Jackson #2
"You can also walk barefoot. You’re not doing either. Car. Now."
"You have an empire to run."
"The empire has survived worse threats than a ninety-minute absence. Your sister’s appointment is at nine. We leave at eight-fifteen. This conversation is concluded."
She argued the whole drive. By the third trip, she stopped arguing and simply handed me her coffee the moment she got in the passenger seat, a warm paper cup placed into my hand without eye contact, like I was someone she trusted with small, ordinary things.
I watched her with Penny. That was the thing that dismantled me.
Not the corporate Kim, not the terrace Kim, but the hospital Kim.
The one who sat beside her sister’s bed and held her hand.
The one who read aloud from that ridiculous vampire novel in different voices until Penny laughed so hard the nurse came in to check the monitors.
She carried fear the way good soldiers carry ammunition, invisibly, distributed, never letting the person beside her feel the weight.
One evening I came into the kitchen and found her sitting on the tile floor with Maple sprawled across her thighs and four kittens in various stages of domestic chaos around her.
The gray runt was in her hands, nursing from a small bottle, and Kim was talking to it in a low, serious voice about the critical importance of hitting its weight milestones and developing a proper appetite.
She looked up and saw me in the doorway. And she smiled.
My breathing stopped.
I crossed the kitchen in four strides. Her eyes found mine, the kitten still in her hands. "What?"
I didn’t answer. I took the kitten out of her grip, placed it gently on the blanket beside Maple, and pulled Kim to her feet.
My hands found her waist. Her back hit the counter.
My mouth found hers, and I kissed her with a hunger that had everything to do with a woman smiling at me from a kitchen floor like I was the person she’d been waiting to see all day.
"What has gotten into you?" She was laughing against my lips, her fingers gripping the front of my shirt.
"You." I kissed her jaw. Her neck. The spot below her ear that made her gasp every time. "You, sitting on my kitchen floor, counseling a cat about nutrition."
"That’s what does it for you? Veterinary wellness lectures?"
"Apparently I’m a man of extremely specific triggers."
She wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me back, and the kitchen got very warm very fast. Maple gave us a look of such concentrated feline disapproval that I was fairly certain she was drafting a formal complaint with the estate management.
I scooped her up and carried her toward the stairs.
"I have functioning legs, you know," she said, though she made no move to use them.
"I’m aware of your ambulatory capabilities." I started up the first step. "I’m exercising my executive right to override them."
"That’s not a real right."
"It is in this house. I drafted the bylaws myself."
She laughed against my collarbone, then playfully bit my shoulder through my shirt.
"That," I said, "is actionable insubordination."
"So write me up."
"Oh, I will. There’ll be a formal review."
"Add it to my personnel file." She tipped her head back to look at me, and there it was, that smile that undid every clause I’d ever lived by. "Right under ‘refuses to be carried.’"
"Noted under ‘refuses, then doesn’t.’" I kissed the corner of that smile and kept climbing.
In the bedroom, I took my time, because I had learned over these weeks that Kim Bishop contained a contradiction that drove me to the edge of reason.
The woman who challenged me in boardrooms, who stood up to me on terraces, who called me jealous to my face without blinking, turned quiet when I undressed her.
She’d look away. Bury her face in the pillow.
Her cheeks would burn, and she’d fold her arms across herself like she was trying to make herself smaller, and it fascinated me and infuriated me in equal measure.
"Eyes on me," I told her, my hands working the buttons of her shirt one by one while she lay beneath me. "You don’t get to disappear, Kim. Not here."
"I’m right here."
"You’re looking at the headboard."
"The headboard has interesting woodwork."
"The headboard is Victorian oak and completely unremarkable.
I, on the other hand, am directly in your line of sight and significantly more demanding of your attention.
" I kissed the skin exposed by each opened button, slow, watching her chest rise and fall.
"And the more you try to avoid my eyes, the longer I intend to take.
I have nowhere to be and absolutely no intention of rushing. "
"That’s a threat."
"It’s a guarantee. I honor every guarantee I make. Consult my legal department."
She laughed, the sound breathless and flushed.
I kissed down her body with a patience that bordered on cruelty, learning every shiver, every catch of breath, every place that made her fingers tighten in my hair.
Her stomach, where I pressed my lips flat against her navel and felt her hips lift.
The curve of her waist, where my teeth grazed the sensitive skin and she gasped my name in a way that made rational thought a distant memory.
Lower, where I took my time until she was gripping the sheets so hard her hands shook and saying please in a voice stripped of every defense she’d ever built.
"Say it again."
"Jackson, please."
"I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of hearing that."
When I finally moved over her, pressing into her warmth, her arms locked around my neck.
She pulled me down, and we both made a low, helpless sound against each other’s mouths.
I moved slowly at first, our foreheads together, her eyes on mine, and it wasn’t just physical.
It was the closest I’d been to another person since I could remember, a proximity that went deeper than skin, and the vulnerability of it was terrifying and necessary and irrevocably addictive.
When she came apart she said my name like it was the only word left in her vocabulary, and I followed her seconds later, my face buried in her neck, holding her so tightly I could feel her heartbeat against my own.
After, she fell asleep against my chest within minutes.
She always did. The hospital visits, the worry for Penny, the emotional weight she carried like a second skeleton—it all caught up the instant she stopped moving.
She’d drop into sleep like a stone into deep water, her hand curled against my ribs, her breathing slow and even and trusting in a way that no security system or legal contract could replicate.
I lay awake.
Her face in the moonlight. The freckles scattered across her nose that she never covered with makeup.
The chestnut curl that always fell across her temple regardless of how many times she pushed it back.
The small crease between her eyebrows that only disappeared when she slept, the single window into a mind that never stopped carrying someone else’s crisis.
And the realization arrived.
I was in love with her.
I was in. All the way in. The kind of in that doesn’t have an exit clause, the kind that rewrites the operating system and renders every prior calculation obsolete.
I stared at the ceiling. My arm was around her shoulders. Her heartbeat was a steady, quiet rhythm against my ribs, and the dread that pooled in my stomach had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the small steel panel hidden behind a painting in the study downstairs.
The safe. The pendant. The plan.
I had told myself, weeks ago, that getting close to her was strategy. A means to a key. An approach to accessing whatever my mother had locked away. And somewhere in the execution of that strategy, the target had become the only thing I wanted to protect.
It was never strategy.
It was never even close to strategy.
And now I was in love with a woman I might still have to betray, and the math, for the first time in my career, didn’t have an answer I could live with.