Overture (North Security 1)

Only a few months ago, my bow fell still in the middle of a song. Now it comes to a graceful close at the end of one I wrote myself. Instead of waiting for Liam to react to the silence, I stand and cross the threshold.

He sits at his office, not making any pretense of work. His large flat-screen monitor is dark. The black leather blotter on his desk is empty. The lamp is off.

“Did you like it?” I ask.

“It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.”

A window behind him provides the only illumination. Moonlight limns his broad shoulders and fair hair. I think more than anything that’s happened, this is what marks adulthood. Fighting for the life I want.

Fighting for the man I love.

Circling his desk, I come to stand in front of him. His chair is turned slightly so that I can kneel down almost in front of him. The way he did to me a thousand times, a light touch on my knee, looking me in the eyes like I was important to him.

The deep green of his eyes is only a suggestion in the shadows.

I touch my palms to his knees. “You don’t want to hear me play in concert?”

“I want it more than life,” he says, his voice rough—even rougher when my hands skate on top of his thighs. I already fought for him with music. Now there’s a different kind of battle to be waged. “More than I should.”

“More than writing letters,” I say, a small mocking note.

“We’re not—” A sharp indrawn breath as I feel his hardness through his slacks. “We’re not going to be pen pals.”

I shake my head slowly. “That’s not what I want from you anyway.”

He moves as if to push me away, only to fall still when I touch the head of his cock. That’s when he goes completely still, hissing out a breath. “What you want is impossible.”

“Explain it to me,” I say, tracing a ridge that circles him. Everything about this is new and exciting. I would enjoy it if there weren’t so much on the line.

“I’m not—Oh God, sweetheart. I’m not made for that. All I do is hurt people, all I do is trap them. Starve them. Make them close their eyes and go to sleep.”

His words don’t make sense on the surface, but they do on a deep level. I feel them resonate on the same level as my bone-deep certainties. That I’ll always be left by a man who doesn’t love me. And he’s so worried about trapping me that he’s determined to leave. We make quite a pair.

“You don’t have to protect me anymore,” I whisper. “I’m grown-up now.”

“You won’t ever be old enough, understand? It’s not about your age. It’s about the fact that I’m responsible for you. I can’t let you die.”

Maybe it should scare me—that word. I can’t let you die. Except this is a man who has lived with death as his shadow for so long. I see what it costs him to send men and women into danger. What it costs him to risk his own brothers with every mission.

I find the button to his slacks and work them, clumsy in the dark. And then his zipper. At any moment he might stop me. His breathing saws in and out, audible even though he can run twelve miles a morning barely breaking a sweat. This is what’s straining him, the hardness of his cock in my hand. It feels softer than I expected. The salt tang of him comes to me in the dark, and I nudge toward him, in search of his desire. My nose bumps his cock first, and a shudder runs through him.

“Samantha,” he says on a helpless chant. “Samantha. Samantha.”

Blindly I search for him in the dark, my lips landing on some velvet-burn place on him. I send my tongue to feel him, to trace a raised vein. Then I pull back, toward the tip, finding that ridge again, exploring it with my mouth while he pants and groans above me, a benediction in the night.

“Is this okay?” I say, pausing uncertainly.

His hand lands on top of my head, falling

down to stroke my hair, to grab it in unruly fistfuls. “It’s more than okay. It’s incredible. I can’t take it. I’m dying.”

I might not know what he means except that he did the same thing to me while I played Beethoven’s “5 Secrets.” Which means I know that dying means he’s close—but not there yet. So I lick him again, remembering the rhythm he used between my legs.

His hips push forward in small thrusts, uncontrolled, almost as if he can’t stop them. His cock moves through the circle of my fist, the same way he did in the shower.

My lips feel swollen as I pull back, sliding against the soft head of his cock as I speak. “You were angry at me that I kept the Coach Price thing a secret, but how many secrets are you keeping from me?”

“It’s my job to keep those secrets.”