Page 27

I stay. But first — because I'm me, and she knows I'm me, and she stands on the porch with a blanket around her shoulders narrating like a golf announcer — I walk the property. Full perimeter, flashlight and phone, photos of the north fence line to Ferro with a request for the rotation car. I check the propane cage lock. I check the barn's new panel, the melter's cooldown, the shed.

"He's checking the shed twice, folks," Sloane reports quietly to Wick, who has assumed the porch rail like a figurehead. "A bold, methodical style. The Russian judge is weeping."

"The Russian judge can see the tree line from here," I say, coming up the steps. "Inside."

Inside is her kitchen, warm and cluttered and smelling like her, wax and vanilla and the ghost of this morning's coffee. Inside is her hand finding mine in the hallway, no audience, no pretext, just fingers lacing like they've been doing it for years. Inside is her bedroom door, and her lamp, and quilts her grandmother probably made, and Sloane Mercer turning to face me with the blanket slipping off her shoulders and the whole night ahead of us, no melter ticking a deadline, nobody's headlights due in any driveway.

"Hi," she says, suddenly shy, which after the workbench should be impossible, and is instead the single most disarming thing I've witnessed in fifteen years of fieldwork.

"Hi."

"So this is my room. Sorry about the — there's a lot of throw pillows, I know what I'm about⁠—"

I kiss her quiet. Slow, this time. That's the difference I want tonight, and I set the pace of it with my hands framing her face and my mouth unhurried on hers until I feel the shyness melt and the melt turn molten. Last night was a dam breaking — teeth and gravity and ten years of pressure finding a crack. Tonight I intend to do this properly. Thoroughly.

I'm a professional. There are standards.

She reaches past me and turns off the overhead, leaving the lamp — "ambiance," she says, "we sell it by the jar, I know what I'm doing" — and the room goes gold and quiet, and for a second we just look at each other in it, both of us fully aware of what tonight is. Not a dam breaking. A decision. The workbench was gravity. This is a choice, made standing up, with the lights deliberately arranged.

"You're sure," I say. Not because I doubt it. Because I want it in the record.

"Brady." She steps in and starts on my top button, eyes on mine the whole time, absolutely unhurried. "I've been sure since the binder. Catch up."

My phone buzzes against my thigh. She groans into my mouth — "I swear to God, if that's the channel" — and I check it one-handed without breaking the kiss, because I've made promises to a case group: EPG SYSTEM: SCHEDULED CHANNEL TEST. NO ACTION REQUIRED.

"No action required," I read aloud, and set it face-down on her dresser like laying a body to rest.

"Finally," she breathes, "a code I like," and pulls me toward the bed by my belt.

The bed is an heirloom, a spindle frame older than both of us, and when she pulls me down onto it the whole apparatus announces us to the room. She winces, laughing. "It's dramatic. It came with the house."

"Joints look sound," I say, against her throat. "Hardware's original. It'll hold."

"Did you just assess my BED⁠—"

I don't let her rush it.

She tries. Of course she tries — she's Sloane, she came into this world negotiating tempo — but every time her hands get greedy I catch them, kiss her knuckles, put them where I want them, and start again. I undress her the way I work a scene: no detail skipped, no assumption unverified. The cardigan first, off her shoulders, my mouth following it. The shirt, one button at a time, until she's fidgeting and flushed and calling me a bureaucrat in a voice that has no air in it. Her jeans, peeled slow, my hands mapping every inch of leg as it appears, her breath going ragged by the ankle.

"Brady." She's sprawled back on the quilt in nothing but lamplight now, hair everywhere, chest heaving, glaring at me with maximum available authority for a woman who just whimpered at a wrist kiss. "I want to state for the record that you are being extremely⁠—"

"Thorough." I kneel over her, take both her hands, press them into the pillow above her head, and hold them there, gentle and absolute. "You said you wanted your money's worth."

"I said that about the BINDER⁠—"

"Sloane." I wait until her eyes settle on mine. Until she stops vibrating and actually looks at me, pinned and lit up and mine, and the room goes still around the two of us. "Ten years," I say quietly. "Let me take my time."

All the fight goes out of her at once, into something softer and hotter and infinitely more dangerous.

"Okay," she whispers. "Take it."

Ten years of rationing. Two fingers of hair at a time, one second of contact on a coffee cup, half a glance across a reception tent, meted out like water on a fire watch. And now the whole account comes due at once, with interest, in a lamplit room with the throw pillows still mostly in formation.

So I do. I let her hands go; she leaves them where I put them.

There's a clock somewhere in the house, ticking. There's a launch in eleven days, a firesetter in the county, a brother in Kingston, a report on a server with my license number pending. There's every reason in the world to hurry, and that's exactly why I don't.

I learn her slow, top to bottom, with the lamp on because I refuse to do this from memory ever again. The throat that swallows around my name. Her breasts, heavier in my hands than the cotton let on, nipples tightening under my tongue while she arches and swears at the ceiling. The soft plane of her stomach, wax scar on one hip — melter, year one, she gasps out when I ask, because I ask, because I want the provenance of every mark on her — and lower, dragging the last cotton down her legs, until I settle between her thighs, hook her knees over my shoulders, and look up the length of her.