Chapter Six
KODIAK
She didn’t kiss me. She did something worse—she as much as gave me permission to. I’d spent months reaching for her and stopping myself, and she’d stripped away the last of my willpower. I cupped her face before I could talk myself out of it.
When I threaded my fingers into her hair and pulled her closer, she made a sound, but not because she was in pain. I’d wanted this for so damn long and had given up hope that it would ever happen.
Her fists balled in my shirt, and she pressed her breasts into my chest. I couldn’t cover her body with mine. Her ribs were injured, and I outweighed her by a hundred pounds. So I cradled her head and kissed her.
I’d played her husband for two weeks and never once touched her for real. What I’d imagined didn’t come close to how good this was.
She gasped when my palm slid down her side, and I jerked my hand away. “Shit. I’m sorry.”
“I’m fine.”
“You flinched.”
“Because your hand was cold.” She tried to pull me closer, but I rested on my heels and put six inches between us.
Her lips were swollen, and I’d wrecked her hair, but her expression said she couldn’t decide whether to be annoyed or if she wanted me to kiss her again.
“I’m twice your size,” I said. “You’re injured.”
“Then, be careful.”
Like it was that simple. I dropped my forehead to hers.
“That kiss was three months overdue,” she said.
“Ten.”
She laughed. “Who’s counting?”
“I’ve counted every single day, sweetheart.”
I hadn’t intended to make that confession, but my mouth had gotten ahead of the part of my brain that kept me from telling her things I shouldn’t.
“Then, why did you stop?” she asked.
“Let me fix that.” I cupped her face with both hands and slid my tongue between her lips when she opened to me.
The circumstances were wrong. I was supposed to protect her from whoever the asshole was who wanted her dead, but nothing in me could accept that something this right could be anything but.
When we broke apart, her forehead stayed on mine. My thumb traced a slow line down her neck, past the opening in her blouse, to where the lace of her bra met her skin.
“I should do a perimeter check,” I said when the alarm on my phone chimed the hour mark.
“Are you going to?”
“Hell no.”
She smiled, but I couldn’t look at her and think straight at the same time, so I stopped trying and replaced my fingers on her breast with my mouth.
When she arched and her body locked, I pulled away.
“Don’t you dare stop.”
“You’re wincing.”
“I’m not.” She was, and the color drained from her face. “Okay. It hurts. I don’t care.”
“I do.” I eased her up until she was resting on my chest. She pressed her forehead into my shoulder and swore under her breath.
“This is bullshit,” she said.
I kissed her hair and didn’t argue.
We stayed on the floor, with her weight against me. My hand found its way under her shirt. I traced the curve of her spine with my thumb, and she pressed closer instead of pulling away.
“Come on.” I helped her to the sofa. Before I sat, I went into the kitchen and grabbed her pain meds and water.
“Don’t make this weird,” she said when I handed them over.
I dropped onto the cushion beside her. After she’d downed the pills, I set the water bottle on the table.
“Now, where were we?” I asked.
“You tell me.” She leaned into the cushion and gave me a look that made resisting nearly impossible.
My fingers found the top button of her blouse, and I waited. She didn’t stop me. I released it, then the next, then the rest, and when the fabric fell open, my restraint snapped.
Her head dropped when my mouth closed over her nipple through the bra’s lace, and she wove her fingers in my hair and held me where I was.
The pace was mine to set, and I took my time. When I pushed the lace aside and sucked harder, she said my name. Not Kodiak—Coleman.
When she gripped the front of my shirt and I moved to her other breast, she groaned in a way I’d remember for the rest of my life.
“Don’t stop,” she murmured.
“I’m not going anywhere, Emma, except maybe into the bedroom.”
“I like the sound of that.” She grinned up at me, and I let her think whatever she liked. While her speech wasn’t slurred, the meds were starting to hit her. I lifted her off the couch and carried her down the hall. By the time I laid her on the bed, she was almost asleep.
“I’m not done with you yet,” she said.
“I know, sweetheart.”
She curled onto her right side and caught my wrist when I turned to leave. “Please stay, Coleman.”
I kicked off my boots, lay down behind her, and wrapped my arm around her waist. Thirty seconds later, she was out.
Sleep wasn’t happening. I was hard as a fucking rock and had been for hours.
In California, I’d spent two weeks wanting her and unable to do a damn thing about it.
The difference was that now I knew the taste of her skin and the sounds she made when my mouth was on her. This was worse. So much worse.
I woke up with Emma’s hair against my cheek and her body pressed into mine.
She stirred before I could talk myself into getting up. Her blouse was open where I’d left it, and when her gaze dropped to my lap, she smiled.
“Well,” she said. “That’s flattering.”
“Knock it off.”
Her laugh was low and raspy from sleep, and her hair was a wreck from the pillow, but still, I couldn’t stop staring at her.
I pushed the loose strands off her forehead. She leaned into my palm and let me trace my thumb along her cheekbone.
“How are the ribs?” I asked.
“Sore.” She opened her eyes. “Don’t use that as an excuse.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, sweetheart.”
I trailed my hand down her neck, along her collarbone, and over the curve of her breast where the blouse gaped open. She didn’t stop me, and while I should’ve slowed down, there wasn’t a chance in hell I could.
I kissed the hollow of her throat and worked lower. When my lips reached the lace, her fingers wove into my hair the same way they had the night before. I slid my hand behind her knee to draw her leg over my hip. She gasped, and I froze.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Don’t you dare pull away.”
I didn’t. My hand stayed on her thigh, and as we kissed, her hips rocked into mine. If she kept that up, I was going to lose what was left of my self-control.
My phone vibrated on the nightstand, but I ignored it. It vibrated again. Three times in a row.
“Dammit.” I reached over her, grabbed it, and read the text from Atticus. Alice and Admiral requested a call at 0900. “You have got to be kidding me,” I muttered.
“What?”
“Team call at nine.”
She dropped onto the pillow. “I hate your job.”
“That makes two of us.”
“You better go make yourself presentable.” She glanced at my lap. “That might take a while.”
“You’re hilarious.”
“I know.”
I showered in eight minutes and spent most of it under cold water. It didn’t help.
Emma appeared in the kitchen twenty minutes before the call, with wet hair and no makeup, and for a minute, I couldn’t remember why we were at the table and not in bed.
The conference began at zero nine hundred on the dot. Alice and Admiral appeared from K19’s headquarters. Tex, Alice’s mentor and a tech savant who consulted with K19 when the problem was big enough to need both of them, dialed in from San Diego. Atticus and Luke appeared from the DC office.
Tex went first. “Somebody inside Treasury is pulling Emma’s access records manually. Not automated alerts—manual queries. Six times in the past four months, each one within hours of you looking at another account.”
Emma leaned forward. “But I never told anyone what I was doing…”
“Exactly, and that’s the problem,” Tex said. “Somebody’s watching in real time. I’m going to tear your devices apart and find out how.”
Emma asked questions that made the world-class tech guy pause and rethink. She caught gaps in the data I couldn’t see and pushed him in directions he hadn’t considered.
After the call disconnected, I made scrambled eggs with hot sauce and avocado on the side. In California, she’d eaten the same thing four mornings out of five.
“You remembered my favorite breakfast,” she said when she walked in and saw the plate.
“How could I forget? Not a big deal, Emma.”
“Yeah, it is, Coleman.”
“It’s eggs, Emma.”
“It’s not.”
She ate standing next to me. When she finished, she set the plate in the sink and kissed my cheek.
When Emma carried her laptop to the living area, I cleaned up the kitchen, then grabbed my boots.
I’d skipped the perimeter check twice, and I needed the air.
My route ran along the island’s northern shore, then inland, toward the motion sensors mounted in the pines. Every light was green, the cameras at the east approach were clean, and the dock was clear.
The twenty-minute loop took forty. I blamed the terrain.
When I returned, she was on the sofa, with her laptop on a pillow and a pen in her mouth.
I sat next to her.
We worked like that for a while. I ran diagnostics on the sensor feeds while she combed her files line by line. When she shifted on the sofa and pressed her palm to her left side, I opened my mouth.
“If you apologize for hurting me, I’ll smack you,” she warned.
I’d planned to. I got her a pill instead.
Long after the sun had set and we’d finished dinner, she settled on the sofa with her tablet. I leaned over her shoulder and kissed the side of her neck.
“Time for another pill.” I held it out with a bottle of water.
She stretched and winced after taking it, then stood.
“Coming?” She led me to the bedroom.
While she was in the bathroom, I kicked off my boots and stretched out on the bed. She came out in a T-shirt and shorts and lay beside me.
My phone chimed with a reminder I’d set for the perimeter check, but I shut it off.
“You’re not going anywhere, are you?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, sweetheart.”
She pressed closer. “Good.”
Emma drifted off within minutes, and I lay with her warm against my chest.
She shifted her hip, and I bit the inside of my cheek until the urge to pull her tighter passed.