CHAPTER 21
Finn
“That’s it, then,” I say, rolling the chart and snapping the band around it. “We’re set.”
“We’re set.” Marcus leans back, stretching. “I’ll have The Quartermaster fueled and provisioned by noon. Connie meets me at the slip at six, we’re off the dock by seven.”
“Normal clockwork,” I say.
“No worries at all,” Marcus says, clapping me on the shoulder as we all stand. “It’s a fourteen-inch piece of rock. We’ve moved harder things in worse weather.”
“I’m not worrying.”
“You’re worrying. You’ve got the face.”
“I don’t have a face.”
“You’ve got the face, boss,” Connie says with a smile, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes, telling me she’s got some pregame jitters.
We file in off the patio, the glass door rumbling shut behind us. The kitchen is full of light and the smell of Josie’s cooking. She’s at the island with a dish towel over her shoulder, wiping down the counter, looking up as we come through.
Marcus peels off toward her. “Josie… that chicken has my stomach speaking to me in ways I’ve never heard before.”
“I’ll offer it again… there’s a plate with your name on it if you want to stay.”
“I would marry you for it,” he quips, “but I think the boss might object.”
“The boss objects,” I say. I’d ordinarily invite both my mates to share the meal with me, but I want to be alone with Josie. I find myself craving that time more than anything these days.
Marcus grins, gives Josie’s arm a squeeze, the easy warm one he gives people he’s decided are his. “’Night, Josie. Thanks for letting us crash your kitchen.”
I like how he says your kitchen, and I like even more that Josie doesn’t try to correct him.
“Anytime, Marcus.”
Connie walks straight past her and offers no words. No goodbye. No glance. She crosses the great room on a line like Josie’s a piece of furniture she’s decided to avoid so she doesn’t stub her toe.
That’s odd given she made an effort to be genial when she arrived.
“’Night, Connie,” Josie says to her back.
“’Night,” Connie replies, but it’s a rote farewell, no true meaning in it.
And then they’re gone, out into the dark.
I tell myself the Connie thing is nothing.
She’s tired. She’s got a run tomorrow. She and Josie don’t have to be friends.
I tell myself the meeting went exactly the way a meeting should go—tight, professional, no loose threads, everybody clear on their role.
The figurine’s a milk run and Connie seemed locked in the entire time.
Everything should go off without a hitch.
I lock the door, set the alarm and head back into the kitchen.
My chest does a thing when it sees Josie and the meal she has spread out on the counter.
There’s a whole chicken, golden and flecked with rosemary, resting in its pot on the stovetop.
There’s a dish of roasted potatoes crisped at the edges and a bowl of green beans with slivers of toasted almonds.
She’s set two places at the island with an open bottle of wine that looks one glass light already.
She made all of this knowing who I am and what I do.
She understands I’ve spent my entire working life acquiring things so I would never again be the kid who slept in a stairwell and stole bread from a market because his stomach hurt.
I have a mansion, two boats, and a successful, thriving art business.
I’ve spent more money on single bottles of wine than my mother made in a month working three jobs to keep food on the table.
And not one thing I’ve ever bought or accomplished has done to me what the sight of this woman’s roast chicken on my stove is doing to me right now.
“How’d it go?” she asks and then immediately blushes. “Wait… don’t answer that. I was just being polite and I don’t really want to know.”
I chuckle, deciding that might be the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen, watching her try to reconcile her feelings and genuine interest in me with her career in putting criminals behind bars.
But I know she carries concern for me as well so I say, “We’re as ready as we can be.”
She smiles gratefully for the reassurance, and I cross the floor to her.
Josie watches me come, her eyes going a little wide as her tongue darts out over her bottom lip.
It’s sexy as fuck and I bet she has no clue she even did it.
I take the dish towel off her shoulder and drop it on the counter, putting my hands to her cheeks to tilt her face up to mine.
“Finn—”
I kiss her before she can mar my intentions with more words. I want her. I want the one thing between us that doesn’t have a wall down the middle of it.
Josie makes a small sound against my mouth, surprised, and then she’s kissing me back.
Her hands come up to fist in my shirt, and the kiss goes from a thing I started to a thing she’s fully involved in.
She tastes like wine and passion, and I’ve kissed her enough times now that the taste of her has its own slot in my brain, filed under things I don’t ever want to live without.
When I break it, I keep my forehead against hers. We’re both breathing harder than a kiss in the kitchen should account for.
“I’m going to pick you up, carry you up those stairs, and I can do one of two things,” I whisper in her ear.
She shudders. “What would those choices be?”
“Make love to you or fuck you hard. Got a preference?”
Josie moans, tilting her head and pressing her mouth to my throat. “You and I seem to have a problem with actually eating meals when they’re ready because we want to have sex.”
“That’s a problem?”
“I made all this food and we’re really going to leave a whole chicken on the stove?”
“You really want to stack the orgasms I can give you against chicken?” I throw back at her.
She giggles, a girlish, very anti-Josie sound that makes my heart thump. “You’re that confident, huh?”
“Yeah. I am.”
“I’ll let you choose what you’ll do to me,” she says, and that’s all I need to hear.
I bend, get an arm under her knees, and lift her off her feet. She squeaks—this composed federal analyst who reads Russian crime syndicates for a living actually squeaks—and then laughs into my neck as I carry her out of the kitchen and toward the stairs.
“The chicken’s going to be cold.”
“Josie.”
“What?”
“I will buy you a hundred chickens. Stop talking about the chicken.”
She laughs again, low, and presses her mouth to the spot below my ear, and I take the stairs two at a time.
In my room, I lay her on the bed in the half dark, the only light from the lamp on her side that she left on this morning. I come down over her, intent to take her apart with my hands and my mouth.
But when I get her undressed, when I get myself undressed and stretch out over her and she puts her palms flat against my chest, the expression on her face stops me.
My pulse skitters because in my entire life, I can’t remember a single time that another human being has looked at me like I was something they wanted to keep.
And it fucking guts me.
“Tell me what you want,” I hear myself say, which is a level of vulnerability I rarely admit.
I’m the one who decides. I’ve always been the one who decides, in bed and out of it, because having control is the only way I’ve ever known how to keep anyone safe.
But I don’t want to decide right now. I want her to give it to me.
I want to do exactly what she needs and nothing else.
Her hand comes up and cups my jaw, her thumb at the corner of my mouth. “Slow. I want you to go slow.”
Something in my chest loosens and I sink into her by incremental degrees.
I watch her face the whole way and when I’m bottomed out, she releases a sigh that sounds like she just found her home.
I drop my forehead to Josie’s collarbone, hold still and feel her, the heat and the give and the way her heart beats from her body into mine.
And then I move, and it’s nothing like any other time.
There’s no race in it, no fight. I work into her, slow and deep and unhurried.
Warmth blankets over me, soothing a part of me that’s been cold so long I forgot it could be anything else.
It’s peace. That’s the closest word and it’s not close enough, and it terrifies me because it means so much, I’m scared to lose it.
For one second, the old wiring kicks in. For one second, I almost go hard, almost drive into her the way I know how to, the way that turns this into a dance about bodies instead of a dance about us.
Josie’s hands slide up my back, both palms flat, dragging up the length of my spine like she’s reading me. She breathes into my ear, “I’ve got you,” and the old wiring goes quiet.
I let it be what it is.
I let myself be hers.
We move together in the lamplight, and I keep my cheek against hers so I can feel every breath she takes.
Josie runs her fingers into my hair and over my shoulders and down my arms like she’s trying to show me with her hands what she can’t say, and I’m trying to show her the same thing the only way I know how, which is to be gentle and present.
Focused solely on her.
When we go over, we go over together, and it isn’t loud.
There’s no shout, no slam of the headboard, none of the beautiful roughness of the other nights.
It’s a long, rolling wave that moves simultaneously through our bodies and carries us together to oblivion.
I press my face into her neck as she arches and shudders under me.
It shreds me from the inside out and after, I can’t move.
I don’t want to move.
Want to stay here forever.
I lie there with my face in Josie’s hair and my heart hammering its way back down to normalcy.
But I recognize a pain in my chest. More of a squeeze of realization that my prior life is gone.
It’s the knowledge that starting right now, I’m a man who built his whole life around never needing anyone and now I need this woman to survive.
It feels like the first warm day after a winter so long you stopped believing in spring.
Josie’s fingers move slowly through my hair, scratching lightly at my scalp. “Hey,” she murmurs.
“Yeah.”
“You good?”
I push up onto my forearm so I can see her face. Her hair’s a mess across the pillow, her cheeks are flushed, and she’s looking at me with that same expression from before, the one that takes me apart faster than her hands ever could.
“I’m getting out,” I say.
Her hand goes still in my hair. “What?”
“The run tomorrow. It’s the last one. I’m done after this.”
She pushes up onto her elbow so we’re face-to-face, and I watch her go from soft to sharp, the analyst surfacing through the afterglow. “Finn. Don’t say that to me right now because of what we just shared.” She gestures between us. “Don’t make a decision in a bed you’ll regret in a boardroom.”
I can’t help but snort. “I’m hardly boardroom qualified, but I made the decision before this.
I told Marcus and Connie out on the patio and I’m going to turn everything over to them.
I’ll give Marcus The Quartermaster and he’ll run things.
Connie keeps her cut, the crew survives, and I walk.
The gallery’s clean and I start a new chapter in my life. ”
“Why?” Her voice cracks a little. “Why would you ever do that? It’s who you are. You built it out of nothing.”
“I’m doing it because I’ve fallen in love with you and there’s no way for our worlds to co-exist. I’ve got to go straight.”
Josie goes completely still.
“I’m choosing you. The work was who I was when I didn’t have anything but expensive trinkets to mark the value of my life. But now I have you, and you’re worth more than everything I’ve ever accomplished.”
Her eyes brighten and well with tears and her lower lip trembles. For a second she doesn’t say anything at all, just looks at me with her whole chest moving.
“I love you too,” she says finally, barely above a whisper. “I’m not falling anymore. I fell. I’m there. I love you, Finn.”
I kiss her.
I kiss her slowly and I kiss her long and somewhere in it I feel her laugh against my mouth. It’s disbelieving and happy, and I gather her, rolling us so she’s tucked into me. I hold Josie there in the lamplight with the chicken going cold downstairs and tomorrow’s run waiting out in the dark.
I feel as she drifts off against me, boneless and warm. I’ll let her sleep for a bit, then I’ll wake her up so we can go down and eat. But for now, I plan the future.
I plan it in broad strokes. The details will come later.
A vacation somewhere with Josie when the Voronin thing is behind us, Sunday breakfasts with Bill and maybe grabbing the occasional beer with Marcus so we can talk about old times.
I’ll learn how to be just one man instead of two and for the first time in my life, the future isn’t a thing I’m bracing against.
It’s a thing I’m reaching toward.