He came around the couch in two strides, the gray of his eyes gone soft and dark, and he pulled her against him, his arms wrapping her so completely she felt the air leave the space between them. The eagle's outline pressed warm along her back through the line of his hands. He smelled the way she'd remembered, gun oil and salt and the clean of him underneath, and the wanting she'd been denying herself for a year unfolded inside her in one long shudder she couldn't have hidden if she'd tried.
She was lost.
His mouth found hers as if his lips had been finding hers for centuries, already in motion before either of them had agreed to it, his hand cradling the back of her skull, her fingers fisting in the front of his shirt, her body pressed flat against the length of him. She knew him. How and why were irrelevant. Recognition, deep and total and almost grieving, the recognition of a thing she had been refused for so long she had stopped knowing she was hungry.
His mouth was warm and slow and confident, and underneath the slow was something close to pain, opening to him because her body had already decided, and his tongue stroked against hers. She made a sound she didn't recognize, something low and broken, and his arms tightened around her until she was almost off her feet.
She wasn't crying, so how could her face be wet?
She gripped the back of his neck, keeping his mouth against hers, hungry for more of his soft lips, the aching taste of him that fed her soul. The light bloomed soft along the edges of her closed eyes, and somewhere a long way off she could hear her own breath shaking apart against his mouth, andshedidn’t care, she didn’tcare, shedid notcare.
He pulled back just enough to find her face with his hands. His thumbs traced her cheekbones. He looked at her like he was reading a language he'd just realized he'd always known.
"My owl," he whispered. “My beautiful stubborn owl.”
The name settled softly even as her body responded. A blessing instead of a wound.
She kissed him again before she could break.
His hand sought the edge of her shirt, pulling it up, his hot fingers against her skin as if he hungered for the silk. “So soft,” he murmured against her mouth.
She bit his lip and he made a deep, rough sound in his chest. Breaking the kiss, he tucked her head under his chin. “As much as I want to kiss you until the end of time, it’s closer than we think.”
“Don’t you dare make a joke now.” She dug into his ribs and he grunted, but his arms tightened around her. There was nothing she could do. He wrecked her body and soul. The only thing that had saved her was distance, and now any hope of resistance was fleeting.
Was the world truly doomed, and had she been chasing a ghost or something else entirely?
6
She didn't knowhow long he held her like that. Long enough for her breath to find his rhythm. Long enough for the trembling in her arms to ease into something quieter, a low tremor she carried in her hands like aftershock. He didn't push for more. He didn't try to take the kiss further. He stood with her against him and let her come back to herself one slow inhale at a time, his mouth resting at her temple, his hand spread open and warm across the base of her spine.
She pressed her face into the hollow under his jaw. She breathed in aroused man, and cinnamon and the gorgeous scent of his natural body, reveling in the tactile warmth of his skin and the slow, even thud of his pulse against her cheek. Her hand fisted slowly in his shirt and unfisted again.
"Don't let me go."
The words came out so quiet she wasn't sure she'd said them, but he heard.
He bent. With one arm braced under her knees, the other across her back, he lifted her off the floor as if she weighed nothing, and she let herself be lifted, which was its own kind of confession. He carried her the short distance to the couch andsat with her cradled against his chest, the amber light pooling around them, and he settled her across his lap and tucked her in against him until the line of her body fit along the line of his like he'd been holding her this way for a long time and had only now been given permission to remember.
She rested her cheek against the place where his shoulder met his throat. She could feel his heart. She could feel the eagle still riding the air above him, the faint pressure of wings she wasn't meant to see, and her own ribcage with its chakana ink and its centuries of forgetting, and the way her body had stopped trying to put distance between them and had instead curled toward him like a hand closing around something it had been searching for.
His thumb stroked along her hip. Once. Slow.
He was deliciously hard beneath her hips, against his groin, thick and hot. So many nights she’d thought about him inside her, burned with the need for not only that damn sexy mouth, those expressive gray eyes and everything that went with it, including this hard-muscled body courtesy of Uncle Sam, but the part of him that was pure male. She moved, unable to stay still, and he gasped, groaned, and said, "Fuck, if the stakes weren’t so damn high right now, I would fucking take you right here on the goddamned floor, and fuck you until you screamed my damn name.”
She turned to look at him, his pupils blown, his face contorted. “Not unless I fucked you first,” she whispered. Her mouth found his again, her lips claiming him, groaning when she turned her body and straddled him. He clutched her hips and thrust against her, his breathing ragged.
She heard voices. Dammit. His team.
He heard them too, and was swift and decisive, lifting her and setting her beside him.
Her breath rushed out.She closed her eyes.
“Is it safe to enter?” Twister asked, standing just outside the open front door.
“Yes,” she said, then turned to Flash. Her voice scraped along the edges. “Damn SEALs can’t follow directions.”
“We can, but we’re used to moving all our muscles and were worried for our boy. Looks like you made up.”
