Chapter 11
Kari
Something wakes me that isn't a sound.
The room smells like old wood and the lavender soap I found under the bathroom sink last week. The ceiling fan clicks its quiet rhythm. Outside, crickets argue about something that's probably none of their business.
Liam's arm is across my waist.
Not the loose, accidental drape of sleep. This is deliberate. His palm flat against my stomach, his breathing slow against the back of my neck, his body curved around mine like he's been doing this for hours. Maybe he has.
My heart does something complicated.
The pillow wall is gone. Has been gone. That particular fiction died so quietly neither of us held a funeral for it.
Just like "this is temporary" died, and "I don't think about him like that" died somewhere around the time I watched him burn chicken and fight the smoke detector like it owed him money.
His thumb shifts. A small stroke across the fabric of my shirt, and I don't know if he's awake or if his subconscious is doing something his conscious mind would never allow.
I press my teeth against my thumbnail. Think about lying still. Think about pretending I'm asleep so we can both keep pretending this is proximity and not a choice.
Then his thumb moves again. Deliberate this time.
"You're awake," I say to the dark.
A pause. His breathing changes. "Yeah."
"How long?"
"A while."
I turn in his arm. Clumsy — my elbow catches the cheerful yellow bedspread, my knee bumps his thigh. Not a graceful romance-novel roll. More of a shuffling rearrangement that ends with my face close to his, his arm still around me.
His eyes are open. Gray, even in the low light. Dark henley pushed up at one forearm, the thin pale scar visible from wrist to past his elbow. The jaw that ticks when he's processing something he doesn't want to process.
It's ticking now.
"You should go back to sleep." His voice is rough. Morning-rough, except it's nowhere near morning.
"Probably." I don't close my eyes. "You should stop holding me like that if you want me to."
His hand goes still on my back. The honesty lands between us — too loud for the quiet room, too true for him to deflect with a perimeter check.
"Kari."
"That's my name."
"This is —" He stops. Starts again. "I'm supposed to be —"
"If you say 'professional,' I'm going to remind you that you told me a story about chasing a diplomat's cat through a hotel lobby."
The corner of his mouth moves. Not a full smile. His version is a crack in concrete — small, reluctant, more structural damage than expression.
"Ambassador," he says. "His name was Ambassador."
"Seventeen pounds of Maine Coon with an escape plan." My voice is steady. My pulse is not. "That's what made me —"
I stop myself. Tap my thumbnail against my teeth in the dark.
"Made you what?"
The ceiling fan clicks. The house settles around us — Millicent and her wallpaper, the pipes I've talked to, the floors that creak in a pattern I've memorized. Foxglove holding its breath.
"That's what made me stop pretending this was fake," I say.
The words sit in the room like something breakable.
Liam doesn't move for a long moment. His hand is still on my back, a warm weight through my shirt. His jaw ticks once, twice. I watch him fight the thing he fights — the need to control, to catalog, to treat every feeling like a security breach that needs containing.
"It stopped being fake for me before that," he says.
My chest does the complicated thing again. "When?"
"The pipe. When you apologized to the pipe for kicking it."
A laugh escapes — startled, real. "That pipe had it coming. Gerald was being useless, the joint wouldn't seal —"
"You said 'I'm sorry, I know it's not your fault, you're doing your best.'" His voice is quiet. "To a pipe."
"It was doing its best."
"I know." His thumb traces a line along my spine. "That's when."
The laugh fades into something that aches in the place where I keep all the things I've wanted and been afraid to reach for. The apartment I rearranged around a man who left. The version of myself I made smaller, quieter, more convenient — because that's what wanting someone cost.
Liam is watching me figure this out. He doesn't rush it.
That's the thing about him. A man who fixes stuck drawers at three in the morning without telling you. Who reads paperback thrillers he hides under his pillow like they're contraband. Who laughed at a woman talking to a pipe and somehow that laugh rearranged everything.
"I'm going to kiss you," I say. "And I need you to know it's not the cover. It's not the proximity. It's not because you're here and I'm scared."
His eyes hold mine. Gray and steady. "Okay."
"It's because you burned chicken and fought the smoke detector.
Because you told me about your mother's gas station magnets.
Because you let me see you read that book on the porch and you didn't move away.
" My voice drops. "Because when I said 'my boyfriend' at Nina's, some part of me meant it. Even then."
His hand comes up. Cups the side of my face with a gentleness that's almost unbearable from a man who sweeps rooms for threats. His thumb traces my cheekbone.
"Kari," he says again, but it sounds different this time. Like my name is the only honest thing left.
"That's still my name."
He kisses me.
Not a movie kiss. His mouth finds mine a little off-center. My hand lands on his chest, over his heartbeat, which is faster than his voice let on. His fingers slide into my hair, tilting my head, adjusting, and then the angle is right.
Oh.
He kisses like he does everything else — deliberate, thorough, unhurried.
No performance. Just his mouth on mine with an attention that makes my skin feel like it's running a low-grade fever.
His other hand pulls me closer, and I go.
My fingers curl into the front of his henley because I need to hold onto something.
When we break apart, his forehead rests against mine. Both of us breathing harder than the moment should warrant.
"That wasn't professional," I whisper.
"No." His voice is wrecked. "It wasn't."
"Good."
My hand is still on his chest. His heart hammers under my palm. Liam Cade — gray-eyed, jaw-ticking, perimeter-checking Liam Cade — is trembling. Just barely. Just enough that I can feel it where our bodies press together.
Something older than wanting stirs. The locked door I built after the last man who left — the one I constructed out of I'm fine alone and I don't need this and the next person who touches me will have to earn it — opens.
I open it. Deliberately. With my eyes open.
"Come here," I say, pulling him down to me, and this kiss is different. Deeper. My teeth catch his bottom lip. His breath hitches — an actual, audible hitch from the man who controls everything — and his hand slides under the hem of my shirt to find skin.
Warm palm on my bare waist. His fingers spread wide. I arch into it because my body has apparently given up pretending.
"Tell me to stop," he says against my mouth. "If you want me to stop."
"I really don't want you to stop." My hips press up against his before my brain approves the motion. His cock pushes against my thigh through his jeans, hard, obvious, and the sound that comes out of me is embarrassing. Needy. Real.
Clothes come off in stages. My shirt first — he lifts it over my head, tosses it somewhere behind him. I pull his henley off because fair is fair. His chest is warm, solid, scarred in places beyond the forearm — a history written on skin that I don't ask about yet.
My hand traces the scar from his wrist up past his elbow. He goes very still.
"Still not asking," I say.
His exhale is shaky. "I know."
Then his mouth is on my collarbone, my throat, the spot below my ear that makes me forget I was ever afraid of this.
His teeth graze my neck — not hard, just enough to send a bolt of heat straight down my spine.
My bra goes next. His hands, those steady hands that check locks and clear rooms, cup my breasts like he's memorizing the weight of them.
His thumb drags across one nipple. Slow. Watching my face while he does it.
"You can stop surveilling me," I murmur. "I'm not a perimeter."
"Force of habit." But his eyes are dark.
Darker than I've seen them. His mouth replaces his thumb, and the wet heat of his tongue on my nipple pulls a sound from me that I would categorize as undignified.
His other hand palms my breast, squeezing, rolling the nipple between his fingers until my back arches off the bed.
My hands learn the geography of his shoulders, his ribs, the muscles along his spine that tighten when I drag my nails across them. I reach between us. Pop the button on his jeans. When my hand wraps around his cock through the fabric, his whole body goes rigid.
"Kari." My name through clenched teeth.
"That's my name."
He makes a sound — somewhere between a groan and a laugh — and then his mouth is on mine again.
Hungrier now. The restraint cracking at the edges.
His hand slides down my stomach, unbuttons my jeans, pushes them down my hips with a efficiency that should feel clinical but doesn't. His fingers find the waistband of my underwear.
He pauses. Looks at me. Asking without asking.
"Yes," I say. "Stop checking and touch me."
His hand slips inside. His fingers slide between my thighs, and when he finds how wet I am his forehead drops against mine with a groan that vibrates through both of us.
"Christ, Kari."
"I've been like this since you told me about the pipe." Not entirely true. True enough.
His fingers move — slow, exploring, reading me the way he reads rooms. Two fingers stroke through the slick heat of me, circling my clit with a patience that borders on cruelty. My hips rock against his hand. Chasing it. Shameless.
"There?" His mouth at my ear.
"There. Don't stop — right there."