Chapter 10 #2
"Nobody uses the word 'endearing' in real life."
"I do. Right now." His left hand came up and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
The gesture was so gentle, so at odds with everything else about the last twenty-four hours, that it nearly undid her.
"You just gave federal testimony against your brother.
You survived a shooting. You've had a target on your back since last night, and the thing that has you pacing a hole in the floor is that someone is trying to hurt me. "
"Of course it is." Her voice came out fierce. Raw. "I just got you back. I'm not losing you again."
The careful control, the measured distance he'd been maintaining, shifted. "You're not going to lose me," he said.
His surety, as if he were invincible, infuriated her. “You can't promise that."
"I can promise I'll fight like hell to make sure of it."
She stared at him—this man who'd saved her life, who'd driven through a blizzard for her, who'd taken a bullet and still claimed he was fine, who'd held her hand in a parking lot with blood on both of them and said he'd make the same choice every time.
Her past and future crashed together like two oceans colliding. Her skin felt too hot. Her heart was skipping inside her chest. All she wanted was to feel Mack’s arms around her.
So she kissed him.
Not the corner of his mouth this time. Not a gesture of gratitude, not a thank-you, not a near-miss. She put her hands on either side of his face and kissed him the way she'd wanted to since the moment he'd appeared in that hallway at the party and the world had rearranged itself around him.
He went still for one heartbeat. Two.
Then his left hand slid into her hair, and his mouth opened under hers.
He kissed her back with two years of silence behind it.
Not gentle. Not tentative. A kiss that tasted like coffee and relief and something desperate, something that said he'd been holding this back and was done pretending he could.
She pulled away just enough to see his face. His eyes were dark, his breathing unsteady, and for the second time today, he looked like a man who didn't have words for what was happening.
"Tell me to stop," she whispered.
"No."
"Mack, your arm—"
"I don't care about my arm."
"You should—"
He kissed her again. Slower this time, deeper, his hand cradling the back of her head as if she were something precious.
She felt it everywhere—the warmth of his mouth, the roughness of his jaw, the careful way he pulled her closer while moving his injured arm out of the way.
Even now, even lost in this, he was aware of the logistics.
She might have laughed if his mouth weren't doing things that made rational thought difficult.
She tugged his jacket off gently so as not to jar his wound. He helped, shrugging it down his arms until it dropped to the floor. The t-shirt underneath was tight across his chest, and she could see the bandage wrapped around his bicep, white gauze against tanned skin.
She touched the edge of it. "Does it hurt?"
"Everything hurts. None of it matters right now."
She traced her fingers along his collarbone, up the side of his neck, and felt his pulse hammering against her fingertips. He watched her touch him with an intensity that made her breath catch—cataloguing her the way she catalogued faces, memorizing the details.
"I've thought about this," she admitted. "For two years. I told myself I shouldn’t, but I did."
"Yeah." His voice was rough. "Me, too."
"Were you angry? When you thought about it?"
"Sometimes." Honest. Always honest. "Mostly I was just—" He paused. His thumb traced the line of her jaw. "Mostly I just missed you."
The words cracked her chest open. Emotions flooded through her. It felt like rain after a drought, welcome and almost unbearable at the same time.
She took his hand—the scarred one, Blake's damage made permanent on his skin—and pressed her lips to his knuckles. Then his wrist. Then the inside of his forearm, where the skin was soft and unscarred and warm.
"Lyssa." Her name was rough.
"I know." She looked up at him. "I know we haven't talked about everything. I know there's still so much between us that we haven't resolved. But I am so tired of being careful. I am so tired of doing the smart thing and the safe thing and the thing that protects everyone else's feelings."
She stood on her toes and kissed the hinge of his jaw. "I want one night," she said against his skin, "where I choose what I want instead of what I should."
He was still for a long moment. She could feel the battle in him—the protector wrestling with the man, duty wrestling with desire, every professional instinct telling him this was a complication he couldn't afford.
The man won.
He picked her up. Just lifted her with one arm, as if she weighed nothing. She wrapped her legs around his waist, and he carried her toward the bedroom, kissing her the whole way. They bumped into the doorframe, and he laughed against her mouth.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m a little…off balance.”
The laugh did it. That sound—warm, surprised, so human after a day of calculated control—dissolved whatever was left of her restraint.
He set her on the bed. Stood over her, breathing hard, eyes dark. "You're sure?"
She pulled him down by his shirt. "I've never been more sure of anything."