Page 47 of The Jackal

Let him lurk. Tonight, he could have the dark. I had everything else.

The water shut off. A few minutes later, the bathroom door opened, and Mags came out wrapped in a white robe, her hair wet and combed back, her skin still flushed from the heat. Every thought in my head went quiet at once.

She looked around. "Where are the dogs?"

I nodded at the adjoining door. "Max told the others we needed some personal time."

She laughed—then caught the look on my face and understood I wasn't entirely joking. Because I wasn't. That's exactly what had happened, and we both knew the dog well enough to believe it.

Mags glanced at the door. Deciding something. I watched her decide it.

Then, she untied the robe and let it slip off her shoulders to the floor.

The breath went out of me slow. She crossed the room to me in the gold light, unhurried, sure of herself in a way that had its own gravity, and the sight of her walking toward me did what it always did—surprised me. Not her. Me. My body, which has held flat through every violent thing this world has thrown at it, came alive for this woman like it belonged to somebody else. A younger man. A hungrier one. I'd spent my whole life master of it, and she undid that mastery just by crossing a room.

"How much time do we have?" she asked, low.

I didn't know. I didn't care. The honest answer was that nothing short of a bomb dropped on Dominion Hall was getting my hands off her now, and maybe not even then.

"All of it," I said.

She straddled me, her knees coming down on either side of my hips, her arms sliding around my neck. I was already painfully hard before her weight settled—aching, undone, entirely hers. I pulled her the last inch closer.

And the world outside that room could wait its turn.

25

MAGNOLIA

He was filthy, and I had never wanted anything so much in my life.

That's the truth of it, the thing I'd have been embarrassed to say out loud to anyone but him.

It had been the longest day I had ever lived through, and he hadn’t washed it off. The man under me still carried the entire day on his skin. Sweat and salt. Gun oil and dust. The note underneath that was just him, just male, the smell my body had filed away in a parking lot and never once deleted.

I should have wanted him clean. Any sensible woman would have pointed him at that marble shower and made him presentable first. But I didn't want him presentable. I wanted him exactly like this—unwashed, unguarded, real, the day still on him, nothing polished or arranged. I pressed my face into the side of his throat where the scent of him was strongest and breathed him in like I'd been holding my breath. Something low in me pulled tight and went liquid all at once.

"You should let me shower," he said, low, his hand already spreading wide and warm across my back. But he didn't move toward the bathroom. He read me the way he read everything, and what he read was that I did not want him to.

"Don't you dare," I said into his neck. "I've been wanting to get my hands on you all day. I'm not waiting on hot water."

I felt the rumble of his laugh more than heard it. Then, his hand came up into my hair and tipped my face back. The laugh was gone and something else was in its place, something that had been building in him all day and had nowhere left to go.

"Mags." Just my name. He said it like a man setting something down he'd carried too far. "I need to tell you something before—" He stopped. Started over, and I watched it cost him, this man who never hesitated at anything. "I've never said it to another woman. Not one. I want you to know that going in."

"Say it."

"I love you." Plain. Flat. Bedrock, the way he said every true thing. Somehow, that made it hit harder than any pretty version ever could have. "I have loved you since Virginia Beach. Since before there was a before. I loved you and I walked away from you. I was wrong. I’ve never been so grateful to have been wrong about anything in my life."

My eyes filled so fast, it startled me.

"I knew," I said. My voice came out cracked. "That's the thing, Cash. I knew, back then. Everybody thought I was crazy—my mother thought I was mooning over a man who wasn't interested—but I felt it. There was something there. I wasn't wrong. I stood in that parking lot with a coin in my hand and I felt the wanting come off you and I wondered if I'd made it up. I hadn't." I pressed my palm flat over his sternum, over the heart that was going quick under my hand, for me, only ever for me. "You just weren't ready. That's all it was."

"No," he agreed. "I wasn't."

"Maybe you just had to catch up."

Something moved through his face, slow. "Maybe I did."