Chapter 7 #2
“I will, mostly because I can’t reconcile what I feel for you, and this will give me time to find out who you are.” She released a soft breath. “God help me, I want to explore all of you.”
“That sounds very promising and fulfills another reason why I’m here.”
“If I had refused?"
He reached out and took her face in his hands, forcing her melted gaze to lock onto his steady gray eyes.
"Listen to me, Killa," he said, his voice dropping all the cosmic weight, becoming raw and entirely human.
"Forget the font. Forget the world. I’m asking you to choose me.
Not because you're a lock, and not because the sky is falling.
If you look into your soul and tell me your answer is no, if you want to stay right here in this tower and let Chaos take the rest of it, then that is what we do. "
He leaned in until his forehead rested against hers. "I’ll send the team away. I’ll sit right here on this couch with you until the world burns to ash around us. I don’t have a cosmic price tag. It doesn't depend on your compliance. The choice is yours. Always."
Her eyes flared, those threads in her irises turning dark, almost predatory.
His dick hardened all the way, aching against his jeans.
He would take this to the maximum with her.
He’d dreamed about it for a year. Now that it was here, he wasn’t sure how he was going to sleep tonight with the fierce beating of his blood.
* * *
For a second, she couldn't breathe. The air in her lungs felt like liquid lead. She looked into his gray eyes, searching for the tell, the angle, the slight shift in focus that would betray a man trying to manage a difficult woman with beautiful words.
There was nothing. Just Flash, raw and stripped of his SEAL armor, offering her a kingdom of ashes if it meant she stayed free.
The realization hit her like nothing ever had in her life. Her shield core melted, the one who spent thirty years braced for the next trap, found absolutely nothing to fight. He was tearing the walls down, standing there unprotected.
A shudder went through her, violent and brief, starting at the base of her neck and dropping straight into her thighs.
His gray eyes were like liquid fog, flaring with heat scorching her.
The vulnerability of his confession made her fiercely, dangerously hungry.
If he was going to lay his whole heart out for her, she couldn’t resist the temptation to claim it.
She leaned into his palms, her jaw pressing against his calloused thumbs, her breathing turning ragged and shallow against his lips.
"You're a fool, Jae Shaw," she whispered, her voice low and devastated. "A beautiful, goddamned fool."
She reached up, her hands moving with sudden, ironclad certainty. She gripped the back of his neck, her fingers tangling fiercely in his hair, pulling his head down that extra fraction of an inch until their foreheads pressed hard enough to bruise.
"You’re handling me—”
“I—”
“Not deliberately. You have me, and you know it," she breathed against his mouth, her scent of hot desert air and dark metallic heat enveloping him completely. "If the world burns, we burn it together. But you aren't sending our boys anywhere."
She slid her hands down to his shoulders, her grip tight enough to leave marks through his shirt, her body shifting on the couch until she was entirely angled into his space, crowding him, taking control back the only way she knew how.
"Come to bed with me," she commanded, an ache bleeding through the heat in her voice. It wasn't a request. It was an eviction of the entire cosmos from her tower. "Right now. Fuck the font, Flash."
“Yeah, all of this is an adventure, babe, and I want to experience it all...with you, in you, all over you.” He leaned forward, whispering into her ear, her shiver uncontrollable.
"I want the taste of you in my mouth, on my tongue, my dick.
Take me. I've watched the skies. Now we fly free, together. "
* * *
She held him with those predatory eyes for a long count, the kind of look a woman like Lechuza gives a man when she's deciding the terms of her surrender.
"Adventure." She tasted the word. "You're going to wreck me with that mouth, Jae Shaw."
"I'm counting on it."
"Stand up."
His body moved eagerly as she rose with him, her hand still locked in his, and the light moved across her face and caught the flicker in her irises that he had no name for and no defense against. She turned toward the stairs and drew him with her, and he followed without resistance.
She moved up the stairs first. He followed a step behind that beautiful, shapely ass.
The tower's upper landing was dim. The two bunk room doors were closed.
Behind one, he could hear Easy's breathing already gone deep, the kind of sleep operators fell into when their bodies finally accepted the perimeter was someone else's problem for a few hours.
Behind the other, nothing. Twister and the junior grades had gone down hard.
She stopped at the door of his assigned room. She didn't let go of his hand. She just looked at him.
He understood. He slipped inside the room without releasing her fingers and grabbed his pack off the bunk, one-handed, gear already organized the way he organized every kit on every deployment, ready to move at any hour.
He slung it over his shoulder, slipping back out like a ghost. She was still watching him from the hall.
"Smooth operator in more ways than one," she murmured.
He grinned. “You’re about to find out. I bet you can’t wait.”
The corner of her mouth pulled. “Cocky bastard,” she said with nothing but affection.
His grin widened. She turned and led him down the hall toward the door at the end.
Her hand was warm in his. He felt her pulse through the place where his fingers wrapped around hers, steady but climbing, the kind of climb she'd never let show on her face. She stopped at her door.
His body was a live wire, every nerve ending vibrating with a current that started in his palm and shot straight to his groin.
His cock, already heavy and thick against his thigh, gave a hard, insistent throb, a primal demand that had nothing to do with thought and everything to do with the scent of her skin, the sway of her hips, the promise of this room.
He could already feel the slick heat of her, a phantom memory that made his balls draw up tight.
He imagined the soft give of her beneath him, the way her nails would dig into his shoulders, the sound she would make when he finally pushed inside, that sharp intake of breath that was half surrender, half challenge.
He wanted to bury himself so deep that this lost feeling would find its home in her, to fuck her with a desperate, claiming rhythm until the only thing she knew was his name, until the only thing he knew was the clench of her around him, pulling him under, drowning him in her until there was nothing left of the world but their pleasure.
One hand on the handle. She didn't move.
He understood the second he saw the set of her shoulders. It was deliberation. Doubt had no place here. She was crossing a perimeter that she hadn’t crossed for anyone in years, possibly ever, and she was doing it consciously, with intention, the way she did anything that mattered.
He was done waiting. He covered her hand, turned the knob, and shoved. The door swung open into a dark room. She stepped inside. He followed, pressing up tight to her sweet, tantalizing body, with a soft exhalation of breath. Her soft groan almost made him come.
The door clicked shut behind them, and she said, quietly, "Lights, low," and the room woke in soft ocher the way downstairs had, low enough to see by and not bright enough to disrupt sleep.
The bed was a queen-sized solid-wood platform pushed against the wall, made up with charcoal sheets pulled tight enough to bounce a coin, a single pillow, military precision.
Above the headboard, a rack with two weapons cleaned and ready, a Sig and what looked like a custom rifle in a setup he wanted to ask about.
A monitor in the corner showed quad feeds from the Eyrie's perimeter, current, live, rotating through angles.
A go-bag stood at the foot of the bed, packed, zipped, positioned for grab-and-go.
The closet door was open enough to show tactical gear hanging in graded order.
This was a forward operating base with a mattress in it. Her battle station, and geezus, he got so hard it hurt.
This woman was in his pores, his bones, his fucking DNA.
On the nightstand, small, carved, pale wood, worn smooth, an owl no bigger than the palm of his hand with its wings tucked and its eyes round and fierce.
The kind of object a person had been holding for so many years that the grain of the wood had taken the shape of their hand.
It was the only thing in the room that didn't have a tactical purpose. It sat there alone, watching the door.
His chest tightened in a way he’d never felt before.
He absorbed her, and she watched him register it, her face giving nothing away. She let him look.
He dropped his bag with a soft plop.
She stood at the foot of her bed in her amber-lit fortress with the owl watching them from the nightstand, and she looked at him, demanding he come to her.
“You have the power to make me beg,” he whispered, moving into her personal space.
“Maybe later.” She released a soft breath. “Flash…” she murmured. “Take it all off. I want to look at you.”
He registered the tone. She hadn't meant to make it sound like a plea. He reached for the hem of his shirt with both hands, pulling it up and over his head in one motion, dropping it to the floor.
* * *
She stopped breathing.
Her chakana was there.