I step back. Straighten my shirt. Push my hair behind my ears. The silver streak falls forward again immediately, which is its habit.
"Good night," I say.
Tala's back is still against the elevator wall. Her lips are swollen. Her breathing is visible. Her eyes are wide and dark and she looks like a woman who has just been kissed by someone she assumed was incapable of ambush.
"You're a menace."
"I'm your caddie." I step into the corridor. Turn back. "Good night."
The doors close between us.
I walk to my room. I enter. I close the door. I stand in the dark suite with the Singapore skyline performing its nightly spectacle through the windows and I press both palms flat against the wall and I breathe.
My hands are steady.
My heart is not.
For the first time in longer than I can calculate, I don't mind the discrepancy.
CHAPTER NINE
Tala
I wake in Nerys's suite with my face against her shoulder and my leg hooked over her hip and the specific drowsy awareness that the woman beneath me is already conscious and has been watching me sleep.
"How long have you been awake?" My voice is rough. Dawn light through the windows turns the suite gray-gold.
"Twenty minutes."
"And you've been doing what, exactly?"
"Observing."
"Observing what?"
"The way you sleep. You move constantly. You adjusted position four times without waking. You talk occasionally — nothing intelligible. And you have a habit of pressing your face into the nearest surface as if you're trying to burrow through it."
"Romantic."
"Accurate."
I shift. Prop myself on one elbow. She's lying beneath me with her dark auburn hair spread on the pillow and the silver streak catching the early light like a vein of quartz in granite. Her face is unguarded in a way she would never permit in public — softer around the mouth, the permanent analytical line between her brows smoothed out by whatever the sleep version of Nerys Quillan looks like.
She looks younger when she's not strategizing. Not young — she's forty-four, and the lines around her eyes and the set of her jaw belong to a woman who has lived through things that aged her beyond simple chronology. But the severity is absent, and without it, she's not intimidating. She's beautiful.
I reach for her. My hand slides under the sheet to her hip, my thumb tracing the bone, my fingers curving around to the warm skin of her lower back. I pull myself closer. Press my body against hers — my chest to her ribs, my thigh between her legs.
"We have ninety minutes before I need to be at the range."
"I know." She looks at me with an expression that makes my pulse skip. "That's enough."
"Not the way I want it."
I roll on top of her. She lets me — my weight settling across her hips, my hands on her shoulders. I pin her wrists against the pillow, testing, playing, discovering what it feels like to hold down a woman who is six inches taller and entirely capable of reversing the position.
Her wrists are narrow in my grip. The tendons shift beneath my fingers. She watches me with calm curiosity, the way she watches me address a ball — cataloguing, assessing, waiting to see what I'll do with the position I've taken.
I grind down. Slowly. Rolling my hips against hers. She's wearing only the gray T-shirt and underwear, and I'm wearing nothing — I stripped before bed and she pulled me against her back and held me there until I fell asleep — and the friction of cotton against my bare skin sends a line of heat from my core to the back of my skull.
