Page 28

"You're doing the assessing face," she accuses, breathless, up on her elbows. "At my⁠—"

"Documenting conditions on arrival." I press a kiss to the inside of one thigh, then the other, close enough that her hips lift, chasing. "Wet. Trembling. Non-compliant."

"Oh my God, if you don't⁠—"

I do. I take her apart with my mouth like the patient man ten years made me — long slow strokes of my tongue through her folds first, learning what the sounds mean, then settling in on her clit while she rides up against my mouth, then two fingers deep inside her while I work her, her taste everywhere, her thighs clamping tight, her voice going up through registers the county hasn't zoned.

She's loud. God bless the acreage, she's loud — bossy and breathless and running commentary until the commentary fails, until she's down to my name and one repeated profanity and her hands fisted in the quilt, and I keep her on the edge, easing off every time she tightens, three times, four, until she starts threatening my license.

"Brady Callahan, if you stop again I will report you to every—" and I stop stopping, and stay, steady, exactly where she needs, and she comes apart with a sound they can probably hear at the annex, thighs shaking around my ears, my name breaking in half in her mouth.

I work her through it, slow, until she goes boneless. When I look up she's got one arm flung over her eyes and she's laughing — helpless, wrecked, gorgeous.

"I have," she announces to the ceiling, "so many regrets about the last decade."

"File them." I kiss my way up over the wax scar, the stomach, the sternum. "I'll process them in order."

"Come here, you smug⁠—"

She hauls me up by the jaw and kisses herself off my mouth, and her hands go to work — my shirt, my belt, wrestling me out of denim with a precision that would pass any audit — and then her fingers close around my cock and it's my turn to forget the terminology. She strokes me slow, watching my face with naked greed, filing her own report, and every disciplined thing left in me starts smoking at the edges.

"Look at that," she murmurs, wicked, when my breath goes. "Still famous."

"Sloane—"

"Condoms are in the nightstand, and if you take ten thorough minutes finding them, I'll die, and my headstone will say he was verifying⁠—"

I'm efficient. First time all day.

When I push into her — slow, both of us watching where we join, her hands gripping my forearms like the piano finally fell and she caught it — the sound we make together isn't a sound either of us has made before. She's scalding around my cock and she takes me to the root with a long exhale like she's been holding that breath for weeks, and I bottom out and have to stop, forehead to hers, buried in her, just breathing, because ten years of architecture is collapsing in my chest and it turns out demolition feels like this.

"Hey." Her palm on my cheek. Her eyes, close and shining, seeing all of it. "You're here."

"I'm here."

"Then move, mountain man."

I move. Slow and deep, the pace I promised myself, dragging nearly out of her and sinking back in while her legs wind around me, the quilt whispering, the lamp throwing us huge on the wall — and she undoes me, that's the truth of it, methodically, the way she undoes every code I've ever tried to hold against her. She rolls her hips into my rhythm and steals it. She says my name like it's her name for something else. She clenches around me on purpose, watching my face when she does it, filing the result.

"You're not the only one who documents," she whispers, wicked, and does it again, and my control drops a full rating class.

She pulls me down into the kiss and murmurs — filthy, tender, both at once, how does she do both at once — everything ten years should've had, deeper, harder, don't you dare be careful now, and the slow burns away like fog off a burn scar. It gets deep and urgent and loud, headboard keeping time against the wall, her nails in my back, her breasts against my chest, the wet slap of us filling the room with evidence, my hand under her hips changing the angle until every stroke drags where she needs it and her voice stops making words. She breaks — again, harder, clenching around my cock in waves and pulling me over the edge with her, and I come with her name in her hair and every last wall down, ten years, paid in full, both of us shaking.

The lamp's still on. The throw pillows are on the floor, all nine of them. Somewhere downstairs, Wick knocks something off a counter in protest at the noise, and neither of us has a single citation left to issue.

"So," she says eventually, to the ceiling, hair wrecked, voice wrecked, one hand flung across my chest like a seatbelt. "Thorough."

"Statement of fact."

"I'm putting it on your commission candle. Compliance: burns slow, lasts forever, ruins you for other candles." She rolls her head to look at me, and her grin goes soft in the middle. "Hey. For the record. Ten years was a crime and I'm billing you for it in increments. But this version of you — the one who knows exactly what he's risking?" She taps my sternum, right over the spot she's been renovating all night. "Worth the wait. Don't tell past you. He'd be insufferable."

"Past me held a tent pole for four hours to keep from asking you to dance."

She's quiet a second. "Okay, tell past you one thing," she says, and kisses the spot she tapped, and doesn't say what the thing is, and doesn't have to.

Later, she's tucked against my chest with her ear over my heartbeat and one leg thrown over mine, tracing idle circles through my chest hair, and reality files in through the dark, quiet as a rotation car on gravel.

"Say it," she murmurs, not asleep. "You've got your assessing face on. I can hear it."