Page 71 of The Dangerous Dance

My hand finds the back of her neck and I pull her to me and the kiss is not careful. It is not the version we had in the safehouse kitchen, which was a question. It is not the version we had in the safehouse bedroom, which was an answer. This is the version we have been waiting to have in this specific room. Weeks of watching her cross this house and not being allowed to do this in it. I am done not doing this.

She makes a sound against my mouth, small, involuntary, the kind of sound that bypasses everything and goes straight to the part of me that has been losing this war. Her hands are at my jacket, pulling, and I shrug it off without breaking the kiss, and then her fingers are at the buttons of my shirt and mine are at the zipper of her cardigan and we are the specific kind of clumsy that happens when urgency meets too many layers of clothing.

"Fuck," she says against my mouth, because her sleeve has caught on her wrist and I am trying to pull my shirt over my head at the same time, and we are tangled in the middle of the study in the grey afternoon light and it would be funny if it were not so urgent.

I get her cardigan off. She gets my shirt off. We stand there breathing, her chest rising and falling, and I look at her. Really look. The way I have not let myself look in this room. Her pupils are blown wide and her lips are swollen from kissing and the thing she has been keeping under the controlled face is at the surface and she is not putting it away.

"The bedroom," I say.

"No," she says. Her hand flattens on my bare chest. "Here. I do not want to walk somewhere and lose the temperature of this. I need to feel you now."

I cut her off with my mouth.

We move. I am not tracking logistics. I am tracking the heat of her and the taste of her and the way her body gives against mine when I walk her backward until her thighs hit the desk. The Brennan file slides to the floor. Neither of us cares.

I pull her shirt free from her waistband. She reaches behind herself and unclasps her bra with the specific efficiency of someone who does not waste movement, and then she is bare from the waist up and I stop.

I stop because I have to. Because she is in front of me in this office, the office where I make decisions, and she is without the layers I have been accounting for. Her breasts are small and the cold of the study has tightened her nipples and she is watching me watch her and her breathing has gone shallow.

"Liam," she says. Just my name. A reminder that looking is not enough.

I put my hands on her waist and I bend and I take one nipple in my mouth and she arches into me with a sound I will think about for the rest of my life. Her hand comes up to the back of my head, fingers in my hair, holding me to her. I work her with my lips and my tongue and the graze of my teeth and she makes another sound, a moan she tries to swallow and does not quite manage. I give the same attention to her other breast until she is trembling under my hands.

I want to take my time. I want to catalogue every reaction. But she is reaching for my belt and I am reaching for hers and we are past slow.

I get her trousers open. She kicks off her shoes and I push her trousers and her underwear down her hips in one motion and she steps out of them and then she is standing in my study in nothing but her socks and the grey light and she is.

"You are beautiful," I say. Not because it is the thing to say. Because it is true and I cannot not say it.

Something flickers across her face. She reaches for my belt and this time she gets it open. The button. The zipper. Then her hand wraps around my cock and I lose all ability to form sentences.

She strokes once. Twice. My forehead drops to her shoulder and I breathe through the feeling of her hand on me.

"Wait," I say. "Wait. If you keep doing that."

She makes a sound that might be a laugh, might be something else, and releases me.

I get my wallet from the discarded trousers. I find what I need. She takes it from my hand and tears the wrapper and she rolls it onto me with the same focused precision she applies to everything, and the precision of it undoes me as much as anything else.

I step close. I put my hands on her waist. I turn her around.

She goes still. Not resistant. Surprised. She looks over her shoulder at me and there is a question in her eyes and I hold her gaze.

"I want to see all of you," I say. "But this time I need to take you this way. Is that all right."

"Yes," she says. No hesitation. "Yes."

She braces her hands on the desk. The desk I was sitting at four minutes ago, reviewing the Brennan data. The same surface. The same room. Everything is different.

I step behind her. I run my hands down her back. Her spine, the indentation of her waist, the flare of her hips. She is lean and strong and the grey light catches the definition of muscle and I think about weeks of watching her move through this house without being able to put my hands on her in it, and now I am here, and she is trembling.

I reach around her. I find her. Hot and wet and ready, and the sound I make is not a word. I stroke through her, learn her, find her clit and circle it and she drops her head between her shoulders and moans.

"Tell me," I say. "Tell me what feels good."

"That," she manages. "Right there. Do not stop, do not."

I do not stop. I keep my fingers where she needs them and I feel her getting closer. The tension in her thighs. The breath going ragged. She is saying "I need you inside me, I need it now, please, Liam."