Page 65 of Tracked and Taken

Her eyes go to the duffel. To the bra on top of it. To my hand beside the bra. To my face.

I do not have an idea that is going to save me. I have years of experience being caught doing things I should not have been doing, and the years have taught me that the only viable response to caught is cocky, and cocky requires a composure I am going to manufacture while my body is still broadcasting exactly what the silk just did to it. I rebuild the half-grin. The build takes one and a half seconds. By the second second I am a male leaning against the bench with one hand loose on the counter and the smirk fully assembled.

“Torres. You’re early.”

“I am not early. I left the yoke because I heard a noise. A noise that turned out to be a sound from your chest at a frequency I have learned to read, and which was, three minutes ago, at a register I have not previously heard from you in proximity to—“ Her eyes go back to the bra. ”—anything I packed for myself. Specifically.”

“Sweetheart.”

“Do not sweetheart me. Move your hand.”

“My hand is not on the duffel.”

“Your hand was recently on the duffel.”

“My hand was repacking the duffel. I was being a gentleman.”

Her mouth makes a sound that is not a word. “A gentleman would have left the room.”

“A gentleman would have observed an open duffel on a colleague’s bench and would have closed the duffel, sweetheart. Which is what I was doing.”

“With your eyes closed.”

“I closed my eyes for tactical reasons.”

“What tactical reasons.”

The smirk widens. “The visual was overwhelming.”

Her mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. She cycles through approximately six options in real time, each vetoed by the part of her training that does not authorize a Head of Station Security to deploy any of them, and lands on:

“You are a menace.”

“I am an asset.”

“You are a— you are not even trying to look ashamed, you are standing there with the expression a male takes when he has been—“

“You packed silk.”

The sentence arrives without permission. It arrives because it is true, and because my discipline has, in the last five minutes, taken a structural injury it will not recover from in the next thirty seconds. Because I have just had my finger on the bow she packed for me and my cock is still hard from the image of her wearing it and I am not going to pretend I did not see what I saw.

She does not respond. I keep going.

“You packed matching silk, and under the silk you packed lace, and you packed it all the night before we launched, sweetheart, after one day of me. You went back to your quarters after the debrief and you packed for an op you had talked your way onto — you talked yourself into Xor’s seat, sweetheart — and you put that at the bottom, on the chance the contractor you’d spent the day being annoyed by was going to be a male you might want a story about. And you have not unpacked it, because you were waiting to find out if I was going to be the male you wore it for.”

The pause she takes is the pause of a woman whose brain has just been handed a timeline it did not permit. I can see the pulse at her throat climbing. I can smell the shift in her scent — heat under the soap, sharp and specific. My overlay logs it and I let it.

I let it sit. Then:

“Are you trying to seduce me, Natalie?”

Her name. The gravel. The question dropped into the galley like a small, precise device. The word seduce sitting between us with the silk still visible in the open duffel and my body still answering it.

The blush comes up under her skin from her sternum to her jaw in a sweep; my overlay catches it as a one-second pulse spike. The breath she takes is the breath of a woman who has just decided to either kill me or kiss me and is picking the option that requires less paperwork. The heat in her scent spikes with it. I want to put my mouth on the place the blush started.

“You—“

“Yes or no, Natalie.”