LITMIR.BIZ

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Not as airy. Didn’t feel like home at all.

      On the other hand, it felt like they were getting away with something just being here together. Cole left his papers and headed for the door, hesitating at the kitchen entry just in time to find Selena standing in the entry hall. Dripping, bedraggled, cheeks flushed and breath still coming fast. He didn’t even have to ask. She’d tried to out-batter and outrun her demons again.

      She hadn’t yet acknowledged that it didn’t really work. Like a drug, the effect wore off. Like a drug, it seemed to take more and more out of her each time.

      He didn’t have to ask what had triggered her this time. He’d known since receiving her phone call from town that she’d have a hard night. He held out a hand. Wordlessly, she removed wet shoes, then stripped off her soaked sweats and gave them over to him. Given his own personal clothes management, he would have tossed them on the floor of the small laundry closet—but for Selena, he hung them in the bathroom. Passing the thermostat on the way back, he turned it up a degree or two.

      He found her at the darkened living room’s picture window, staring out rain-smeared glass into the darkness. Still in her workout shorts and sports bra top, all long, lean muscle and more angles than most women. Unless, from this view, you looked at her ass.

      Cole always looked at her ass.

      He adjusted his jeans to allow for the predictable response, and went to join her. He knew enough to make noise as he entered the room, and to wait for the slight shift of her head that meant she’d heard him, lost in thought as she was. Cole had enough of his own nightmares to respect hers…and he’d seen her in action. He respected that, too.

      He came up behind her, snaking an arm around her long waist to flatten his hand against her stomach. Hard abdominals met his touch, as tense as the rest of her. He kissed her bare shoulder next to the black strap and rested his chin there, as glad for her height as ever.

      It made for a good fit.

      She didn’t resist as he snugged her back against his chest. He said, “You’re not one of the bad guys. It wouldn’t upset you like this if you were.” And he didn’t know why she snorted softly in true amusement, but it didn’t really matter because she relaxed slightly under his hand, fitting in more securely against his chest and making him regret the old collared polo he had on. He kissed the side of her neck, lingering there.

      She said, “If only I hadn’t—”

      He snorted back, right against the soft skin of her neck, and then nipped that skin lightly in apology. But his voice held no sign of doubt. “And what if some guy on the street had grabbed you like that? Do you think he’d be in it for fun and games? You reacted just right, darlin’.”

      “Then I should have stopped sooner. I should have known the guy was with the two I’d already exposed.”

      He shrugged; he knew she’d feel it. “Lena, they train us. They send us out into the field, and they make us who we are. They want us because of who we are. Dobry is the one who put his trainees at risk. Dobry is the one who’s ripe for a lawsuit—from you as much as from that poor dumb kid.” Not so much younger than either of them, that trainee hadn’t been. Not physically. Emotionally…psychologically…just an infant.

      Selena released a pent-up huff of air, amusement at the thought of bringing suit against Dobry. “Well, I am a lawyer.”

      “See?” he said, speaking the words into the satin skin below her earlobe. “He’d never know what hit him. You always have that effect on me, too.” He slid his hand lower, over skintight spandex, and tugged her bottom back into his growing erection. He managed to lose half of her next words, his eyes closing, his breath catching.

      “—miss it?”

      “Um,” he said. “What?”

      Not that she was immune to his touch; she tilted her head slightly so he could nuzzle aside her wet hair, tasting salt and rain. “Being in the field.”

      Ah. Guilt of another sort, also on her shoulders. He’d been a contract operative for the CIA before the incident at the Berzhaan capital—before he’d been caught on film and tape and digital media, tangled up in crutches and an air cast and heading to meet his equally battered wife at the steps of the capitol.

      He had one of those pictures, an eight-by-ten glossy, tucked away. It captured everything about their marriage worth saving—the intensity of their feelings, fierce and devoted and out there on their faces for the world to see. It captured Selena’s grit, her triumphant emergence from the smoking, battered building—bruised and bloodied, beaten and shot and nonetheless coming down those steps on her own two feet.

      Of course, it also captured his scruffy blond hair and charming all-American features, devoid of the disguise he’d worn on his way into the situation. He had, at that moment, become a liability to the very agency that found his operational flexibility to be such an asset. No more laid-back, come-what-may exfiltrations, no more flying by the seat of his spy pants.

      They hadn’t even picked up the bill for his broken leg. He’d come after Selena in spite of the CIA, not because of it.

      So now he played at security consulting, appeasing paranoid companies and individuals whose imagined problems far outstripped their reality.

      Good money, though.

      And it would do, for now.

      Selena tensed in his arms; he blew gently against her neck. “Relax,” he said, and used all his breaking and entering skills to dip his fingers inside the waistband of that darned spandex. “Just thinking. Of course I miss it. But the leg’s just now getting back to where it’ll hold up to real stress.” He pushed against her without thinking and nearly lost his train of thought again. It wasn’t just the touching, the contact, the delicious pressure…

      It was knowing what she’d do to him if she ever turned around and took him on.

      He cleared his throat. “And anyway,” he managed, “this is great timing. Being in the same country as each other for more than a week at a time is definitely an asset when it comes to the whole family thing.”

      Oops. That had been a mistake. The whole family thing hadn’t gone so well. A for effort, not so great for results. They’d checked; they’d learned that Selena’s erratic cycles were more than just inconvenient. That getting pregnant would take a lot more than what happened naturally every time they got their hands on each other. And then it came…her words soft, a little sad. “And look how well that’s turning out.”

      “Ah,” he said, regret making his throat hum. “Darlin’, that’s turning out just perfect.” And it always did. Perfect moments of intimacy, pillow talk cementing the bond that had once been fracturing.

      Not to mention the marriage counseling.

      He realized he’d introduced a rhythm to his movement against her, and that the blood was fast draining from his brain as she accepted his words and matched his movement. He was doomed if he kept talking, because he would soon be babbling nonsense. “We’ll find a way, but in the meantime…just…” That last word turned into a strangled noise as she offered up a little twist of her hips, her stomach muscles tensing beneath his hand. When had his other hand crept up to cradle her breast? He had no idea. He pulled her tighter, but it didn’t keep her from turning in his arms and wrapping one long leg around his hips so they met properly, all the right spots in all the right ways. While he was still gasping from that, she somehow shucked out of that spandex.

      “Oh, thank goodness,” he said fervently. And he wasn’t sure how he ended up on the floor on his back, or when she’d gotten his jeans off, or how she’d so quickly positioned herself to take him in, but it didn’t matter. He gasped, and he rocked his head back, and he said, “Oh…thank—”

      And she laughed, and she took him on.

      Chapter 2

      Selena

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