I pulled back just enough to look at her. The mask was cracking along familiar fault lines. Her jaw was set, still trying for defiance, but her lips were parted, swollen from the kiss, and her chest was heaving in a rhythm that had nothing to do with cardio.
There you are, I thought.There's the woman under the mask.
I traced the line of her. Hip to thigh. Forearm to ribs. She let me feel the answer in the lift of her hips, the press of her ribs, the grip of her fingers at my back.
The fan kept its pace. She didn’t. Her pulse jumped under my thumb. She smelled like soap, sweat, and want. Simple as that.
“You’re studying me,” she accused, breathless.
“I’m learning you,” I corrected. “There’s a difference.”
I lowered my mouth to the swell of her breast, dragging my stubble across the sensitive skin just above the lace of her bra. Her back bowed off the mattress. A sound escaped her, rough at the edges and too honest to hide.
"That's the sound," I said, lifting my head to watch her eyes flutter. "That's the one I wanted."
The mosquito netting drifted at the edge of my vision, turning the bed into its own private perimeter. Her nails dug into my shoulders. And the line between us, hot, insistent, uncompromising, held steady.
She wasn't fragile.
She was the most dangerous thing I'd ever held.
And I had no intention of letting go.
When I finally sank into her, nothing in my world accounted for it. The need was brutal, but the moment wasn’t careless. It locked into place between us, breath to breath, body to body. Her jaw tightened, her eyes fixed on mine as she began to fracture. I held her on the edge, and she met me there without flinching.
Every trained response in me went quiet. My hands stayed on her. Neck. Hip. The places that kept her with me while the last of her control burned down. When she finally broke, she dragged me under with her. I folded over her, face buried in the sweat-damp curve of her neck, listening until her breathing steadied against my ear.
I’d spent my life avoiding anyone waiting for me. But lying there, with her fingers still tangled in my hair and her breathing warm against my neck, I knew I wasn’t going anywhere.
Not tonight. Not tomorrow.
The results were in. And for the first time in fifteen years, I wanted to be the man who stayed.
Chapter 18
Twenty-Four Hours
JULIETTE
Dawnhadnotbrokenyet, but the deck had already gone blue and cold. I sat on the edge of the deck in his discarded t-shirt, the hem hitting mid-thigh, a heavy ceramic mug between my palms. The heat from the coffee was the only thing grounding my body. The cool air on my bare legs made the shirt feel like a borrowed skin.
Beside me, Nick was a silhouette against the rising silver of the horizon. He was half dressed, cargoes on, boots laced, no shirt. He wasn’t looking at the view. He was stripping his sidearm in silence, fingers sure, movements compact, attention narrowed to steel and spring and habit.
The snick-click of the slide cut through the quiet, all metal and purpose, and my coffee suddenly felt like an accessory from another life.
Muscle memory, I thought. Steel, sequence, control. His hands knew the sequence better than the morning did.
The weight of what we’d admitted without saying it still sat beneath my ribs. The oil-slick shine of the slide caught at the edge of my vision.
The phone vibrated against the teak table between us, face up. The screen bloomed. A notification banner slid into view—Sofia.
[1 New Message].
Nick didn’t flinch or shift his weight. He let the light burn out, the screen returning to black.
"You're not taking that?" I asked.
"Not yet," he said. He didn't offer an explanation, and I didn't ask for one. I wasn't his dispatcher.
