9. Jace #2
“Diesel would make an excellent me.”
“Diesel would tower over the folders and end the bit in one second flat.” Nora set the phone down, still grinning. “Anyway. Don’t change the subject. You were about to tell me everything.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You were about to. I could see it building. Let it build. I’m very patient and I ordered you a second drink preemptively.
” Nora nodded at the server already approaching with exactly that.
“Speaking as someone who has watched approximately four hundred people almost die and then decide, on their way back from the brink, that their first priority was texting an ex—nobody gets to pretend they don’t feel things around me. I’ve earned the right to call it.”
“That’s morbid.”
“That’s my job. I contain morbid and delightful in equal measure, ask anyone.” Nora leaned in, all teasing dropping into something gentler. “Talk to me. For real this time.”
Emma turned her glass by the stem, buying a second she didn’t need, and the low light and the second drink and two weeks of carrying this alone finally wore her resistance down to nothing.
“It stopped being fake.” She said it fast, like ripping off a bandage, before she could talk herself out of it. “I don’t know exactly when. Somewhere around the first week, maybe sooner. It stopped being a cover story and started being the one part of my day I genuinely looked forward to.”
Nora didn’t say anything yet, which was, for Nora, an act of remarkable restraint.
“I’m terrified of it,” Emma admitted, quieter now.
“Not of him. Of what happens to the rest of me if I let this be real. I’ve spent my whole career being the smartest person in a room full of people who resented me for it.
I don’t actually know how to be someone’s partner instead of someone’s problem to manage.
What if I’m good at being needed and terrible at just being loved, day to day, with nothing on fire? ”
“Oh, honey.” Nora’s voice softened, all the interrogation gone out of it at once. “You say that like loving someone comes with a final exam. It doesn’t. You show up. You get it wrong sometimes. You show up again. That’s the whole test, and you pass it just by staying in the room.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“I’m not in the comfort business. I’m in the truth business.
” Nora reached across the table and squeezed her hand, quick, fierce.
“Go home. Tell him. Or don’t tell him, and stop pretending you don’t mean every look you give him, because I promise you, the entire safe house already knows, and you’re the last person still performing for an audience that stopped watching the show days ago. ”
“That’s oddly exact.”
“I’ve met your team. They’re not subtle.
None of them are subtle. It’s honestly a little exhausting, being around that much repressed feeling at once.
” Nora sat back, delighted with herself the way she got when she’d successfully bullied someone she loved into being honest. “Stop being careful. You’ve been careful your entire life and look where it got you—engaged to a man you have to lie about loving. ”
Emma’s phone buzzed. She glanced down, and the message rearranged her whole chest in about half a second.
Diesel wants it on record he’d have caught the folders with more grace than I did. I’m choosing violence later tonight.
She was still smiling at her phone when Nora reached over and stole it clean out of her hand.
“Oh, this is adorable, I hate it, give me a second to compose myself.” Nora read the exchange twice, cackled, and handed the phone back. “You’re going home tonight and you’re going to stop being a coward about it. I’m not asking.”
Emma didn’t have an answer for that. She didn’t try to find one. She finished her drink, hugged Nora goodbye a little longer than usual, and caught a cab back to the safe house with her heart going too fast for a woman who told people for a living that feelings weren’t data.
Her phone rang halfway home. Claire, whose internal radar for Emma’s emotional state had never once needed an explanation to activate.
“You sound different.” No hello. Claire never bothered with one either, which Emma had always privately suspected was a family trait. “Good different. Suspicious different. Explain.”
“I don’t sound like anything. I’m in a cab.”
“You sound like a woman who just admitted something to somebody who isn’t me, and I am deeply offended on principle.” Her voice dropped, softer. “Is it the fiancé? The real one, not the wedding-blog one Mom’s book club found on the internet and has apparently been discussing for a week.”
“There’s a wedding blog?”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“It’s real,” Emma admitted, and felt the truth of it land somewhere new, now that she’d said it twice in one night to two different people who loved her. “It got real. I only just ’fessed up to it.”
“Good.” Claire didn’t sound surprised, which was its own kind of comfort. “You’ve spent ten years building a life nobody could take anything from, and I love you, but that’s not the same thing as a life you actually want. Go have the real thing. I’ll be insufferable about it at Christmas.”
“I’m counting on it.”
Somewhere around the third red light, after they’d hung up, Emma gave up pretending she wasn’t smiling at nothing out the window.
The kitchen light was on when she got back, which meant Jace was home too, and the two of them arrived at the same conclusion at the same moment: the pretense that had gotten them this far had officially run out of road.
He was leaning against the counter when she walked in, tie loosened, jacket slung over a chair, wearing the look of a night spent thinking too hard about things he usually kept locked down. He looked up when she came in, and the silence that followed was supposed to read as awkward and didn’t.
“Good night?” he asked.
“Nora billed me for emotional labor and told me to stop being careful.” Emma set her bag down slowly. “You?”
“Roman clapped me on the shoulder and told me the whole team’s known the entire time.” He pushed off the counter, closing the distance between them without hurrying, already decided on where this was going and in no rush at all to cover the last few feet. “Apparently I’m bad at hiding things.”
“Apparently we both are.”
“What did you tell her?” His voice had dropped, quiet, direct, a man who already suspected the answer and wanted to hear her say it more than he wanted to protect either of them from it.
“The truth. That this stopped being fake a week ago. That I’m terrified of how much I want it to stay real.” Her heart was going too fast for a kitchen conversation, but she held his gaze anyway, done hiding behind competence for one night. “What did you tell Roman?”
“That my wolf knew you before I did. Before either of us said a word.” He closed the last step between them, close enough now that she had to tip her head back to hold his gaze. “I’ve never once doubted it since.”
Neither of them moved for a beat. He didn’t touch her yet, and the not-touching had its own weight, charged and deliberate, the choice being made in full view before either of them acted on it.
She could feel the heat coming off him, could hear the change in his breathing that matched the one happening in her own chest, could see the moment his gaze dropped to her mouth and stayed there.
“You’re doing the thing,” she said, breathless despite herself.
“What thing.”
“The staring thing. Roman’s right, you know. You do it constantly.”
“I’ve earned the right to stare. I’ve been not staring for two weeks.
Considerable restraint was involved.” His hand finally came up, slow, and brushed a strand of hair back from her face with a gentleness more intimate than anything else that had happened between them tonight.
“I’m done with the restraint now, if that’s all right with you. ”
“It’s more than all right.” Her voice had gone rough at the edges. “It’s the only thing I want tonight.”
She reached up and fisted a hand in his shirt, pulling him the rest of the way down to her. “I was never very good at pretending in the first place.”
He kissed her like he’d been waiting his whole life for permission he hadn’t known he needed, one hand sliding into her hair, the other splayed wide across her spine, pulling her flush against him.
She kissed him back with everything she’d spent two weeks not saying out loud, fingers curling into his shirt, and when he lifted her onto the counter without breaking the kiss, she wrapped her legs around him and pulled him closer instead of protesting.
His mouth left hers to trace along her jaw, her throat, and the low sound he made against her skin registered more than it was heard, his hands settling at her hips, tracing her through the fabric before he let himself have anything more.
“Upstairs,” she managed, against his mouth. “I want a bed. I want you to have time.”
“I have all night.” His voice had gone dark and rough, wolf close under the surface, his eyes gone molten at the edges in the low kitchen light. “I intend to use every hour of it.”
He carried her up the stairs as though she weighed nothing at all, mouth finding her throat, her jaw, the spot behind her ear that made her breath catch every single time, and by the time they reached her room neither of them had a single coherent thought left about anything but each other.
He set her down at the foot of the bed and held her gaze for one long moment, amber eyes gone dark, memorizing the view like he intended to keep it for the rest of his life.
The lamp on her nightstand threw everything into low gold light, soft enough to blur the edges of the room and sharpen everything about him instead—the way his chest rose and fell too fast for a man usually built out of stillness, the way his hands weren’t quite steady when they found the top button of her blouse.
“You’re allowed to go faster than that,” she said, watching his fingers work the second button with a patience that bordered on torture.