17. PIPER
Some arguments are never actually about the thing they claim to be about.
This one starts with a leak investigation and ends with both of us finding out exactly how much we’ve been lying about everything else.
“It has to be someone with property access and Northbridge ties,” I say, pacing the length of the sitting room while Calder stands by the cold fireplace, arms crossed, jaw set in the hard line he’s worn since the attack.
“Contractor badges don’t fabricate themselves. Someone on staff is feeding Roman real-time information.”
“I’ve run background on every person with clearance twice. Nothing flags.”
“Then run it a third time, because someone knew that vehicle switch within the hour, and someone knew exactly where to position a van on the north access road.”
My voice is sharper than the conversation requires, adrenaline still working its way out of my system hours after a stranger’s hand closed around my wrist.
“This isn’t a paperwork problem, Calder. Someone almost took me off that gravel drive tonight.”
I hear my voice climbing toward something I don’t usually let it reach in front of anyone, and I don’t pull it back.
I am tired, suddenly, bone-deep tired, of being the only person in every room who isn’t allowed to sound afraid.
“You think I don’t know that?”
His voice cracks, just slightly, the first real fracture I’ve heard in it since Roman said Jonah’s name.
“You think I haven’t run every scenario where my men were four seconds slower?”
“I think you’re standing there interrogating spreadsheets instead of admitting you’re terrified, because feeling something inconvenient doesn’t fit into whatever system you’ve built to survive the last twelve years.”
“And you’re standing there turning your own near-abduction into a strategy memo because God forbid you sit with an emotion long enough for it to actually touch you.”
He steps closer, and there’s nothing controlled left in his expression now.
“You do it with everything, Piper. You did it with your grandmother. You did it with the footage. You take the rawest thing that could possibly happen to a person and you turn it into a sentence you can manage, because managing it is safer than feeling it.”
“At least I feel things, Calder. You treat every single person in your orbit like a future corpse. Like the only question worth asking is how they die and whether you could have stopped it.
You’ve spent twelve years so busy grieving people in advance that you’ve forgotten how to actually be with them while they’re still alive.”
I hear myself say it and feel the vertiginous thrill of having found the sentence that cuts exactly as deep as I intended.
I do not take it back.
Something goes very still in his face, and I know, the second the words leave my mouth, that I’ve found the exact place it hurts most.
“That’s not fair.”
“No,” I agree, breathing hard, closer to him now than I meant to get.
“It’s not fair. None of tonight was fair. You don’t get to stand there being furious at spreadsheets when what you actually want to do is put your fist through a wall because a man almost took me,
and I don’t get to keep turning my own fear into press strategy just because it’s easier than admitting I was terrified too.”
He doesn’t answer right away, and the silence between us is charged with everything neither of us has said out loud in the two weeks since Cordelia first put us in a room together.
“Piper—”
There is a version of tonight where I let him finish that sentence, whatever careful, controlled thing he was building toward, and we both retreat back into the roles we’ve spent a year perfecting.
I have spent enough of my life waiting for the safer version of the truth.
I kiss him before he can finish the sentence, and for one suspended second he goes rigid with surprise before something in him simply breaks open and he kisses me back like he’s been waiting for permission he never thought he’d get.
It isn’t gentle.
Neither of us has the patience left for gentle tonight, not after the tackle and the footage and Roman’s voice dropping Jonah’s name like a knife, not after four seconds of watching a stranger’s hand close around my wrist and Calder’s hands shake afterward like something in him had finally,
permanently cracked.
His mouth is hard and certain against mine, one hand fisting in my hair, the other flat against the small of my back, dragging me in until there’s no pretending this is anything but exactly what it looks like.
“Tell me to stop,” he says against my mouth, voice wrecked, giving me the exit even now, even wound this tight.
“Don’t you dare.”
We don’t make it to the bedroom with any grace.
I get his jacket off somewhere near the fireplace, and he gets my blouse open with hands that are anything but steady, and every point where his skin meets mine feels like the answer to a year of increasingly elaborate arguments neither of us ever admitted were their own kind of foreplay.
He kisses down my throat like he’s memorizing it, murmurs something rough against my skin that might be my name, and I pull him closer, greedy, adrenaline and fear and a year of pretending finally burning off into something we can’t take back.
He backs me toward the bed without breaking the kiss, and when the backs of my knees hit the mattress, I pull him down with me.
For a man who approaches everything like a tactical operation, there is nothing calculated about him now.
His hands move over me slowly at first, as if he’s giving me every possible chance to change my mind.
I don’t.
I drag his shirt over his head instead.
“Still want me to stop?” he asks, his mouth against my throat.
“Ask me that again and I might actually kill you.”
A rough laugh leaves him, low against my skin.
“There she is.”
He kisses me again, and whatever restraint he had left disappears.
I have spent a year fighting this man across conference tables, through endless text messages and arguments neither of us knew how to lose.
Now every sharp word, every look held half a second too long, every moment I’ve wanted to strangle him has found somewhere else to go.
His mouth trails lower and my fingers tighten in his hair.
“Dominic.”
He looks up at me.
And that almost undoes me more than anything else.
No arrogance.
No challenge.
Just that unnerving, absolute attention he gives to everything that matters to him.
Tonight, somehow, that’s me.
By the time he comes back up to kiss me, I’m breathless and impatient and completely done pretending I want anything except exactly where this is going.
“Condom?” I manage.
He stills immediately.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
He reaches for his bag without another word, and the tiny interruption should make the moment less intense.
It doesn’t.
If anything, watching Dominic Calder lose control while still refusing to stop taking care of me might be the most unfairly attractive thing he’s ever done.
Then he’s back.
His forehead rests against mine for one suspended second.
“Piper.”
There is a question in my name.
I answer it by pulling him closer.
“Yes.”
When we finally come together, all the anger between us changes shape.
He kisses me through it, one hand tangled with mine against the mattress, the other holding me like he’s still half convinced someone might try to take me away if he loosens his grip.
There is nothing polished about us anymore.
Nothing controlled.
Just heat and breath and the sound of my name in his voice until I stop remembering all the reasons this was supposed to be a terrible idea.
For once, Dominic doesn’t seem interested in being the most disciplined man in the room.
And for once, I don’t want to manage what happens next.
I just let it happen.
Later, considerably later, tangled together in the dark of the bedroom, his heartbeat slowing beneath my palm, neither of us says anything for a long time.
The fire has burned down to embers again.
Outside, the wind has gone quiet.
I have never in my life let my guard down this completely, this fast, with anyone, and some analytical corner of my brain, the same one that reads headlines and calculates fallout, is already cataloging the risk of it, even as the rest of me refuses to regret a single second.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” I say eventually, though I don’t entirely believe it as I say it.
“No,” Calder agrees, his voice low, rough, careful in a way I haven’t heard from him before. “It wasn’t.”
“Are you going to tell me you regret it?”
I feel him go very still at the question.
“No.” He says it too fast, too certain, and something in his tone makes me turn to look at him even in the dark. “I don’t regret it. I regret that I don’t know what to do with it.”
“That makes two of us.”
“There’s something else.” He says it into the dark, careful. “The condom didn’t hold. I felt it go. I should have said so then.”
“I know. I felt it too.”
“Piper—”
“The odds are small. If there’s anything to deal with, we’ll deal with it. Not tonight.”
He doesn’t argue, which I file, at the time, under consideration rather than what it actually is, which is a man letting me manage a fact because I asked him to.
I trace an idle line along his forearm.
“We work together. We have a client whose life might depend on us functioning as a unit tomorrow morning. This complicates things considerably.”
It’s the kind of complication I have spent a decade building strategies specifically to avoid, and I find, lying here with his heartbeat slowing under my palm, that for possibly the first time in my professional life, I don’t actually want the strategy.
“I’m aware.”
A pause, and I feel him turn his head toward me in the dark.
“I don’t have a plan for this, Piper. I have a plan for almost everything. I don’t have one for this.”
“Good,” I say, surprising myself. “I’m tired of being the only one in the room without a script.”
He laughs, low and startled, like the sound caught him off guard as much as it does me, and something about hearing Dominic Calder actually laugh, unguarded, in the dark, settles a little of the chaos still humming under my skin.
We lie there a while longer, close enough that I can feel every place our bodies still touch, and I don’t have language yet for whatever just cracked open between us, something bigger than adrenaline, bigger than a year of professional friction finally boiling over.
I only know that when I close my eyes, the last thing I think about isn’t the case, isn’t Roman, isn’t even the fear that clawed through me on that gravel drive.
It’s the particular way his hands finally stopped shaking, right before they found me instead.