Page 58 of Locked and Loaded

His hand came up and settled on the side of her neck, his thumb brushing the line of her jaw, and then he kissed her. Not like the first time. The first time had been measured, controlled, a test. This was not a test. This was a man who had run out of reasons not to touch her and had decided to stop looking for new ones.

She kissed him back with her free hand braced against his chest. The key was still in her other hand, clenched so tight the iron fronds bit into her palm. She didn't care. His skin was hot from the shower, and his mouth was doing things that made thinking impossible, and she didn't want to think. She wanted to stay right here in this steam-filled room where Chloe wasn't in danger, and the monster Konstantinos Georgiou wasn't top of mind, and she wasn't a woman with a stolen key and a bad plan.

His hand slid from her neck to her hip and pulled her closer. The towel was damp against her jeans. She skimmed her fingers on the scar on his ribs. She traced it without meaning to, and he made a sound low in his throat that she felt all the way down her spine.

She dropped the key.

It hit the tile with a clatter that neither of them looked at.

His mouth left hers and found the corner of her jaw, then the line of her throat. She tipped her head back to give him more room, and he took it, working lower until she felt her pulse hammering against his lips and had to grab his shoulder to stay upright. Her fingers found the edge of the towel at his hip, and he went still for half a second, waiting to see if she'd stop, and when she didn't, he made a rough sound against her skin that told her exactly how much restraint that had cost him.

His hands found the hem of her blouse and pulled it loose from her jeans, and his palms came up flat against her bare back, warm and slightly damp from the shower, pressing her into him until there was no space left between them at all. Each of his heartbeats resonated under her fingertips, faster than she'd have guessed a man that controlled would allow himself.

"Lennox." Her name was rough in his mouth, half warning, half something that wasn't a warning at all.

"Don't stop."

"I'm not⁠—”

He stopped.

His whole body went rigid under her hands. For one long moment, he didn't move at all, didn't breathe, his mouth still against her throat, and she thought at first it was restraint, some final scrap of discipline reasserting itself. Then she felt it. The change in him wasn't slow. It was total. His hand flattened against her back, not in affection now, but in warning, and his head came up, turning toward the door, every line of his body taut and alert in a way that had nothing to do with her.

"What—” she started.

He pressed a finger to her lips without looking at her. His eyes had gone flinty, fixed on something beyond the bathroom wall, cataloging sound the way she'd watched him catalog her thoughts all afternoon. Then she heard it too. A sound from somewhere in the house. A door. Footsteps that didn't belong to either of them.

"Stay here," he breathed. It wasn't a request.

He moved past her and pulled on his t-shirt and jeans in quick, silent motions, the towel gone, the moment gone with it. He slid his feet into his boots. The gun appeared in his hand from somewhere she didn't see, a black shape that seemed to materialize out of the steam. He crossed to the door, closing it until it was only open an inch.

Lennox stood frozen, her back against the counter with the copper basin, her heart hammering for an entirely different reason now. The sensation of his mouth still lingered on her neck. She could still taste him. And she was looking at the key on the floor between them, the iron key that was her way out, and realizing she had no idea what she wanted more.

Dragan heard it a second time before he moved, and this time there was no mistaking it. Two sets of footsteps. Not staff. Staff didn't come until Monday, and staff didn't move like that, careful and even and spaced too far apart to be casual.

He should have heard them the first time. That was the thought that kept surfacing, unwelcome, while the rest of his mind ran through exits and the layout of a house he knew better than his own hands. He should have had ten seconds of warning instead of three. He hadn't had ten seconds because he'd had his mouth on Lennox’s throat and his hands under her shirt and every part of his training switched off like a man who'd never spent a night in his life waiting for someone to come through a door.

He eased into the hallway and pulled the door most of the way shut behind him, leaving Lennox in a thin bar of light. Stupid. He knew it was stupid before he'd finished the thought. He'd been in this game a long time, and he had never once let himself get that far gone, not with a target moving toward him, not with a woman who had just tried to lift a key off his jeans while he stood under running water.

He'd known she was in the bathroom before she opened the door. He'd heard her on the tile, felt the change in the air when the door moved. He could have stopped her before she touched the key. He hadn't wanted to. That was the part that bothered him more than the footsteps did.

He moved down the upper hallway low and fast, hugging the wall, the gun steady in his hand. The house was quiet in the particular way a house went quiet when it had something to hide. He counted doors. Counted the seconds since the second footstep. Two men, moving across the courtyard below searching the rooms, one by one.

He reached the top of the stairs and flattened himself against the wall, and below him in the courtyard he saw more movement, two more shapes crossing between the pool and the far archway. He watched them long enough to be sure, and then he was moving again back toward the bathroom and Lennox.

He'd let himself get comfortable. He didn't get comfortable. That was the job. The one rule he never broke, and he'd broken it over the space of one afternoon because a woman with shaking hands and a missing sister's worth of guilt had looked at him like he was the only solid thing left in her world, and something in him that he'd forced into dormancy for a long time had decided to answer that.

More movement in the courtyard had the effect of refocusing him on the here and now. Settled something in him, cold and immediate, cleaner than anything he'd felt in the bathroom ten minutes ago. Whatever this was, whatever he'd let himself want with his hands on her back and his mouth on her skin, it could wait. It would have to wait. Right now, there were two men in his house who wanted Lennox dead.

He came to the bathroom door to find Lennox in the hallway crouched low, bag slung across her body. He nodded at her and put his finger to his lips. He grabbed her hand, kissed the palm, and then turned and guided it to the waistband of his jeans.

They were going to have to make a run for it. He could probably take the two men inside, but who knew how many were outside, and he couldn’t guarantee Lennox would be safe if he started shooting. He glanced back at her. “Follow me closely,” he whispered, and then, at her nod, turned back and raised his gun.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

He crouched low and led her down the hallway toward her bedroom. They passed the staircase and turned the corner. He silently pushed open another door and brought Lennox inside. Then he closed it as quietly as possible, locking it.

"They're in the courtyard. It’s only a matter of a few minutes before they start up the stairs. That means we go up."