Her touch, her nearness, her tenderness, her want, kept it from being funny.
It wasn’t funny because it had been so long that even those things—Yardley’s breath, Yardley’s fingers in her hair, her lavender skin—were enough to set off aching, insistent, reckless desire, the kind only sated by skin against skin.
It wasn’t funny because Yardley’s nape was hot, and because Mirabel hadn’t fired his stupid gun, and because KC had been crushing on the Unicorn for ages, and she could almost taste Yardley and knew just how she melted and went hot and alive when KC softly bit her bottom lip.
So she bit it.
Yardley’s legs laced between hers with a soft moan that sounded like a prayer.
“I didn’t mean to,” KC whispered.
Yardley smiled against her mouth. They hadn’t even really kissed, only touched their lips together. But if KC didn’t do something quick, she was going to really kiss Yardley, and that wouldn’t be fair.
She wasn’t being fair.
She didn’t want to be fair.
She didn’t want this blackmailed job, one arm wrenched behind her back by the people who were supposed to be her colleagues. Didn’t want to lie anymore. Didn’t want everything she’d been foolish enough to hope for to be reduced to this miserable, flaming bag of shit.
She wanted to want, and get what she wanted, every urgent grind and gasp leading to more, more, more.
She wanted a kiss that would force their love back to life, a kiss that would take them back to that party and give them a chance to start completely over and not fuck it up.
Everything she couldn’t have. That was what KC wanted.
She eased back, everything hurting, her body protesting leaving Yardley’s body with pain. “Hey.”
Yardley shook her head, just a fraction.
“No,” she whispered. She’d begged with only that word so many times in their fights, when they didn’t have any more words left—no, no, no.
“It’s only because of the day.” Her voice rasped over the lie, a barbed hook in her throat. “Because of being scared earlier, the adrenaline. Being in a room with one of the most powerful people in the world. Maybe the helicopter.” It definitely wasn’t because of the helicopter, but she needed to convince herself so she could convince Yardley.
Sooner or later, Yardley would find out about the secrets KC had been keeping. It was safer, better, to put anything but a professional relationship behind them.
Yardley’s hands were still in her hair. KC made herself remember the POD in the driveway, pushing mental fingers against the bruise until it hurt enough to give her the resolve she so badly needed.
“We’ve never worked together before.” She managed to say it with some conviction. “We forgot. We forgot because we haven’tbeen doing anything but arguing or crying or not talking for weeks, months, and then suddenly we were doing something new together.”
“It’s not real,” Yardley said.
“It’s definitely not. How could it be?”
At last, Yardley dropped her hands from KC’s hair and pushed her chair back. KC did the same, the sting of bare truth washing away the throbbing ache of what was gone and couldn’t be recovered. “We’ll get used to it,” KC said. “It’ll get easier.”
Yardley almost looked like she might say something in response to that—KC couldn’t imagine what—but she didn’t. She took a deep breath that seemed to smooth the color from her cheeks and make her eyes cool.
“The point I was making,” she said, with that same crispness leaching into her voice, “is that Flynn’s skills must also have developed over the years. So if she’s leaving an old calling card in her code, it’s likely because she wants old contacts to see it. Is there anything about what you saw from the door key code in Toronto, or even this toaster oven message, that speaks directly to you or to anyone you could identify?”
The question snapped Tabasco into focus. “Not directly to me, though it’s definitely her old signature. But you have a point. Word gets around. She might know I’m with the CIA.”
“Do you think the toaster oven message was for you? Given that you cracked the hotel door code and she knows that you, specifically, could do it as quickly as you did?” Yardley had eased her chair all the way to other side of the small table. The distance helped.
“Maybe.” KC gently shut the lid of the laptop. “What’s the plan for this mission?”
“They want us to fly to Dublin on a military jet and shake down Flynn’s partner, assumed baby daddy, for where she may be. Find a cover for you at his workplace. Or surveil him, et cetera.”
KC wrinkled her nose. “That is very—”
