Riggs cleared his throat. “I’ll get this information to Huxley immediately, boss! You have a wonderful evening!”
“Much better,” I told him. I ended the call and let myself into Quinn’s shop, locking up behind me and letting Herc off the leash. I found Quinn still curled up in bed, sleeping off the lunchtime beer.
He’s an asset. Nothing more.
The late-afternoon sun laid a warm golden stripe over his shoulder and down one arm, illuminating a smattering of freckles. An errant lock of hair curled the wrong way over one ear, and a faint pink imprint of his fingers showed on one cheek from where he must have been lying on his hand.
He was the most beautiful man I’d ever met.
My heart rate went from command-level steady to a funky kind of disjointed thumping as I watched him and cataloged all of the small injuries on his body.
A ragged and torn fingernail from where he’d gnawed on it a few nights before when Herc had slipped his leash on a late-night walk and chased a squirrel down a side street and into the dark night. Two small scratches above his wrist from when I’d accidentally scared him while he was trying to retrieve a lost fork in the bottom of the dishwasher. A yellow-green bruise on his exposed shin from where he’d tripped over my boots on a midnight bathroom visit a week earlier.
It was a habit to catalog small injuries like these on the men under my command, to evaluate the health and wellness of my team. But with Quinn, it was different. These little signs weren’t indicators of operation readiness but indicators of how absurdly naive I was about how much time we’d been spending together lately.
I needed to leave.
And I would. I would leave.
In a minute.
After stripping off my own clothes, I slid into bed next to him and reached out to twist the little errant curl around my finger. Quinn’s eyes fluttered open and caught me staring. The bridge of his nose crinkled in confusion, so I leaned forward to smooth it with my lips.
He smelled warm and soft with sleep. The faint scent of his high-end hair gel lingered on the pillow beneath his head, and for a split second, I imagined burying my face in it simply to inhale as deeply as I could.
“You’re still here,” he murmured. I brushed his lips with mine, stopping him before he could say anything else, before he could remind me of all the reasons I shouldn’t still be here.
The sleepy hum he let out as I deepened the kiss went straight to my dick. I wanted him with the kind of hunger that was bone-deep, like a thirst that hadn’t been quenched, despite all the times I’d had him just like this.
I knew that Quinn believed I showed up on his doorstep because he was convenient or, like last night’s front-hall blow job, because I wanted to sweeten him up. The truth was… Well, I didn’t know what the truth was, exactly, but it was way more complicated. Way harder to control.
The ex-soldier and the fussy wedding planner should have been the punchline to a joke. The Universe’s way of getting back at me for giving Riggs so much shit when he’d fallen for his blue-blooded doctor. But looking at Quinn in that moment, the feelings that swamped me were anything but funny… and the absolute opposite of convenient.
In fact, the desperation I felt to get back inside his body and bury myself there was all-consuming and the closest I’d come to terrified in a very long time.
Want you. Need you.
My hands skated across every inch of his sleep-warmed skin. I heard the hitched intake of breath when my fingers reached his nipples and felt the warm breath against my lips as he exhaled.
I moved my mouth down his throat to the dip at the base and then licked my way down the center of his chest with small, open-mouthed kisses and bites. His heart thundered in his chest, and his legs came up to wrap around my back. I looked up at him and caught his half-lidded eyes for a beat.
You take my breath away.
They were words I would never say out loud to him, but they floated through my mind nonetheless. He was stunning. Despite his tendency to talk back to me and argue every little point, he never failed to make himself vulnerable in bed with me. When we were together like this, touching and sharing, there were no walls between us on either side.
Had I taken the time to stop and think about it, there would have been a Champ-shaped hole in the door of his apartment and a cloud of dust in my wake.
But he was addictive. And once I started touching him… and tasting him… I couldn’t stop for anything.