I stood up. The chair scraped back. Sterling didn’t move, but his body went still in that way that meant his nervous system had just switched from idle to alert, the way a rifle’s safety clicks off—quiet, precise, unmistakable if you knew what to listen for.
I knew what to listen for. I’d been listening for weeks.
I rounded the desk in three strides, put my hands on his shoulders, and slammed him against the wall behind the desk. Not hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to mean it. The framed topographic beside his head rattled once and went still.
Sterling’s body went rigid against mine. His hands came up to my chest, not pushing, not yet, hovering in that space between defense and something else entirely.
His breath hit warm against my jaw, and underneath the coffee and the graphite I could smell him—pine soap and sweat and something that was just Sterling, the scent that had beenliving in my brain since approximately the hallway incident and showing no signs of vacating the premises.
“Stop pretending you don’t know what I’m doing in here,” I said.
His eyes held mine. Dark, flat, giving nothing, and then—there. The fracture. Small, almost invisible, a hairline crack in the mask that widened when my grip tightened on his collar and I pulled him forward half an inch, close enough that our mouths were a breath apart.
“There you are, sweetheart,” I said, and kissed him. Hard.
Sterling made a sound against my mouth—low, rough, the kind of noise that came from somewhere behind his sternum when the argument was over and the truth had won.
His hands left my chest and gripped my hips, fingers digging in hard enough to leave marks, and I kissed him like I’d been wanting to for months, thorough and demanding and completely without apology.
His mouth was hot. His stubble scraped my jaw rough enough to burn, and I didn’t give a shit. I licked into his mouth and tasted coffee and something darker, something that was just Sterling, and he let me, his body opening under mine the way a door gives when you lean on it long enough.
My fist was still in his collar. I used it to hold him against the wall and kissed him harder, my other hand sliding into his hair, gripping tight at the base of his skull where the short dark strands were thick and warm under my palm.
Sterling’s breath came faster. His chest pressed against mine, hard muscle and heat, and I felt his heart hammering under my thumb where it rested against his neck.
He kissed me back like a man who had been arguing with himself and had just lost. Thorough. Urgent. His tongue against mine, his teeth catching my lower lip once, sharp, and the smallpain of it lit something low in my belly that had been smoldering for weeks.
I dragged my mouth along his jaw, down his throat, and Sterling’s head tipped back against the wall, his Adam’s apple working under my lips. I bit the tendon where his neck met his shoulder, not hard, just enough to make him suck in a breath, and the sound he made—low, ragged, almost a groan—did more to my nervous system than anything that had happened so far.
“Jesus Christ,” Sterling said, his voice rough and wrecked.
“I know,” I said against his skin.
His hands were everywhere. One wrapped around the back of my neck, fingers threading into my hair with a grip that said he’d been thinking about this for longer than he wanted to admit. The other slid under the hem of my t-shirt, palm flat against the small of my back, warm and callused and possessive in a way that made my cock harden against his thigh.
Sterling felt it. His hips shifted, pressing into mine, and the friction of it drew a groan out of me that I hadn’t planned on letting escape. The sound bounced off the low ceiling and the pine walls and the maps scattered across the desk, and Sterling’s breath caught, and for a second we just stood there pressed together, breathing hard, his forehead against my shoulder like he needed the contact to stay upright.
The lamp pooled light over the desk where the eastern perimeter map sat, forgotten, its grid lines and contour marks rendered completely irrelevant by the fact that Sterling Callahan was currently holding onto me like I might disappear if he let go, and the contradiction of it—Sterling, the man who treated control like religion, gripping my shirt with both hands and not letting go—was so perfect I almost laughed.
I didn’t laugh. I kissed him again instead, slower this time, letting my mouth soften against his, and felt the fight drain outof him in one long, shuddering exhale that he pressed into my collar.
His hands slid up my back, under my shirt, palms flat against my skin, and the warmth of him—Sterling’s hands, warm and rough and everywhere—lit something in my chest that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the needy sound he’d made when I kissed him, like something breaking that had needed breaking for a very long time.
The lamp light caught the side of his face. His eyes were closed, his jaw slack, his mouth swollen from kissing, and the sight of Sterling Callahan looking wrecked because of me did more to my ego than anything that had happened in the last decade, and I filed it under its own category: Worth Every Second of the Wait.
The maps waited. The eastern perimeter was still out there, still a problem, still something that needed handling.
But right now, in this room, with Sterling’s breath hot against my throat and his hands under my shirt and his body pressed against mine like he’d stopped caring about the walls he’d spent months building, none of that mattered half as much as it should have.
And that, right there, was the whole point.
I got my hands on the hem of Sterling’s shirt and pulled. Once, hard, popping the top button. Twice, decisive, dragging the fabric up over his chest and off his arms while he stood there against the wall with his breath coming fast and his eyes dark on mine, not stopping me, and that right there was the whole goddamn victory.
Sterling’s chest was a map I’d been studying from a distance for months. Up close it was better. Broad, slick with muscle, the eight-pack I’d been privately admiring since that time I’d walked past the bathroom and caught him shirtless and hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it for three consecutive days.
Scars mapped across his ribs—thin white lines, a thicker one along his right side, stories he would never tell and I had stopped asking about. Tattoos I’d only glimpsed before, now visible in the low lamp light: something Cyrillic across his left pec, a date in small block numbers along his collarbone, the kind of ink that meant something to the man wearing it and nothing to anyone else.
I traced the longest scar with my fingertips first, feeling the raised line of it under my thumb, and then I leaned in and put my mouth on his sternum. Warm skin, the beat of his heart under my lips, fast and hard. I kissed my way along his collarbone, slow, deliberate, feeling the muscle jump under my mouth when I hit the spot where his neck met his shoulder.
