Page 88 of Rope Burn

I can't hold it.

I kept my eyes open going over a fence for Grant Corbin with a bull on top of me. I kept them open on a barroom floor in Cheyenne. Then she looks at me as if she knows every inch of what I am and means to stay anyway, and my eyes close.

Her hand comes up to my face. When she reached for me like this before, she gripped my jaw like a dare. Tonight her fingertips settle along my cheekbone, and her thumb travels once over the scar across the bridge of my nose. She doesn't ask me to open my eyes. She holds my face so I don't have to.

It takes me with my eyes still closed. With nothing to watch, there's only her: the slick heat of her still pulsing around me, her breath hot against my throat, her thumb resting on the scar. My rhythm breaks. I drive into her twice more, as deep as her body will take me, and my fingers fist in her hair and pull her mouth hard against my throat.

Then it tears up from the base of my spine and hits all at once. I come in long, punishing pulses, spilling deep inside her, each one jerking my hips tight to hers and pinning her thigh over my hip. She clenches around me with the last of her own release and pulls another pulse out of me, and another, until my whole body shakes with it.

The sound comes up out of me raw. For once I don't bury it in her shoulder or kill it in my throat. I let her hear it. I don't hear the air conditioner, the lot, or anything but her breathing. Even after it's over, I don't let go of her.

When I can open my eyes again, hers are waiting.

For a long time, neither of us speaks. The air conditioner ticks and rattles under the window.

Out in the lot, a car door slams. I hear it, and I don't move. She feels me not move. Her thumb goes still on my cheek.

I roll onto my back and pull her with me. She settles against my side with her head on my shoulder. Her hand lies flat over the bruise on my ribs.

"You closed your eyes," she says quietly.

"I know."

"You've never done that."

"I know that, too." I turn my head on the pillow so she has to look at me. "I love you."

It comes out in the voice I used on Kessinger, level and certain, a fact entered into the record. She goes still against me.

"You're supposed to work up to that," she says.

"I worked up to it for weeks. You were there for all of it."

She props herself up on one elbow and looks down at me, and there's no agent anywhere in her face. "I love you," she says. "It's a terrible idea, and I've known it since you walked out of Torres's building with the sun coming up."

"Then we agree."

The corner of her mouth moves. Once, in a motel lot, she corrected me on that. "This time we agree."

She lies back down against me with her breath slowing on my skin. After a while her hand goes loose, and she sleeps.

I lie awake with the order folded in my shirt pocket across the room and my arm around her. She shifts in her sleep, and my grip tightens before I think about it.

My whole life, strength has meant knowing how hard to hold and when to let go. I'm finally learning which one this is.

20

MORGAN

The transfer paperwork rides in my bag on the passenger seat, already signed. I signed it this morning at a borrowed desk in the Albuquerque field office before the break-room coffee finished brewing, and I didn't pause long enough to reread the page. The ink had dried by the time I merged onto the interstate.

Now the mountains stand jagged against the eastern sky, and the folder is still the lightest thing in the car. At the last light before the fairgrounds, I slide the page halfway out.

Reassignment: Intelligence Program, Human Trafficking Pattern Analysis. Report date: Monday.

My name sits underneath in blue ink, as steady as a notary's. The expedited review closed a few weeks ago. My suspension ran its course, and the decision that came out the other end was fairer than I expected and harder than I wanted.

The undercover career I built is finished. The finding says the Bureau won't send me back out under a borrowed name. I compromised myself with a man inside my own investigation, and a clean ending doesn't change that. I filed an appeal on the restriction anyway, and it's sitting in a queue in Washington where it can wait its turn.