"I told myself it was the job." His voice is low, rough, carrying the grit of someone who's been breathing concrete dust all day and holding back something heavier. "I was keeping you alive, keeping you close, running the sweep, checking the locks, standing in every doorway between you and the next threat. I wrapped the whole thing in protocol and discipline because that's the box I know how to put things in."
His hands rest on the bench behind him. The stillness in them costs him.
"It was never the job, Nox. And I'm tired of pretending I don't know that."
"What was it?"
"You know."
"Say it anyway."
"I love you." He says it with no hesitation and no careful framing, just three words with his full weight behind them, the way he leans into a cut on a live wire because half-measures get people killed. "And I should've told you that in the conference room instead of walking out. That one's on me."
The words land in the stillness of the EOD bay, and the space they fill is the one I've been building walls around since the first morning I woke up in his loft and found my rings on his counter next to the coffee maker. The walls are good walls, solid architecture built by a woman who knows exactly how to construct something that keeps the world out.
"I love you too," I say, and the walls come down so softly that I barely hear them go. "And I'm terrible at this, and you should know that going in."
"Noted." The corner of his mouth shifts. "I'll file a complaint."
The callback lands with a warmth that has no computational equivalent. When he reaches for me, the motion carries the certainty of a decision already made. He pulls me in andpresses his mouth to my forehead, and the tenderness of it from someone with this much controlled force behind his hands cracks something inside me I thought was structural.
Then his grip shifts, tilting my head up, and his mouth finds mine. The kiss is slow and tastes like solvent and adrenaline and the end of pretending, and his free hand lands at my waist, heavy, proprietary, done keeping distance.
Neither of us says anything when we pull apart. He grabs his toolkit, I grab my laptop bag, and the walk to the truck is close enough that our shoulders brush with every step.
The drive to the loft takes long enough for the adrenaline to finish its exit and the wanting to take its place. Griff's hand rests on my thigh in the truck, and his grip isn't gentle. His thumb presses against the inside seam of my trousers in a slow, rhythmic stroke that turns the drive into a specific kind of torture, and the look he gives me when I shift in the seat says he knows exactly what he's doing.
The loft door closes behind us. The deadbolt turns. The late afternoon light comes through the bay windows in long amber columns, painting the exposed brick in gold and shadow, and the space looks and smells and feels like home in a way that has stopped being theoretical.
Griff unfastens his vest and drops it on the counter, and when he turns toward me, I'm already moving, closing the distance with a conviction I have never brought to this before. Every time before this, the first contact was a fuse, a spark that handed him the authority to set the pace. He controlled, he held the reins with the same patient hands he brings to every wire he touches. This time, my hands find the hem of his shirt and pull it over his head, and my mouth is on his before the fabric hits the floor, and I have no intention of letting him take over.
He responds immediately, his hands at my waist, and the kiss carries the taste of someone who has been thinking aboutthis since the corridor. My fingers trace the planes of his chest, the ridges of muscle, the place over his sternum where his heart beats steady and strong against my palm.
The man runs toward live explosives and his resting pulse is lower than mine during a software update.
"Bedroom," I tell him.
"Yes ma'am." The drawl is low and amused, and the effect it has on my nervous system is something I refuse to quantify.
His hands slide under my sweater and pull it off in one smooth motion, and the rest of the hallway disappears in a trail of clothing that neither of us stops to pick up. His bedroom is the same as we left it, sheets still tangled from the last time we slept here and the last of the afternoon light slanting warm through the windows and nothing on the walls, except it stopped being just his bedroom somewhere between the shortbread and the rings and the morning I woke up here and didn't want to leave.
I push him down onto the bed and watch the surprise register on his face, brief and genuine, because every time before this, he set the terms. His back hits the mattress and I straddle his hips and lean down to kiss him, and the shift in dynamic does exactly what I want it to do: his hands go to my hips, grip tightening on instinct, his whole body recalibrating to the fact that the power just moved.
"My turn," I say against his mouth.
His eyes hold mine, dark and focused, and permission arrives without a word. I find the hollow of his throat, the ridge of his collarbone, the flat plane of his stomach where the muscles tense under my lips, working down his body with attention to the places that make his breathing change.
Each response is small and controlled, because Griff doesn't give away more than he chooses to, and cracking that discipline open is the kind of problem my brain was designed to chase.
My fingers work the button on his trousers and drag them down his hips with his briefs, and the length of him is hard and straining against his stomach. I wrap my hand around the base. The tendons in his neck flex with the effort of holding still.
"You don't have to be steady right now," I tell him.
"Sweetheart." The word is rough and carries a warning I feel in the base of my spine. "You have no idea what I have to be right now."
I lower my mouth to the head of his cock and take him in slowly, my tongue tracing the underside in a long stroke. He's thick and hot against my tongue, salt and skin and the faint clean taste of soap, and the weight of him in my mouth narrows the world to this: the slow slide, the stretch of my lips around him, the pulse I can feel against my tongue when I take him deeper. The sound he makes is rough and low, pulled from somewhere deeper than the voice he uses on the radio. His hand finds the back of my head, fingers threading into my hair without directing, just holding, and the restraint in that costs him more than any render-safe.
I take him deeper, finding the rhythm that makes his hips rock upward and his breathing fracture. My tongue flattens against the underside on the upstroke and circles the head on the withdrawal, and the second time I do it, the hand in my hair tightens. His thigh muscles flex against my palms where I'm bracing, and a low groan vibrates through his chest. The sound goes straight between my own thighs, a pulse of wet heat that has nothing to do with being touched and everything to do with what I'm doing to him.
