“I’m not stopping,” I said, and drove into him harder.
His hand found the back of my neck again, grip firm, pulling me closer as he turned his head. I kissed him, messy and desperate, our mouths sliding together, and felt the moment his control shattered completely—his body clenching around me, his cock pulsing hot against my stomach, his groan muffled against my mouth as he came in thick, hot stripes.
I followed him over, driving into him hard through his orgasm, my own release hitting with a force that pulled a groan out of me that bounced off the low ceiling and the pine walls and the maps scattered across the desk.
For a long moment we just stood there pressed together, breathing hard, Sterling’s head on my shoulder and my hand still wrapped around his cock, both of us shaking slightly in the warm, quiet dark of the ops office.
The lamp pooled light over the desk where the eastern perimeter map sat, completely forgotten, its grid lines and contour marks rendered irrelevant by the fact that Sterling Callahan was currently holding onto me with both hands and not letting go, his breath hot against my neck, his body warm and spent against mine.
I kissed the side of his head. His hair was short and thick under my lips, damp with sweat at the temples, and he made a small, quiet sound that might have been contentment and might have been surrender and was probably both.
“Okay,” Sterling whispered. One word. Spent carefully, the way Sterling spent all his words, but this one landed where it was supposed to.
I grinned at the wall over his head. Wide and unrepentant, the kind of grin that said I told you so without needing the words, and squeezed his hip once because sometimes touching said more than talking, and Sterling Callahan had always been better at reading touch than words anyway.
Right now, in this room, with Sterling’s weight against me and his breath slowing against my neck and his hands still on my hips like he’d forgotten they were there, none of that mattered half as much as the fact that Sterling Callahan had just come apart in my hands, and he was still here, and he wasn’t running.
And that, right there, was the whole goddamn point.
* * * *
Sterling tugged his shirt back on with the same efficiency he brought to everything—methodical, unhurried, treating getting dressed like a functional necessity rather than a performance.
I watched him button it one-handed, his other hand braced on the desk, and filed the sight under its own category: Sterling Callahan Putting Himself Back Together, and Letting Me Watch.
The lamp light caught the line of his jaw, shadowed with stubble, and the particular set of his mouth—softer now, the rigid control temporarily suspended—did more to my chest than anything that had happened in the last twenty minutes, which was saying something considering what had happened in the last twenty minutes.
I pulled my own shirt down, adjusted my jeans, and leaned against the desk beside him. Close. Not touching, but the option was there, hanging in the air between us like something we’d both decided was worth keeping.
The office felt different. Warmer, somehow, though the wood stove hadn’t changed its output. The maps on the desk were the same maps, the eastern perimeter still waiting with its cut fence and its boot prints and its diamond tread pattern, but the weight of it sat differently now. Less urgent. More manageable. Like problems always felt smaller when you weren’t carrying them alone.
Sterling picked up the pencil. Rolled it between his fingers once, twice, his eyes on the map. Then he set it down and looked at me. “You’re going to be a problem.”
The corner of his mouth did the thing. The small, stubborn warmth I’d been collecting since week two, spreading from the crease beside his left eye to the whole left side of his face, and it landed in my chest with the clean, tactical certainty of something I had wanted for a very long time.
I grinned. Wide and unrepentant. “Take the win, Sterling. You earned it.”
“I didn’t win anything.”
“You absolutely did. Several things. In rapid succession. I was counting.”
He shook his head. The motion was almost fond, which from Sterling Callahan was approximately equivalent to anyone else writing poetry, and I stored it carefully, added it to the collection.
We turned back to the map. Side by side now, shoulders nearly touching, and the proximity felt earned rather than accidental. Sterling’s hand moved across the paper, tracing the contour lines with his fingertip, and I watched the way he did it—focused, precise, the same intensity he brought to everything,but without the rigid desperation that had been there at two in the morning.
“The northeast blind spot is the approach I’d use,” I said.
Sterling’s finger paused on the map. His eyes lifted to mine, recalibrating, the look he gave when someone had said something he hadn’t expected to hear and was deciding whether it was worth taking seriously.
“Explain,” he said.
“Jackson flagged it. Cruz said the same thing. The greenhouse blocks the sight line from the main house, and the tree line gives cover all the way to the river access.” I tapped the spot on the map with my knuckle. “If I was running surveillance on this property, that’s where I’d park. Good sight lines to the bunkhouse and the main barn, concealed approach from the county road, easy exit vector if things go sideways.”
Sterling was quiet for a long moment. His eyes moved across the map, tracking the terrain the way he always did—methodical, thorough, missing nothing—and I watched his face do the thing it did when he was thinking, the slight furrow between his brows, the set of his jaw.
“You’re right,” he said finally.
“I know.”
