Page 30 of Forbidden Protector

The dream doesn't ask permission. They never do.

His kitchen. His hands. Not the version of him that sat across from me at Nell's with his jaw set, drinking his coffee, but the other one. The one I watched look at a child's crayon drawing like it was worth more than anything else in this house. That version of him walks me backward into the counter without a word and lifts me onto it like I weigh nothing. My legs go around him before I've told them to, and his mouth finds the exact place on my throat that's been burning since a parking lot in the middle of the night.

He doesn't rush it. Even here, even in a dream where I've stopped pretending I have any authority over what my body wants, he takes his time with my neck, my jaw, and the soft place below my ear.

His hands go up under my shirt and spread flat against my ribs and I feel every callus on them.

I say his name in a voice I have never used on another human being.

Then his mouth goes lower. Then his hands. Then I am saying things into the dark of his kitchen that I would arrest myself for in daylight.

I wake disoriented, heart going, the sheets twisted wrong and his name half out of my mouth before I catch it.

My hand is low on my stomach, fingers still inside myself from wanting something that was never actually in this room.

I lie there in the dark hating him.

I'm still soaked and aching in the early morning with a locked door between us. There is no version of today where I sit across that kitchen table from him and pretend my body didn't already decide something my mind hasn't agreed to yet.

Somewhere down the hall, a floorboard gives.

Once. Then nothing.

Just the kind of quiet that means a man is standing very still on the other side of a door, awake at four in the morning for reasons he'd never admit to either.

I lie there with my heart still going and listen to him not knock.

My hand finds the door handle in the dark. I don't turn it.

But I don't let go for a long time.

NINE

HOLT

The lights come up in my mirror a few miles past the Sullivan Ranch gate, driving home, and they don't pass.

Ten years of training teaches a man to read a road before he's decided to look, and never once lets him stop.

Following distance too even. Speed matched to a decimal a civilian never bothers with.

Mackenzie's got a legal pad on her knee, working the timeline she's been building since the Riverview. She doesn't look up when I ease off the gas to see what the truck behind us does.

It eases off too.

"Company," I say.

She's already turned, one hand braced on the dash. "Since when?"

"Since the gate."

"Make, color?"

"Can't tell yet. Keep your eyes on it instead of me."

I'd marked the storm an hour out, that blue-black stack of clouds over the Divide that means the mountain's about to let go of something. I'd already dropped speed for it, thumbed the truck into four-wheel before the first flake hit glass.

What I hadn't planned for was somebody reading that same sky and timing a hit for the exact window when snow would erase whatever came next.