Chapter 6 #2
"Training dive. Equipment failure. Holden searched for forty-seven minutes before the recovery team called it." He delivers this how he delivers bomb assessments: flat, precise, clinical. The steadiness itself is the tell. "I'm the one who pulled Holden out of the water."
He stops. The label is shredding under his thumbnail.
"You watch someone you love lose the person they love most," he says, quieter. "It teaches you things about attachment you don't unlearn."
"And that's when you decided to keep everything casual."
"That's when I confirmed what I already knew.
" The words come out reluctant, catching on things they don't want to leave behind.
"My parents split when I was twelve. Old man ran cattle outside Kerrville.
Mom was a music teacher from Austin who thought ranch life would be romantic.
" He turns the bottle in his hands. "Turns out romantic has a shelf life. "
"What happened?"
"What always happens. She loved him, he loved her, and they spent a year tearing each other apart across a kitchen table until she drove her car down a dirt road and didn't look back.
" He flicks the shredded label off his fingers.
"And he went inside and made dinner like it was any other Tuesday.
That was the whole lesson, right there. Staying is what breaks you. Leaving is just geography."
The drawl has gone flat. The humor is absent.
The man sitting next to me on this floor is not the man who calls me ma'am over tactical channels and hides bourbon behind protein powder.
This is the load-bearing structure underneath, and it's built on the conviction that everyone who stays will eventually drive down a dirt road.
"My brother said something similar." He just handed me a thing that cost him, and sitting here holding it without offering anything back would make me the kind of person my mother raised.
"When I left for university. He said the Bradshaws don't run, we strategize.
As though leaving a family that treated my intelligence like a commodity constituted a failure of nerve rather than self-preservation.
" I take the bottle from him. The whiskey is smooth and a little mean, exactly how good bourbon should be.
"My mother leveraged it at dinner parties.
My father brokered it into professional connections.
My brother resented it, wanted it for himself.
Nobody asked what I wanted to do with it.
The assumption was that it belonged to the family first and to me as an afterthought. "
"So you took it and left."
"I took it and crossed an ocean. And I've spent a decade proving it was mine all along, and the returns diminish every year because the people I'm proving it to aren't watching."
The silence after that is different from our other silences. No distance in it, no caution, no careful geometry of two people maintaining a perimeter.
"You're sitting on my bourbon."
I look down. The bottle has migrated during the conversation, wedged between my thigh and the base of the couch. "I'm protecting it from unauthorized access."
"Hand it over."
"Make me."
His fingers close around the bottle where it rests against my leg, and the contact isn't accidental, the brush of his knuckles against the outside of my thigh through thin fabric. He lifts the bottle free, takes a drink, and sets it down on his other side, out of reach.
"There," he says. "Secured."
The heat from where his hand touched my leg is a point of data I can't file properly. It doesn't fit in the category marked professional, and the category marked temporary is already overflowing, and there isn't a third category because I didn't build one.
"Griff."
"Nox."
"If we do this, we need to have the conversation first. The practical one.
" My voice sounds how it sounds when I'm delivering a technical brief.
Measured, precise, nothing extraneous. "I have a contraceptive implant.
It's current. I was tested clean earlier this year, and there hasn't been anyone since. "
His expression doesn't shift toward discomfort or surprise. He just meets it. "Tested clean. Same situation."
"Then we don't need a condom."
"No."
"Good. Performative coyness is a waste of both our time."
"I know." The corner of his mouth shifts. "I've been watching you refuse to perform coyness for a while now. Not a surprise."
"Then you also know I don't do this with expectations attached. No morning-after analysis, no relationship audit, no recalibration of the arrangement."
"Nox."
"What."
"Stop talking."
He doesn't move toward me. He waits. The bourbon is on the floor beside him, the bay spread wide through the dark windows, and the absolute stillness in his body, a man who will not cross a line until invited, is the thing that makes me cross it myself.
I lean forward and kiss him. Waiting for Griff to breach his own perimeter would take the rest of the deployment.
His mouth is warm and tastes like bourbon and a layer underneath that's just him, and for one second he doesn't move, absorbing the contact, gauging the force before he responds.
Then his hand comes up to the side of my neck, thumb along my jaw, and he kisses me back with a control that is worse than urgency.
Control is a choice, and choices can change, and the deliberateness of his mouth on mine says he's been thinking about exactly how to do this and the thinking didn't involve anything casual.
I pull back far enough to breathe. "Bedroom."
His hand finds the small of my back as we stand, guiding us through the living space, and I let him guide. My spatial awareness has narrowed to the points where his body meets mine and the furniture can fend for itself.
Moonlight through the bay windows paints his bedroom in shifting silver. The bed is made with military corners, and I want to wreck every one of them.
I pull his t-shirt over his head. The body underneath has been occupying too much of my processing power since the first time I saw him.
He has broad shoulders, lean muscle that moves under his skin when he reaches for me, a scar along his left side that looks like shrapnel, and a tattoo on his inner forearm I'll ask about later.
My palms flatten against his chest and his stomach tightens under the contact, a visible response he doesn't try to mask.
"You're in a hurry," he says against my throat.
"You're not in enough of one."
He laughs, quiet and low against the hinge of my jaw, and pulls my sweater over my head with hands that don't waver.
My bra follows. His gaze drops and his thumbs trace the undersides of my breasts with slow, deliberate pressure before his mouth replaces his hands, tongue circling one nipple while his thumb works the other, adjusting when my breath hitches and doing exactly that thing again.
It's the first real evidence that Griff approaches this how he approaches a live device.
Methodically. Thoroughly. With full commitment to locating every sensitive point before he proceeds.
My back hits the mattress and he follows me down, braced on his forearms. I hook my leg around his hip and pull, yielding ground never having been in my vocabulary, and the feeling of his weight settling against me is an argument for more, not less.
He responds by pinning my hip with one hand, firm, holding me where he wants me, and the calm authority of that grip sends a pulse of heat low through my abdomen that has everything to do with the specific friction between a woman who controls everything and a man whose hands are steady enough to take that control apart.
I push back. He holds. The contest lasts long enough to establish terms, and then his mouth drops lower, tracing a line down my sternum, my stomach, the hollow of my hip, and his hands go to the waistband of my leggings with a patience that borders on cruelty.
"Holland."
"Bradshaw."
"Faster."
"No."
He strips the leggings and my underwear in one pull, which is efficient enough to suggest he heard me, hooks my knees over his shoulders, and settles between my thighs. He looks up at me once, face caught in the moonlight, expression focused and absent of humor, and then his mouth is on me.
The first stroke of his tongue is slow, broad, exploratory, mapping the terrain before committing to a path.
My hips jerk and his hand presses flat against my stomach, holding me still while he works, and the counterpoint between his mouth and his restraining hand is the power dynamic made physical, him controlling the pace while I strain against it.
He finds the rhythm fast, working in tight, focused circles with the tip of his tongue, varying pressure in precise increments, tracing every catch in my breathing and every flex of my hips and adjusting in real time.
When two fingers push inside me and curl forward, stroking in time with his mouth, the dual sensation pulls a sound from my throat that I don't authorize and can't retrieve.
My hands find his hair. My thighs clamp against the sides of his head.
His flat hand on my stomach keeps me pinned while his tongue and his fingers build toward detonation, each stroke layering sensation on sensation until my nerve endings are burning and the only coherent thought left is the specific, devastating pressure of his mouth and the unhurried focus of a man who treats precision like a moral obligation.
"Right there." My voice is gone, scraped down past recognition. "Don't stop."
His tongue adds pressure. His fingers curl deeper.
The orgasm detonates from the core outward, seizing every muscle in sequence, my spine bowing off the mattress, my fists twisting in his sheets, his name tearing from my throat raw and entirely too loud for a loft with concrete walls and open windows.