Chapter 11 #2
He doesn't stop. His fingers keep that rhythm — steady circles, the right pressure, the kind of focused attention that makes my thoughts dissolve into white noise.
My hand tightens on his shoulder. Nails digging in.
His cock strains against his jeans where my thigh presses against him, and the combination of his fingers on my clit and the hard evidence of what this is doing to him pushes me fast.
"I'm going to —" The sentence doesn't finish. The orgasm hits like a wall I didn't see coming — sharp, sudden, my whole body clenching around his fingers while I press my face into his neck and say his name in a voice I don't recognize.
He works me through it. Slower now. Letting the aftershocks roll while his mouth presses against my temple.
"Okay?" he asks.
"If you ask me that every thirty seconds, this is going to take a very long time."
The crack in the concrete. That almost-smile. "Noted."
The rest of our clothes come off with less finesse.
His jeans. My underwear. His boxer briefs, which I pull down while he kicks them off the end of the bed.
Naked, he's broader than the henleys suggest. The scars don't end at his forearm — a raised line across his ribs, a faded mark near his hip.
A body that has been through things. Still standing. Still here.
My hand wraps around his cock. He hisses through his teeth. Hard, thick, hot against my palm. His hips jerk forward — involuntary, human, the opposite of controlled — and I stroke him once, twice, watching the way his jaw clenches.
"You're enjoying this," he manages.
"The part where the man who catalogs exits can't form sentences? A little bit."
His eyes flash. Something shifts in his expression — the control slides back, just enough to be dangerous. He grabs my wrist. Pins it above my head against the cheerful yellow bedspread.
"Let me enjoy you, then."
My breath catches. Not from fear. From the low promise in his voice, the weight of his body settling between my thighs. His cock presses against me — not inside, just there, sliding through the wet heat between my legs. Teasing. My hips lift to meet him.
"Liam. Please."
"Please what?"
"Don't make me beg. I don't beg."
"You don't have to." He reaches between us. Lines himself up. Pushes into me in one slow, steady thrust that steals every word I've ever known.
Full. The stretch of him, the way my body opens around his cock — the reality of Liam Cade is better than every late-night imagining for being imperfect. His forehead drops to mine. His arms shake with the effort of going slow.
"Fuck," I whisper. Not an exclamation. An observation.
"Yeah." His voice wrecked. "Yeah."
He pulls back. Drives in again — deeper, harder, and I wrap my legs around his waist to take all of him. My nails rake down his back. His hand grips my hip, angling me up, and the new position hits something that turns my vision white at the edges.
"There — right there, don't you dare stop —"
He doesn't stop. He finds a rhythm that's ours — not performance, not choreography.
Hard enough to make the bedframe knock against the wall.
His mouth on my throat. My fingers in his hair, pulling.
His hand slides between us, finds my clit, and the double sensation — his cock inside me, his thumb circling that swollen nerve — is too much. Not enough. Both.
"Come for me." Low. Against my ear. Not a command from the operative. A request from the man.
The orgasm builds different this time. Slower, deeper, rolling up from somewhere behind my navel.
My pussy clenches around him, tight, tighter, and when it breaks I don't muffle the sound.
Let it fill the room — his name, broken syllables, the ceiling fan clicking its rhythm above us while I come apart around his cock.
He follows three strokes later, shuddering, burying himself deep. His face pressed into my hair. A groan that sounds like surrender. His hand finds mine, lacing our fingers together against the cheerful yellow bedspread, and he holds on like I'm the only solid thing in a room that's spinning.
Neither of us speaks.
After, we lie tangled in the yellow bedspread. His arm around my shoulders. My head on his chest. The ceiling fan clicks. The house settles. Somewhere outside, a cricket resumes its argument.
My fingers trace idle patterns on his sternum. His hand moves through my hair — so instinctively tender it makes my throat ache.
"So," I say, because the silence is getting heavy and I handle heavy things with humor. "On a scale of one to chasing Ambassador through a hotel lobby, how much of a professional crisis is this?"
His chest vibrates under my cheek. Not a laugh. Close to one. "Off the scale."
"Cool. Cool cool cool." I tap my thumbnail against my teeth, realize I'm doing it, stop. "So what happens now?"
He doesn't answer right away. His hand keeps moving through my hair — the slow touch of someone who just remembered that touching another person doesn't require a tactical reason.
"I don't know," he says.
Honest. Terrifying in its honesty.
I press my face harder against his chest. Breathe in the smell of him — something clean, something warm, something that's started to smell like home the way Foxglove smells like home. A dangerous thought.
The people I want always leave.
Not a new thought. An old one. Worn smooth from handling. Del stayed, but Del is the exception that proves the rule. Every other time I've reached for someone — not the careful version but the real, terrifying, full-throated kind — they took what was convenient and moved on.
Liam isn't even mine to lose. He's here on assignment. Vance sent him. When Gus Novak is neutralized, Liam goes back to The Glasshouse. Back to HPG. Back to a life where he doesn't sleep in a Victorian B&B with yellow bedspreads and a woman who names her power tools.
His arm tightens around me. Like he heard the thought.
"Stop," he says quietly.
"Stop what?"
"Whatever you're thinking that made you tense up."
I almost laugh. Of course he noticed. The man who catalogs exits and monitors angles can feel the exact moment I go rigid against his side.
"I'm not thinking anything."
"Kari." Patient. Gentle. Devastating.
"Fine." My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. "I'm thinking about what this means. And whether 'I don't know' is the kind of 'I don't know' that turns into 'this was a mistake' by morning."
His hand stops in my hair. Then resumes. "It's not."
"You sound sure."
"I am."
Two words. No decoration. The quiet certainty of a man who doesn't say things he doesn't mean. I want to believe him so badly it feels like a bruise.
"Okay," I whisper. "Okay."
The fan clicks. Gary the gnome stands guard in the moonlit garden below our window.
The cameras record their steady loops. Somewhere out there, someone is watching this house — watching me — and I should be thinking about the notes, the surveillance, the man who thinks he can scare me out of the only place that's ever felt like mine.
Instead I'm lying in the aftermath of something I chose, with a man who's still holding me like I matter, and I'm terrified.
Not of the stalker.
Not of what we did.
Of how easy it would be to rebuild my entire life around the shape of Liam Cade, the way I rebuilt around the last man — and of what happens to me when this one leaves, too.
His breathing evens out. His arm stays heavy across my shoulders. Mine.
For now.
I close my eyes. Press my ear against his heartbeat. Try not to count the days until he goes back to being someone else's security detail.
Try not to wonder if the person watching the house already knows that the best way to hurt me isn't a note under the door or a photo slipped through a blind spot.
It's him. It's always been him.
The thing I'd lose that would finally make me leave.