Mission Eve
14
The next afternoon, Hartgrave set Bernie and Willi practicing with each other on one side of the room and decreed that the other was for magic versus anti-magic combat.
He raised his hands and a challenging eyebrow. “Ready?”
She pushed up her sleeves and put out her own hands, the excited anxiety that churned in her stomach promising plenty of what Hartgrave had once called her disagreeable particles. “Oh, I’m ready.”
She wasn’t.
When his red-tinted spell hit her, she had only a nanosecond for it to register as smooth and hard—just like one of his barriers—before it pushed her backward at a rapid clip. She pressed bare skin against it and tried to project anti-magic with all her might, which had to be considerable given the spike of adrenaline brought on by fear, but it wouldn’t give. Oh God, she would hit a wall—
The red barrier abruptly stopped. Hartgrave had let up. She slid to a halt, arms pinwheeling.
“You can’t disrupt magic nearly as easily when your opponent pumps in reinforcements,” he said. “Don’t you dare get complacent.”
“I won’t,” she said, shaky and mortified.
He mercifully ratcheted the next lesson down about ten notches, having her take apart barriers that (like the last one) he continued to bolster with magic but (unlike the last one) stayed put. Each took half a minute to destroy, an age compared with the seconds required for the sort she’d practiced on before.
“You will get better,” Hartgrave called out when she took a water break. Something about his delivery sounded more like a threat than encouragement.
When she trotted back, Willi had joined Hartgrave. The former was shaking his head at the latter.
“Alexander,” he said, “you are being too optimistic. She is not able to protect herself. You will need to do it.”
Hartgrave answered before she could insert herself into this conversation about her. “Yes, well—you may be right.”
“No,” she said, a little annoyed. “Give me more of a chance than that.”
Willi offered an apologetic shrug. “If we had more time—but even then, I do not think so. He is more suited to this. You are”—Willi waved a hand toward her—“delicate. ”
“What,” she ground out, very annoyed.
“I mean you are not made for this sort of thing,” he said, as if the previous statement required clarification instead of rapid backtracking. “Let Alexander take care of it. This is a job for the men.”
“You —”
That was all she managed to get out before Hartgrave shot a spell at her. It hit her bare arms and fizzled to nothing at almost the same instant—which was also the moment she realized this was a setup to make her good and angry. Again. And she’d fallen for it— again .
“Oh yeah,” Hartgrave said, “really pissed off is definitely the way to go.”
“I did not mean it,” Willi said quickly, raising his hands. “You are not a damsel.”
“Damn right,” she muttered.
Hartgrave looked as if he were swallowing laughter. He really was the most provoking man she’d ever met.
“Were you bolstering that spell?” she asked, managing to sound only a touch grumpy.
“No, but you’ve never cut through magic that fast before,” Hartgrave said. “So just remember: Scared is okay, but mad is better.”
After that, they practiced with illusory fireballs, with prison domes like the one that had trapped them in Clear Lake, with magic that dragged her to and fro. She focused on what the Organization did to people, what they did to Willi’s wife, and got progressively better.
In between, Hartgrave put her through an exercise requiring the other extreme of the emotional spectrum, necessary for getting to Organization headquarters— the stomach-churning, head-spinning jump of teleportation.
“I don’t know what would happen if we attempted this while you were producing any significant amount of anti-magic,” Hartgrave said by way of introduction, “but it seems to me that our molecules might never re-form. And as you’ve noticed, we do have a bit of consciousness in that state, so it would be one of those worse-than-death fates. Do be careful.”
She halfheartedly thwacked him on the arm. “Why on earth would you tell me that if you wanted me to be calm?”
“You managed it while being attacked,” he said, eyebrows raised.
Well—true. With effort she managed it again, and he popped around the room with her until she could go through the unnerving experience without her legs feeling like jelly when those body parts came back together.
But they wouldn’t be able to jump directly into the house, protected as it likely was by shielding to prevent intrusion. Instead, they would have to land nearby and break in—while avoiding the motion detectors all over the lawn.
That produced yet another exercise in the pauses between self-defense: Walking well above the ground on magically hardened air. No sweat—certainly much easier for her to do than for Hartgrave to create.
Making an airborne sidewalk while staying under the radar required him to charge up and cast as much as he could in under five seconds, all while ensuring he used up enough magic in the process, and he’d only recently gotten the knack of it.
She skipped along the altered air, having great fun with it. Hartgrave watched, saying nothing. It struck her when she jumped down that he looked rather grim.
That was her only warning. As she stretched, he cast something at her—and she couldn’t put her arms back down.
“This is not a game, Daggett,” he said. “You could be attacked at any moment.”
“Oh, come on,” she said.
His spell had caught her at the elbows, and those were covered by her shirt, a bad start. She struggled to get her hands in a position where she could reach the conjured binds. Then she craned her neck to try to put her forehead to some use. In the end, she could do nothing but get as angry as possible and wait for that to work.
It took more than five minutes.
She glared at him as she rubbed her abused elbows. “Are you still trying to persuade me not to go?”
His eyes had a guarded look to them. “Is it working?”
“No . Name a date. It’s already—wait, what is today? I’m losing track of time down here.”
“Tuesday. January twenty-first.”
Anxiety twinged in her stomach, but not for any Organizational reason. She’d burned through almost all her break, the break she’d intended after Professor Fletcher’s warning to spend madly writing a paper good enough for a journal to publish. She needed to get it done before her contract was up in May, and managing that during the spring semester—while teaching five classes—would be difficult at best.
Well. She would just have to do it somehow. Getting an offer from Ashburn beyond her one-year contract was likely her only chance for a career in academia, considering her lack of options last year and the new crop of history PhDs set to be disgorged in the spring.
She took a deep breath. Time enough to worry about that later. The career she’d spent eight years preparing for was important, but in no way could it outrank saving innocent people from mass murderers. And anyway, she had every intention of managing both.
Hartgrave was nominally watching Willi and Bernie practice at the other end of the room. Perhaps he thought he’d successfully dodged her effort to get him to pick the day they would set their plan in motion. But probably not, considering all the prior examples she’d given him of single-minded pigheadedness.
“Spring semester starts next week,” she said. “I have a meeting about it Friday. If you think I’m ready, we ought to go.”
He looked at her, expression impenetrable. “You’re never going to be ready, Daggett, in the same way the rest of us are never going to be ready. They’re more powerful than we are. You do understand that?”
Yes. That was part of the appeal. It was childish and silly, and she would never admit it to him, but there it was. She’d wanted an adventure, wanted to battle great evil, and now she was about to get her wish, fifteen years after the fact. She couldn’t endure the strain of sitting around while he went adventuring by himself, but she considered with significantly more excitement than fear the prospect of going together.
She cleared her throat and came up with a more rational response. “If we can stick with the plan, none of us will have to go head to head with them.”
He ran a hand over his eyes. “All right. Tomorrow, 7 p.m.”
Her heart accelerated so fast, she had to put out a hand to steady herself on him. Tomorrow.
“Okay,” she said. “Good.”
. . . . .
By the time they took a well-deserved break for dinner at Mexican Foo, everyone but Hartgrave was caught up in pre-mission euphoria.
“To thirty minutes!” Bernie raised his glass of beer, Willi’s one culinary nod to his country of origin. “To thirty minutes, six seconds—my personal record!”
“As you’ve reminded us at least thirty times so far today,” Hartgrave said, though he was the first to drink to the toast. Thirty minutes in the room translated to fifteen minutes outside it, and that was good news indeed.
“To Dr. Daggett,” Willi said, topping off everyone’s glasses. “Full of courage!”
She grinned at Hartgrave. “Or foolishness, depending on whom you ask.”
“No comment,” he said, clinking her glass.
Keeping hers raised, she added, “To all of us. May the forces of good overcome evil. ”
“How about, ‘May we overcome them ,’” Hartgrave said dryly. “Just in case the gods of toasts have any doubt which is which.”
She managed to not spit out her mouthful of beer, but it was close. “That’s by far the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard all month.”
Bernie slung an arm around her shoulders. “You know he has to find the objection to everything. It’s a compulsion. Go ahead, Hartgrave—it’s your turn.”
Hartgrave contemplated his glass for a moment. “To Daggett,” he said finally, lifting it. “May she forgive my many sins.”
“Likewise,” she said, touched.
“I will drink to that,” Willi said.
“You’ll drink to anything ,” Bernie said, and the serious mood lifted.
But her sense that Hartgrave was rattled only increased on the walk home. He kept stealing glances at the map filling his cell-phone screen.
She slipped her gloved hand into his free one. “Where are they? Crawford, Shaw and Kincaid, I mean.”
“Cornwall.”
She got a better look at the map, zoomed in on that region. Definitely fewer wizards than on the night she and Hartgrave escaped from Clear Lake, which seemed to confirm a pattern he had noticed—the weekend swarmed with Organizationists while the middle of the week was much sparser.
Fortunate, since they had to creep through the Organization’s house-and-headquarters without being seen. They ought to be all right once in the basement, location of the server running the tracking system, but—love of adventure notwithstanding—she was glad the intervening distance would be covered on a day with fewer potential guards. And at 2 a.m. Cornwall time, when anyone left in headquarters would either be sleeping or sleepy.
She’d suggested an invisibility spell, but apparently those rapidly ran out if you didn’t keep feeding them magic. (“And the air shimmers around you if you move,” Hartgrave had noted. “Not exactly the effect you want when you’re trying to be inconspicuous.”)
He took one last look at the dotted map as they descended into the Inferno, then slipped his phone back into his pocket.
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” she said. “How did you manage to get a tracking system, too? Did you hack into theirs?”
He stopped dead, a half-dozen feet from the door to his room. His laugh, when it came a beat later, was short and bitter. “Good God—if I could hack into it, I would have destroyed the unspeakable thing years ago.”
Of course. She winced, feeling foolish.
“The reason I have my own tracking system,” he said, “is that I made it.” He paused, then gave a sharp sigh. “Because mine runs off my own server, we’ll still have it after we eliminate theirs. Which is critical, because it will never be safe to not keep an eye on them.”
He let her into his room ahead of him and leaned against the wall near the door once in, staring at nothing. His obvious anxiety about the next day was starting to rub off on her .
“Do you still have the old phone you lent me?” she said.
He nodded. “Do you need it?”
“I want to call my parents.”
He retrieved it from a box under his wardrobe. She held it in her still-gloved hands for a moment, biting her lip, then dialed the number.
Her father answered with his usual greeting, made wonderfully absurd by his level of gusto. “Yellow?”
A strained giggle slipped from her throat, unbidden.
“Em? Is that you?”
“Yes,” she said, getting herself under control. Mostly. Her hands trembled. “I’m not catching you at dinner, am I?”
“No, just finished. Where have you been? We were getting worried—well, you could probably tell by the ten thousand messages. Would have been twenty thousand if you hadn’t dropped your home phone service.”
“Oh!” Three-and-a-half weeks since she’d last called them—no wonder they were getting worried. “I’m so sorry . I haven’t checked voicemail once. I’ve been ... spending time out of the office.”
“Spending time out of the office?” She could hear the grin in her father’s voice. “Well, that’s good. I got the impression you were all but sleeping there last semester.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. That secret she could have let him in on, but she figured it would make him anxious about both her finances and her common sense, so she hadn’t. She’d never kept so much from him. There’d never been a reason before .
“How are you?” she said. “There’s nothing wrong, is there?”
“No, no—we just wanted to chat. Oh, and to tell you to check your email. Your mother sent new photos. You’ll really like the one she took from inside the barn while it was snowing—well, just take a look. I can’t do it justice.”
“I will,” she said, the queasy feeling in her stomach spreading in tendrils up her throat. She hated not telling him things. She hated the thought of what he and her mother would go through if, by a stroke of very bad luck, she didn’t come back from the mission.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. Perhaps a bit too quickly.
Silence. Then: “Hmm.”
Oh, God. She was in great danger of bursting into tears.
“Hmm ,” he repeated.
“Dad ...”
“You’re with that highly inappropriate man, aren’t you.”
She sucked in a shocked little breath. He was as perceptive as he possibly could be, given the circumstances.
“Aha ,” he said. “But what’s wrong? He’s not making you unhappy, is he?”
“No.” She glanced at Hartgrave, sitting in his chair, deep in thought. “Quite the opposite.”
Her father must have heard the truth in her tone, because he laughed and said, “All right then,” and prodded her no more. He told her about Houdini, their escape- artist of a rooster, strutting right into their house that afternoon. He relayed the news that the Alvarezes, one farm over, had won a trip to L.A. He read her a particularly funny restaurant review in the paper and made her laugh three times.
“Uh oh,” he said. “Your mother is giving me the evil eye. I’d better hand you over, or I’ll never hear the end of it.”
That inescapably brought to mind the possibility, hopefully slim, that this conversation would be their last. Pop went the little bubble of home he’d created. Anxiety roared back.
“Wait! Dad—I love you.”
“I love you, too,” he said, clearly taken aback by the vehemence of her declaration. But then her mother said something in the background that made him chuckle, and he added, “I have been informed that your mother also loves you, and if she doesn’t get an immediate opportunity to tell you so herself, she will wrestle the phone out of my clutches.”
“Finally,” her mother exclaimed the next moment. “My God, if I didn’t start making threats, I would never get to talk to you. So—what’s this about an inappropriate man, and when will we get to meet him?”
When Emily hung up ten minutes later, she felt such a potent mix of conflicting emotions that she had to retreat to the bathroom, splash cold water on her face and order herself to get a grip. Dying wasn’t a likely outcome. The whole point of her assignment was to go unnoticed .
Still, she couldn’t easily excise the image of parents heartbroken over the idiot daughter who simply vanished. She wasn’t about to back out now, so what she needed was a distraction.
She made a beeline for Hartgrave. “Can we practice?”
He looked up from his hands, taking her in with a concerned frown. Perhaps her voice had sounded just a tad strangled.
“It depends,” he said. “Do you want to be upset?”
“Well, when you put it that way ...”
He reached for her hand, still gloved, and pulled her onto his lap. They sat like that for a moment, her head tucked under his chin, his arms around her. Then he said, “Would you like to fly?”
She sat up, heart fluttering. “Would I!”
“You’ll need to get calm first,” he warned.
“Right.” She hopped to her feet. “But I think I’ll help things along just a bit.”
She buttoned her coat to her neck, pulled her hat from a pocket and yanked it so far onto her head that it half-covered her eyes. “How’s that?”
“Ridiculous,” he said, sounding wistful, and leaned in to kiss her—which turned out to be a mistake. “Ow .” He rubbed his lips. “Sorry. More evidence in favor of my adrenaline theory, though.”
She groaned. “Can’t I have any strong emotion without polluting the atmosphere?”
“I hope so.” Nothing about the way he’d said it suggested innuendo, but her mind went there anyway, and she could feel her cheeks go rosy. “You just need to focus, Daggett. ”
Yes, on something other than sleeping with him. She was still five days away from the one-month mark.
“Close your eyes,” he said.
Okay. Closed—check.
“You can feel yourself calming down,” he said with the exaggerated delivery of a cut-rate mesmerist.
She swallowed a snort.
“Your mind is a still pond ...”
She shouldn’t, she really shouldn’t, but: “Dirty, eh?”
Did his breath just hitch? “Your mouth,” he murmured, closer now, making her heart beat faster, “is taking a cue from your eyes.”
She almost made a comment about how that was such a polite way to say shut up . But then he touched her. The barest contact, a bit of the pad of one finger against the dip in her chin. When that produced only a slight twinge, he traced his thumb over her lower lip.
That felt—
God , that felt—
“You are thinking serene thoughts,” he continued, as if he had no idea what he was doing to her. “Sunsets ... summer vacation ... reading ...” He pulled away, drawing a sound from her throat that was embarrassingly close to a whimper. “No, perhaps not reading, considering the books you prefer.”
“Hartgrave!” Her laugh was breathless. “Really, you’re the worst choice for calming anyone—”
The rest gave way to an “eeep” as her feet left the ground, her eyes flying open.
“Probably,” he said, seven feet below her. “But you must admit I’m brilliant at misdirection. ”
She was airborne. Airborne. She had no words to admit anything.
He followed her up, slipped a hand into hers and pulled her higher. Then he let go and gave her a gentle push. The sensation was like being in water without the actual water. She walked on nothing, darted around the chandelier, tucked her chin to her chest and turned a flip.
Hartgrave circled her, staying out of the way, saying nothing. When she finally got her voice back, she said, “How are you doing this? Dampening gravitational pull?”
He produced his sort-of smile, the upward twitch that characterized so many of their seven o’clock meetings. “Someone once told me scientific explanations drain all the magic out of magic.”
“A wise person, that someone.”
“Contradictory, too, considering how much she likes to ask questions.”
He turned onto his stomach and hung there, contemplating the floor more than a dozen feet below. She performed two more flips and joined him, thankful happiness had more in common with tranquility than adrenaline-soaked excitement.
“I’m so glad I came here.” She removed her gloves and slipped a hand into his. It tingled. “I’m so glad I met you.”
He stole a sideways glance at her. “Are you really?”
She almost laughed at the ludicrousness of this question. Wasn’t it blatantly obvious to him how she felt? She wasn’t quite equal to saying I seem to be in love with you , so she made do with, “There’s no one like you.”
He winced.
“I don’t mean the magic,” she hastened to add. “I mean you . Though I do appreciate you letting me into the magical world I’ve always wanted to believe existed.”
“What we want does not always turn out to be good for us.”
She took this to be a commentary on adventure, not his opinion of himself. “Look—I’m anxious, too. Especially for Bernie and Willi. But you’ve said it yourself: At the first sign of real trouble, we can bail.”
He gave a humorless chuckle. “I wasn’t just talking about tomorrow. I meant everything. Magic.”
She bit her lip, reminded of a conversation they’d had. The first real conversation. “I thought you said there’s nothing inherently wrong with it.”
“Magic seems neutral, I must admit,” he said. “People, however, are evil.”
“You don’t really believe that. All people?”
“What’s the first thing you learned about power, studying history?”
“Well ...” She saw where he was heading, and it made her uneasy. “It corrupts.”
“And absolute power?”
“Corrupts absolutely.”
“And what, my dearest Daggett,” he said softly, “would you call magic?”
She didn’t want to think of it that way. She wanted the magic of her childhood books. Whimsy. Possibility. Great feats for good purposes. An occasional dark sorcerer to defeat seemed much more palatable than this Hartgravean vision of every individual as a potential evil overlord.
“Silence indicates tacit agreement,” he said.
“You’re saying you don’t think anyone should use magic?”
He scowled at the far-off floor. “The human race hasn’t advanced nearly enough to be trusted with such a force.”
“But the problem is that it’s secret and only a few use it. If it were general knowledge—”
“Then it would be a massive problem of a different sort, unless every single person knew how to defend themselves from those who would use it against them. And even then, I don’t think I’d like to live in such a world.”
A subduing thought. “You wish you’d never learned,” she said, looking at their twined hands.
“Devoutly.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. A moment passed. Then he twisted himself so he was floating on his back, looking up at her.
“Forget what I said about not wanting to explain how I discovered what the Organization does.” He grasped both her hands. “Ask me. Ask me, and I’ll tell you.”
She pulled free before her distress could zap them both. “No!”
He stared at her. “No?”
Even she was half-surprised. She’d wanted to know. But now all she could think about was opening Hartgrave like a jar, watching him fly apart and not being able to put him back together. All the myths in which curiosity ruined everything ran through her head.
“No,” she repeated, more firmly.
It was impossible to tell from his expression whether he was relieved or disappointed. “You would have me without knowing everything about me?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Very trusting.”
“I do trust you,” she said, cupping his face. His skin nipped against hers in a not unpleasant way. She’d calmed down quickly. “And I know who you are: a stubborn, aggravating, clever man who risks his life for what he believes in.”
He let out a ragged breath. Then he reached up and kissed her.
Ardent, toe-curling, over too soon.
When he pulled back, she knew she couldn’t wait a minute longer, let alone an arbitrary five more days. “Come to bed with me,” she blurted.
Both their bodies dropped several feet. Too late she recalled that startling a magic-user could be hazardous.
“It’s either that or you have to let me go back to my office tonight,” she said, unable to look directly at him, “because I’m in danger of—”
He grabbed her hand and twisted sharply up, then down, putting their feet on the floor in under two seconds.
“Stay,” he said, towing her to his bed, the real one not made of ephemeral spells. “Dear God, stay.”
Together they made short work of her hat and coat, pausing for another head-spinning kiss. She shrugged off her shirt while he undid his, popping a button in his haste. The smooth chest and trim waist that came into view was exactly what she had imagined.
She was about to reach out and touch these freshly revealed parts of him when he held up a hand.
“Two rules,” he said. “Don’t think of anything upsetting. And pull away immediately if you feel any pain.”
“You don’t think ...” She trailed off as she realized how wildly her heart was beating—and what that meant. “Adrenaline!”
“No, no, don’t get upset. Just stay focused on what we’re doing”—he gave her a look as tactile as a caress—“and I predict the adrenaline won’t be a problem.”
If it was a problem, if they had to stop, she would just about jump out of her skin.
He leaned in and unhooked her bra, the brush of his hand against her back leaving an insistent trail of little shocks. “How does that feel?”
“Good,” she said, voice almost failing her. “Oh ,” she added as he ran his fingers down her arms, pushing the bra off. Her whole body tingled in sympathetic reaction.
As she reached for him, he turned her around, pressing against her from behind, wrapping one warm arm around her waist. “Can you guess why I’m willing to bet this will end with the right sort of screaming?”
Oh, the image this created. “How do you”—she gasped as he brushed against her stomach with his free hand—“expect me to think at all?”
He chuckled. And then he made it infinitely worse by slipping his hand down the gap between her stomach and her jeans, insinuating into her underwear and pressing intimately against her.
Every nerve ending in her body fired off an insistent plea that he keep doing that—and for the moment he was holding perfectly still.
“Does that hurt?” he said, as if there were any doubt why she was moaning. He trailed kisses down the curve of her neck. “Should I ... stop?”
“No!” She rubbed against his palm and fumbled behind her back with the button on his pants. “You’re trying to get me to beg, aren’t you?”
“Really, Daggett. I’m not sadistic.” He pulled her closer, the better to hold her in place so she couldn’t wriggle or unbutton. “I’d just like you to work out why, despite the adrenaline, this feels so good you could be induced to beg.”
“You’re—oh God!—going to be so sorry.”
“Humor me,” he murmured, moving his thumb in little circles just north of where she was aching to be touched. “Leaps of logic are sexy.”
She moaned again—nothing sexier than a man turned on by cleverness—and rested the back of her head on his shoulder. What could it be? What?
He slid his thumb down—briefly, deliberately—and the spare moment of contact almost undid her. He was sadistic. Surely he knew her hormones had all but overpowered higher brain functions—
“Oh!” She clutched at his arm, the one holding her up as her legs turned to jelly. “Other chemicals disrupt the adrenaline? ”
“Mm, yes,” he said, pressing more kisses along her neck. “Or at least that’s my theory. Oxytocin, perhaps. It’s a sort of anti-fear hormone produced in the heat of the moment. Makes you blissful. Fascinating, isn’t it?”
“Hartgrave —”
“And now I intend to use this information to good effect,” he said.
He moved his thumb back to that spot.
Guh .
She tried again to unbutton his pants, but her hands were trembling too much. She gave in to the sensations. Magic thrummed against her skin—he had her positioned for maximum contact. His arm around her waist. His bare chest pressed against her back. His warm lips and devious fingers.
When the time came—quickly—she did indeed scream.
“Oh ,” she said, slumped in his arms, gasping. “I’m going to give you a taste of your own medicine ... just as soon as I have the strength to do anything at all.”
His laugh wavered. He was breathing as unsteadily as she was, and when she turned around, the way he looked at her sent aftershocks through her body.
She shucked off the rest of her clothing and helped him out of his. The sound he made as her fingers brushed down his upper thighs was the sexiest thing she’d ever heard, and she had to stop for a moment to gather her self-control.
He pulled her into bed, taking in every newly uncovered part of her with an unblinking gaze. “May I touch you, or does the lesson I’m about to be taught preclude that?”
She almost said yes to the first part of his question— please yes —but reconsidered. “You may not.”
He smiled at her stern instructor tone, but his voice was noticeably ragged as he replied, “Tell me what to do, then.”
“Lie back.”
He obeyed immediately—and without taking his eyes off her. She looked back just as intently, enjoying the sweep of his neck, the broad shoulders he wasn’t hiding with a slouch, the wiry legs and, between them, the evidence of his intense interest in the proceedings.
She trailed a hand down his chest.
“That—that’s ridiculously good,” he gasped. “I mean, it’s my chest, it’s never done anything for me before, and— oh my God .”
That exclamation—and a jerk of his hips—was the consequence of her leaning in to swirl her tongue around his nipple.
“Daggett,” he murmured as she sat back and ran the pads of her fingers along his sharp jawline, tracing around his lips, feathering down his neck. He tipped his head back, giving her easier access. “Do you have any idea how hard it’s been to sleep practically but not quite next to you?”
“A pretty good idea, I’d wager,” she said, kissing the hollow of his throat as she let her hands drift lower. “Based on how it felt sleeping practically but not quite next to you. ”
She’d reached his thighs. Hartgrave’s sharp exhalation telegraphed his opinion about that.
“I want to touch you,” he whispered, the words sending little electrical shocks down her spine. He’d fisted his hands in the sheets, holding himself back.
“Soon,” she promised. Difficult enough to concentrate on what she was doing as it was. The mere memory of those hands on her … “Tell me how this feels. For science.”
His body twitched as he laughed. “Like the very best sort of torture. I—” He arched into her hand as she made a strategic change of location. “Oh my God, Daggett, please keep doing that .”
She did, slowly, her blood singing in her veins as he moaned.
“Talk to me,” she whispered.
He let out a shaky breath. “Because turnabout is fair play?”
“Because you have the very best voice.”
He laughed again, this time more of a disbelieving hah .
“You do. I’ve always liked to hear you talk, even when I was annoyed by the actual words coming out of your mouth.”
His half-smile twisted his lips. What would it take to make him completely and unreservedly happy?
“I feel exactly the same way about you,” he murmured, reaching up to brush his fingers against her cheek.
His touch was literally magic. But in that moment it was his words that made her breath catch .
“Oh Schei?e, I forgot,” he said, pulling his hand back. “What do you do to the wretched miscreants who”—he gasped as her thumb rubbed over just the right spot—“fail to follow your rules?”
“Depends on the rule.” She grinned at him. Hartgrave bossing her around in bed was completely predictable. Hartgrave just as happily letting her boss him around was … surprisingly heartwarming. “Why don’t you wait here while I get a condom from my—”
Something slapped into his suddenly outstretched hand, a fleet bit of magic. “Allow me,” he said, ripping the packaging open.
She laughed. He laughed. This was already the best time she’d had in bed with anyone—by far.
“Well, Professor,” he said, arching an eyebrow, “may I have permission to touch you now?”
“Please,” she said, trying to get her giggles under control.
He went up on one elbow, put out his other hand and pulled her in for a slow kiss. Her body sparked with anticipatory pleasure—all the places he wasn’t touching but would. Soon. Almost.
Now.
They gasped in unison. Her heart swooped in just the way it had when he’d broken the law of gravity for her.
“All right?” he murmured, his lips against her neck. Waiting, not moving.
“Oh yes ,” she said, and those were the last coherent words she managed. His pace was slow, so slow—he was patient and she was not. His hands on her hips boxed her in and his tongue in her mouth felt unbelievably good and each time he pressed into her was like a burst of fireworks in her brain, the answer to a vital question, the opposite of the disconnected way she’d been living for so long.
Over the edge she went a second time, taking him with her.
Afterward, they lay in a tangle of limbs, his heart thudding under her ear, his skin making hers tingle everywhere they touched.
“That,” she said, still catching her breath, “was amazing. Why did we wait this long?”
He trailed his fingers up and down her back. “I thought it would be better to let you broach the subject, but honestly, I was about to crack.”
She smiled against his chest, a warm feeling in her own that was spreading to the rest of her body.
“Every night,” he said, “new items for my To Do To Daggett list would pop into my head as I tried to sleep.”
“How long is this list?”
He pulled back to look at her. She thought she caught a hint of something bleak in his eyes, but he flashed a wicked grin and it was gone. “Very .”