Chapter 14
Fourteen
LAYLA
The man could follow orders.
As requested, he didn’t hold back. That was the first thing I registered when he came at me properly.
The difference between a man managing his output and a man actually in the fight.
The restraint didn’t disappear entirely.
I sensed the edges of it, the places where he still made choices about force.
But the calibration had changed, and what remained required my complete attention to fend off.
Good. That was exactly what I needed.
The fight absorbed everything. I’d always loved the way martial arts demanded total presence.
It crowded out every other thought by sheer necessity.
There was no room for Bruce’s face, or the weight of what I’d chosen, or the hold of a ship, or any of the rest of it.
There was only Jace moving and me moving and the constant recalculation of distance and angle and force.
He was good. Better than I’d expected, though I didn’t know why I’d expected less.
He’d spent more than a decade in the Navy, and whatever he did for them wasn’t the kind of thing that left a man soft.
He moved beautifully, economically, with none of the flashy telegraphing that the guys back home sometimes indulged in.
No showy technique that looked impressive and cost you a half second you didn’t have.
He displayed brutal efficiency instead. Every movement purposeful, no wasted motion, his whole body organized in service of whatever his objective was in that particular exchange.
Sweat beaded along my back and temples, and I thrilled at the exertion as we circled the mat, trading positions, executing strikes without either of us landing anything decisive.
I got inside his reach twice and had to work to stay there without being taken down.
He used his size advantage with intelligence, not relying on it but not ignoring it either. He made me earn every inch.
Speed had always been my asset. I earned a lot.
But his body was lethal. Not in a way he actually deployed—the restraint was still there, a deliberate ceiling on what he actually brought to this fight.
But I felt the shape of what existed above that ceiling.
The difference of someone who had been trained to end things rather than simply win them.
I hadn’t expected to find that distracting.
But there it was. A warmth low in my stomach that had nothing to do with exertion and everything to do with a complete appreciation of his body as a competent, controlled weapon. That appreciation cost me a fraction of a second of focus, and that was all he needed.
Jace moved fast and low and got under my center of gravity, and then I was going down, and he was coming with me. We hit the mat together with an oof that rattled me because I didn’t have my hands free to dissipate the energy of the fall.
The fight didn’t end, it simply moved to the floor as I immediately hinged my body, attempting to wiggle free and kick at his head in the process. Jace just dove toward my middle, wrapping those long arms around me and shifting to gain the upper hand.
Grappling was different than sparring with blocks, kicks, and strikes.
Closer, more immediate, the whole calculus changing when you couldn’t rely on distance and had to work with what your body could do against the specific geometry of another person’s body.
I thrust up with my hips, and triumph surged as I took the top.
But he only rolled again. We switched positions four times in rapid succession—me gaining a dominant hold, him reversing it, me reversing that.
His strength and size were harder to redirect on the floor than on our feet, and I had to be precise in a way that cost energy I’d already spent.
The fury and the storm of grief I’d come here to bleed out had waned.
The fifth time he reversed, he had me.
His bulk came down and settled, and I felt the exact moment when the balance tipped decisively in his favor.
Too much mass, too well-distributed, my legs wrapping around his hips automatically in a last-ditch attempt at a reversal that I already knew wouldn’t work.
His forearms braced on either side of my head.
I tried threading my arms through his, attempting anything to destabilize him, but it only brought me closer to his throat.
So close I tasted the tang of his sweat.
The gym had receded into a kind of ambient noise. Weights somewhere. Ray’s radio. The distant sound of someone’s conversation near the front desk. All of it irrelevant.
Jace shifted, dropping more of his weight on me and curling down to immobilize me further, a position which made it very clear that the distraction was mutual and had become something else entirely.
His chest heaved against mine, and his erection pressed against me. He wasn’t doing anything with it, but I stilled and met his gaze. Those blue eyes were hooded. He could’ve apologized and backed off. Could have joked it off as merely biology.
It wasn’t merely biology.
Jace stared down at me with a hungry expression I recognized because I was certain I wore something similar.
“Feel better?” His voice was a gravel rasp.
“Getting there,” I murmured.
A beat. Two. Neither of us moved.
We had an audience. I’d been aware of that for a while. The two men at the free weights who’d stopped making any effort to look busy. Ray behind the desk with his arms folded and an expression of elaborate neutrality. I didn’t particularly care. I didn’t think Jace did either.
By tacit, silent agreement, we broke apart, each rolling to stand.
The absence of his weight was its own thing to register, an awareness of space where there’d been none. Lack of sensation that made my body protest at the loss.
Neither of us said anything.
Koa uncurled from the corner and stretched, apparently satisfied that the proceedings had concluded. I picked up my stuff. Jace picked up his bag. We nodded at Ray on the way out, and Ray’s expression said he’d be telling this story for years.
The truck was cold, a stark contrast to the heat still radiating through me. Koa leapt into the backseat. I slid into the front and stared through the windshield at the parking lot and was acutely aware of Jace getting in on the other side.
He started the engine. Neither of us spoke for the drive back to the cottage, which took maybe five minutes and seemed like considerably more.
My body still ran hot from the fight and from everything that had bloomed from it.
I was having a conversation with myself about whether I intended to do something about that, and the conversation wasn’t going the way the sensible part of me wanted it to go.
He pulled into the driveway.
Neither of us moved.
The engine ticked. Koa’s breathing came from the backseat, a steady pant. Nothing moved on the street, though it wasn’t yet evening, so the after-work crowd hadn’t made their way home.
I needed to say something. Or not say something, which was also a choice. Both choices had consequences I could see clearly from here. I sat in a driveway having a crisis of decision-making that was frankly embarrassing given everything else I’d managed to do in my life.
“Do you want to come inside?” My voice came out gratifyingly steady.
Jace turned his head and looked at me with a face all shadows and angles. The ravenous look in his eyes didn’t help the internal debate.
“If I come inside, we’re picking up right where we left off back there.” He paused for a single beat. “So don’t ask if that isn’t what you want.”
I thought about all the reasons this was complicated.
The case. The investigation. The things I couldn’t tell him.
The things he’d eventually figure out—because he was exactly the kind of person who figured things out—and what happened then.
I thought about all of it with complete clarity, and it didn’t change a single thing about what I wanted in this moment.
So little of my life had been about what I wanted.
I lifted my head and met his gaze.
“Do you want to come inside?”