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I lean in and press my mouth to hers—soft, deliberate, a question more than a demand—and feel the exact moment she begins to answer it. Fortunately, her answer doesn’t involve neutering me for my audacity.

Instead, her lips part on a sharp inhale. Her hand comes up between us, not to push me away but hovering there, caught between instinct and indecision. I slide my hand along her jaw, tipping her head back just enough to deepen the angle, and she lets me. That’s the thing about Mia—she lets nothing happen to her that she doesn’t choose. So, when she chooses this, when her hand finally settles against my chest and her mouth moves against mine with that particular kind of reluctant hunger, it hits harder than anything forced or taken ever could.

I feel it in my wolf like a struck match.

I want more. I want everything she’ll give me if I keep going—and I know, if I pushed her, she would. I can feel it in the way her fingers curl slightly into my shirt, the way she leans in by a fraction she probably doesn’t even notice.

Which is exactly why I pull back.

Her eyes open. There’s a dangerous look in them now that I find enormously sexy.

“What the hell was that?”

“A preview.”

“Of what?”

“What you’ll get when you ask me to do it again.”

“There you go with that arrogance again.” She rolls her eyes, but her flushed cheeks tell a different story. “What the hell makes you think I’ll ask?”

“Because I’m patient enough to wait for it,” I say, low. Like a promise. Like a fucking vow. “Eventually, you will ask. And when you do—” I let my gaze drop to her mouth for just a moment before coming back up to those sea-green eyes, “—I plan to make you beg for me.”

Her expression is back to murder, but her peaked nipples make it impossible for me to fear her anymore.

“The job comes first,” she says. The words are steadier than her pulse. I can hear it, and the erratic rhythm satisfies me more than it should.

“I know.” And I do. It’s one of the things I admire about her; that bone-deep commitment to something bigger than herself. She carries this city on her back and doesn’t complain about the weight. “I would never ask you to compromise your duty.”

“Is that why you didn’t give me away today? When I pretended we just met?”

All hint of teasing dies, and I tell her with solemn conviction, “I won’t violate your trust, Mia. Not ever.”

I step back, giving her space and looking down at her—the fierce, unyielding, luminous thing she is—standing barefoot in her bright apartment in the middle of a city that doesn’t know how lucky it is to have her, and I smile. “Goodnight, Mia. I look forward to watching you pretend you don’t want me tomorrow.”

She says nothing to stop me as I let myself out. But she doesn’t tell me I’m wrong, either.

4

MIA

Idon’t sleep well after Nash leaves. This is not a surprise. I’ve spent the last two years cataloging Nash Cross in the past tense, filed neatly under never gonna happen again. What we had was amazing, but it was one night. Nothing more. And even though I might have daydreamed about an encore someday, I never actually thought I’d see the man again.

Yet, here he is, sleeping a few miles away at the Giovanni estate, and I can still feel the exact pressure of his mouth against mine and the specific warmth of his hand along my jaw and the way my fingers curled into his shirt before I remembered to stop them.

I plan to make you beg for me.

I stare at my ceiling for what feels like a century.

The problem with Nash—one of approximately a hundred problems with Nash—is that he doesn’t behave the way men who want something from you are supposed to behave. He’s not performing. He’s not angling. He walked into my apartment in pants that looked like a circus tent—right down to the erection he was using as a support beam, complimented my apartment in a way that suggested he actually understood it, made me laugh against my will, kissed me with a skill that made my toes curl, and left.

Which means the ball is now in my court, and he knows it, and I know it, and the only winning move is to not think about it—which I’ve already utterly failed at, but Nash doesn’t have to know that, dammit.

I toss and turn all night, and by the gray pre-dawn hours, I’m more pissed at myself than I’ve been in a long time. I’m also sexually frustrated in a way that makes me want to throw something. I get up at five, run seven miles, shower, and take my Null with my coffee like I do every morning. By the time I’m in the car, I have successfully not thought about the kiss for almost six minutes straight.

Progress.

I leave early enough that I beat the traffic, and in girl math, that earns me enough time to stop for one of Claire’s fancy lattes, so I make a pit stop at the restaurant. Once, I would have avoided this place like the plague, considering it was Franco’s chosen “office” space. But ever since Lexi inherited it and then gave it to Crow, the place is quickly becoming a second home.