightened on his jaw, holding him there as I answered the kiss properly this time. The distance we had kept between us all night collapsed in an instant, the tension that had been building since the woods breaking as I pulled him closer rather than letting him go.
The laptop continued to hum behind him, camera feeds glowing across the screen as the compound carried on unaware in the distance. Outside the forest, the cameras remained still, watching every approach road and perimeter path we had mapped earlier in the night.
Inside the cabin, however, the careful distance we had maintained since we’d first met was gone.
THIRTEEN
Caleb
Novak’s handswere already on me, fingers digging into my hips hard enough to bruise, and I should’ve shoved him off. I should have. But the way his tongue forced its way past my lips, hot and demanding, sent a jolt down my spine that locked my muscles in place. Iwantedthis—I’d been edging myself since the first day I saw him, and now he was here, and I could have him. My ass hit the counter, and he caged me there, forearms braced on either side of my thighs.
I turned my head, breaking the kiss just long enough to breathe. “What the fuck are you doing, Novak?”
His dark eyes didn’t waver. “What I’ve been thinking about for weeks.”
