Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When she tugged him down by his shirt, Mack stopped thinking.
Not all at once. Not completely. The trained part of his brain—the part that tracked exits, calculated threat vectors, and never fully powered down—still registered the monitor glowing in the other room, the locked door, the agents in the stairwell.
But the rest of him, the part he’d kept under military-grade containment for two years, surrendered to the simple, devastating reality of Alyssa underneath him, looking up at him like he was the only solid thing left in the world.
He heard the slight catch in her breath, noted the way her fingers tightened in the fabric of his shirt. But he stayed where he was, braced on his left arm, and looked at her the way he hadn’t let himself since the party.
He hadn’t allowed himself to study her like this. Not in the SUV, not at the cabin, not during the debrief. Every time he’d caught himself staring at her for too long, he’d pulled back, filed it under operational awareness, and moved on.
But there was no operational framework for this. No protocol for being in bed with the woman you’d been trying to stop loving for seven hundred and thirty-plus days and failing every single one.
The dim glow from the hallway monitor caught the angles of her face, the flush along her cheekbones. The strand of hair across her forehead that he’d tucked behind her ear in the kitchen was loose again. Her green eyes, lit with desire, watched him with a patience that made his chest ache.
She’d given him that same look once before—the first night they’d spent together, in his apartment outside Quantico, when he’d been nervous enough to forget everything he thought he knew about women. She’d just waited, calm and certain, with a wicked grin on her face.
He’d known, with the absolute clarity of a scope dialed to zero, that she was it for him.
All these years later, in a safehouse above a dry cleaners with a contract killer hunting them, nothing about that had changed.
The scar through her eyebrow was a thin silver line in the low light. Blake’s mark on her. Mack traced it with his thumb—gently, the way she’d traced his scarred knuckles on the road—and felt her breath stutter.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
“Looking at you.”
“You’ve been looking at me for twenty-four hours.”
“Not like this.” His voice came out low and rough. “I want to soak you up.”
The last trace of uncertainty in her eyes—the last question mark—dissolved, and what was left was just her. Open. Unguarded. Giving him permission to just be himself.
He kissed her. This kiss was slow, intentional.
He kissed the corner of her mouth first—giving back the gesture she’d given him on the highway, the one that had nearly broken his resolve—and then her lower lip, and then fully, deeply.
She made a sound against his mouth. Low, quiet, barely a breath. He felt it vibrate through him like a tuning fork.
Her hands found the hem of his shirt and pulled upward.
He helped, sitting back to let her ease it over his head.
She was careful with his arm—working the sleeve over the bandage slowly, her fingers light around the gauze—and the tenderness of it, the way she handled his wound like something that mattered to her more than it mattered to him, made his throat tighten.
The shirt dropped. He’d never been self-conscious about his body—the military had stripped that out of him. But the way she looked at him now wasn’t the way someone looked at a body.
It was the way she looked at a face she was about to draw—absorbing everything, the whole and the damaged, finding the story in the details.
Her fingers traced the scar on his left hand, moved up his forearm, and found the older ones on his shoulder from shrapnel. Then to the fresh bandage on his right bicep. She touched the edge of it, feather-light.
“Battle scars,” she said.
“Some of them.”
“All of them Blake’s fault?”
“Not all.”
She leaned forward and pressed her lips to the bandage. Just that. A kiss against white gauze and medical tape, so careful he barely felt the pressure. But it detonated something in his chest—a detonation without sound, the kind that rearranges everything internal while the surface stays intact.
He pulled her up to him. Kissed her harder, one hand in her hair, and the taste of her mouth and the warmth of her skin against his. The small, urgent sound she made fueled his mouth, his fingers.
His hands shook as he helped her remove her shirt. That surprised him. He’d held a rifle steady in sixty-knot crosswinds. He’d performed field surgery on a teammate with a flashlight between his teeth. His hands were the most reliable part of him—trained, conditioned, precise.
This wasn’t a rifle or a field kit. This was Alyssa, and the last time he’d touched her like this, they’d been engaged. The future had been simple, and he hadn’t known yet that a single lie could incinerate everything.
She took his hands and pressed them against her ribcage, her skin warm under his palms, her heartbeat knocking against his fingers.
“I’m right here,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
He breathed. Let his hands steady against the rhythm of her heartbeat. Let the truth of her settle into his bones—alive, present, choosing him. Right here, in this room, she was choosing him after everything.
“I know,” he said. And kissed the hollow of her throat.
After that, time stopped behaving like time.
He’d forgotten this—the way the world narrowed to a single point of focus whenever he was with her. The way everything outside the room faded to static, and the only signal that mattered was her.
He’d forgotten how she fit against him. The geometry of it—her head tucked under his chin, her hips under his, the way her legs wrapped around him like she was anchoring herself.
Two years had changed the details but not the architecture. She still fit. He moved slowly. Not because she was fragile—she wasn’t, she’d proved that a dozen times in the last twenty-four hours—but because he wanted to pay attention.
He’d spent their time apart numbing himself, and now that what he wanted and needed was here, vivid and real, he didn’t want to miss a second of it.
The pulse in her neck fluttered when he kissed her just below her ear. She squirmed when he licked the dip of her collarbone, where she was ticklish and always had been.
He smiled against her skin, moving down her body. Reaquainting himself with it. The plane of her stomach where her muscles tensed under his lips. Her hips arching up on a gasp when he trailed kisses down her thighs.
He measured each response the way he did wind direction and distance, but this was the opposite of tactical. This was devotional. This was a man on his knees in the only church he’d ever believed in.
She pulled him back up to her. Kissed him while her hands explored the planes of his back, traced the ridge of his spine, and found the knot of tension between his shoulder blades. She kneaded her thumbs into it, and he groaned.
“There,” she said against his mouth. “That’s what you sound like when you stop controlling everything.”
He might have laughed. He might have said something. But her lips kissed the old shrapnel scar, and he lost the thread of whatever sentence he’d been constructing.
His injured arm protested when he shifted his weight. A sharp pull along the graze that made him grit his teeth—not enough to stop, not even close, but enough that she saw.
“Lie down,” she said.
“I’m fine.”
She nudged his shoulder. “Lie. Down.”
He did. She adjusted with him—a fluid recalibration, the kind two people made when they knew each other’s bodies well enough to compensate without discussion. He settled on his back, his good arm free to touch her, his injured arm resting on the bed while she straddled him.
“Better?” she asked.
He reached up and unhooked her bra. Her breasts, full and gorgeous, swung free. “Better.”
She laughed and kissed his jaw. Then lower—the base of his throat, where his pulse was hammering.
“Lyssa.” Her name came out like a warning—a door being held open at the last second before it closed for good.
“Ssh,” she said again, running her hands over his chest, his sides, his hips. “Let me take care of you.”
The moment everything else fell away—truly fell away, the last shred of distance between them closing —Mack understood something he’d been circling for two years without landing on. He hadn’t been angry at her.
Underneath the pride and the hurt and the walls he’d built from the rubble of their engagement, he’d been terrified. Terrified that she’d seen him clearly and chosen someone else’s truth over his, because that meant his truth wasn’t enough.
That he wasn’t enough.
And now she was here, tugging his pants off, closing her fingers around the hard length of him, and watching him through half-lidded eyes.
He cupped her breast, held her gaze, and tweaked her nipple. She sucked in a breath and shifted so the tip of his cock was at her opening. She was wet and slick, ready.
“Mack,” she breathed his name. “I need you inside me.”
All he could do was watch as she slid down his shaft, tossing her head back, her hair falling down her back. Her face, tipped up to the ceiling, was filled with pleasure.
A pleasure that raced through his body as well. He hung onto her hips as she began to move, building a rhythm. “Jesus, Lyssa. All I ever wanted was you.”
When she looked down at him, she was smiling. “And now I’m back where I belong.”
He saw it—the old Alyssa and the new merging into one.
He was hers. She was his.
She leaned forward, creating exquisite friction between them, and kissed him. Their bodies continued to move together, the rhythm becoming urgent.
“Stay with me,” she whispered. Not a request about tonight. A request about everything.
“I’m not going anywhere.” He meant it the way he meant operational promises—as a commitment he’d back with his life. “Not this time.”