Page 82 of Faultline

Tosh pulls the flannel over her head and drops it on the chair beside the door. The thermal underneath clings to her ribs and the narrow span of her waist. She pulls her phone from her back pocket and sets it on the table.

"I need to call Nancy in an hour. The U.S. Attorney's team starts witness interviews tomorrow, and if I don't have a coordination plan ready, they'll build their own, and their version won't protect Pete."

She's already working. Burying a man and building a federal case in the same morning without breaking stride.

The sight of her standing in my kitchen after everything—the grave, the gathering, the war that's building around us—reaches past every defense I've built since the bridge went down and finds the thing I've been holding in place.

"An hour," I say.

She looks up. Reads my face. Her eyes narrow with the focused precision she brings to evidence she hasn't finished cataloging.

"You're looking at me like you're about to do something you can't take back."

"That's because I am."

I cross the kitchen. My hand finds her jaw, tilting her face up, and the contact runs through my palm and locks into my gut. Not gentle. Not urgent. The grip of a man who has decided what happens next.

"Liam." My name in her mouth. Low. Steady. The voice of a woman who sees exactly what's happening behind my expression and isn't going to look away.

"I'm not gentle," I say.

"I know."

"I want to be. Right now. With you." The words come out stripped. I don't know how to touch her without fighting something, and the admission costs me more than silence ever has.

Her hand comes up and covers mine on her jaw. Her fingers press against my knuckles—the same knuckles scraped raw on the bridge embankment, still bruised, still carrying the evidence of those I pulled off that span and the one I couldn't reach.

"Then be gentle," she says. "I'll survive it."

What I hear from my own throat has no language in it. Something I've held together through every escalation, every fire, every night spent mapping defensive positions instead of sleeping finally gives. It starts behind my sternum and comes out rough and unfinished and entirely hers.

I kiss her. Slowly. The pace is wrong for what my body wants, and the discipline it takes to hold the tempo carves through my control with more force than urgency ever has. Her mouth opens beneath mine, warm, yielding, and I take it the same way I take everything from her—completely, on my terms, refusing to rush what I've decided to make last.

My hands find the hem of her thermal and pull it over her head. The light from the kitchen window moves across her bare skin.

I press my mouth to the hollow of her throat where her pulse is running fast beneath the surface. My lips trace down to the ridge of her collarbone, and I bite down softly enough that her breath catches but hard enough to leave the impression of my teeth.

The sound she makes is small, involuntary, the kind she only gives up when she's stopped thinking.

I want every one of those sounds. Every single one she's got. And I'm going to take my time collecting them.

I sweep her up. One arm under her knees, the other behind her back, and her weight settles against my chest like she was built to fit there. I carry her down the hallway to the bedroom that stopped being mine and started being ours on the night she moved from the guest room. Neither of us mentioned it then. Neither of us needs to now.

I lay her on the bed, take off her boots and follow her down, bracing my weight on one arm while my free hand works the button of her jeans. The denim slides off her hips. The cotton underneath is damp enough that my jaw tightens when my fingers brush against it, and I strip it away with a restraint that takes more discipline than roughness ever required.

She reaches for my shirt. I catch her wrists. Hold them against the mattress above her head with one hand while I look at her—bare beneath me, flushed and breathing hard, her eyes locked on mine with the defiance of a woman who knows she's not in charge and isn't going to pretend otherwise.

"Not yet," I say. "I'm not done."

I release her wrists. She keeps them where I put them.

My mouth starts at her collarbone and works down. The slope of her breast. The underside, where her skin is thinnest and my tongue draws a tremor out of her that runs the length of her body. I close my lips over one nipple and suck until her spine bows off the mattress, then move to the other and give it the same unhurried attention.

My hand slides down her stomach and settles between her thighs.

She's wet. Slick and swollen against my fingers, and the groan I make at the contact has nothing polished about it.

I part her with two fingers and find her clit with my thumb, working unhurried circles while her legs fall open and her hands fist in the sheets above her head where I left them.