Chapter 11 #2
She made a sound that was part laugh and part sob. Her hands pressed against his chest, breasts unbounded and free as she slid up and down on him.
As emotions and desire rose to a crescendo, his hips bucked underneath her. He held onto her while the world outside continued to be dangerous, and none of it mattered as much as the woman in his arms and the sound she made when he touched the bundle of nerves between her legs.
She exploded, arching her back again. “Mack!”
His name. Just his name. But it was said in the throes of passion. Her muscles clenched around him, and his vision burned white. He gripped her hips, jackknifing into her once, twice, three more times as his own climax hit. “Alyssa,” he said through clenched teeth. “It’s…always…been you.”
Later, the night had deepened. The safehouse was quiet—so quiet that Mack could hear the faint hum of the dry cleaning equipment below, some timer or motor running on its overnight cycle.
Alyssa lay against his chest, her breathing slow and even, not quite asleep but close.
His left hand traced a path up and down her spine, an absent pattern he’d fallen into without deciding to. His right arm rested on an extra pillow. She’d insisted he elevate it. He’d let her fuss.
He should be running scenarios, calculating variables.
Planning the next few hours—the move to SPS headquarters if the road was clear, the Eric Edwards threat, Blake’s next move.
The part of his brain that never fully shut down was trying to engage, nudging him with priorities like an alarm he kept hitting snooze on.
Not yet. Give me ten more minutes.
He wasn’t sure who he was negotiating with. God, maybe. Himself. But right now, he was in a bed with the woman he still loved, and a heartbeat against his ribs that had synced once more with hers.
“What are you thinking about?” she murmured.
“The day I proposed.”
She lifted her head. In the faint glow from the monitor, he could see the curve of her smile. “We were in San Diego.”
“The sunset.” He paused. The whole day had echoed Flathead Lake. “You fell asleep on me on that dock. Charcoal on your fingers, your nose sunburned. I sat there for an hour.”
“While your legs fell asleep.”
“From the knee down. I didn’t care.”
She shifted so she could see his face. “Why didn’t you wake me?”
“Because you were peaceful. You’d been wound tight for weeks, building your freelance portfolio, worried whether the caricature gigs were going to cover rent.
Your dad was retiring and your mom was driving you crazy with constant calls about his party.
And then you fell asleep, and your face did this thing.
” He traced the line of her cheekbone with his thumb.
“All the worry just... smoothed out. And I could see you. The real you, under all of it.”
She stared at him. “You never told me that.”
He grimaced. “I didn’t know how to say it without sounding like a Hallmark card.”
“It doesn’t sound like a Hallmark card.”
“It sounds like something a guy says when he’s lying in bed with a woman he’s been in love with for years, and he’s too tired to edit himself.”
The words came out the way his truths always did—plain, undecorated, stripped of anything that might blunt the impact. He felt her go still against him.
He let it sit there. Didn’t qualify it, didn’t soften it, didn’t attach a caveat about timing or circumstances or the fact that loving her had been the most painful thing he’d ever done.
Loving her was just a fact. Like gravity. Like ballistics. Like the way a bullet traveled in a straight line until something bent its path.
She’d bent his path, and she was still bending it. He was done pretending that bothered him.
“Mack.”
“Yeah.”
She cupped his cheek and brushed a soft kiss over his lips. “I love you.”
No stumble. No catch. She said it with her eyes open, her voice steady, her hand against his cheek. She slid it down to the spot right over his heart, as if she wanted to feel the impact of her words landing.
“I’ve loved you since the day we met,” she said. “And I spent two years pretending I stopped. I didn’t. Not for one day.”
The feeling that moved through him was too large for language. It was a wave that started somewhere behind his ribs and radiated outward until his whole body felt like it was ringing.
He cradled her face in his hand. Kissed her forehead. The kind of kiss that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with the weight of what they’d survived to get back to this bed, this room, this moment.
They were still here. That was a miracle he hadn’t expected.
He brushed the hair from her face. “Thank God.”
She laughed before she settled back against his chest. His hand found its rhythm again—up and down her spine, the same absent path, the same steady motion.
“When this is over,” she said, “I want to go back to Flathead Lake. With a better canoe.”
He pulled her closer, chuckling. “With a much better canoe.”
She was quiet for a while. He thought she might have fallen asleep, but then her fingertip traced a line along his sternum and she spoke again, her voice soft and half-dreaming. “I’m going to draw you,” she said. “Tomorrow. Like this.”
“Like what?”
“Unguarded.” She pressed her lips to his chest, right over his heart. “You never let anyone see you like this. But I see you, Mack. I want an updated version of you just like this for my sketchbook.”
She was right—he didn’t let anyone see this version of himself. He’d built the walls deliberately, reinforced them with training, discipline, and, after their breakup, the carefully maintained fiction that he didn’t need anyone.
And she’d walked through every one of them tonight.
He didn’t regret it. He might tomorrow—when Edwards was still out there, the cartel was recalculating, and the operational complications of being in love with the woman he was protecting became impossible to ignore.
But right now, with her breathing against his chest and her heartbeat synced to his, he felt peace settling over him like snowfall.
He kissed the top of her head. She fell asleep within minutes. He felt it happen—the gradual softening of her body against his, the way her breathing deepened and steadied, the small unconscious way she burrowed closer, seeking warmth.
When he’d bought her the engagement ring, the jeweler had asked about her ring size, and Mack had known it—6.5—because he’d measured it while she was sleeping. He’d slid a piece of string around her finger with the same steady hands he used to field-strip a rifle.
He wondered if she still had it.
She shifted in her sleep, mumbled something. Her hand curled against his chest.
He stayed awake. Not because he was on watch, but because he wanted to hold this. This moment, in this room, with this woman.
Tomorrow, the war resumed. The reality that he was in love with his principal. Garrett would have every right to pull him from the detail, and they both knew it.
Tomorrow, he’d deal with all of it.
Tonight, he held her. And remembered what it felt like to be the man on the dock—the one who sat for an hour with dead legs because the woman in his arms was peaceful and he would have sat there forever if she’d let him.