“But,” he continued. “Every moment that I’m not on duty, I want you in my arms. I want one of my legs between yours, I want my hands on your stomach, on the inside of your arms, in your hair.” He let his hands track over her body in all the places that he was mentioning. He watched in fascination while her eyes went even darker than normal. The shadows that arced across her face went deeper as her face pulled into arousal. “I can’t be everything to you, Elena, not yet. But I swear to you that some morning, when all this is over, you’re going to wake up with my mouth here. And here.”
He brushed the back of his hand lightly over the tip of her breasts and swallowed hard when that had her nipples pushing out through the thin cotton of her t-shirt. Knowing he had to do something or he was going to rip her shirt off and taste her, he rolled her over onto her stomach. His hands firm at her hips, he brought her to her knees, falling over her so that their bodies were flush against each other. He pushed the length of his erection against her and spoke hotly into her ear. “I’ll kiss you until you’re begging for me and then you’ll bite a pillow while I take you from the back.”
She whimpered and pushed back on him. Cedric reared back and traced the hourglass of her as he peered down at her from his knees. His length was smashed against her heat, his hands gripping her hips. He let himself imagine this scenario with far fewer clothes before he sat backwards and turned her, straddling her on his lap, her breasts smashed against his chest.
He knew this game was torturous, but it was also a hell of a lot of fun and as close to sex as the two of them could get for the foreseeable future. So he kept going. “Some night, you’re gonna suck on my mouth as much as you want while you ride me.” Her pupils were completely blown as her hands fisted the straps of his undershirt. He took her hips and worked her core against his length one, two, three times. The fabric created a wildly frustrating friction. “I’ll want you to scratch the shit out of my back because then I’ll know that I’m giving it to you just how you like it.”
Not everyone was into dirty talk. Actually, Cedric himself had never particularly been into it. But here he was, painting a filthy picture of the things he was going to do to her and it seemed perfectly right.
He didn’t want there to be a second of confusion over how he felt about her. How much he wanted her.
He tipped Elena back and settled himself between her legs, giving her just a little of his weight as he peered down at her on the bed, her hair tousled and her mouth parted.
“Someday, Elena, I’m gonna know what it’s like to be inside you, as deep as I can go.”
He jutted his hips forward just enough to push her an inch up the bed. She moaned and tightened and reached for him.
“Until then,” he said, kissing her palm as she cupped his cheek. “I’m just going to have to dream about it.”
CHAPTER TEN
Elena looked forward to the day when her knees were no longer made of jelly.
Every moment that she thought she was regaining her sea legs, her brain shot her back to the things that Cedric had said to her, the way he’d moved her body, and she dissolved into a quivering pile of hormones all over again.
He’d left to go start his shift and Elena had launched herself straight into a cold shower. She couldn’t remember ever wanting someone this bad. She was not the kind of woman who said things like she was burning for a man. But, good lord, she was burning for Cedric.
She towel dried her hair, pulled on jeans and a V neck, and caught sight of herself in the mirror. She groaned. Her color was high, her eyes were somehow bright and fuzzy at the same time. Her lips were parted as she panted. She was practically fogging up the mirror. She looked like a dang sex kitten! They were going to tease the shit out of her if she went downstairs like that. As it was, they were probably already teasing Cedric.
Not quite wanting to head downstairs to face Atlas, who was on duty for her that day, Elena putzed around the room for a little bit. In a very uncharacteristic move, she found herself straightening up her things. It wasn’t until she moved a pile of dirty laundry off her desk chair that something caught her eye.
Her laptop.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d opened it. Elena tossed the laundry into her hamper and turned back around, peering across the room at the computer. One of her thumbnails found its way into her mouth.
Though she’d been initially resistant to come to Rook’s bunker because she’d thought it would mean that she couldn’t work, no one had stopped her from working but herself.
Every time her mind had started to wander to work, she’d found herself occupying her time with something else. A game of ping pong or pool or poker. Nonsense conversation with Atlas. Making herself helpful in the kitchen with Sequence. A movie at nighttime. Anything to keep from letting her thoughts dwell on work.
It was because any thoughts of David were so mortally painful that she hadn’t been able to stomach anything that might have reminded her of her friend.
She pulled her thumbnail from her mouth. She realized that working actually kind of sounded good to her. She had nothing else to do. She had all these hours to kill before she could see Cedric again. She definitely wasn’t chomping at the bit to go get teased by Atlas. Why not work?
Elena tucked her computer under her arm and wandered downstairs to find the empty third floor office that she’d been told she could use if she ever wanted to. It had a desk, a ridiculously comfy swivel chair, and a partial view of the East river. Elena took a nice long look at the river before she opened her laptop and it was a good thing she did, because once she started engaging with her work, she didn’t look up again.
It was hours later, the light beaming in from a different set of windows when a knock at the door had her finally looking up from her work.
“You didn’t come down for lunch,” Sequence said as he frowned at her. His blonde beard was much neater than Atlas’s scruff. In fact, all the lines of his haircut were ruthlessly neat. Whenever they were side by side, Elena always kind of thought that Atlas looked like a version of Sequence that had been put together just a little haphazardly. Atlas was bright and unpredictable and goofy. Sequence on the other hand, was never confusing. He could always be relied on to be quiet, somber, and scarce.
But he was confusing her right now. He was the one member of the team who had never once been assigned to be her personal guard. He was strictly on the reconnaissance side of protecting her. Which meant that he had never once come to find her in the bunker. But there he was, standing in the door, holding a plate of what looked like a sandwich with some pasta salad on the side. And was that… yes, that was definitely a glass of iced tea in his other hand.
Elena blinked at him. “Oh. Sorry. I guess I just forgot. I was kind of distracted.”
Sequence, still frowning, lifted the plate and the glass, as if to ask if she wanted them.
“Yeah! Yes, definitely,” Elena said as she slid her laptop to one side. She didn’t realize until he slid the sandwich under her nose just how hungry she really was. “Barbecue tempeh sandwich! Sequence, you spoil me!”
He shrugged and went to check out the view from her window. “I like making the vegan stuff. It’s nice to try new recipes.”
“You’re good at it,” she said with a mouthful of sandwich. When she looked up at him, his eyes were on her laptop, as if he almost wanted to ask what she was occupied with. But, Sequence being Sequence, he said nothing instead.
He got all the way to the door before he turned around, signature frown on his face. “Don’t miss dinner.”
“Cross my heart,” she told him, though her attention was already turning back to the files on her laptop.
***
Cedric was just reporting to Rook that evening, an hour or so before dinner, when a light knock at Rook’s door had both men turning.
“Come in.”
“Sorry to disturb you—oh.” Elena’s cheeks turned pink as she realized that Rook wasn’t alone.
On the other hand, he also wouldn’t have minded if their very first professional interaction since last night wasn’t directly in front of Rook. Alas, here they were.
“You’re not interrupting. Please, come in.”
Cedric could feel Rook’s eyes studying him and he refused to fold under the pressure. It was another reason why Cedric was Rook’s number two. He was perhaps the only member of the human race who never twitched under Rook’s gaze.
Elena took a few steps into the room and didn’t let her eyes go back to Cedric. “I have a security question.”
“Shoot.”
“I need to send emails to my team.”
Rook’s face pulled into a frown. “Well. All right, but I’m not sure why you’d need to email people who are literally never more than three hundred feet from you.”
Elena laughed and the light, bright sound of it had Cedric shifting in his chair. She sounded just like she had in high school. For a moment, with her standing there in her jeans and t-shirt, her mismatched socks and her hair all down her back, she could have been the high school version of herself. Relaxed and whip-smart and not a care in the world.
“No, not my security team. My team at the IWCF. If I’m really going to work from here then I’ll need to be able to contact them. There’s only so much I can do offline.”
She’d worked today? Holy hell! That was such good news. It didn’t take a detective to figure out that Elena’s work had been a consuming passion for her before the bombing. It was a huge part of who she was. Up until now, she obviously hadn’t been ready for it though. Her security team had all wondered when and if she would find her way back to her work.
“Oh. All right. Well, I’ll talk to Sequence about how to do that securely. It will probably mean that we create you a new email address and you will email everything to a third party email that will then forward your messages on to your team and vice versa.”
She bit her lip for a second, looking disappointed. “You mean I won’t be able to access my old emails? I have so much information in there that I don’t have anywhere else.”
“You don’t back it up?” Rook lifted one eyebrow and looked thoroughly disapproving. It was a look that would have made the Queen of England shift guiltily on her feet.
Elena, however, just raised an eyebrow right back at him. “Usually I’m a little too busy with things like saving the elephants to be bothered with office protocol.”
“Fair enough,” Rook replied, and his expression softened with humor. “We’ll discuss it at our briefing tonight and see what we can’t figure out. No promises though.”
***
There was a soft knock on Elena’s door that preceded Cedric slipping inside the room. She heard him make a small noise of approval and happiness at finding her in bed, wrapped up to her chin in covers and waiting for him.
He’d gone to his briefing after dinner and she’d gone up to her room to get a little more work done at her desk. Which led her to slip into pajamas, which led to heavy eyelids, which led to waiting for Ced in bed.
She’d known with all her heart that he was going to come to her that night, even though they hadn’t discussed it.
She wasn’t sleeping, but her eyes were closed. It was too enjoyable to listen to the soft clinking and rustling sounds of him quietly moving around her room. That was him slipping his sneakers off. That was him setting a fresh glass of water on the nightstand. That was his watch being set next to the glass of water. And gently, gently that was the covers being pulled back.
Her eyes still closed and a small smile on her face, Elena lifted one arm and waved Cedric over into her space.
He chuckled. “Are you awake?”
“Little bit,” she told him, groaning in satisfaction as his warmth came up against her. She rolled into the crook of his neck and shoulder, burying her nose somewhere under his ear. “You showered after your meeting.”
He was damp and smelled like soap and man. For one wildly exhilarating moment, when her chin encountered only skin, she thought that he might be shirtless, but the flat of her hand found the fabric of his undershirt. She’d have to open her eyes someday, but right now she was too comfortable in her little cocoon of warmth and good smells and Cedric’s alluring combination of smooth hardness everywhere she touched him.
“I had to wash the day off before I got into your bed.”
“Was it a particularly stinky day?”
He palmed the back of her head before sinking his fingers through her hair to her scalp. He started giving her something between a scratch and a massage. He chuckled again. “No, not particularly.”
“Then you don’t always have to shower before you come see me. I like the way you stink.”
This time he outright laughed. “Thanks?”
“I’m serious,” she told him, burrowing in even further. “I’ve always liked it. I remember the way your room smelled in high school.” She gave a little obliging shiver.
“You’re kidding.”
“Cross my heart. It was like a mixture of laundry detergent, fresh sweat, and boy. It was mouthwatering.”
He didn’t respond to that except to squeeze her tightly to him.
“It was a good day, Elena.”
Something in his tone had her eyes finally coming open. She blinked up at him to see his midnight blue eyes staring down at her, fringed in that alluring auburn. She could smell his cinnamon toothpaste on his breath. Her nose was a centimeter from his neatly trimmed beard and suddenly it was all too much.
Elena hadn’t quite been able to merge all the different versions of Cedric in her mind. There was the boy who she used to know and thought was pretty cute. There was the man she’d just met and thought was pretty cute, a member of her personal security team. And there was the man who’d kissed her. Who’d come to her last night and made her feel things she’d never felt before. Who lit her up at the same time he made her feel safe. Who’d whispered all those dirty things in her ear this morning.
She buried her face in his shoulder because, for a moment, she couldn’t figure out which version of Cedric was holding her. Which version of him had his fingertips tracing circles on her scalp. Which Cedric had his knee between her legs.
She swallowed hard and didn’t let her shyness get the best of her. “What made it so good?”
He laughed and she heard it through the cavern of his chest. “You really have to ask? I woke up in your bed.”
“And then you said some very dirty things to me.”
“Too dirty?” he asked, tipping his shoulder up so that her face rolled back and she had to look him in the eye again. His expression was knit down into concern.
She blushed but held his eyes. “Just dirty enough. You’re my own personal Goldilocks.”
He chuckled and shifted so that they were curled toward one another, foreheads touching and their bodies like two halves of a heart. Even their feet were tangled.
“Good. I wouldn’t want to scare you off before I get to try to convince you that I’m worth keeping around.”
“Cedric, you haven’t tried to convince me once. Which, actually, is exactly what’s convincing me.”
He grunted in response. Color rose on his cheeks and now he was the one glancing shyly down.
She was charmed. “You’re probably the least duplicitous person I’ve ever met, Cedric. You come as you are. Which is what makes it so easy to know you.”
He just breathed slow and even for a minute, his eyes tracing back and forth, making that fringe of auburn eyelashes slowly ripple. She knew him well enough by now to know that he was processing her words. Carefully filing them away in his head the way he carefully organized files on a desk. Everything at perfect right angles.
“I don
’t understand how some people can have more than one personality,” he finally said. “Or act differently in some situations than they do in others. It would be so much to keep track of. I’d never be able to keep it all straight.”
Just like that, she brought all her versions of Cedric into focus and they all circled down into one image. The man in front of her. The man who was currently playing with the hem of her sleeve, trying to get it to lay flat against her skin.
A great affection rolled up through Elena. She suddenly had the insane urge to put him in the bathtub and gently soap him up. She wanted to rub the knots out of his back. She wanted to feed him soup.
“Jesus,” she mumbled under her breath, trying to get a hold of herself before she spontaneously combusted into a pre-teen superfan, holding a posterboard with the words marry me, Cedric emblazoned in glitter.
“What?”
“Nothing. I was just thinking about what you said. I’ve never been very good at altering who I am to different situations either. But I’ve had to learn to do it a lot working at the IWCF.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, so much of getting that legislature passed was done through lobbying reps and senators.”
“Ah, so you had to learn how to schmooze.” Cedric couldn’t help but smile as he pictured Elena in slick business attire, smoking cigars alongside a Don Draper lookalike.
“More or less. I was never very good at it. I think I must roll my eyes with every part of my body.” She tucked her hands under her chin. “I also think it helped that I’m an attractive woman. That goes a long way in rooms like that.”
He frowned. “You’re probably right.”
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