I step behind her.
Close enough that the amber-bourbon-and-vanilla of me is the only scent in her radius, that the heat of my chest is half an inch from her back, that the line of my body is along the line of hers without making contact. My hands settle, slow, deliberate, on the curve of her hips. Right side first, because the left is sore. Right side only, because the left is sore.
She does not move.
She does not, in fact, miss a beat with the spoon. But the small quiet inhale she takes through her nose tells me everything about how the contact has landed.
“Taste,” I tell her, quiet, against the small soft place above her ear.
She lifts the spoon. Blows on it. Sips.
Tell me, Pinky.
Her shoulders lift.
“Jude.”
“Mm.”
“This is fucking amazing.”
Good girl.
Captain. Internal monologue. Tighter.
“It will be perfect once I bake the bread,” I tell her, brushing a thumb in a small slow circle against the bone of her hip. “Which is the next step. I will start that in twenty.”
She turns her head.
The corner of her cheek brushes the corner of my mouth before either of us has authorized the movement, and her storm-grey eyes lock onto mine at the close distance of a woman who has decided that the captain is, finally, scheming over the wrong information.
“So,” she murmurs, very low, the way she murmured at Coach Declan on a four-in-the-morning ice, except without any of the spite, “what exactly does one need to do to enter the dating graces of Captain Kavanagh.”
I do not chuckle.
A chuckle would, professionally, be the wrong move. I let the corner of my mouth lift, and I have, in the time it has taken her to ask the question, finished doing the captain math.
Patient Alpha. Patience over. Pull the trigger.
I lean in.
I do not lunge. I do not hurry. I press my mouth against hers. Tender. Firm. The kind of kiss you give a woman you have been waiting fourteen days to kiss and that you intend, on the inside of your own chest, to keep kissing for considerably longer than fourteen days.
Her breath catches against my mouth.
Her free hand, the one not holding the spoon, comes up automatically to fist in the front of my T-shirt. She does not pull me in. She does not push me away. She anchors herself there, the grip of a goalie locating a steady point in the kinetic chaos of a play, and she kisses me back.
Slow. Considered. The yes I have been waiting for, delivered the way I asked the question.
I pull back, half an inch.
“The real question, O’Shea,” I tell her, against her mouth, “is whether you can handle all three of us.”
She smirks.
It is a slow smirk. A storm-grey one. The taunt-and-challenge in it is the same thing I clocked on her face two weeks ago in a corridor and was, even then, fairly certain I had no professional defenses against.
“Challenge accepted, Captain.”
