CHAPTER 10 #2
Clara went still. The storm filled the pause. The laptop fan whispered.
Somewhere under the floor, the generator coughed, recovered, and kept humming.
“Where?” she asked.
“Your face. Your hand. Nowhere else.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to kiss you, and I will not do that by accident.”
Her cheeks colored. This time she did not look away.
“You are very direct for a man who hides files in seven layers of encryption.”
“I am trying to be less of an idiot where it matters.”
Her laugh came out unsteady. “That might be the most romantic thing you have said.”
“A low standard.”
“A tragic one.”
He waited. Every part of him understood waiting as action now. He did not move until she crossed the last foot between them and lifted her hand.
She touched his wrist first. Two fingers, light, testing. His pulse jumped under them.
“You can touch my face,” she said. “And you can kiss me once.”
Once.
The restraint nearly undid him.
Rian raised his hand slowly steadily enough to stop him. He brushed his thumb along her jaw, feeling heat, life, the tiny tremor she did not hide. She tilted her face into his palm by a fraction, and that fraction felt like surrender from him, not her.
He bent.
The kiss was not gentle because he lacked hunger. It was gentle because she had trusted him with a limit. Her mouth was warm and careful at first, then less careful.
Her fingers closed around his wrist. The small sound she made went through him, and he pulled back before want started bargaining in his blood.
Clara's eyes opened slowly.
“Once,” he said, voice rough.
“I can count.”
“Good.”
“I might be angry about that later.”
“I can live with that.”
She did not let go of his wrist at once. That, more than the kiss, nearly broke him. Then the laptop chimed again.
Clara stepped back, breathing harder than the kiss warranted. Capacity. Injury.
Power. He made himself remember every word of his own rules.
She sat and turned to the screen. “The queue opened a priority file.”
Rian moved behind the chair, keeping distance. “Can you read it?”
“Header only.” She leaned closer. “Operational disposal authorization.
“Target name redacted.”
“The file decrypted another line.”
Clara's face drained of color.
Rian saw Greer's digital signature before he saw the subject line beneath it.
Rian made himself take one full step back.
Once meant once. Permission did not become momentum because Clara's mouth had softened under his or because her fingers still held his wrist as if she had forgotten to let go. The old animal part of him wanted to read that hold as invitation.
The man trying to be worth the risk knew better.
She noticed the step.
Of course she did.
“You look like you are defusing a bomb,” she said.
“I am respecting a boundary.”
“That should not look so painful.”
“It is less painful than violating it.”
Her face changed. A small shift, quickly contained. Rian had seen men miss more obvious warnings on surveillance feeds.
He had missed things because he had believed distance made him accurate. Clara made distance feel like another lie.
“Good answer,” she said.
The words should have pleased him. Instead they landed as an assignment he had not yet passed.
He moved to the desk and rotated the laptop toward her, careful to keep his hands away from the chair until she sat. “Decrypt queue is holding at thirty-eight percent. No outbound traffic.
“Original drive remains in the safe.”
“You are reciting custody because you are nervous.”
“Yes.”
“Also because you think evidence is the only subject you cannot ruin right now.”
“He looked at her. ”Also yes.“
That earned him the smallest curve at the corner of her mouth. It was gone almost at once.
“Guest room key,” she said.
He removed it from his ring and placed it on the desk between them. Brass against dark wood. A modest thing for how much it cost him to set down.
He had made whole departments sign for less access than this, and here he was, handing her a door because she had asked and because keeping it would make every kiss afterward taste like control.
Clara did not take it immediately. “If I use it?”
“I stay out unless you invite me in or there is fire, structural failure, or a medical emergency that prevents you from answering.”
“Define medical emergency.”
“Unconsciousness. Severe bleeding. Respiratory distress.”
“Fever high enough to impair judgment.”
“Pain is not consent to override me.”
“No.”
“Anger is not impaired judgment.”
“No.”
“And attraction is not trust.”
“That one cut with precision. ”No.“
She took the key and closed her fist around it. “I am angry with you.”
“I know.”
“I wanted you anyway.”
The admission hit him harder than the kiss. He had no useful response except the truth, and even that felt too heavy for the room.
“I want you with very little dignity,” he said.
Her laugh came out low and startled. “There he is. A sentence with blood in it.”
Rian's throat tightened. “I am trying not to make desire another form of pressure.”
“Then keep doing that.”
“I will.”
She looked down at the key in her hand, then back at him. “And when the next ugly file opens, do not soften the language for me.”
“You want the raw text.”
“I want reality before your mercy edits it.”
He could not blame her for that. His mercy had worn too many locks.
“All right,” he said.
The queue window brightened behind her shoulder, a thin white pulse crossing the screen like a held breath before the machine decided what truth to give them next.
KILL ORDER: VANCE, CLARA.