Chapter 5 #2
He was standing where the lamp light caught him at the edge, half in shadow, the gray of his eyes nearly black in it, the eagle's outline still riding the air above his shoulders, faded now, a suggestion she wasn't sure she was meant to see.
He looked tired, his jaw tight, and his hands at his sides, fingers half curled.
Before she could speak, he beat her to it.
His own anger flared, clean and hot, and she felt it land before the words did.
"You told me to watch the skies." His voice was low and rough at the edges. "I've been watching for too damn long. What do you think you're doing? Do you think for one minute I'm going to stay in Virginia Beach while you're being hunted for something you didn't do?"
Oh, God.
The breath she'd been holding cracked apart in her chest.
How did he do that? Six months of running, six months of files and forensics and the slow, careful work of building a case for a name she might never get back, six months of looking at her own face in every mirror and trying to remember she was still the woman she'd taken her oath as, and he stood in her living room and dismissed every word of the charges against her in a single sentence.
He didn't believe she'd done it. He'd never even considered believing she'd done it.
He had watched the skies for her and decided what was true about her without needing to be told.
Her hands shook.
She closed them into fists at her sides, and the shaking moved up into her arms.
She wanted to touch him. She wanted it with the full-body wanting she'd refused herself for so long that the refusal had become its own muscle, and the muscle was giving out.
She wanted her palms on his face. She wanted to feel his rough jaw and the warmth of his skin and the place under his ear where his pulse would be, to drag her hands down his throat and across the planes of his chest and over the ridges of his stomach and lower to map him with her mouth, all of him, every scar and every plane and the soft skin she remembered along the inside of his wrist where she'd pressed her thumb once in Venezuela for no reason except that he'd let her.
She wanted to ruin herself on him. She wanted to be allowed to.
The wanting was unbearable, and it was going to flatten everything she'd built if she let it stand for one more second.
She made herself breathe again and find her voice.
"This fight doesn't belong to you, Flash." Her voice came out steady, and she hated it for the lie it was telling. "It's mine to deal with. I won't allow you to risk your life, your career, or your honor to help me. Leave. Please be kind and leave. I don't want you here."
Other words crowded behind them, and she had to set her teeth against the ones that wanted to spill instead.
I missed you. I want you. I haven't stopped thinking about you from the moment you opened that door in Herrera's prison.
I'll never forget the warmth of you or the way your body carried me like I was a part of you.
She clamped down on every one. The ocher lamp light pooled on the rug between them, and her grandmother's weave caught the gold. He folded his arms across his chest.
"No."
She'd given him a way out, given him grace, given him the door propped open with her own hand, and he was refusing to walk through it.
The wanting and the terror collided somewhere under her sternum and went hot, and she made the mistake before she could stop herself, surging across the rug until she was inches from him.
"You don't get to refuse," she snapped. "You don't get to tell me what to do.
" Her hands came up to shove him, but he was faster.
His fingers closed around her wrists, gentle and absolute, and the heat of him traveled straight up her arms into her shoulders, down her spine, settling into her core and the tips of her aching nipples.
She lost the next breath she'd meant to take.
"Get out!"
"Goddamn it." His voice cracked at the edges. He held her wrists like he was holding something he was afraid to break, and her body wanted this energy, this struggle. She wanted to straddle him, make him cry out, take him hungry and hard until she had him writhing and thrusting deep into her.
"No."
She knew it wouldn't do any good. She begged anyway. "Please. I can't. I won't risk you. Not you."
I can't lose you again.
The words rose unbidden. Her mouth was already shaping them.
She’d spoken them before, in the way she was certain of her own pulse.
On the heel of that thought came the heat.
A flood of it across her palms where they pressed against his forearms, slick and hot and wrong, a wash of blood that wasn't there, his blood, the wet of it traveling up to her wrists, and her breath broke open in her chest.
His face contorted. His breath hitched.
"Quri Killa."
The name out of his mouth was strange. She didn’t know how to process it. Quri in Quechua meant gold and Killa was moon. Gold moon…was that some kind of sweet talk?
She tore out of his grip. Anger moved through her with such force that she stumbled, the rug slipping under her boot, her shoulder catching the corner of the bookshelf. He was on her in a step, hand reaching for her elbow.
She pushed him off. "Don't try using my own language to charm me." This was what he did, try to lighten the tension instead of sitting in it. But the name spooked her for reasons she couldn’t understand.
He let her go the instant she had her balance as if she'd burned him, his hands raising slightly, palms open, the universal sign of a man who knew how to back away from a frightened animal.
She reeled around the end of the couch and put it between them.
Clutching the cushion, her fingers sank into the softness of it.
She made herself look at him through the light, made her face do what her training had built it for, and she had no idea what was happening to her.
The wet on her palms was gone. The smell of copper she'd tasted in the hangar was gone.
The almost memory that she held a blade against him and used it sat in her body like a stone she could feel but not see, and the certainty that she'd watched him bleed, somewhere, sometime, sat right next to it.
She glared at him because the alternative was sobbing.
He swallowed. Hard. She almost broke on the hurt in his eyes, the way he was looking at her like a man watching a door close on a room he'd just begun to enter.