"I've been trying to place him," she says. "He's in six frames. Always staying back, always at the same distancefrom Delacroix, but never actually working. Not loading, not directing. Just watching."
I look at the frame. The posture is there, the specific stance of a man who is accustomed to watching operations rather than running them. "You think he's above Delacroix."
"I think he's checking on Delacroix." She scrolls to the next frame. "Look at the angle. He's positioned so he can see the whole operation, including Delacroix. That's not a subordinate."
I look at the next frame, then the next, and she's right. The positioning is consistent and deliberate, the stance of a man who is assessing rather than participating. "Can you get more resolution on the face?"
"I've been trying. The angle's wrong in every frame. He's good at staying just out of it." She zooms in and the image pixelates. "But if I can get him in front of someone who knows who Delacroix answers to…"
She leans over my shoulder to point at something on the screen and her hair brushes my jaw.
I turn.
She's right there.
The distance between us is nothing, an inch, maybe less, the space of a turned head, and she's looking at the screen still for one more second before she feels it and looks at me instead.
The look on her face is not surprise. It's the look of a woman who has been aware of something building and has been waiting to see who acknowledges it first.
Neither of us speaks.
The kiss starts slowly.
I move toward her the fraction of an inch required and she closes the rest of it, and the first contact is deliberate. Both of us choose it with our eyes open, both of us knowing exactly what it costs.
Her mouth is warm. She tastes like the coffee she's been drinking and underneath that is something else, something that's just her. The combination of it does something to my chest that I'm not going to examine right now.
Her hand comes up and finds my jaw, and the touch of it breaks something loose that I've been keeping caged for two days.
I pull her up off the floor without breaking the kiss.
She comes without hesitation, her hands going to my shoulders, and I walk her back until she's against the gun room wall. The sound she makes against my mouth when her back meets the plaster goes straight through me. I press my body into hers and feel her hips roll forward seeking friction, and the control I've been running on for two days develops a crack straight down the center of it.
"We shouldn't," she says against my mouth. Her hands are in my hair, pulling, which is not the behavior of a woman who means it.
"Tell me to stop." I drag my mouth down her neck, feel her pulse jump under my lips, scraping my teeth against the soft skin below her ear until she shudders against me. "Say it and I will."
She doesn't say it. Instead, she tips her head back and her fingers tighten in my hair. I walk her out of the gun room and down the dark hallway with my hand at the small of her back.
The door to my room closes behind us. In the dark she turns and finds me by feel, her hands flat on my chest, and I can feel her heartbeat through my shirt; fast and steady, but not from fear.
I get her shirt off and drop it. In the low light coming through the window, she's lean and angular and completely unselfconscious about it. She has the body of a woman who lives practically and without apology. I run my hands up her sides and feel her breath catch.
"Your turn," she says, and pulls my shirt over my head before I can do it myself.
Her palms flatten against my chest. She reads me the way she reads everything. Slowly, the photographer's attention turned on my skin, her fingers tracing the tattoo across my shoulder and down my ribs. I let her because the alternative is ending the patience early and I want to draw this out.
She looks up at me. "You've been watching me for two days."
"Yes."
"I've been watching you too." No performance in it. Just information. "I thought you should know that."
I take her face in both hands and kiss her until she stops talking.
I get the rest of her clothes off and mine too, and when I lay her back on the bed she pulls me with her immediately, her legs wrapping around my hips, her hand reaching between us and wrapping around my cock with a grip that makes me groan against her throat.
She strokes me slowly and deliberately, watching my face while she does it, the photographer cataloguing my reactions with the same patience she turns on everything else.
