Page 53 of Hunted in the Silence

“So have I.”

“I know you have.” Her teeth scraped against her bottom lip. “You’re not as hard to read as you think you are.”

“I’ve been told I’m very hard to read,” he countered, knowing she was probably the one person who saw straight through him.

“By people who weren’t paying the right kind of attention.”

He looked at her for a long moment. At a woman who had every reason to keep the walls up and was choosing, incrementally and deliberately, to take them down.

And he made a decision.

Cole sat up and moved down the couch.

Not fast. Each movement was deliberate, measuring her reaction. She adjusted herself as he closed the distance, meeting him in the middle, and when he reached up and tucked a strand of her dark hair back from her face she didn’t lean away this time. She held his gaze and he held hers, and finally…finally…

He kissed her.

Soft at first. Careful. Testing. Hardly believing it was real. She was someone who felt close yet out of reach. Yet she didn’t pull away. Her hand came up and found the front of his shirt, and she kissed him back with the same careful honesty she brought to everything.

And then the careful part fell away and it was just them in the quiet house, in the lamp light, with winter pressing against the windows.

When they finally pulled back, she kept her hand fisted in his shirt with heavy-lidded eyes that made him want to do it all over again and keep that satisfied look on her face always.

“Okay,” she said quietly, her warm breath whispering across his lips.

He almost laughed. “Okay.”

“I’ve been wanting to do that for two weeks.”

“Longer,” he admitted with a light chuckle.

Her eyes darted between his curiously. “How much longer?”

“The night you held the door open and told me every minute mattered.” He watched something move through her expression, warm and unguarded. “I ignored it and told myself it wasn’t relevant.”

“You were wrong,” she breathed.

“I was wrong,” he agreed.

She leaned her forehead against his jaw for a moment, and he put his arm around her, and she settled against his side as if she were meant to fit there. And if he had it his way, that’s exactly where she would stay. In the safety of his arms.

Outside, somewhere in Blackridge, Devlin was out there making his calculations.

Tomorrow, Silas would call with a response strategy to build and Olivia would be running surveillance and all the work that was still unfinished.

But right now, the house was warm and Brynn was here in his arms, and he had stopped being careful about the one thing that he’d needed to stop being careful about.

He held onto that.

The lamp clicked off, and Brynn snuggled closer, and Cole settled in for a long night next to the only person he wanted to spend his time with, and for now, it was enough.

Chapter 17

Brynn woke first.

The safe house bedroom, the early light casting heavy shadows across the walls, and a peek out the blinds revealed a sky that hadn’t quite decided what kind of day it was going to be yet. Brynn sat on the end of the bed for a moment and listened to the house, the small sounds of someone else’s presence nearby that she had not woken up to in a very long time.

She thought about last night. The kitchen. The couch. The conversation that had traversed nearly a decade of their lives with an ease she hadn’t experienced with anyone, ever, as if they had finally dropped all pretenses and stopped protecting themselves from one another. What was there to even protect from? Cole had been the single most trustworthy man she’d met her whole life, making her put her guard down despite her best efforts not to. There was an honesty about him, an earnestness that poured from his eyes—the windows to his soul—that told her she didn’t need to be afraid. And she leaned into that like her life depended on it. Which, she supposed, it now did.