"Inconvenient," he repeated.
"Very."
I stood. Walked around the table. Stopped beside his chair.
He looked up at me. The same angle as the midnight kitchen, the same proximity, the same charge building in the air between us. But this time, I didn't wait for him to reach for me.
I leaned down, put my hands on either side of his face, and kissed him.
His mouth. Years of wanting distilled into the first point of contact—his lips against mine, the pressure firm, the angle slightly off and then correcting as his head tilted and his mouth opened and the kiss went from contact to collision. He tasted like coffee and the dinner Irish had made and something underneath that was only him. A taste I'd carried in sense memory and had never been able to describe, because it wasn't a flavor—it was a vibration on my tongue that my body recognized the way it recognized its own heartbeat.
His hands came up. Found my hips. Pulled me closer, the grip fierce and sudden, his fingers pressing into the muscle through my jeans. I cupped his face and kissed him deeper, my tongue finding his, the heat of his mouth radiating through my hands and into my arms and down my spine and into every part of me that had been cold for so long without knowing it was cold.
A sound escaped him. Not a word. A vibration in his throat, low and involuntary, the sound of something breaking open that had been sealed for too long. The sound hit me in the gut. My body responded with a surge of heat that erased every remaining thought that wasn'thimandnowandfinally.
He pulled back. Just enough to breathe. His forehead against mine, his hands still on my hips, his breathing uneven.
"Not here," he murmured. The same words from two nights ago, but different now—less a wall and more a redirect. The kitchen was open. The corridor was ten feet away. Anyone could walk in.
"I know." My voice came out rougher than I intended. Lower. "I'm going to my room. To prepare."
The word landed. I watched understanding move across his face—the dark eyes widening by a fraction, the pupils expanding, the jaw tightening in a way that had nothing to do with restraint and everything to do with want.
"Same," Diego said. One word. Carrying everything. "Come to my room. Fifteen minutes."
I let my hands slide from his face slowly, my fingers trailing along his jaw, his neck, dropping from his shoulders. I stepped back. Held his gaze for a beat longer than necessary. Then I turned and walked toward the corridor, and I did look back—once, at the doorway—and found him still sitting in the chair, his hands flat on the table, his eyes on me, his body carrying the stillness of a man counting to fifteen and intending to use every second.
I went to the guest room. My heart hammering against the inside of my chest, the pulse visible in my throat, my hands shaking with something that was the opposite of fear. I showered fast. Cleaned thoroughly. Dried off. Dressed in the flannel shirt and jeans—not for long, but the walk through the corridorrequired clothes and the flannel was the first thing my hands found.
Fifteen minutes. I counted breaths. Not to calm down. To hold on.
Then I walked.
Thirty feet of corridor. The fluorescent lights humming overhead. The compound quiet. My bare feet on the concrete—I'd left the boots behind, and the vulnerability of walking through someone else's home without armor on the most basic part of my body felt right.
His door. Closed.
I knocked.
It opened.
Diego stood in the doorway. Shirtless.
My breath stopped. My diaphragm locked and my lungs held and for a span of time that could have been a second or a century, I stood in the corridor and looked at him and felt the time we spent apart collapse into a single point.
He was lean—nothing excess, everything functional, every line of muscle defined beneath brown skin that caught the low light of his room and held it. The geometric tattoos ran from his wrists up his forearms and across his shoulders, dark ink mapping a geography I didn't know yet but intended to learn. His abs were cut, visible even in the dim light. And the scars. Two bullet scars on his chest—one high on the left, near the collarbone, one lower on the right—pale circles against the brown, the tissue raised and smooth, the permanent evidence of moments where the world had tried to take him and failed.
I looked at his body and felt two things simultaneously: the awareness of everything he'd survived without me, and the overwhelming, consuming need to touch every inch of what had survived.
I stepped through the door. Closed it behind me. The lock clicked.
His room was small. A bed, a footlocker, a weapons rack on the wall. Bare. Deliberately, fiercely bare. No photographs. No decoration. Just the bed, the locker, the blades, and the man standing in front of me with his chest bare and his eyes carrying the heat that the wordsoonhad been holding in reserve.
I reached for him. Both hands finding the sides of his face, my palms against his jaw, the stubble rough beneath my fingers. I pulled him to me and kissed him.
This kiss was nothing like the one in the kitchen. The kitchen kiss had been a declaration. This kiss was the conversation itself. Deep, open, his tongue meeting mine with an urgency that vibrated through his jaw and into my hands. His hands found my chest, my shoulders, the buttons of my flannel shirt, and his fingers worked them with the precise, efficient speed that defined everything he did—three buttons, four, five, the fabric parting, his palms pressing flat against my bare chest with a contact that sent electricity through my skin in every direction.
The shirt came off. His hands traced my shoulders, the width of them, the muscle that four years of fence posts and hay bales had built. His fingers pressing into the density of the tissue with an attention that was half exploration and half reverence, and the sound he made—low, barely voiced, a vibration I felt more than heard—told me he'd noticed the changes. The boy from Bragg had been lean. The man in his room was thick, solid, built for labor, and Diego's hands were mapping the difference with the focus of someone memorizing terrain he planned to return to.
