Page 70 of The Dangerous Dance

"I know," I say. "I worked that out."

"And you let me come back anyway."

"Yes."

"Why," she says. The word has the specific weight of the same question I asked her — not demanding, not challenging, actually asking.

"Because you came back," I say. "And because you put the case on the desk rather than opening it." I hold her gaze. "And because I have been—" I stop. I find the word. "Compromised," I say, "since a warehouse floor in November, and I've been calling it something else for two months and I'm done calling it something else."

She looks at me.

"I'm addicted to you," I say. Low and direct and with none of the management I've been applying to it. "That's the honest version. You are in my operational files and my breakfast table and the specific way I check my phone in the morning, and I've been trying to run a clean security operation around the fact that I don't want to be in a room you're not in, which is—" I stop. "Problematic."

"Professionally speaking," she says.

"Professionally speaking, yes." Something moves at the corner of my mouth that isn't amusement and is adjacent to it. "And in every other way."

She is very close.

The room is doing the thing it does — contracting, the way rooms do when two people have been circling the same point for long enough that the room itself has gotten impatient. The desk behind me. The chair behind her. The case in the drawer and the Brennan file open on the desk and the grey light pressing in from the window, and she is standing close enough that I can see the specific quality of her eyes, which are the kind that show the whole thing at a certain depth, and she is not filing anything away.

"Liam," she says.

"I know," I say.

"I need you to know that I know it's complicated," she says. "That I know what I am in this operation and what that means for what this—" She stops. Her hand comes up and rests against my chest, over the lapel of my jacket, warm and real. "But I also need you to know that when I was sitting in that coffee shop with the case in my hand I wasn't thinking about Viktor or Dara or the operation."

"What were you thinking about."

"You," she says. "Checking the circulation twice." A pause. "It's a small thing."

"It's not a small thing," I say.

"No," she agrees. "It isn't."

Her hand is still on my jacket. My hand comes up and covers it — not removing it, just holding it there, her hand and mine and the warmth between them and the terrible patience of two people who have been here before and keep arriving back at the same place.

"Tell me what you want," I say. The same question I asked her in the safehouse.

She looks at me.

"All of it," I say. "Not the operational version."

She reaches up with her free hand and she takes the lapel of my jacket, which brings her fractionally closer, and the space between us is now the specific distance where distance stops being distance and starts being something else, something that has been reducing since a warehouse floor and a farmers market and a studio and a kitchen table, reducing and reducing until it arrives here, at this point, at this room, at this grey November afternoon with the case in the drawer and the Brennan file open on the desk and neither of us pretending anymore.

"Stay," she says.

One word.

I look at her.

And then the distance closes.

CHAPTER 23

Liam

I kiss her like a man who has stopped managing things.