"Were you angry? When you thought about it?"
"Sometimes." Honest. Always honest. "Mostly I was just—" He paused. His thumb traced the line of her jaw. "Mostly I just missed you."
The words cracked her chest open. Emotions flooded through her. It felt like rain after a drought, welcome and almost unbearable at the same time.
She took his hand—the scarred one, Blake's damage made permanent on his skin—and pressed her lips to his knuckles. Then his wrist. Then the inside of his forearm, where the skin was soft and unscarred and warm.
"Lyssa." Her name was rough.
"I know." She looked up at him. "I know we haven't talked about everything. I know there's still so much between us that we haven't resolved. But I am so tired of being careful. I am so tired of doing the smart thing and the safe thing and the thing that protects everyone else's feelings."
She stood on her toes and kissed the hinge of his jaw. "I want one night," she said against his skin, "where I choose what I want instead of what I should."
He was still for a long moment. She could feel the battle in him—the protector wrestling with the man, duty wrestling with desire, every professional instinct telling him this was a complication he couldn't afford.
The man won.
He picked her up. Just lifted her with one arm, as if she weighed nothing. She wrapped her legs around his waist, and he carried her toward the bedroom, kissing her the whole way. They bumped into the doorframe, and he laughed against her mouth.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m a little…off balance.”
The laugh did it. That sound—warm, surprised, so human after a day of calculated control—dissolved whatever was left of her restraint.
He set her on the bed. Stood over her, breathing hard, eyes dark. "You're sure?"
She pulled him down by his shirt. "I've never been more sure of anything."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When she tugged him down by his shirt, Mack stopped thinking.
Not all at once. Not completely. The trained part of his brain—the part that tracked exits, calculated threat vectors, and never fully powered down—still registered the monitor glowing in the other room, the locked door, the agents in the stairwell.
But the rest of him, the part he’d kept under military-grade containment for two years, surrendered to the simple, devastating reality of Alyssa underneath him, looking up at him like he was the only solid thing left in the world.
He heard the slight catch in her breath, noted the way her fingers tightened in the fabric of his shirt. But he stayed where he was, braced on his left arm, and looked at her the way he hadn’t let himself since the party.
He hadn’t allowed himself to study her like this. Not in the SUV, not at the cabin, not during the debrief. Every time he’d caught himself staring at her for too long, he’d pulled back, filed it under operational awareness, and moved on.
But there was no operational framework for this. No protocol for being in bed with the woman you’d been trying to stop loving for seven hundred and thirty-plus days and failing every single one.
The dim glow from the hallway monitor caught the angles of her face, the flush along her cheekbones. The strand of hair across her forehead that he’d tucked behind her ear in the kitchen was loose again. Her green eyes, lit with desire, watched him with a patience that made his chest ache.
She’d given him that same look once before—the first night they’d spent together, in his apartment outside Quantico, when he’d been nervous enough to forget everything he thought he knew about women. She’d just waited, calm and certain, with a wicked grin on her face.
He’d known, with the absolute clarity of a scope dialed to zero, that she was it for him.
All these years later, in a safehouse above a dry cleaners with a contract killer hunting them, nothing about that had changed.
The scar through her eyebrow was a thin silver line in the low light. Blake’s mark on her. Mack traced it with his thumb—gently, the way she’d traced his scarred knuckles on the road—and felt her breath stutter.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
“Looking at you.”
“You’ve been looking at me for twenty-four hours.”
“Not like this.” His voice came out low and rough. “I want to soak you up.”