Page 22 of The Agent’s Curvy Seduction

"Yeah," I say. "We get ready."

Outside, the light is starting to fail behind the tree line. Voss has gone dark—disappeared from every surveillance feed we have, pulled his team, and vanished into the kind of operational silence that means he's assembling something. Michaelson didn't mobilize him for a conversation.

He's coming for her. I just don't know when.

I am not letting him finish what he started on that embankment.

nine

. . .

Willow

The next few days settle into something that feels dangerously close to normal.

Hudson and I move around the cabin like we've been doing it for months instead of less than a week. He cooks. I clean up. We take walks along the tree line where he points out the camera angles and the best places to take cover if we ever need them. At night he pulls me into the big bed and makes me say I'm his while he's buried deep inside me, and I say it without hesitation now because it's true. I'm all in.

The realization hits me on a quiet afternoon while I'm standing in the kitchen wearing one of his t-shirts and nothing else. He's outside checking the generator. I'm slicing fruit for later, and the scars on my hip and thigh are fully visible every time the shirt rides up. I don't tug it down. I don't angle my body away from the window. I just keep cutting strawberries and let the sunlight land on every raised mark without flinching.

When Hudson comes back inside he stops in the doorway and looks at me for a long second. His eyes drop to the scars, then lift to my face. Whatever he sees there makes his expression go soft in a way that still catches me off guard.

"You're not hiding them anymore," he says.

"No." I set the knife down and turn to face him fully. "I'm not. You looked at them like they were something worth wanting. I'm trying to believe you."

He crosses the room, cups my face in both hands, and kisses me slow and deep. When he pulls back his forehead rests against mine.

"They're part of you. That means they're mine to take care of. You don't ever have to hide from me."

I believe him. That's the part that scares me a little less every day.

That afternoon, on the back porch with the trees pressing close on every side, Hudson runs me through the shooting drills again. He stands behind me with his chest against my back and his hands over mine, correcting my grip, talking low into my ear about breathing and sight line and the half-second of stillness before a trigger pull that's the difference between hitting what you're aiming at and missing completely.

"You're anticipating the shot," he says. "You're flinching before it happens. Stop thinking about the noise."

"Easy for you to say."

"You're going to thank me later." He adjusts my elbow slightly. "Again."

I exhale. I stop thinking about the sound. I squeeze.

The can he'd set up on the fence post twenty feet out spins off into the grass.

He makes a low sound of approval against my hair that does things to my concentration. I try not to smile and fail completely.

"Again," he says, but his voice has dropped into something warmer, and I can feel him smiling too.

That night we fall asleep tangled together the way we always do now—my head on his chest, his arm locked around my waist, his hand resting over the scars like a promise. The nightmares stay away again; no screaming metal, no empty hospital bed, no reaching for people who aren't there. I dream about the porch swing he keeps talking about and the way his voice sounds when he says my name like it already belongs to him.

I wake up to the sound of glass breaking.

It's 2 a.m. according to the clock on the nightstand. The cabin is dark. Hudson is already moving before I'm fully upright, shoving the covers back and reaching for the gun he keeps on his side of the bed. He checks his phone in the same motion—a habit now, always the phone first—and I see his jaw tighten at whatever's on the screen.

He stares at it for another second, then swears low and vicious.

"What?" I ask, but he's already pulling me out of bed.

"Outer team got reassigned thirty minutes ago. Command authorization, legitimate credentials." His voice is flat, dangerous. "Access road and ridge trail both pulled. We're blind out there."