How many hours did they have left together?
The instant she popped the final bite in her mouth, his chair scraped back and he crooked two fingers at her.
If he’d been any other man, she would have balked at the command. But her pulse skipped stupidly as she stood and followed him from the kitchen.
The conversation dwindled as the team watched them go, and resumed when they were halfway down the short corridor.
Archer grasped her by the wrist and pulled her into one of many unlit spaces carved into the walls. She gasped out as he pressed her against the wall and his warm, steely body crowded in.
“Where are we?”
He cut off her question with his kiss. Hot. Urgent.
Her insides leaped at the liquid heat of his tongue against hers. Before she could moan, he pulled back.
She blinked up at him in the shadows, fighting to find her brain cells. “Supply closet?” It smelled dusty and a bit like cleaner.
“Yes.” He ran his hands over her sides. “Whose shirt is this?” The low roughness in his tone sent heat to every corner of her body.
“I have no clue. I found it in the box.”
He started to lower his lips to hers and stopped, his body going rigid. She cocked her head and heard what he heard first—footsteps heading toward them.
Archer stepped back just as Cannon stopped in the doorway, the too-white overhead light casting stark shadows across the hard planes of his face. “As of this minute, we’re still a go to get you out tonight,” he said without preamble or questions about what they were doing in a supply closet. “If all goes to plan, we’ll drop you at your motel in three hours.”
Her relief should have been immediate. Instead, her stomach performed a strange little dip. Three hours. So little time left.
“Thank you.”
Cannon shot Archer an unreadable look and vanished as quickly as he’d arrived. The silence he left behind felt like a boulder between her and Archer.
He didn’t look at her right away. When he finally lifted his stare to hers, he asked a question she never expected.
“How old are your siblings?”
She tripped over the question but was pleased by his interest. “Jake is twenty-five. Tanner’s twenty-two, and Lara is eighteen. She just graduated last spring.”
He gave her a stiff nod. “Tell me more.”
A lump formed in her throat, his request touching her someplace tender. A place nobody ever bothered to find out existed.
He wanted to know her—now.
Before she left.
When he could just claim her body and spend their last minutes in the throes of pleasure, he chose to know her.
She leaned back against a shelf. “Jake is three years younger than me. Tanner is six years younger. Lara’s ten years younger. But she was the bossiest one by age six.”
He stepped closer but didn’t touch her yet. “Your parents died when she was little.”
She nodded once, her throat clicking with her forceful swallow. “So things got…messy. I had to grow up fast.”
“You raised them alone.”
Again, it wasn’t a question.
“We raised each other,” she said softly. “But yeah. Mostly me.”
