Page 62 of Power Play

"But Asher never almost told me the truth and stopped himself because he cared about what the truth would do to my sense of self." I hold his gaze. "Asher never burned his own operation to the ground so I could verify the wreckage. Asher never sat across a table and said yes three times in a row when the redirect was right there and the yes was the harder answer."

"Meagan."

"You asked me what happens if the answer is no. If the connection didn't survive. I need you to hear this clearly: the connection survived. I verified it at the wine bar using every tool I have, and the read is clean. What I don't know yet is whether you can stay in the open. Whether the man I saw at the bottom can hold position without the walls going back up the moment this gets hard again. Because it is going to get hard again. Arthur is going to make sure of that."

"I can't promise that." The words are spare, stripped down, with none of the managed delivery that used to wrap everything he said. "The walls are not a choice I make. They're the structure I grew up in. What I can tell you is that I would rather let you see the walls go up and call me on it than keep you at a distance where you never have to."

The sentence is the most honest thing he has ever said to me. It is more honest than the three yeses, more honest than the confession about Arthur. Because it isn’t a promise of transformation. It is a promise of access, which from Kincaid is the harder thing to give.

I walk to him. The space between us closes by my choice, on my timeline, at my speed. When I’m close enough to feel the heat coming off his skin through the button-down, I stop.

"This is not forgiveness," I say. "This is me finding out if we survived with our bodies the way I just did with my head."

His hand comes up slowly, the way you move when you are reaching for something you are afraid will disappear if you move too fast. His fingers find the side of my jaw, and the touch is controlled in a way that tells me exactly how much force he is holding back. The restraint of it puts pressure on something behind my sternum that I’ve been holding rigid for days.

I kiss him first. The decision is mine. The timing is mine. This is two people reaching across damage they both caused, testing the ground with each step before committing their weight.

His mouth finds mine before the last word lands. His hand fists in my hair and tilts my head back to change the angle, and there he is. The man is exactly who he has always been: territorial and consuming, running on a frequency that my body tunes to whether my brain authorizes it or not. He tastes like coffee and want, and when I bite his lower lip the groan he releases against my mouth is low enough to register in my spine.

I pull back. His hand stays in my hair, not pulling, not releasing, holding me at a distance that lets both of us breathe.

"My apartment," I say. "My rules."

"I'm aware."

"Then stop handling me like I'm made of something breakable."

His eyes sharpen. The calculation behind them recalibrates from careful to controlled, which is a different animal entirely. The look he gives me is pure Kincaid: assessing and hungry, willing to follow my lead only because following it costs him and the cost is the point.

We move from the hallway to the bedroom. His shirt comes off when I unbutton it because I want to see him, the full scope of what he is physically, in the light of my bedroom rather than the dark. The scar is there, a pale line on his left side below the ribs, and when I trace it with my fingertips his breath catches in the back of his throat.

I push him onto the bed. He goes because I pushed, and the fact that a man this size lets himself be moved by my hands tells me more about where we stand than anything he said tonight.

He sits on the edge of the mattress looking up at me, and the power inversion puts pressure on every dominant instinct he carries. His hands land on my hips. The grip is reflexively firm, fingers pressing into the bone with a possessiveness that his body deploys before his brain can edit it.

"Meagan." My name in his mouth is a sound I will carry in my body from this point forward. It is a request and a confession of the precise thing he has been unable to redirect since the night we met.

I straddle his lap. The position puts my face above his, and the reversal of the usual sightline does specific things to both of us. His hands slide under my sweater and up the bare skin of my back, and the calluses on his palms drag against my spine in a way that makes my hips roll forward into his.

He is hard against me through the denim, the rigid length of him pressing exactly where the friction matters. The low, wrecked exhale that escapes him when I grind down is involuntary enough to crack the composure he has been white-knuckling all evening.

My sweater comes off. His mouth drops to my collarbone, then lower, and when his lips close over my nipple through the thin fabric of my bra the suction is firm enough to arch my spine. He doesn't ease into it. He reads my reaction to the first contact and gives me more of what made me respond. His tongue circles the hardened peak with a precision that tells me his body remembers exactly what mine needs even when his head is trying to override the autopilot.

"The bra has a clasp," I tell him. "In the back. In case you've forgotten how those work."

"I haven't forgotten anything about you." He unclasps it one-handed without looking, which is either practiced efficiency or showing off, and when the fabric falls away and his hands close over my bare breasts what crosses his face isn’t tenderness. It is possession, pure and undiluted, and the heat of it goes straight through my core.

I reach between us and work his belt. The buckle gives under my fingers and when I wrap my hand around his cock the full-body shudder that runs through him is visible in the muscles of his chest. He is thick, hard, burning against my palm. I stroke the length of him once, slow, and his hips jerk up into my grip with an urgency his jaw is clenched against permitting.

"You're testing me," he says. His voice has dropped into the register that lives in my body memory alongside the weight of his hands and the specific way the muscles of his stomach contract when he is holding back.

"I test everything. You know that about me."

"I know everything about you." His hand slides between my thighs, two fingers parting me through the cotton with a pressure that makes my breath stutter. "Including that you're already wet, and you have been since the wine bar."

"That's a professional assessment?"

"That's a fact." His thumb finds my clit through the fabric and presses with a precision that makes my hand tighten on his cock. He reads the pressure change and adjusts, circling with a slow deliberation that is control and torment in equal measure. "I can feel it through the fabric, Meagan. You came here to test whether this survived. Your body already knew the answer."