I push the shirt off his shoulders and press my mouth to the scar below his collarbone, the silver line from ordnance training that I’ve kissed so many times now it feels like mine. His hands tighten on my ribs.
We lose the rest of our clothes without urgency. His hands know where they’re going. Mine know where to follow. No fumbling, just the choreography of two bodies that have learned each other well.
He cups my face and kisses me with intention. A kiss that knows where it's going but isn't in any hurry to arrive. Not tonight.
Ethan’s hands find my hips as I rise onto my knees. Reaching between us, I position him at my entrance. We both exhale shakily as I sink down onto him.
I set the pace. My hands brace on his shoulders, his on my hips. We find the rhythm the way we find everything now—together. Not his pace, not mine. Ours. The unhurried rock of two people who have nowhere to be and no one to perform for. His forehead presses against my collarbone. My fingers thread into his hair. He breathes against my skin, and every exhale moves through my ribs.
His thumb traces the dip of my waist, up along the curve beneath my breast, down to the hollow of my hip. Mapping me the wayhe mapped fence lines and perimeters and every room he ever walked into for danger, except there are no threats here. Just skin. Just us.
The build is slow and deep and inevitable, the way the day becomes night. His hand slides up my spine to pull me closer, chest to chest, his heart hammering against mine. He is everywhere—his heartbeat, his breath, his hands—andthis is what it means to be home in another person.
I come apart quietly. My forehead drops to his as my body tightens around him, and I whisper his name. He follows me with his face pressed into my neck and his arms locked around me.
We stay there, still joined, breathing together. His arms haven't moved. My fingers haven't left his hair.
I press my mouth to his temple. Ethan turns his head and captures my lips in a soft, unhurried kiss that feels like coming home after a long time away, except I’m not going anywhere, and neither is he.
“Tea’s cold,” I whisper.
His laugh vibrates through my whole body. “I’ll make more.”
He doesn’t move. Neither do I.
The room is quiet. The cats are somewhere downstairs committing small crimes. And this moment with my husband is the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever been part of.
We’re lying in bed when the phone rings later that night.
Ethan reaches for it. “Yeah.” A pause. “When?” Another pause. “I’ll tell her.”
He sets the phone down. “Beckett. Federal agents picked up Vance an hour ago.”
I sit up. “It’s over?”
“The first part.” He pauses, and a muscle flickers in his jaw, the way it does when he’s sorting information into columns. “Marlon Ennis cleared out his desk at the bank this afternoon. Nobody saw him leave. His house is dark.”
The insider. The man whose name has been in red on Ethan’s dashboard for weeks, feeding LandCorp information while shaking Sutton hands across the counter.
“He ran.”
“Beckett thinks he got wind of the arrest and bolted before anyone could loop him in.” Ethan’s thumb traces a circle on my spine. “He's not the priority tonight. Vance is. But Marlon Ennis is out there with everything he knows about LandCorp’s network, and a man who runs is either scared or making himself useful to someone bigger.”
Alexander Voss. The name neither of us says.
Ethan’s hand finds my shoulder. “Okay?”
It’s the question he’s asked me every day since the ditch.
I lace my fingers through his. “Okay.”
