Chapter 6
Judge
Two days.
It's not surveillance. I want to be clear about that, at least to myself, because I've spent enough years being precise about my own motives that I'm not going to start lying about them now.
It's not surveillance. It's the specific, inconvenient awareness of a man whose attention has attached itself to something without his permission and won't let go.
She came down to breakfast both mornings. Sat at the end of the table with her coffee and her laptop and her photographer's eye moving over the room in that way she has: peripheral, patient, cataloguing everything without appearing to look at anything.
She talked to Kourtney. She was careful around the brothers, not unfriendly, just measured, giving nothing she didn't mean to give.
She asked Templar good questions when he sat down with her the first morning, the kind of questions that tell you someone has been thinking rather than waiting, and Templar's face did the thing it does when he reassesses something.
Just a fraction, just enough for me to catch it.
She ate Kourtney's food both mornings without being asked twice. That shouldn't mean anything, but it means something.
Yesterday afternoon she was in the outbuilding behind the main building, the one we use for storage and overflow, and I know this because I walked past the window and saw her through the glass.
Just sitting on an upturned crate with her laptop and her cards, working through frames, a cup of coffee balanced beside her. She didn't see me. I kept walking.
This is not who I am. I'm a man who runs on information and discipline and the understanding that sentiment is a liability in the kind of life I've chosen.
I don't track women through compound windows.
I don't lie awake at two in the morning thinking about the way someone's hair smelled in the cab of my truck.
I get up and go to the gun room.
She's already there.
Sitting on the floor against the far wall, back straight, laptop open on her crossed legs, the screen throwing blue light across her face in the dark.
She hasn't turned on the overhead light. It’s just the laptop, just that one cold rectangle of light, and she's so focused on whatever she's looking at that she doesn't hear me come in.
I stand in the doorway for a moment.
I should send her back to her room. It's two in the morning, this is the gun room, and she's a guest under the club's protection, not someone with access to every part of this compound. Those are all correct thoughts. I have them clearly.
I pull up the stool at the bench and sit down.
She looks up then, registering the movement, and for a second her whole body goes still like she's assessing something. Then she sees it's me and the stillness changes quality from threat-assessment to something else, something I don't name.
"Couldn't sleep," she says. It’s not a question.
"No."
She looks at me for a moment, then back at her screen.
I reach for the Glock on the bench and start breaking it down, and the familiar sequence of it — the click and slide of the mechanism, the weight of each piece as I set it down — does what it always does.
Quiets the top layer of my head and lets me think underneath it.
We work in the same silence for an hour.
It's the same silence as the truck, the same quality.
Not empty, not requiring anything. She's on her floor, I'm at my bench, and the gun room is dark except for her laptop and the small work light I've clipped to the bench.
The only sounds are the occasional click of her keyboard and the mechanical work of my hands.
I finish the Glock and move to the next weapon. She scrolls through frames and occasionally zooms in on something, and I'm not watching her but I'm aware of her the way you're aware of a fire in a room.
"Judge."
I look over. She's turned the laptop toward me, extended it slightly, leaning forward with it like she wants me to see the screen without having to describe what's on it.
"Come look at this," she says.
I stand, cross the room, and crouch beside her. She tilts the screen toward me. It's a frame from the bayou. Not Delacroix, a different figure, standing further back in the cargo light, his face partially turned.
"I've been trying to place him," she says. "He's in six frames. Always staying back, always at the same distance from Delacroix, but never actually working. Not loading, not directing. Just watching."
I look at the frame. The posture is there, the specific stance of a man who is accustomed to watching operations rather than running them. "You think he's above Delacroix."
"I think he's checking on Delacroix." She scrolls to the next frame. "Look at the angle. He's positioned so he can see the whole operation, including Delacroix. That's not a subordinate."
I look at the next frame, then the next, and she's right. The positioning is consistent and deliberate, the stance of a man who is assessing rather than participating. "Can you get more resolution on the face?"
"I've been trying. The angle's wrong in every frame. He's good at staying just out of it." She zooms in and the image pixelates. "But if I can get him in front of someone who knows who Delacroix answers to…"
She leans over my shoulder to point at something on the screen and her hair brushes my jaw.
I turn.
She's right there.
The distance between us is nothing, an inch, maybe less, the space of a turned head, and she's looking at the screen still for one more second before she feels it and looks at me instead.
The look on her face is not surprise. It's the look of a woman who has been aware of something building and has been waiting to see who acknowledges it first.
Neither of us speaks.
The kiss starts slowly.
I move toward her the fraction of an inch required and she closes the rest of it, and the first contact is deliberate. Both of us choose it with our eyes open, both of us knowing exactly what it costs.
Her mouth is warm. She tastes like the coffee she's been drinking and underneath that is something else, something that's just her. The combination of it does something to my chest that I'm not going to examine right now.
Her hand comes up and finds my jaw, and the touch of it breaks something loose that I've been keeping caged for two days.
I pull her up off the floor without breaking the kiss.
She comes without hesitation, her hands going to my shoulders, and I walk her back until she's against the gun room wall.
The sound she makes against my mouth when her back meets the plaster goes straight through me.
I press my body into hers and feel her hips roll forward seeking friction, and the control I've been running on for two days develops a crack straight down the center of it.
"We shouldn't," she says against my mouth. Her hands are in my hair, pulling, which is not the behavior of a woman who means it.
"Tell me to stop." I drag my mouth down her neck, feel her pulse jump under my lips, scraping my teeth against the soft skin below her ear until she shudders against me. "Say it and I will."
She doesn't say it. Instead, she tips her head back and her fingers tighten in my hair. I walk her out of the gun room and down the dark hallway with my hand at the small of her back.
The door to my room closes behind us. In the dark she turns and finds me by feel, her hands flat on my chest, and I can feel her heartbeat through my shirt; fast and steady, but not from fear.
I get her shirt off and drop it. In the low light coming through the window, she's lean and angular and completely unselfconscious about it. She has the body of a woman who lives practically and without apology. I run my hands up her sides and feel her breath catch.
"Your turn," she says, and pulls my shirt over my head before I can do it myself.
Her palms flatten against my chest. She reads me the way she reads everything. Slowly, the photographer's attention turned on my skin, her fingers tracing the tattoo across my shoulder and down my ribs. I let her because the alternative is ending the patience early and I want to draw this out.
She looks up at me. "You've been watching me for two days."
"Yes."
"I've been watching you too." No performance in it. Just information. "I thought you should know that."
I take her face in both hands and kiss her until she stops talking.
I get the rest of her clothes off and mine too, and when I lay her back on the bed she pulls me with her immediately, her legs wrapping around my hips, her hand reaching between us and wrapping around my cock with a grip that makes me groan against her throat.
She strokes me slowly and deliberately, watching my face while she does it, the photographer cataloguing my reactions with the same patience she turns on everything else.
"Jesslyn." Her name in my mouth sounds like a warning.
"Mm." She doesn't stop. She tightens her grip and works me until my hips are moving against her hand and my jaw is clenched and I've got a fist in the sheets beside her head.
I pull her hand away and pin her wrist above her head, and the sound she makes — surprised, pleased, a little breathless — does nothing good for my self-control.
I settle between her thighs and drag the head of my cock through her, feel how wet she already is, and her whole body arches up toward me.
"Judge."
"Not yet." I do it again. Slowly. Watching her face while I work her with just enough contact to make her want more. Her free hand grabs my hip, fingers digging in, trying to pull me where she wants me.
"Tell me what you want," I demand.
"You know what I want."
"Say it anyway."
Her eyes meet mine in the dark, direct and unguarded, all the careful composure gone. "I want you inside me," she says. "Now."
I push inside her in one slow stroke and we both go completely still.
Just breathing. Just the weight of it. Her eyes are open and on mine, and there is no performance in what I'm looking at. Just a woman feeling something she didn't plan to feel, with a man she didn't plan to want.
I understand that completely.
I start to move. She rises to meet me immediately, her hips rolling up in counterpoint, and the patience I had a minute ago burns off entirely. Her nails drag down my back hard enough to sting, and I drive into her harder in answer. She makes a sound against my shoulder that I feel in my spine.
I get my hand between us and find her with my thumb, work her in tight circles while I move inside her, and she breaks rhythm immediately, her whole body stuttering, her breath going ragged.
"Don't stop," she says. "Please don’t stop."
I don't stop. I work her until she's shaking under me, until her thighs are clamped around my hips, her hands are fisted in my hair, and she's saying my name over and over in pieces, broken apart by her breath.
She comes with her back arched off the bed and her whole body clenching around me, and the feeling of it — the sounds she makes, the way she grips me — pulls me over with her. I bury myself deep and groan her name against her throat and come until there's nothing left.
Afterward we lie in the dark with the ceiling fan turning overhead, her hand resting flat on my chest, and both of us just breathing.
The compound is quiet. Through the window, the perimeter lights make a low amber glow. The fan turns. Neither of us speaks for a long time.
"That was a bad idea," she says.
"Probably."
She turns her head and looks at me in the dark, direct, no coyness anywhere in it. "Don't apologize."
"I'm not going to apologize."
"Good."
She sits up, reaches for her shirt on the floor, and pulls it over her head. I watch her and don't say anything, because there's nothing to say that wouldn't be either too much or not enough.
She finds the rest of her things in the dark with the easy efficiency of a woman practiced at moving through unfamiliar spaces and looks at me from the doorway.
"Go to sleep, Judge," she says.
She leaves. The door closes quietly behind her.
I lie in the dark and stare at the ceiling.
I can smell her on the pillow beside me, and I think about the figure in the bayou frame.
The man standing just far enough back to see the whole operation, positioned to watch Delacroix the way a handler watches an asset.
Layers. Whatever Delacroix is, he's not the top of it.
I think about that.
I think about her saying I've been watching you too, clean and precise, like it was the most ordinary thing.
The ceiling fan turns.
Sleep doesn't come for a long time.