Chapter 14 #2
Something breaks. Not fractures. Breaks — clean, structural, the kind of failure that can't be repaired because it was never meant to hold. The wall between what I want and what I allow myself to have collapses in a single, silent implosion. What's underneath is raw enough that breathing hurts.
I pull her into my lap. Knees bracketing my hips in the old chair, springs protesting. My hands slide up her back — not assessing. Just touching. The ridge of her spine. Warmth beneath fabric.
"I don't know how to do this," I say against her throat.
"This isn't a skill, Liam. You don't have to be trained."
She kisses me. Slow. Deliberate. Not a question but an answer to something I didn't know I'd asked. Tips my chin up. Traces my jaw. Kisses the pulse point below my ear where my heartbeat announces everything my voice won't.
"Stay with me," she murmurs.
Not the house. Not the assignment. Here.
I let her lead.
Her hips roll against mine in the chair.
A slow grind that sends heat straight through me, and my hands grip her waist — instinct, not strategy.
She's warm through the thin fabric of her shirt.
Warm everywhere. My cock hardens against her, obvious, impossible to hide, and she doesn't pretend not to notice.
She rocks into it. Deliberate. Watching my face while she does.
"Still with me?" Her mouth curves.
"I'm not going anywhere."
She pulls her shirt over her head. No bra underneath.
The lamplight catches her bare skin — the freckle on her collarbone I cataloged three days ago without meaning to, the soft weight of her breasts, the way her stomach contracts with each breath.
I have spent two weeks training myself not to look at this woman.
The training collapses in under a second.
My mouth finds her collarbone. The hollow of her throat. She makes a sound when my lips close around her nipple — a sharp inhale that I feel in my own chest. My tongue circles the peak while my hand cups her other breast, and her fingers tighten in my hair. Pulling. Not gentle.
Good.
We move from the chair to the bed. Not gracefully — the chair objects, my knee catches the bedframe, she laughs against my mouth. The sound cracks something open in my chest.
On the yellow bedspread, she lays me on my back.
Takes her time — reading the structure, finding the places where the damage runs deeper than the surface.
Her mouth on the scar, the hollow of my throat.
Her hands unbuttoning my jeans with the steady competence of a woman who renovates houses — no fumbling, no hesitation.
When her hand wraps around my cock, my hips lift off the bed. Can't stop it. Won't try.
"There he is," she murmurs. Not mocking. Tender in a way that makes it worse. Her grip tightens, stroking slow, thumb dragging over the head, and the sound that comes out of me is not operational. Not controlled. Not anything I'd allow if I had a choice.
I don't have a choice. She took it. I gave it to her.
Her mouth follows her hand. Lips on my stomach, my hip bone, the trail of hair below my navel. When her tongue drags up the length of my cock I grab a fistful of the yellow bedspread and hold on.
"Kari —"
"Shh." Her mouth closes over me. Wet heat. The slow, devastating rhythm of her tongue working the underside while her hand grips the base. My head drops back. The ceiling fan clicks above me. My hand finds her hair — not directing, just needing to touch her while she takes me apart.
She's thorough. Of course she is. The woman who names her power tools and apologizes to pipes does nothing halfway. Her cheeks hollow around my cock, taking me deeper, and when she hums — a low vibration that I feel in my spine — I pull her off me.
"Stop."
She looks up. Lips swollen. Eyes dark. "Problem?"
"I'll come in your mouth, and that's not where I want to be."
The smile she gives me is slow, knowing, the kind of expression that rearranges a man's priorities. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Climbs back up my body.
I flip her. Fast — the one move I don't let her control. Her back hits the yellow bedspread and her breath comes out in a laugh that turns into a gasp when my mouth finds her breast. My hand slides down her stomach, past the waistband of her underwear, between her thighs.
Soaked. My fingers slide through her pussy, slick, swollen, and the knowledge that she's this wet — from touching me, from having my cock in her mouth — makes my chest tight in a way that has nothing to do with arousal.
Everything to do with it.
My thumb circles her clit while two fingers press inside her. She's tight around my knuckles. Hot. Her hips chase the rhythm I set, and I watch her face — not surveillance this time, just need. The need to see exactly what breaks her open.
"Liam." My name in a voice I've never heard her use. Stripped of humor. Stripped of defense. "More."
I give her more. Deeper. Faster. My thumb pressing harder on her clit, and her back arches, her hand gripping my forearm, her thighs shaking.
"Come for me." The words are out before I know I'm saying them.
She does. Her pussy clenches around my fingers, tight rhythmic pulses, and the sound she makes — my name again, broken into syllables that don't quite fit together — is the best thing I've ever heard. Better than all-clear. Better than the line going quiet after a threat is neutralized. This.
I am not cataloging exits. I am not scanning the room. For the first time since I walked into the Foxglove, I am not the operative. I'm the man.
Her hands find my face. Pull me up to her mouth. She kisses me while her body is still trembling, still coming down, tasting herself on my fingers when I trace her bottom lip.
"Now," she whispers. "I want you inside me."
I push into her. Slow. The stretch of her around my cock — tight, wet, impossibly warm — and my arms tremble with the effort of not driving in hard. Her legs wrap around my waist. Heels digging into the backs of my thighs, pulling me deeper.
"All of you," she says against my mouth. "I want all of you."
I give her all of me.
The rhythm builds — her hips meeting every thrust, my hand gripping the headboard for leverage. Not careful. Not controlled. The bed knocks against the wall. Her nails rake down my back, and the bright sting of it makes me groan against her throat.
"Harder." Not a request. A demand from a woman who renovates Victorian houses with her bare hands. A woman who doesn't ask for things she can take.
I drive into her harder. Deeper. Her pussy grips me with every stroke, and the wet sound of us — skin against skin, the slick heat between her thighs — fills the room alongside the ceiling fan's click.
Her hands find mine. Fingers laced against the bedspread — same as the first time, but different. The first time was discovery. This is decision.
"Look at me," she says.
I open my eyes. She is above — no, beneath me in the lamplight, hair spread across the pillow. The expression she wears is not performance. It's the unguarded, terrifying face of a woman who sees what she's looking at and isn't flinching.
"Kari." Her name comes out wrecked.
Mine. Not surprised this time. Not the unauthorized intrusion it was that first morning. A statement. A claim I'm making with my eyes open, knowing the cost, choosing it anyway.
I feel her tighten around me. Her breath catches. Her fingers crush mine against the bedspread.
"Come with me," she whispers.
My forehead drops to hers. Three more strokes — deep, unraveling, the last shred of control dissolving — and I come inside her with a groan that I couldn't contain if I tried.
Her orgasm hits at the same moment, her body clenching around my cock in waves, and the sound she makes is quiet this time. A breath. My name. Just my name.
I stay inside her. Don't move. Don't pull away. My face pressed into her hair — coconut, always coconut, the smell that rewired something in my brain weeks ago and never switched back.
When I finally shift to the side, she curls into me. Her head on my chest. Her hand resting over my heart.
Not the operative maintaining position. Just a man holding a woman in a bed with a yellow bedspread, in a house that creaks around them like it's settling into something permanent.
She sleeps.
Her head on my chest. Her hand resting over my heart — not possessive, just there. Breathing slow. Even. Trusting.
The anger is still here. At Novak. At the patience of a man who spent months learning a dead woman's house, buying bypass tools, leaving threats with methodical precision.
Tomorrow, Reese sits across from Gus Novak. The evidence is circumstantial but heavy — heavy enough to crack a man who thinks of himself as a problem-solver, not a criminal.
Kari shifts against me. Murmurs something. Her fingers curl against my chest.
This woman — asleep on my chest with coconut in her hair, plaster dust still under her fingernails — has turned me into someone who can't go back. She asked me to be inside the perimeter.
I'm so far inside I can't see the walls anymore.
Tomorrow, we move.
Tonight, I hold her.
Morning comes gray and sharp.
Kari is already up when I swing my feet to the floor.
The shower running. The smell of coffee from the kitchen, which means she went downstairs before I woke — something I'll address later, or won't, because the woman does what she does and the only thing that changes is whether I waste energy objecting.
Reese arrives at seven-fifteen in Saint — HPG's blacked-out Suburban, tinted glass, reinforced panels, the kind of vehicle that tells a neighborhood nothing good is about to happen somewhere else. Two knocks on the front door. No third. His signal, not ours.
He's exactly what I expected from his file. Mid-thirties, lean build, the kind of face that disappears in a crowd because it was designed to. Polo shirt, dark jacket. Nothing that announces what he does for a living.
"Cade." He nods once. No handshake.