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She closed her eyes as she huffed out a small laugh. “Funny and sweet, yes. I did say that, didn’t I?”
A drop of liquid rolled down her cheek and she caught it with the tip of her tongue. Resisting the impulse to lean down, capture her pink tongue in my mouth, was threatening to demolish the last of my control.
“You also said having a sense of humor is a good thing, but not a compliment you usually get. That hasn’t changed in those thirteen years?”
“You’re right, I did say that.” How’d she remember that conversation so well? And I shook my head, because, no, things hadn’t changed.
“You’re distracting me again.” She sniffled. “How are you so good at calming me down?”
“Fucking ditto.” I shook my head again. Because A, my sleep-deprived brain did me dirty. Had me sharing what was meant to be a thought. And B, I had to cool it with how often I threw the fucks around her. She was the sweet one. She didn’t deserve my foul mouth. A part of me I’d done a better job at concealing back in the day.
“You’re not supposed to distract someone on a mission, and I did back at that house. I’d been pushing you to talk about other stuff while I was in that chair, just before those people showed up. I’m so sorry.” She slipped her hand between us and held her stomach.
I was losing her again. She was unraveling, and I wasn’t sure if I ought to let it happen. To give her some time to fall apart, then help pull her back together after. Or was I supposed to keep her in one piece and never let her crumble to begin with?
She lifted her hand to her temple. “Pretty sure I’ll never look at glasses the same again, always wondering if someone’s keeping tabs on me. Feels like I had a stalker, and that’s creepy, even if my dad did call in a favor to Sydney’s dad for the tracker, and . . .”
Both her father and Sydney’s had confirmed the truth behind the device. The jury was still out on who else could’ve known about the tracker and managed to hijack the system to determine our location.
A stalker. Yeah, you have one. Me. But the checking-in-on-her thing helped save her life, and I had to remind myself of that.
I hadn’t questioned the amount of security at her lab, or how hard it’d been to find where the new company had constructed it prior to Diana’s move to Amsterdam. I’d assumed the owners wanted to protect their patents and project from theft. In hindsight, I should’ve questioned everything.
“Glasses or not,” she began, and I half expected her to start rambling again, “I can see how tired you are. When was the last time you slept?”
I tried to remember and shrugged. “Maybe a few hours on the flight from D.C. to Germany.”
“That was a while ago.” Turning to the side, I followed her line of sight as she pointed her head toward the bed. “Take a nap now. You can’t be running on empty the way you are.”
“Giving me orders, huh?” There went my lips again. I’d killed a dozen people tonight, and we had more questions than answers about what in God’s name was going on and who was really after this woman, but I was grinning. Maybe I really was losing it from sleep deprivation? A nap wasn’t a horrible idea.
I’d taken a sixty-second shower once the plane had leveled out, washed the blood from my body to remove that reminder from Diana’s view, but it hadn’t been enough to wake me. Doubtful coffee would do the trick right now either.
“I am, in fact, telling you what to do.” The twitch of her lips into a slight smile cracked the walls of my chest open. “You’re already in comfy clothes. Both of us are.”
She lowered her chin, studying my black tee and sweats before moving on to her Stanford sweatshirt she’d changed into post take-off and her kill-me-right-fucking-now gray yoga pants.
“If I tell you that I need to rest for a bit, and I don’t want to be alone, will that convince you to lie down, too?”
“Playing dirty now.” The words eased out a bit huskier than I’d intended, but she had a habit of catching me off guard and making me behave in peculiar ways.
A bit of turbulence hit—not even complaining about the timing—sending her stumbling against my chest, and my hands slipped around to her back. I kept my balance, and us both upright, so we didn’t wind up falling onto my bed. Not the place I needed to be with this woman. She’d find out how much I truly had wanted to tie her up at that house. Of course, I’d have had her naked in that chair so I could eat her out while she squirmed from pleasure and called out my name.
That thought right there alone was exactly why it was Falcon out in the cabin working leads instead of me, because only one head of mine was functioning.
This had to be how Griffin, Gray, Jesse, and the others had felt when our cases had involved the women they were now married to. Thrown off and unfocused. I hadn’t been able to comprehend what they’d been going through, because it’d made no sense to me.
Until now.
Until Diana.
The woman making me forget logic and reason.
The woman whose breasts were still plastered to my chest as I continued to hold her against me.
“You’ve crammed a lot of bad shit into this week.” The number of cities I’d been in the space of a day was . . . I’d lost count. Where were we now? Flying over Russian airspace, for all I fucking knew. “So, if you want to take a nap, I’ll do it for you,” I agreed. Because, in truth, I was so fatigued I wasn’t sure if my dick would even work right now, which was saying a lot. Especially around this woman.
“Thank you.” She looked over at the bed, and I knew what she had to be thinking. She was wondering if I’d ever had sex there. The bedroom had racked up plenty of miles, all of which were from my teammates, though. Never from me.
