Page 33 of Faultline

The afternoon turns dark early. Clouds push over the ridgeline from the west and drop the temperature until the cold bleeds through the cabin wall behind my chair.

Liam feeds the woodstove and adjusts the damper, and the heat pushes back through the room in a slow wave that reaches my ankles first.

I'm deep in the corporate filings when his hand closes over the top of my laptop screen and presses it shut.

The gesture is calm. Unhurried. The same deliberate economy he brings to everything he does with his hands. He folds the screen down against the keyboard with quiet authority. He's decided something and doesn't intend to explain what.

I look up at him. He's standing beside my chair, close enough that I can see the grain of dried pitch on his knuckles. His eyes are on me with an intensity that has nothing to do with shell companies.

"I've been reading the same paragraph long enough to have it memorized," I say.

"I know. You stopped scrolling a while ago."

He's been watching me closely enough to track my scroll speed. Heat pools at the base of my spine and stays there.

"Come here," he says.

Two words. No explanation. He showed me where the firearms were and how to arm the sensor. He maps defensive terrain in his sleep.

And right now he's standing in his kitchen asking me to close the distance between us with nothing in his voice except certainty.

I could say no. I could say I need to finish the filings. I could redirect the conversation back to Cascade and shell companies and the women on my list who aren't safe. I could do all of the smart things I've trained myself to do when a man makes a claim on my attention, because I know what happens when you give it without counting the cost.

I stand up.

The chair scrapes back, and I'm in front of him. He's bigger than me by enough that my eye line hits his collarbone. I tilt my chin up and let him see everything I'm not going to put into words. The same way I did that first night in this kitchen.

The difference is that this isn't adrenaline. The adrenaline ran out days ago. This is the thing underneath it. The thing that's been growing in the space between his coffee mug and mine on the counter, in the silence of shared mornings, in the weight of an admission neither of us took back.

His hand comes up and cups the side of my face. The palm is rough. The touch is not. His thumb traces the line of my jaw, and the gentleness of it cracks something I was counting on to protect me. Force I can fight. Force I understand.

This careful attention from hands that split firewood and build firebreaks is the thing I have no defense against, and he knows it.

This isn't the man from that first night. That man was holding back and losing. This man has already decided what he wants. The control is settled into his shoulders, his hands, the even rhythm of his breathing. He's not fighting himself anymore.

The question forms behind my teeth before I can stop it. What is this. What are we doing. The words that would give me back the footing I'm losing under the pressure of his thumb on my jaw.

"It's the thing I didn't take back," he says, before I can ask. As if he read the question in my face and decided I don't need to voice it. As if the answer is his to give and the timing is his to choose.

His mouth finds mine, and the kiss is different from every kiss before it. Slow. Thorough. The kind of kiss a man gives when he's not trying to prove anything, when the urgency has burned down to something deeper and hotter and harder to extinguish. His hand stays on my face, holding me where he wants me, and his other hand slides to the small of my back and presses me into him.

The contact is total. Chest to chest, hip to hip, my hands flat against his sternum where his heartbeat thuds under my palm. Steady. Controlled.

The opposite of what's happening below his belt, where the evidence of what he wants is pressed thick against my stomach.

He breaks the kiss long enough to pull my shirt over my head, and the air hits my bare skin.

His gaze drops to my body and stays, and his expression strips away everything professional I've ever used as armor. The advocate is gone. The case builder is gone. What's left is a woman being studied by someone who intends to know every inch of what he's looking at.

"Liam."

"I'm here." His hands find my waist, and he lifts me onto the edge of the kitchen table. My files scatter. The legal pad slides to the floor.

His hips press between my thighs, and the angle puts him exactly where the seam of my jeans is doing nothing to protect me from what I'm feeling.

"Don't move," he says against my jaw. His lips trace down my throat to the hollow just below my ear where the pulse runs close to the surface. I tip my head back because the alternative is fighting what my body already decided, and the sound I make when his teeth graze the tendon in my neck isn't one I'd produce in front of a jury.

His hands work the clasp of my bra without fumbling. The fabric falls away. His palms close over me, rough skin against soft, and my breath leaves my body in a rush that reaches my toes.