Chapter Five
Jenna
I WOKE UP WITH A MAN in my bed for the first time in two years, and my first coherent thought was that he ran warm.
His arm was across my waist. Heavy, relaxed, his chest pressed to my back and his breathing slow against my hair.
My fingers were still loosely curled around his wrist where I'd fallen asleep holding on.
I could feel his heartbeat between my shoulder blades, calm now, nothing close to the hammering under my palm last night.
I lay still. The apartment was quiet. Sunday morning quiet, which in the Quarter during Mardi Gras week meant the city had finally passed out and wouldn't stir until noon.
Gray light through the curtains. Through the wall, the distant whine of a garbage truck making its daily attempt at Bourbon Street.
His fingers tightened on my hip. Not awake. Reflexive, pulling me closer, and the warmth that curled through my stomach wasn't complicated. I just wasn't going to name it yet.
I turned in his arms.
He looked different asleep. The jaw was the same, architectural, not optional, but the constant scan was off, the calculated ease dropped. His face was open, hair pushed flat on one side, a crease from my pillowcase running across his cheekbone.
I touched it.
His eyes opened. Gray, focused on me before they were fully open.
"Morning," I said.
"What time is it?"
"Early enough that you don't get to ask."
He shifted closer, his leg sliding between mine under the sheet. "You stole my shirt."
I looked down. His gray t-shirt, the one I'd pulled on somewhere between the front door and the bed. The collar had slipped off one shoulder and his eyes tracked it.
"Annexed," I said. "Legally distinct."
"On what authority?"
"Possession. Which in this apartment is the law."
His palm slid along my bare thigh, warm, unhurried, and the curl in my stomach pulled tighter. I could feel him half-hard against my hip and the casual confidence of it, no adjustment, no apology, was doing more for me than it should have at this hour.
"I need coffee," I said. Because I did. And because the alternative was letting him see exactly how fast my pulse had changed, which was information I wasn't giving up before eight in the morning.
I climbed out. His hand dragged along my thigh and let go at the last second and neither of us mentioned it. I walked to the kitchen in his shirt and nothing else, and behind me I heard the bed shift as he got up.
THE PERCOLATOR WAS running and I was reaching for the mugs, top shelf, because I'd organized this kitchen at five-five and no one had ever cared about the top shelf until this week, when he was behind me.
The displacement of air first, then the warmth, and then his hands on my hips and his mouth on my neck and my fingers were still on the mug handle and my whole body went still.
"I was getting coffee," I said.
"I know." His lips pressed below my ear, slow. "Keep going."
"Hard to reach the mug when you're—"
He turned me around. My back hit the counter edge and he was right there, bare chest, gray sweatpants riding low, his hands braced on the tile on either side of me.
The look on him wasn't the charm or the professional cool.
This was the man from last night, and he was looking at me with an intent that made my thighs press together.
"I thought about this all night," he said against my jaw. "You asleep. Me not sleeping."
"That sounds like a you problem."
"It is." He lifted me onto the counter. "I'm solving it."
His mouth was on mine before I finished the breath, and the kiss wasn't last night's detonation.
Slower, more deliberate, his hands sliding under the t-shirt and up my ribs while his tongue traced mine.
He peeled the shirt over my head and dropped it on the floor and stepped between my thighs, lips trailing to my throat, my collarbone, lower.
He took his time. Kissed across my stomach while I gripped the counter's edge and tried to remember that I was usually the one running this show.
"Dane—"
"Hold on."
He gripped my hips, pulled me to the counter's edge, and dropped to his knees and put his mouth on me and I stopped pretending I had a vote.
His tongue was deliberate and certain, gray eyes holding mine while he worked my clit with measured strokes, and the eye contact during it was obscene and electric and I grabbed his hair and his groan vibrated against me and my breath caught.
"Inside me," I said. "Now."
He stood, shoved his sweatpants down, and lifted me off the counter. I wrapped my legs around him and he pinned me against the kitchen wall and pushed his cock into me and the sound I made was not quiet and I did not care.
He fucked me standing, one hand under my ass, the other braced above my head, forehead against mine. I could see every muscle in his shoulders working, his jaw tight with control, and I reached down between us and got my fingers on my clit and his rhythm broke when he felt my hand.
"Fuck—Jenna—"
"Don't stop."
He didn't. Harder, faster, his breath hot against my skin, and I rubbed myself in tight circles and came with my teeth sunk into his shoulder and my whole body clamped around him. He followed seconds later, hips pinning me to the wall, a raw groan against my hair.
We stayed there. His forehead dropped to my shoulder and I felt him laughing before I heard it. His body shaking against mine, silent and real.
"What," I said.
"Coffee's done."
I listened. The percolator was clicking on the counter, finished, patient, completely ignored.
"Your fault," I said.
"Worth it."
"The coffee's going to be terrible."
"I'll drink it." He pulled back enough to look at me and the expression, warm, open, a little wrecked, was going to be a problem I dealt with after caffeine.
I shoved his chest. "Put me down. And put on a shirt. You're distracting."
"Copy that."
WE WALKED TO PROOF at three.
Sunday shift, scaled back from Saturday's chaos. Huck coming in at three-thirty, two servers at five. The Sunday before Fat Tuesday had its own rhythm. The Quarter recovering, tourists getting one lazy night before the real push, the whole city at half speed but still humming.
Dane walked at my shoulder, same positioning he'd held all week.
He was in a gray button-down, sleeves cuffed, the holster line barely visible under the fabric.
I knew where to look now. I knew a lot of things about what was under his clothes now, which made the walk to work considerably more interesting than usual.
We cut through the side street behind Proof, the shortcut I'd taken a thousand times, the narrow stretch between my building and the parking lot that opened to the alley entrance.
It happened fast.
A man stepped from behind my car—my car, the one with the smashed windows still sitting in the lot—and he was moving toward me and there was something in his hand that caught the afternoon light.
I didn't process the details. My body locked, the same freeze from Wednesday night in the alley, that animal recognition of wrong.
Dane was between us before I finished the thought.
He moved so fast I didn't see the transition: beside me and then in front of me, his arm sweeping me back, his body squaring to the man.
He caught the wrist, twisted, and drove him face-first into the brick wall.
The knife—short, ugly—clattered on the concrete.
Dane had the arm pinned behind the man's back at an angle that would snap with one more degree, his knee in the spine, his face absolutely empty.
No anger, no fear, no anything. The man who'd been laughing in my kitchen an hour ago was gone. This one was someone I hadn't met.
"Don't move," Dane said. Quiet. The voice was worse than shouting.
The man didn't move.
My hands were steady. That surprised me. I pulled my phone and called 911 and gave the address and Dane didn't shift by a millimeter until the patrol car turned onto the block.
Perry Hebert arrived twenty minutes later. Looked at the man on the ground. Broad forehead, thick neck, the scar through one eyebrow. The enforcer from my alley. Wednesday night. The same face I'd been seeing behind my eyelids for five days.
Hebert looked at me. Looked at Dane. Looked at the enforcer zip-tied on the concrete.
"He came at her with a blade," Dane said. "I stopped him."
Hebert nodded slowly. "He'll stay in holding. The DA will want this for the grand jury file. This helps your case. A lot."
I nodded. My hands were still steady. The rest of me wasn't entirely, but the hands were enough.
Hebert drove us home because my car was evidence now. I sat in the passenger seat and looked out the window and Dane put his hand on my knee and didn't say a word, and I covered his hand with mine and didn't either.
THE COUCH.
My grandmother's couch, the one I'd threatened to throw him through the window over, which felt both very recent and very far away.
I sat on one end. He sat on the other. Not touching, but close.
The apartment was quiet, the streetlights coming on outside, the city gathering itself for one more push before Tuesday.
"So that's what you do," I said.
He looked at me.
"When it counts. Not the grin, not the charm, not the stool at the end of my bar. That's who you actually are."
"Does that bother you?"
"No." I pulled my knees up. "It bothers me that it doesn't bother me."
His mouth moved, close to a smile, not quite. "I've been doing this a long time. I show up, I handle it, I drive away clean." He looked at his hands. "This one's not going clean."
"Was it ever?"
"No. But I told myself it would until about Thursday."
"Thursday. You lasted one day."
"Day and a half. Give me some credit."
I laughed. An hour after someone had come at me with a knife, sitting on my grandmother's couch, and I was laughing because this man had admitted he'd fallen for me forty-eight hours into the assignment with the same flat voice he'd use to report a broken lock.