CHAPTER 18
Cole
The building is quieter by evening, the daytime chaos of Jameson softened and more domestic as the hours turn.
The smell of whatever Anna left in the community kitchen slow cooker drifts through the upper floors.
The building breathes differently at night, like it’s allowed to relax, secure behind steel bars and infrared cameras.
I find Tessa at the dining table in my apartment.
Not the lobby worktable where she’s been spending most of her days, but here, in my home, which has stopped feeling like a small detail worth noting and started to become a feeling I’d be devastated to lose.
Her laptop is open, a nearly empty mug at her elbow, printed pages spread in a loose arc around her with handwritten notes in the margins.
Her hair is twisted up with locks that have fallen free, her reading glasses on and a pen tucked behind her ear.
She looks up when I come in, and the expression that crosses her face quickly flashes through relief, warmth, and even a flash of irritable jealousy that I can come and go as I please.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.” I drop my jacket over the entry chair and move into the kitchen, filling a glass of water and leaning back against the counter to look at her properly. “Still at it?”
“Almost done,” she says, which is what she’s been saying for two days. “I’m in final edits. Tightening the narrative arc, closing the loop on the SAPG connection.” She pulls off her glasses and sets them on the table, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “Simon’s going to want changes.”
“He always does,” I say, remembering the times she would rant about him, but she knows his work makes hers better.
“But the bones are solid,” she adds on.
“It’s good?” I ask.
She looks at me with the directness she reserves for things she’s certain about. Her confidence is never lacking when it comes to her work. “It’s the best piece I’ve ever written,” she says. “I know that sounds immodest.”
“You’re the humblest person I know, so I know it’s accurate.”
She exhales slowly, sitting back in her chair. The tension in her shoulders is more pronounced tonight. She’s carrying not just the coiled frustration of being trapped but the burden of carrying a heavy load for too long and can almost see the place where she gets to set it down.
Almost.
“How were the docks?” she asks brightly.
A little too brightly.
“Productive,” I say. “Josie found some anomalies worth following up on.”
“Mmm.” She turns her pen over in her fingers. “Must be nice. Getting out.”
She says it lightly, but I hear the envy underneath it and I’m not going to pretend I don’t. “Yeah,” I say simply. “I know.”
She tilts her head, studying me. “You always do that.”
“Do what?”
“Agree with me instead of arguing.” The corner of her mouth curves. “The old Cole would have told me the building was perfectly comfortable and I was being ungrateful.”
“The old Cole was an idiot,” I say.
She laughs, surprised and unguarded, her eyes lighting up for a few precious moments. “And you’re the most self-aware man I know. I appreciate that about you, you know?”
I ignore the compliment as she’s said it to me more than once over the years. I push off the counter and move toward the table, pulling out the chair beside her and sitting, close enough that my knee finds hers underneath.
“How much longer?” I ask, nodding at the laptop.
“The article?” She glances at the screen.
“Tonight maybe. Tomorrow morning at the latest.” She pauses.
“And then I wait for Simon, and then I wait for legal, and then I wait for print,” Tessa says with the impatient resignation of someone who has made peace with the last mile of a long road, then blows out a long breath. “I’m just ready to be done with it.”
“It’s almost over,” I say.
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it keeps being true.” I reach over and close her laptop gently.
“Tessa. Look at what you’ve built. Financial trails, the SAPG connection, Vega tied to the breach, Pelham and DelRey linked through blood as well as business and damning emails.
” I rest my forearm on the table, angling toward her.
“When this publishes, there’s nowhere for them to go.
The FBI investigation starts the same day.
The public pressure and the legal pressure hit simultaneously. It’s over.”
She looks at me steadily. “You sound very certain.”
“I am certain.”
“About the case,” she says. And then, more carefully. “What about after?”
The question settles between us without urgency. There’s no demand or ultimatum in her tone but a weighted curiosity. It feels like she’s been turning it over for days, but then again… I’ve been doing the same. Tessa and I never had a problem with was communicating our fears and desires.
I don’t look away from her. “What about us, you mean?”
“We haven’t talked about it,” she says with a soft smile.
“We’ve been—” She gestures between us. “Whatever this is, and it’s been good.
Really good. But I have a job that is always going to involve some level of danger, and you have a job that is always going to involve some level of danger, and neither of us has said anything about what happens when this particular danger is over. ”
“What do you want to happen?” I ask, a bit of a cowardly way out of laying out my feelings first.
She considers that for a moment with the same careful honesty she brings to everything. “I feel like I have you again, and now I don’t want to lose you,” she says simply. “I spent five years being very disciplined about not wanting that, and I’m tired of the discipline.”
I feel a shift in my chest, slow and certain, like the vessel that’s been holding the tension finally snaps open.
“I think we’re both in alignment on that, but I can’t pretend that the same fears aren’t there for me.
If anything, they’re more brutal because we’re in the thick of it. My worst nightmare coming true.”
She looks at me for a long moment. “I’m not sure I ever really understood—and maybe I still don’t—how that translates into fear for you. You’re always so confident.”
“Not when it comes to losing you,” I say with a half laugh.
“I know I dressed up all my objections to your career as concern and principle and reasonable disagreement, but it was just fear. Plain and ordinary.” I reach over and take her hand off the table, holding it the way I’ve been doing in the car, simple and deliberate.
“I’m still afraid and that clearly hasn’t gone away. ”
She turns her hand in mine, squeezing once. “But maybe fear is a reason to hold on tighter, not a reason to let go. Have you ever considered you might have it backward?”
“Yeah, I’ve considered it and it’s still a war going on inside me, Tess.
Not sure I’ve got any real clarity and it’s hard…
with all this going on. You’ve got a legitimate target on your back, and it doesn’t get any more real than what we’re facing now.
So I’m not sure I can even comprehend what our future looks like together.
I’m just trying to look at this day, and this day alone, making sure you stay alive. ”
She nods in understanding, giving my hand another squeeze.
Then she stands, still holding my hand, and tugs. “Come on,” she says.
I let her pull me up and lead me to my bedroom.
She’s unhurried tonight… I’d even call it settled and solid.
At the bedside table, she lifts the pen from behind her ear, setting it down and unclipping her hair.
It falls loose in a glorious crimson veil.
She reaches for the hem of her shirt at the same time I do, our hands colliding, and she laughs softly.
“I’ve got it,” she says.
“I know,” I say, and let her.
She pulls it over her head and drops it, and I don’t move as I drink my fill, taking in her perfection, this woman I have been trying not to want since the second she called my name and asked for help. She lifts her chin, comfortable being seen in a way that some people never are.
I step forward and she lets me, my hands finding her waist, her palms coming up to my chest.
“You’re staring,” she says.
“I am,” I confirm.
“Why?”
I think about Josie on the docks earlier. Don’t wait until the threat is neutralized to figure out what you want.
“Because I can,” I say. “And I wasted a lot of time when I could have been doing this instead.”
A flash of emotion crosses her face before she reaches up and pulls me down to her, and I go without resistance. My mouth finds hers in a kiss that starts slow and stays that way, deliberate and thorough, the kind of kiss that doesn’t have anywhere urgent to be.
Her hands move to the buttons of my shirt, working them slowly, and I let her, my hands burying in her hair to tilt her head back slightly. She hums when my mouth finds her neck.
When the last button gives, she pushes the shirt off my shoulders and runs her palms flat across my chest, my ribs, the plane of my stomach, like she’s relearning the geography of me. Not urgent. Deliberate. The way you touch something you intend to keep.
“You’re still so—” she starts, then stops herself.
“So what?” I ask.
She looks up at me, a small curve at the corner of her mouth. “Never mind.”
I reach behind her and unhook her bra with one easy flick. Her expression shifts from amused to unguarded lust. I ease the straps down her arms, kissing her shoulders, and drop it somewhere behind me without looking.
“So what?” I ask again, quieter this time.
“Unfairly built,” she says against my mouth, and I feel her smile.
I walk her backward to the bed, her knees buckling when we reach its edge. I grasp the waist of her leggings and she lifts her hips cooperatively, and I pull them down and off in one motion, leaving her in nothing but a scrap of cotton that I take care of next.
Then I just look at her and she stares back without shame.
She tilts her chin up slightly. “You’re doing it again.”
“Looking at you?”
“Staring,” she corrects.
“You’re worth staring at,” I say, and her face softens in a way that makes my chest ache.
I put one knee on the mattress and lean over her, my mouth finding the curve of her throat, the hollow of her collarbone, the soft swell of her breast. She inhales sharply when my lips close over her and she arches into me, her hands coming up to grip the back of my neck.
I take my time. More than she wants me to, judging by how her fingers press harder.
“Cole.”
“Mmm.”
“You’re doing that on purpose.”
“Doing what?” I murmur against her skin.
“Going slow.”
“I am,” I confirm. I move lower, my mouth tracing the curve of her waist, the soft skin below her navel, and she makes a sound that she tries to muffle against her wrist.
I lift my head. “Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Hide your sounds… your words.”
She looks down at me, chest rising and falling, eyes dark. “Do your worst.”
And I do. I part her legs, savage her pussy with my mouth, and pin her down when she thrashes too much for me to concentrate.
When her body draws tight and the orgasm takes her, I lick at her harder to drive her higher.
It’s my name she screams and then murmurs over and over again as I bring her down to where she’s loose and boneless against the sheets.
I work my way back up her body slowly, her hands finding my shoulders, my jaw, pulling me up to her mouth. She kisses me with a lazy, heated thoroughness that starts to build again, her hips shifting beneath me with a wordless request I understand perfectly.
I settle my weight over her, moving her legs to force them around me. She digs her heels into the back of my thighs, and when I finally thrust into her, she exhales against my neck in a long, shuddering breath of relief.
I stay still for a moment, just breathing her in.
“Hey,” she says against my jaw, voice low and warm.
“Hey,” I say back.
She laughs quietly at that, and I feel it everywhere, and then I start to move and the laughter gives way to something better.
The other times have been urgent, driven by adrenaline or fear or five years of compressed wanting finding its way out all at once. But tonight we move like a couple who has decided we’re not going anywhere.
Tessa’s hands move restlessly over my back, my shoulders, the nape of my neck. She whispers into my ear that I don’t have the presence of mind to fully process the words, fragments of sentences and my name and sounds that aren’t words at all.
At some point she shifts, pulling me closer, changing the angle, and I groan against her temple.
“There,” she breathes.
“Yeah,” I manage.
But eventually the unhurried quality gives way to a deeper and more insistent need.
The pace builds between us until her nails find my back and her legs lock around me and then she’s falling.
I follow her over the edge with my face pressed into her hair and her name in my throat. I hold her closer than I need.
Afterward she lies with her cheek against my chest, one hand flat over my heart, her breathing slow and even. I have my arm around her, my hand tracing the same slow path up and down her back that I’ve traced hundreds upon hundreds of times before.
“Cole,” she says into the dark.
“Mmm.”
“I’m sorry I’ve been difficult about being here.”
I look down at her, though I can’t see much in the low light. “You haven’t been difficult. You’ve been caged and I’m not so boneheaded that I don’t know the difference.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “It won’t be much longer,” she says, and I realize she’s saying it to bolster herself. Reminding herself that the finish line exists.
“No,” I agree. “It won’t.”
Her hand presses flat against my chest, feeling my heartbeat. She tilts her head up and kisses the underside of my jaw, soft and brief.
And within ten minutes she’s asleep, breathing deep and even against my shoulder, her hand still resting over my heart like maybe she’s protecting it.
I stay awake longer than she does, the way I always do, watching the city lights shift on the ceiling.
Be patient, I told her. Soon this will all be done.
I have to believe that.
Because the alternative—that it isn’t over soon, that it gets worse before it gets better, that I could still lose her to this—is a worry I’ve filed away in a deep place I don’t want to look at.
I press my lips to the top of her head and close my eyes.