Well, he didn’t get to walk away during a fight, and he especially didn’t get to walk away to spend time doing work for her so she’d feel shittier than she already did.
She tracked him down, shoved into his computer lab where he sat, jacket off, sleeves rolled up, hair tied back, a glass of wine in his hand, and his focus on the wiped comp.
“I am not jittery, and that’s a dumbass word.”
“As you like.”
“And you don’t get to do that.” She jabbed a finger at him. “You don’t get to respond in that reasonable voice that’s completely fake so I come off looking unreasonable. It’s fighting dirty.”
He spared her one cool look. “I fight as I like.”
“I don’t have time to fight. I’m trying to do my job because if I don’t somebody else is going to end up on a slab. Morris is going to start charging me rent.”
“Then go do your job, by all means, Lieutenant. I’m not standing in your way.”
“You are, too.” She snatched up his wine, took a gulp. “You’re screwing up my head, making me feel stupid and selfish and—”
“Jittery?” he suggested, and earned a burning, narrowed-eye stare.
“Call me that again, and I swear I’ll punch you.”
He stood. Nose to nose, eye to eye. “Try it. A bloody good brawl might do us both some good.”
She slapped the wineglass down again. “Oh, don’t tempt me.”
“I’d call it more a dare.” He smiled, very deliberately. “Unless you’re too jittery to follow through.”
She didn’t punch him; he’d be expecting that. Instead, she hooked her foot behind his, angled for a takedown. Which he countered, so momentum took them both down.
He tried to turn, take the brunt of the impact, but they both crashed, hard enough to jar bones on the floor of the lab. She scissored her legs, tried a roll that would’ve landed an elbow in his gut, but he’d always been slippery, and blocked it.
He used his superior weight, almost had her pinned. But she was slippery herself, slid clear. And nearly, very nearly, had her knee in his balls.
And she called his tone fighting dirty.
They grappled, rolling and bumping into stools, cabinets, each willing to take or give a few bruises, until he did manage to pin her—and she managed to press her knee, none too gently—against his balls.
His hair had come loose, and fell to curtain his face and hers. Breath came fast over the hum and click of equipment. His eyes, fiercely, furiously blue met her seething brown.
His heart, her heart, beat like war drums.
Then, in the flick of a switch his mouth was on hers, her legs wrapped around him. All the fury, the frustration, the insult, channeled into violent and primal need.
She nipped at his tongue, he tore at her shirt, all while that need, that violence, built and burned. Now they rolled, they grappled, to take in an urgent, almost vicious quest for release.
He filled his hands with her, filled his mouth with her, while his blood raged, while her body arched, quaked. She coiled under him, surrounded him, inflamed him beyond any thought of control.
He yanked her trousers down her hips, ripped away the thin, simple barrier and drove her to gasping, shuddering peak with his hands.
And more and more, from him, from her, in a wild whirlwind of mindless, reckless, impossible lust.
Soaked in the flood of dark pleasure, blind with greed for more, for all, she dragged him to her. Bridging up, she demanded that first savage thrust, then the next, the next. With her legs locked hard around him, she drove him, brutally as spurs to flanks, until he’d filled her. Until he’d emptied her.
Until he’d emptied himself.
He collapsed on her, his breath gone, his mind gone. She’d destroyed him, he thought. She’d stripped him to the bone, then shattered him. Now she lay under him, limp, and he could feel the tremors, those aftershocks of crazed sex shake her.
Or him. Or both of them.