Page 44 of Power Play

"I know."

"Do you?" She steps closer. Her chin comes up. Her eyes hold mine with the intensity of someone who has been staring at evidence for weeks and has decided to stop verifying and start acting. "Because you're standing in my apartment again. Uninvited. After I told you to leave. And the lock on my door is one you installed. Everything about this situation is you deciding what happens to me."

"I’m not deciding what happens to you."

"Then what are you doing here?"

The answer isn’t operational. The answer has nothing to do with threat perimeters or the regulatory filing I killed this morning. The answer is standing in front of me barefoot, with the vein at her neck beating too fast and her fury so clean and targeted that it cuts through every defense I’ve built in a career spent building defenses.

"I’m here because I can't be anywhere else."

The sentence lands unprotected. The deflection does not fire. The professional framing does not engage. The sentence is the truest thing I’ve said to her since the night I told her I walked into the risk with both hands empty, and the truth of it sits in the space between us with nowhere to hide.

Her hand comes up. For a fraction of a second I think she is going to hit me, and the calculation I run in that fraction is whether I would let her.

She grabs the front of my jacket. The grip is hard enough that I feel her knuckles through the leather. She pulls me forward, and there is no space left between us.

The kiss is not a kiss. It is a detonation. Her mouth hits mine with the force of a woman who has spent time converting fury into fuel, and the fuel ignites on contact. My hands find her waist and the grip is harder than anything I’ve allowed myself since the last time I touched her. She makes a noise against my mouth that is equal parts rage and want, and the noise undoes whatever was left of the tactical framing I walked in here with.

She bites my lower lip. The copper taste of blood registers at the same time as her hands fisting in my shirt, pulling the fabric tight across my shoulders, pulling me closer when closer is already not close enough. I push her back against the counter and her spine hits the edge and she arches into the contact instead of away from it.

"I hate you for this," she says against my mouth. The accuracy is intact even now. Even with my hands on her body and her hands pulling my jacket off my shoulders, the sharpness of her anger hasn't dulled.

"I know."

"You don't get to fix this by being here."

"I know."

"Stop saying you know." She shoves my jacket down my arms and it hits the floor. Her hands find the hem of my shirt and pull it up. Her fingers are cold against my ribs and the contact sends a shock through me that has nothing to do with temperature. "You don't know anything. You think you know, but knowing requires honesty and you have never once been honest with me without a crisis forcing it out of you."

I lift her onto the counter. The legal pad and the laptop shift. Her legs wrap around me and the heat of her through the thin fabric is enough to fracture whatever discipline I have left.

"Then ask me something." My mouth moves to her jaw, her neck, the place below her ear where her pulse is running too fast for the control she is still trying to maintain. "Ask me something and I will give you the honest answer."

"Why did you come here?"

"Because the thought of someone destroying you is the one scenario I won’t allow."

"That's the redirect."

She is right. Even now, even with her body pressed against mine and the taste of blood on my lip, I’m deflecting the personal answer onto operational territory. She called it. The way she always calls it.

"Why did you come here?" she asks again. Her hand grabs my jaw and forces my face level with hers. The grip digs into bone. "The real answer. The one that has nothing to do with threat assessment."

I look at her. Her eyes are dark and furious and waiting, and she is the most dangerous person I’ve ever met because she is the only one who has ever demanded that I stop performing and start existing.

"Because you are the only thing I’ve ever wanted that I can't turn into a task." The words scrape out of me like something being pulled through a space too small for it. "And the wanting has not stopped because you told me to leave. It has not stopped because you were right to tell me to leave. It got worse. Every day I stayed away, it got worse. And when Priest called this morning and told me someone was coming for you, the wanting and the fury became the same thing and I stopped being able to tell them apart."

She pulls my mouth back to hers. The kiss this time is slower and more brutal, a deliberate taking that has none of the curiosity of the first time or the tenderness of the second. This is the third time, and the third time is built on wreckage. Her teeth find my lip again. My hands grip hard enough to bruise. The counter digs into her thighs.

My hand slides under the sweatshirt and finds bare skin. Nothing else. The discovery rearranges every priority I walked in here with, and I pull her closer, my mouth on her neck, her jaw, the hollow below her ear where I can feel her heartbeat against my lips.

Her hand comes up and lands flat on my chest.

The pressure is firm.

I stop.