Maya
His control was gone.
The careful, measured man was stripped away now. His expression when he lifted his head nearly undid her.
His mouth parted slightly with each breath, his eyes dark and unfocused. There was no calculation in him right now. No law. No morality.
Just her.
Maya felt something fierce move through her chest.
Mine.
The thought came sudden and hot and possessive.
Not forever. She knew that.
But now.
Right now.
He was hers.
Her body was moving with his. She wanted him, she wanted this. She wanted the feeling of his body answering hers without hesitation.
His hand gripped her thigh, holding her open for him. His forehead dropped to her shoulder.
“Maya,” he said.
Another woman had never had him like this. Never had Reid Lawson bare. She was taking this. She was owning him.
It felt good.
Her legs tightened around his hips and she felt his body react to her, the rough catch in his breathing, the loss of rhythm until he steadied himself.
His eyes found hers.
He looked… He looked utterly consumed by her.
The law was nowhere in the room. Nowhere in his head. That there was no courtroom or badge or evidence file that could pull his attention away from her now.
She rolled her hips, a counterpoint to his movement, and felt him lose composure, his sharp inhale.
The power of it went through her like heat.
She wanted this man—this brilliant, rigid, impossible man—to belong to her completely for once in his life.
Even temporarily.
Even just practice.
He was trembling. She owned him.
“Maya,” he said again, louder this time. The last of his control was breaking apart completely. His hips were moving faster now, and she gripped him. She could feel him everywhere.
With a shout, he broke apart. He gave her everything he had, pressing himself into her with a groan. His thrusts losing rhythm as he lost himself.
Reid, shaking apart in her arms. Her husband.
Mine, she thought.
For a long moment neither of them moved.
Reid collapsed half on her, half beside her, his breathing uneven, his face still pressed to her neck.
His hand found her hip. Like he needed the contact. She let her fingers move through his hair, still wet from the picnic.
She let herself have this moment.
The warmth of him, the weight, the sound of his breathing returning to normal.
"I'll be right back," he murmured eventually, pressing a kiss to her shoulder before he eased away.
He came back with a warm, damp flannel and a glass of water, the same as he always did.
But this time, when he went to clean her, her whole body went hot with embarrassment.
It was different without the condom. It felt more intimate than usual, and his hands were so careful and so unhurried about it.
"Reid," she said, mortified.
"Let me," he said quietly. He didn't rush. He didn't make it awkward. He just took care of her, like there was nothing remotely awkward about any of it.
When he was done, he set the flannel aside and gathered her against his chest, and she let him.
She wanted to just be here, be the woman who had just been thoroughly, completely known by someone who loved her.
She closed her eyes. She would let herself have this for another minute, maybe two. Then she would be practical again.
She lay there until the intimacy of what they had done was impossible to ignore.
“I need—" she started, and he understood, helping her up. She made it to the bathroom on unsteady legs and closed the door.
He was sitting on the edge on the bed when she came back into the room. “Don’t leave,” he said, when she started to dress. “Please.”
She glanced at him.
“I want to be your husband again,” he said. “You are everything to me. I just—" He exhaled. "I messed up.”
She could see that he meant it. Reid Lawson did not lie. When he said something it was because it was true.
She knew that.
She believed that he believed it.
"I know," she said gently.
"Maya—"
"I know you mean that," she said. She kept her voice as even as she could. "And I love you for saying it."
Reid was a good man. He was a genuinely, deeply good man, and he loved her, she had never doubted that, not really, not even at the worst of it.
But he was telling her she was his everything and that wasn’t true.
She understood that. She was a practical woman. She knew how people worked.
He had loved her, she knew that, and when she had co-existed with his job, it hadn’t mattered that she had been second place. She hadn’t even realized it. Until it had mattered, and Reid had followed his principles. That had destroyed her, it had broken her.
She was grateful for his love. She wanted to wrap it up and carry it with her. Even if it wasn't—couldn't be—enough.
The next time something came across his desk, the next time the law and Maya Lawson pulled in opposite directions—
She looked at him.
He was watching her like she was the answer to a question he'd been asking his whole life.
She wanted to believe it so badly her chest ached with it.
That was the problem.
She wanted it too much to trust herself.
"I have to go," she said.
She walked to the door and stopped in the doorway.
She was aware of him behind her, the warmth of the room, the comfortable silence of a bedroom that had been hers.
She could be unhappy without him.
She had been doing it for weeks. She had been living a transient existence in the Merritts' guest room. She had cried and then wiped away those tear and kept going and she had been okay. She would keep being okay.
But there was another path open to her. She could also be unhappy with him.
She could come back and love him and watch the careful distance between his principles and her needs and spend the rest of her life waiting to see which way it fell.
Both pathways of unhappy could be her future.
She didn't know yet which one she could live with.
But she was a practical woman.
She would figure it out.
Everything was the same.
The pictures on the wall. The creaks in the floorboard.
Her scarf was still hanging on the hook by the door.
The house would legally be hers. Reid had made sure of that.
For a second she stopped, her hand hovering near it.
She could remember leaving it there without thinking, weeks ago, back when this had still been her house, back when she hadn’t needed permission to exist inside these walls.
Back when walking out the front door had meant coming back later, not being shut out.
Home.
That feeling was a lie.
Nothing had changed.
Maya stepped outside and pulled the door shut behind her.
The evening air hit her warm and soft, the music from the picnic carried. She could hear the low thump of bass, someone's kids shrieking with laughter, the muted noise of the crowd drifting to her.
It was six blocks walk to the Merritts'.
As she walked, she could feel the awareness low in her body, impossible to ignore. A physical reminder of where she had just been. What she had asked for. What Reid had given her.
They had never had unprotected sex before.
Reid was always careful. Sensible. That was who he was, part of what had made her trust him so completely.
And today he had looked at her and said yes to everything she asked.
Maya kept walking. She kept her chin up and her pace steady. She knew her hair was mussed, lips swollen. Her face felt flushed in a way that had nothing to do with the evening heat.
Could people tell she had just come from her husband's bed?
Nothing had changed.
She was still the woman who had been arrested in front of her community. Still the woman whose husband believed she was guilty.
And now also the woman who had gone back to him afterward and asked him to give her a child.
Was she different now?
Maya exhaled slowly through her nose and tried to gather herself back together.
She could go back to him.
He was trying so hard to fix what he had broken. Now he knew she was innocent, there was no conflict. Reid’s job and his wife could co-exist once again.
Maybe it could be enough.
Maybe she could go home and let herself have the life she had wanted before everything fractured apart.
She could sleep in her own bed again. She could raise a baby with him, watch him become someone’s father. She could bake the cookies for next year’s picnic. She could keep going as his wife.
She would be happy like that.
Wouldn’t she?
People compromised in marriages all the time. She had known exactly who Reid was when she married him, and she had loved him, not despite that, but because of it. His certainty. His principles.
For years she hadn’t even noticed that she came second to those things.
But then the law, the rules, the certainty he trusted so much had turned toward her, and Reid had followed them instead of following her.
That was the thing she couldn’t unknow now.
Her steps slowed as she turned onto the Merritts’ street.
She couldn’t spend the rest of her life loving a man while always carrying the knowledge that if the two of them stood on opposite sides of that line again, he would not choose her.