Then he kisses me.
Not like the gun room. Not careful, not the deliberate weighing of a cost and the choice to pay it. His mouth opens over mine and his hands pull me against him with nothing measured in it. It’s the specific urgency of a man who has spent hours keeping everything intact and needs, right now, to put it down somewhere.
I give him somewhere to put it.
His mouth drags down my throat, his teeth at my collarbone, and his hands move over me in the steam — my waist, my hips, the curve of my ass — learning me thoroughly and without apology. He walks me backward until my shoulders hit the tile. The contrast of the cool wall against my back, the heat of the water, and his chest against mine makes me gasp against his mouth.
He drops to his knees.
The water runs over both of us as his mouth finds the inside of my thigh. I get my hand in his hair and stop thinking about anything except where his mouth is going. He takes his time. He learned me once already and he uses that knowledge now, his mouth and his tongue working me until my knee buckles.
My head goes back against the tile and I say his name loud enough that it doesn't matter who hears it. He keeps going after that. He doesn't stop until I'm shaking and gripping his hair and coming against his mouth with my whole body, the orgasm rolling through me in long waves. His hands hold my hips against the tile and he works me through every second of it.
He stands, lifts me against the tile in one motion, and I wrap my legs around him. He pushes inside me and we both go still for a moment. Just breathing, just the weight of being joined, just the steam and the water and both of us looking at each other.
Then he moves.
He moves like he has something to say that doesn't have words for it. Deep and unhurried at first, his eyes on mine, his hands on my hips directing every angle, like he knows exactly what I need and intends to give me all of it before he's done. His mouth goes to my throat and my shoulder and back to my mouth, and I kiss him back with everything I have, my hands in his hair, my legs pulling him deeper.
Then unhurried becomes something else.
His hands grip hard and he drives into me with the full force of everything he's been holding together all night — the compound, the shots, Remy on the ground, the hours of keeping it all intact and not breaking under it — and I take all of it.
I rise to meet every thrust and the tile is cool against my back where he pins me and his mouth is hot at my throat and I stop thinking about anything except him. The sounds I'm making bounce off the walls and I don't care.
His name comes out of me in pieces and I don't care about that either. I drag my nails down his back. He groans against my throat and drives harder in answer. I do it again because I want that sound, because the sounds he makes are the most honest thing I've heard from him yet.
He gets his hand between us and works his thumb against me while he moves inside me. I go taut immediately, my whole body pulling toward the edge, my legs locking around him. He doesn't relent. He keeps his thumb moving and his hips driving and his mouth at my throat, and I can feel every nerve ending I have converging on one point.
When I come it's with his name torn out of me and my teeth in his shoulder and my whole body clenching around him in waves that go on until I'm limp against the tile.
He follows me. His grip tightens past the point of caution and he buries himself deep and stays there, shuddering through it, my name in his mouth against my hair like he's saying the thing he's been meaning to say all night and is finally saying it.
He turns off the water. He reaches past me for the towel on the rack and wraps it around me before he reaches for one for himself, which I notice. We dry off in the quiet of the bathroom with the steam still thick around us and neither of us says anything because there's nothing that needs saying.
We go back into his room. He pulls back the covers without asking. We get in and he pulls me against his chest with the same certainty he's done everything else tonight — no question in it, no performance, just the decision made and acted on.
I let myself stay exactly where I am.
I don't tell him I've never let anyone hold me like this before. That I've never stayed. That I've spent seven years learning to travel light, to keep connections shallow, to never need anything from any place I'm going to leave, because leaving is the joband the job is the life and needing things from places you leave makes the leaving harder.
He can probably tell. He reads everything. He's been reading me since the bar on Bourbon Street. He knows I've never let anyone hold me like this.
He holds me anyway. Like he's already decided what to do with the knowledge.
His hand moves through my hair once, slow and deliberate.
I close my eyes.
Outside the compound breathes in the Mississippi dark: old wood, the distant sound of the perimeter rotation, the ordinary sounds of a place that came through the night still standing. We came through it still standing.
That's enough for tonight. That's more than enough.
Chapter 10
Judge
Church meets at noon.
