I said it quietly. Two syllables I hadn’t spoken aloud in two years, the name I’d locked away because locking it away was the price of survival. Giving it to him felt like unclenching a fist I’d held so long my fingers had forgotten any other shape.
“Mia,” he said.
My name in his mouth. Low, careful, held like he understood the weight of it. A different sound than Macy. Sharper. More real. The name of a woman who’d sat in a courtroom and chosen to destroy the man she’d loved once because he deserved to be destroyed.
I hadn’t heard it from another person in two years.
The sound of it cracked through every wall I’d built. Not violently, not dramatically. Just a shift, a settling, the quiet collapse of a structure that had been holding by willpower alone. My eyes burned, my chest hurt, and the man standing in front of me had just given me back the thing I’d been missing without being able to name it.
I kissed him.
I didn’t plan it. I didn’t weigh it or calculate or run it through the risk assessment that governed every other decision in my life. I just needed to feel something that was mine. All those months of performing, of following rules, of being someone else in a town I didn’t choose, and this man had taken a bullet for me and said my name like I was someone real. Besides, I was so tired of being careful. I was so tired of being disciplined and controlled and invisible. I’d almost died yesterday. I’d almostdied and the only reason I hadn’t was standing right here and I wanted to feel alive and I wanted to feel like I was choosing and most of all I wanted his hands on me.
So I kissed him. I put my hand on his chest and stepped into him and pressed my mouth to his.
He was still for one heartbeat. Then his hand came up to the side of my face and he kissed me back, slow, thorough, with the careful attention of a man who’d been waiting and wasn’t going to rush now that the wait was over. His mouth was warm, his hand steady against my jaw, and when his other arm came around my waist and drew me closer I felt the solid width of him against my body and the last of the pretending fell away.
I pulled him into the room. He came, kicking the door shut, and then his hands were in my hair and my back was against the wall and the kiss deepened into heat that spread through my whole body.
I pulled his shirt over his head. The bandage on his shoulder was stark against his skin, the ink on his arms vivid, and I traced the edge of the gauze with my fingertip. He caught my hand and pressed his lips to my palm, and the tenderness of it made my breath catch.
Then his mouth was on my throat, my collarbone, working down while his hands found the hem of my shirt and stripped it over my head. He unclasped my bra and his lips trailed across my sternum, between my breasts, and when he took my nipple into his mouth I arched off the wall and gripped the back of his neck and heard myself gasp. He moved between my breasts, his tongue circling, his hand cupping and stroking, learning what made me react and doing it again until I was panting against him.
His hand slid down my stomach, over my hip, along the inside of my thigh. His touch made every part of my body feel electric. He worked my jeans open and pulled them down withmy underwear and I kicked them free and I stood bare against the wall while he knelt in front of me.
He looked up at me. Held my gaze. Then he pressed his mouth between my thighs and my head fell back and I stopped thinking entirely.
Slow, deliberate strokes of his tongue that built heat in layers. He gripped my thigh, holding me steady, and when he found the rhythm that made my legs shake he stayed there, relentless, patient, until the pressure crested and I came with his name on my lips and my hand braced against the wall because my knees had stopped working.
He kissed the inside of my thigh. Stood, lifting me as he went, my legs wrapping around his hips. He carried me to the bed and laid me down. I reached for his belt, got his jeans open, pushed them down, and wrapped my hand around him. The sound he made was rough, strained, his breath catching as I stroked him.
I guided him into me. He pressed forward slowly, filling me, and we both went still, adjusting, breathing, the intimacy of it enormous. His face was close to mine, his weight braced on his forearms, and I could see everything in his expression. Want, tenderness, the quiet intensity of a man who was exactly where he’d been trying not to admit he wanted to be.
He moved. Long, deep strokes that made my spine arch and my nails dig into his shoulders. I wrapped my legs tighter, pulling him deeper into me. The angle shifted and the pressure rebuilt, sharper this time, more urgent. His pace increased, his hips driving against mine, and I could hear myself making sounds I hadn’t made in years, raw, unguarded, sounds that belonged to Mia, not Macy.
“Right there,” I gasped. “Oh my god, don’t stop.”
He gave me exactly what I asked for. Every stroke precise, his body moving with power and focus, his hand gripping my hip to hold the angle. I felt the orgasm building from deep inside,tightening, radiating outward, and when it hit I clenched around him and cried out and he followed seconds later, burying deep, a groan tearing out of him that I felt through my whole body.
Quiet. His weight settling over me, warm, real. His face against my neck, his breathing ragged, his heart hammering against mine.
He shifted onto his side and pulled me with him, keeping me close. His arm settled around my waist and I lay there with my cheek against his chest, listening to his heartbeat slow, and I thought about the fact that twenty-four hours ago I’d been standing in my shop arranging peonies and now I was lying in a bed in a compound full of ex-military bikers and somehow, I was more myself than I’d been since the WITSEC gave me a new name.
I was just Mia. In a room with a man who’d said my name like he wanted to say it over and over.
I closed my eyes and lost myself in the moment.
FOUR
PRIEST
She slept with her hand on my chest.
I woke before she did, the way I always woke, early, alert, the transition from sleep to consciousness instant and complete. A holdover from the Rangers. My body didn’t do the slow climb toward morning. I was asleep and then I was awake, and the first thing I registered was her hand, flat over my sternum, her fingers spread, her breathing slow and even against my shoulder.
I didn’t move, and I didn’t want to.
She’d curled into me during the night. Her leg hooked over mine, her hair falling across my arm, the length of her body warm against my side. The bandage on my shoulder had shifted slightly. The graze was stiff and pulling, the skin around it hot. I’d had worse, I told myself.
