Page 34 of Forbidden Protector

"Careful one."

She swings her legs off the bed like she means to prove something with it. Maybe she does. I'm already up off the floor before her feet find it.

Neither one of us planned that part. It just happens, like weather.

"I had a whole sentence," she says, and her voice has gone somewhere lower than the interview-room register I've heard on her all week. "I had a whole⁠—"

She doesn't finish it.

I don't let her, or she doesn't want to. By the time either of us could say which, there's no floor left between us to cross.

Two feet of it, gone in one step. Her hand fists in my shirt like she's arresting me. Mine finds her jaw where it found it in that parking lot, except this time there's nothing clinical left in it, and neither of us checks anything after that.

"This changes nothing," she says, mouth an inch from mine, already lying.

"Didn't say it would."

Then there's no more talking to keep score of.

TEN

MACKENZIE

He doesn't kiss me first. I notice that even now, some forensic corner of my brain still running its own program in the dark.

He waits, hands loose at his sides, the same coiled stillness I watched him hold over Jacob's tracks in the snow. I close the last of the distance myself, my fist twisted in his shirt like I've got a warrant for it.

Only then do his hands come up. One at my jaw, the same place he held it in that parking lot, except there's nothing clinical left in it now. The other flat against my spine. He doesn't pull me in so much as stop pretending there was ever any space between us to begin with.

I get his shirt off first, careful of the arm, some part of me still running triage.

He notices me noticing, catches my hand before it lands on the bandage, and moves it an inch lower instead, to skin that isn't holding stitches.

"It's fine."

"It's fine because I'm not an idiot about it." I press my palm flat to his ribs instead, feel his heart going under it. "Keep it that way."

"Yes, ma'am."

That gets a laugh out of me I didn't plan on, more breath than sound.

His mouth is at my throat, the exact place he's been staring at since a church pew, and the laugh goes somewhere else entirely. His jaw's gone rough again since the funeral, three days of stubble he hasn't bothered with. It drags against the soft skin under my ear, down the side of my neck.

I feel the burn of it land somewhere much lower than my throat.

He gets my shirt off slow and determined. Not tearing, working it.

Every inch of me he uncovers, he looks at first, before his hands or his mouth follow. Like he's confirming something he already believed and wants proof of anyway.

Grey cotton, plain, practical, the kind of bra a woman buys three of in the same color because she doesn't have time to think about it. He runs one thumb along the strap like it's the finest thing he's ever been handed.

"Federal issue?"

"Calvin Klein. Six-pack from a department store." I get his belt undone, an efficiency he clearly wasn't expecting from a woman he's spent all this time thinking is all discipline. "Don't make it a thing."

"Wasn't going to." He says it with none of the clip he's had since the airport. "Just glad it's real. Not the version I built."

"You built a version?"