Chapter 2
REMINGTON
"Remington Graves."
She said it like she was tasting something expensive. Drawing the syllables out, letting them roll across her tongue while I slid deeper into her, slow enough to make her breath catch and her fingers twist in the sheets.
I wanted to tell her not to say my name like that.
Not to say my full name at all—not here, not with her back arched and her lips parted and the way she watched me over her shoulder, cataloguing the moment for later.
For the retelling. For whatever version of this she'd construct over brunch with her friends in some sun-drenched café in Melbourne or Cambridge, mimosas sweating on the table while she leaned in and lowered her voice and said you won't believe who I—
But I didn't say any of that. Because this was part of it.
Part of who she was, part of the role she'd cast herself the moment she'd spotted me across the room at Zuma, her eyes doing that quick, unconscious arithmetic women like her did without thinking: face, watch, shoes, posture.
The calculus of worth. She'd solved the equation before I'd finished my drink, and I'd let her come to me because that was easier than going to her, and because Remington Graves didn't chase.
He was arrived at.
I'd given her the smile. Bought the bottle she'd chosen—Krug Clos du Mesnil, because women who moved in her orbit didn't drink anything that couldn't be identified by label from across the room.
I'd played the part she needed me to play because it was easier than not playing it, and because the alternative was sitting alone in a suite that cost more per night than most of my platoon earned in a month, staring at a ceiling and having conversations with myself.
So, here we were.
I pulled back, my cock sliding smoothly. Almost all the way out. Watched her spine curve, her hips tilt in pursuit, chasing what I'd taken away. I held there—just out of reach, just enough absence to make her want.
"Don't stop," she breathed.
I wasn't stopping. I was deciding. There's a difference. She'd never know it, and that was fine.
I pressed forward again. Slow, controlled, one hand on her hip and the other flat against the mattress, the sheets bunched under my palm, still cool where our bodies hadn't reached. She made a sound that was genuine underneath the theatre of it—raw and startled—and I gave her credit for that.
She was beautiful. Objectively, architecturally beautiful, in the way that made people's gazes snag and hold without permission. But she was also smart—smarter than most people would ever bother to discover, which was a particular kind of curse reserved for women who looked the way she did.
Structural engineering at Harvard when she wasn't walking runways in Milan. Her brain worked in load-bearing calculations and tensile strength, even when the rest of the world only wanted to discuss her cheekbones.
I liked her. That was true.
I just wasn't here. Not entirely. Not the way she deserved, if I was being honest—which I rarely was in situations like this.
My rhythm was steady. Practised in a way I'd stopped examining a long time ago—the way you stop examining anything you've gotten efficient at.
I knew the angle that made her breathing change, the pace that kept her suspended between enough and not quite.
The moment to shift my thumb across her hip bone in a way that drew a sound from somewhere deeper than she'd prepared for.
When to slow down until she pushed back against me, demanding.
When to drive forward hard enough that her arms buckled and her face hit the pillow.
It wasn't boredom.
That would be unfair and inaccurate. The sex was good. She was responsive and present, and I wasn't so far gone that I couldn't appreciate the heat of her, the flush that spread from her shoulders down, the small involuntary contractions that told me more than her sounds ever would.
It just wasn't the thing I was looking for.
I'd stopped being able to name what that thing was somewhere around twenty-five, which was its own quiet crisis I had no intention of addressing tonight or any night, because addressing it would require sitting still long enough to look at it directly.
I shifted my grip. Changed the angle. She swore—Australian, throaty, the accent thickening—and I filed that away as real. Kept moving.
The bourbon and the Krug hummed in my bloodstream.
Not enough to impair anything, but enough to round the edges I preferred sharp.
I could feel it behind my eyes, in the slight delay between intention and execution that would have been imperceptible to anyone who wasn't trained to notice everything.
She'd ordered it with the ease of someone who'd been holding champagne flutes since before she could legally drink from them.
I'd matched her glass for glass, because that was what you did.
I was thinking about tomorrow.
Even now, part of me had already packed up and moved on.
Tomorrow was unstructured. And unstructured time made me dangerous.
Not to anyone else. To myself. I’d requested leave while the rest of the team continued training Saudi special forces, and I had nothing ahead of me but this suite and this city and the humming emptiness of free time.
Free time was where the questions lived. And the questions had teeth.
Beneath me, she tensed. I felt it build before she did—the shift in her breathing, the way her fingers went white against the sheets, the involuntary tightening that started deep and radiated outward.
I adjusted. A fraction deeper, a degree slower. Gave her exactly what she needed, because reading a body was not so different from reading a room. I'd been doing both since I was old enough to understand that survival meant paying attention to what people couldn't say.
She came apart.
The sound was loud and uncontrolled—a shudder that started at the base of her spine and moved through her like a current, her whole body quivering, face pressed into the pillow, thighs trembling and then, slowly, still.
The room held the echo of it for a moment.
Then there was nothing but her breathing and the distant, muted hum of Dubai being Dubai sixty-three floors below.
Job done.
I eased out of her carefully. Rolled to my back, one arm behind my head, and stared at the ceiling while my pulse settled into something that felt nothing like resolution.
It had been a long time since I'd been truly satisfied.
The kind where your mind goes quiet and your body feels like it belongs to you again instead of something you operate from a distance.
I'd stopped counting how long. The count had started to depress me, and I had a policy about that—I didn't let things depress me until they became operational liabilities.
Not being able to come with a beautiful woman hadn't yet made the list.
It wasn't the sex. The sex was fine. I was good at it the way I was good at most physical things—with a competence trained into me and refined through repetition until it looked effortless and felt, from the inside, mechanical.
Like fieldstripping a weapon in the dark.
Like clearing a room with my rifle up and every variable accounted for before I crossed the threshold.
My body knew the choreography. My mind was already somewhere else.
Always somewhere else.
The life I'd built—the real one, the one that mattered—was as a Navy SEAL. That was where I existed. Where Rem Graves made sense, where the name on my trust documents and the name on my service record overlapped enough that I could simply be.
I loved the work. The brutal clarity of it. The binary simplicity of a mission: execute or don't, survive or don't, protect the man beside you or fail him.
Failure was not something I entertained. In this life or any other.
But there were times like this. Shore leave. Gaps between deployments. Moments when I slipped out of that world and back into the one I'd been born into—the one that waited for me the way old money always waited, patient and well-funded and indifferent to my feelings about it.
Remington Graves, heir to the Graves fortune.
Old money. East Coast. The kind that had stopped being a number generations ago and had become a kind of weather system—something that surrounded you, shaped what grew and what didn't, determined the landscape before you ever set foot in it.
You didn't spend it. You existed inside it.
The men I served with didn't know. Most of them.
They knew me as Rem, or Graves, or hey fucker, don't get your dick shot off, which was Chief Petty Officer Halloran's preferred term of endearment.
It had been repeated so many times it had calcified into something almost indistinguishable from love—or whatever love looked like between men who communicated through insults and the willingness to die for each other without discussing it.
They made a decent living. Good men. Hard men who sent money home to wives and kids and parents in towns with one traffic light and a church that doubled as the community centre.
Men who worried about truck payments and VA claims and whether dental would cover their kid's braces.
I sat next to them on transport flights, ate the same MREs, carried the same eighty-pound pack, bled in the same dirt.
None of them knew that the watch I didn't wear on deployment—the one locked in a safe in a Manhattan apartment I visited three times a year—was worth more than their houses.
A few knew. Further up the chain. Officers who'd seen the background check and the financial disclosure and had done the quiet arithmetic that produced a look I could identify on sight.
The one that said what the hell are you doing here.
The one that rearranged itself into professional neutrality within a few seconds, because what I was doing there was none of their business as long as I performed.