His hand moves and it pulls my waist and pulls and suddenly the distance between us is gone and those green eyes are very closeand his voice is low and almost amused when he asks, "Princess. Is this some sort of hint?"
I study the line of his brow. The set of his mouth.
"What if it is?" I reply, and I bring my hand up to his jaw and stroke it.
He takes my face in his hand and he stares into my soul. My heart is drumming in my chest. His lips curve into a cruel smile and his hands tighten around my face as he starts to lean in. I hold my breath as his lips meet mine and electricity jolts through my body.
The kiss is nothing as I expected. His mouth is warm and strong and I moan as my hands find his shirt and grip it. His fingers are in my hair, pulling at the root, and it should not feel the way it feels but it does and I stop thinking about strategy for a stretch of seconds that I lose count of as this tongue finds its way into my mouth and he sucks in.
He pulls back.
We are both breathing hard. His eyes are darker and he looks at me for a moment with an expression I still can't read and then he straightens, steps back, and turns to go.
My arms go around him from behind, hands flat against his chest, and I press my face between his shoulder blades and I say it into the fabric of his shirt.
"Please don't go?"
He looks down at me for a moment, those pale eyes moving over my face with their usual thoroughness.
"You want to stay with me?" he asks.
I nod.
An hour later I am kneeling on the floor of his office holding a stack of files. He sits behind the desk working and occasionally reaches across and takes a paper from the file I am holding and reads it and sets it aside and reaches for another. The files are heavy and my arms are beginning to register the fact but I keep them level and I keep my expression cooperative.
He glances down at me with a thin smile. "Comfortable?"
"Very," I reply, forcing a smile. He chuckles and he takes another paper.
I watch him work for a while. The office is large and ordered, everything in its place, the desk clear except for what he is currently using. There are no photographs. Nothing personal anywhere that I can see. Just the clean geometry of a space m.
"What is it that you actually do?" I ask.
He doesn't look up. "I ship ammunition."
I let a beat pass. "Isn't that illegal?"
He turns a page. "It is."
"So you're a criminal."
He turns then, swiveling the chair slightly to face me, and grins, and it does something to his face that I was not prepared for, something that makes him look younger and more dangerous at the same time.
"Yes," he replies. He leans forward until I can feel his breath and his eyes drop to my mouth for half a second.
"Does that scare you?"
The kiss surfaces in my memory without my permission. The pull of his fingers in my hair, the certainty of it, the way it had knocked every careful thought I had out of sequence. I push it back down.
"Should it?" I answer.
His phone rings.
He holds my gaze for one more second and then stands, pulling the phone from his jacket, and moves to the window. His voice drops into something clipped and businesslike as he paces and I watch him for a moment and then I look at the desk.
The lower left drawer is slightly ajar. I look back at him. His back is partially to me.
My father had always kept a gun in the lower left drawer of his desk. I had discovered it when I was seventeen, reaching for a stapler, and he had appeared in the doorway and told me to close it and never open it again and I had understood from that moment that there were parts of my father's life that organized themselves around things I wasn't supposed to know about.
