Chapter 14 #2
Isaac looked across the room to Endicott who was still at his table, Laura beside him, the close protection detail three feet away. Covered. Safe.
He looked back at Fallon. She had no one.
He crossed the room.
He moved fast but not urgently—a man with somewhere to be, nothing more. He adjusted his path to intersect with hers before she could close on the mark. Ten feet. Five.
He caught her elbow.
Her head snapped toward him. The flash of recognition was instant—then confusion, then the beginning of something sharp and angry.
“Don’t,” he said, low enough that only she could hear. “Come with me right now.”
“What are you—”
“Right now, Fallon.”
He steered her away from the bar, away from Red Face, away from the crowd. Through a gap between cocktail tables, past a service door. A utility closet was just inside. He jerked the door open and pulled her inside and shut it behind them.
Dark—only light enough to see from the red of the backup lights in the corner.
Tight. A mop bucket against one wall, shelving stacked with cleaning supplies, barely enough room for two people standing face to face.
The sounds of the event were muffled now—music and voices reduced to a low hum through the walls.
She ripped her arm free.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Isaac?”
“Keeping you from getting hurt.”
“I wasn’t doing anything. I hadn’t even—”
“I know you hadn’t. But you were going to. I got to you first.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You just pulled me off the floor in front of three hundred people for nothing. I thought we agreed you didn’t care. That petty theft was below Zodiac’s—”
He cut her off. “The venue security team doesn’t feel the same.”
“What? Nobody—”
“Listen to me. Two of this venue’s security guys were bragging about how their coworkers caught someone in Dallas going through coat pockets.
You know what they did to him? Took him out back and broke his fingers.
And then they stood there laughing about it, saying they hoped someone would try it tonight so they could do the same thing. ”
Her jaw tightened. “I’ve dealt with aggressive security before.”
“Not like this. These are actively looking for someone like you. They’re hoping someone gives them a reason to get ugly. They want it, Fallon. They’re bored and they’re violent and they’re looking for exactly what you do.”
She opened her mouth. Closed it. He watched the argument die on her lips as something behind her eyes shifted.
She shook her head. “You weren’t even supposed to be here tonight.”
He had to find out how she kept knowing Zodiac’s schedule, but not right now.
“The person we’re guarding changed his schedule at the last minute,” he said. “We had to scramble. But thank God I was here.”
She pressed her back against the wall. In the dim red light, he could see her processing. But she wasn’t scared, just considering.
Goddamn it. He was fucking scared enough for the both of them.
“You can’t keep doing this.” The fear in his chest had nowhere to go, so it came out hot.
“Do you understand what I just watched? I watched you walk toward a target with a guy twenty feet away who would have hurt you. Broken bones, Fallon. That’s what they were bragging about.
You would have made your move and smiled your way through it the way you always do, and ten seconds later you’d have been in a back hallway with men who think hurting you would be fun. ”
“I would have—”
“You would have what? Fought them off? Guys who outweigh you by a hundred pounds each? With no gate opening for you to squeeze yourself through?” His voice was climbing and he couldn’t stop it.
“You can’t keep doing this. Sooner or later you’re going to walk into something you can’t get out of, and nobody is going to be there to pull you out.
You need to think about what you’re doing.
You need to think about a different line of—”
She reached for his belt buckle.
Everything in the universe stopped.
His voice cut off mid-sentence. His hands, which had been moving while he talked, went still at his sides.
The sound of the event through the walls faded to nothing.
The only thing in the world was her fingers on his belt, pulling the leather through the buckle with a slow deliberation that had nothing to do with haste, fear or panic.
“Fallon.”
She didn’t stop.
He grabbed her wrist. Held it. Her pulse hammered against his thumb, fast and hard, and her eyes came up to his in the dark.
“You’re sexy when you’re all alpha male protective, Isaac.”
“We can’t do this.”
Her hand reached through the elastic of his boxer briefs. “I think we can. I think we should. I think we both want this more than we want anything else.”
That was the truth.
He keyed his radio with his free hand. “Ryder.”
A beat. “Yeah.”
“I need you to handle things for a few minutes.”
The pause that followed was loaded. Isaac could practically hear Ryder choosing his words.
“Copy that. We’ve got it under control. Good luck with your side quest.”
Isaac pulled the earpiece out and shoved it in his pocket. He had no idea if Ryder had seen him with Fallon or not, and right now he didn’t care. All he cared about was that her talented, nimble fingers were already driving him crazy.
Her mouth found his. Their kiss was hard, open, without patience or tenderness. His hands found her hips and lifted her against the wall before his brain finished catching up to his body.
Her legs wrapped around him. He shoved her dress up her thighs, bunching silk and fabric between them. He pulled her silk panties to the side, his knuckles dragged against skin that was hot and damp, and she made a sound against his mouth that wiped every rational thought from his head.
“Condom,” she breathed. “Please tell me—”
“Wallet.”
She pulled it from his back pocket faster than he could have. Tore the wrapper. Rolled it on him with shaking hands while he held her pinned against the wall with one arm.
He pushed inside her and she buried her face against his neck and said his name in a way that undid him completely.
This was nothing like Boston. Boston had been slow and careful and tender, two strangers learning each other’s edges in a hotel room with harbor lights on the ceiling.
This was need stripped raw. He took her hard against the wall of a utility closet while a mop bucket rattled beside them and his team ran the operation without him, and he didn’t care. None of it mattered even a little.
She’d been twenty feet from a man who wanted to break her hands, and she hadn’t known, and if Isaac had been positioned anywhere else in that room he wouldn’t have seen it in time.
He hadn’t been supposed to be here tonight at all. She would’ve been completely on her own. That didn’t seem to scare her, but it scared the shit out of him.
He pounded harder—lust and punishment and protectiveness rolled tight together.
She didn’t shy away from that, either. Her breath against his throat and her hands gripping his shoulders and the broken sound she made when he hit the right angle—she wanted this just as much as he did.
It was over fast. Too fast. She came first, her body locking around him, her teeth against his shoulder through his jacket, and he followed seconds later with his face pressed into her hair and a groan that he couldn’t have held back with a gun to his head.
They stayed like that. His forehead against the wall beside her head. Her legs still wrapped around him. Both of them breathing like they’d sprinted a mile. The muffled thump of music through the walls. The chemical smell of industrial cleaner and the faint grit of dust on the shelving beside them.
He lowered her slowly. Her feet found the floor. Her hands stayed on his shoulders for a few seconds as he dealt with the condom and fixed her dress. She helped him tuck in his shirt and redo his belt. Small, careful movements in the dark, neither of them speaking.
Reality came back in layers. The earpiece in his pocket. The radio he should have been monitoring. A client somewhere in that ballroom, paying Zodiac to keep him safe, while Isaac was in a closet with the buckle of his belt still warm from her hands.
“I have to get back,” he said.
“I know.”
He cracked the door. The corridor was empty. The fluorescent strip overhead hummed. He checked both directions, then turned back to her.
“I need you to not work tonight,” he said. “Not here. Not while they’re actively looking for pickpockets and want to do violence.”
She was quiet for a moment. He braced for the fight—the counter-argument, the insistence that she could handle herself, the sharp reminder that he didn’t get to tell her what to do.
“Okay.”
One word. No edge to it. He’d never seen her accept someone else’s lead before, and the quiet trust in it hit harder than anything that had just happened against the wall.
She moved toward the door. He caught her hand.
She turned. In the thin light from the cracked door, her eyes found his.
Gray and steady and holding something neither of them tried to name.
Her lips were swollen. A strand of hair had come loose from whatever she’d pinned it into.
She looked wrecked and beautiful and like the most dangerous thing that had ever happened to him.
He brought her hand to his mouth and pressed his lips against her knuckles. One breath. Two.
She slipped her hand free. Stepped into the corridor. Walked into the event without a backward glance.
He watched her go.
Then he straightened his jacket, checked his shirt and zipper, put the earpiece back in, and walked the same way.
“Ryder, I’m back.”
“Copy. Everything’s quiet. Endicott’s still at his table. Zero incidents.” A pause. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Isaac stepped through the service door and into the ballroom. The band was playing something with brass. The crowd moved the same way it had before he’d left. Everything looked the same.
And yet nothing was.