Chapter 4
Caden
Iknow before she's through the door that something's wrong.
I've been at the kitchen table with the Morozov background files open for two hours, cold coffee at my elbow, and I've learned enough about Vivienne Ferraro in four days to know the difference between her entering a room and her arriving in one.
Right now she's arriving. Whatever happened in that meeting is still happening inside her and she's holding it by the throat.
She sets her bag on the console table. The silence is heavy.
"How was the meeting?" I ask.
"Fine." She moves toward the kitchen without looking at me. "It was fine."
It was not fine.
I watch her cross the room, dressed in a dark silk blouse, hair up; the full assembled version of herself she presents to rooms full of people she doesn't trust. She goes to the cabinet, takes down a glass, pours two fingers of whiskey.
Doesn't offer me any. The first night she poured for both of us without thinking.
That single change tells me everything. She's not managing the room right now.
She's just trying to get through the next ten minutes.
I close the laptop.
She stands at the counter with her back half-turned, one hand flat on the marble, the other around the glass, and she looks out at the city and says nothing. The wanting feeling that has been sitting in my chest since the conference room returns with a blazing vengeance..
I'm done maintaining it.
She's furious. Not at the situation — at herself, for letting it crack her. I know that feeling. I've spent seventeen years using it to stay sharp.
I stand up. "Vivi."
She turns. This is the first time I’ve said her name, without the “Mrs” pretence. Her chin lifts and her eyes stay on mine and I feel the shift in the room the same way I feel shifts in any environment I'm responsible for.
Something just changed.
"They know," she says. "The foundation board.
They know enough to make it clear they're watching.
Waiting to see if the widow becomes a liability.
" She sets the glass down. "I built that foundation.
From nothing, inside a marriage that gave me nothing, I built something real.
And now I'm standing in rooms full of people deciding whether I need to be managed. "
The word managed comes out like something she's been clenching between her teeth all the way home.
I cross the kitchen.
She watches me do it and doesn't move — just stands with her back against the counter and her chin up and that look in her eyes that is fury on the surface and something raw underneath, and I stop directly in front of her, close enough that she has to tilt her head back to hold my gaze. I can smell her perfume.
"You're not a liability," I say.
She looks at me for a long moment.
I reach past her and cover it with mine, her fingers disappearing under my palm, and I feel her freeze up. I wait.
She looks down at our hands.
"Caden."
"I've got you," I say. Simple. True. And I mean it in a way that has nothing to do with the job.
I don't know who moves first. I don't care. What I know is her hands are in my hair and my mouth is on her throat and the soft sound she makes against my shoulder reaches into my chest and takes hold of everything I've been keeping on a leash since the moment I walked into that conference room.
I walk her back into the kitchen wall.
My hands go to her hips first, fingers pressing in, feeling the warmth of her through silk, taking the impact when her back meets the wall and feeling her arch into it rather than away.
She's not startled. She's not uncertain.
Her hands tighten in my hair and she pulls.
I answer it by pressing closer, one hand flat against the wall beside her head and the other sliding to the small of her back, and she tips her chin up and I drag my mouth up the line of her throat and stop on the place just below her jaw where her breath breaks and her whole body shudders.
I stay there.
I feel her try to swallow the sound it pulls out of her. Feel her press her lips together, contain it, hold it back.
"Don't," I say against her skin. Quiet. Absolute.
I find that spot again and this time she doesn't swallow anything.
The sound she makes is soft and involuntary and it goes straight through me like a current, and I am hard and I want her and I have wanted her since the photograph in the file and I am completely done pretending otherwise.
I want her hands on me, I want her mouth, I want every sound she's been containing behind that composure for ten years.
I want to be the only person who ever hears them.
Her palms slide from my hair to my chest and she's gripping, fingers curling into my shirt, using me to keep herself upright, and I feel the exact moment she stops arguing with herself and simply lets herself want this.
The surrender of it moves through her like a breath released and I feel it happen.
I want to press my mouth to every place on her body where she's been holding tension and make her let go of all of it.
I pull back just enough to look at her.
Her eyes are dark and her lipstick is done and her composure is completely gone and her mouth is —
My phone buzzes against the table.
It buzzes again. Three short bursts. Ops priority. The pattern I set because I don't ignore it regardless of circumstances. I close my eyes for one second — one second I will spend a long time wanting back — and reach into my back pocket without stepping away from her.
Garza. Morozov contact confirmed near the building. Thirty minutes, maybe less. Your call.
I look up. She's already read my face, which she does faster and more accurately than anyone I've worked with, and her expression shifts with the heat still there, visible and undisguised, but the awareness back over it.
"Work," I say.
She nods. Smooths one hand down the front of her blouse, which does nothing to fix what I've done to it.
Lifts her chin. I watch the armor come back up stone by stone with her back against a wall I had her pressed against thirty seconds ago, and the want in my chest becomes something closer to pain.
"Go," she says.
I pick up my jacket and my keys and I walk out of that kitchen and it takes more effort than breaching a defended building.
The Morozov contact is a courier. Low-level, a dead drop in the parking structure two blocks east — nothing that gets us to the cleaner but it confirms the operation is active, patient, and pointed at her building.
I work the secondary entrance feeds with Garza for two hours in the cold and I keep the professional part of my brain on the job.
The rest of it I don't bother trying to manage.
I come back at ten. The apartment is quiet, the kitchen clean. Her bedroom door is closed. The whiskey glass is washed and put away.
This isn’t finished.