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I do. His mouth is wet from me and he isn’t the least bit ashamed of it. He slides two fingers inside me and circles me with his thumb, and watches his own hand, and watches my face, and that’s what breaks me. I come hard, my legs shaking, and he keeps my wrists pinned and works me all the way through it without a word.

When I can see again, he lets go. I reach for him and get one stroke of his cock before he takes the condom from the nightstand. The small ordinary sound of the wrapper belongs in the room with us.

He catches my wrists again, above my head this time, and pushes into me in one long steady movement. The stretch is sharp and full and wanted. I wrap my legs around him and pull him deeper.

He sets the pace. Slow at first, so I feel every inch, then harder when my body starts meeting his. The bed knocks the wall. His weight holds me inside the choice I made, not outside my own power.

“Tessa.” It comes out rough. Almost a warning.

I answer by lifting into him. He drives deeper and changes the angle, and the new pressure hits somewhere that makes me close my eyes.

“Open,” he says.

I look at him. The grip, the pace, the stark need in his face pull me toward a second climax that builds around one sight: his control failing only where I invited it to.

I come with his name in my mouth. He follows a few strokes later, buried deep and shuddering, and he lets go of my wrists before the rest of him goes still. I turn my hands and lace our fingers together, and he makes a sound against my hair I’ve never heard a man make.

Afterward he brings water, and a roast-beef sandwich, and another apple cut into four exact quarters.

“You cut another apple,” I say.

“The first one was abandoned evidence.”

I laugh for the first time since I got to Texas, and he looks at me like the sound surprised him too.

I eat two quarters. He eats half the sandwich only after I push the plate between us. When I lie down, he doesn’t take my wrists or decide where my body goes. I choose the space against his chest myself, and his arm comes around me like it’s been waiting.

For tonight, I believe the boundaries we said out loud will hold.

The radio wakes me before dawn.

Static cuts through the lowered speaker, followed by a security voice reading yesterday’s movements for the incoming shift. “Rowe case moved main house to north records annex at sixteen twelve. Stationary at the black water tank seven minutes. Returned main house seventeen forty-one. No further deviation.”

Garrett is awake before the transmission ends. His whole body goes still beside mine.

That tells me he understands the report before I do.

I never told anyone about the water tank.

Chapter 8

Garrett

Tessa gets out of my bed without covering herself, without apologizing, without asking me what the radio meant.

She already knows what it means. I watch her know it.

She dresses in yesterday’s clothes, fast and exact. She leaves the ring on because taking it off would require attention she doesn’t intend to spend on me.

“Don’t call security,” she says when I reach for the radio.

I could stop her at the door. I have men in the hall, locked gates at both roads, and authority over every employee she’ll pass. The knowledge arrives as a list of things I could do, and that list is exactly what she tried to explain to me last night. I step aside.

She collects her case from the guest room and walks down to security without letting me carry anything. Cole has the route report closed and both hands flat on the desk when we come in.

“Open it,” she says.

He looks at me.