His mouth is warm and unhurried, and Beckett kisses like he has nowhere else to be.
"This," I say as I pull back just far enough to breathe, "is a terrible idea."
"You opened with that." His thumb traces the line of my jaw, and I feel it in places that have no anatomical connection to my jaw whatsoever. "I was hoping for new material."
"I mean it."
"I know you do." He tilts his head, studying me with the particular attention he deploys like a scalpel. "You also kissed me first."
"I'm stress-making decisions. My therapist would have notes."
"Do you have a therapist?"
"I'm about to need one."
He laughs, and I feel it against my mouth before I realize I've closed the distance again, because apparently my self-preservation instinct has taken the night off and left disaster in charge.
This kiss is less careful than the first. His hand slides from my jaw into my hair again and I make a sound I immediately want to recant. His other arm — the bandaged one — tightens at my back with enough pressure to make the room tilt.
I can feel the heat of his bare chest through my dress, a detail my nervous system catalogs with deeply inconvenient thoroughness. I grip the front of his shirt because the alternative is grabbing the counter and I refuse to be that person.
I am so embarrassingly gone for this man.
The thought arrives with the specific horror of a truth you've been outrunning successfully until the exact moment you can't. I've been cataloging him for weeks — the way he fills a doorway, the deliberate quality of his attention, the fact that he stepped in front of a knife without blinking.
Now I'm in Sloan's kitchen cataloging the way his shoulders feel under my hands — broad, solid, the muscle shifting every time he moves — and the sound he makes when I pull at his collar.
The conclusion is the same every time: this is not manageable.
He walks me backward, one slow step, and my lower back finds the counter. He doesn't crowd me against it — he just settles his hands on either side of me, bracketing me without trapping me, giving me the shape of the choice.
"Your brain is still going," he says against the corner of my mouth.
"My brain doesn't have an off switch."
"I've noticed." He pulls back enough to look at me, and the low light from the kitchen catches the line of his cheekbone, the steel-blue of his eyes gone dark at this distance. "What's it saying?"
"That this complicates everything."
"It already complicated everything." His thumb brushes my lower lip, barely there, and my entire nervous system registers the contact like an earthquake measured on equipment nobody told me I owned. "We're just catching up to the complication."
"That's the most convenient reframe I've ever heard."
"I'm a strategic thinker." He leans in and presses his mouth to the hinge of my jaw, and I tilt my head before I've decided to, my fingers tightening in the fabric of his shirt.
His lips trace down to the side of my throat, and I feel the warmth of his breath against my pulse point a half-second before his mouth follows it. My fingers curl into his shirt hard enough that I'm probably leaving wrinkles I'll have to pretend I don't remember making.
The warmth of it spreads under my skin and settles low in my belly. "Beckett."
"Still here."
"I'm serious."
"So am I." He lifts his head, expression is stripped of the performance.
He is just a man looking at a woman like she's the only interesting thing in the room. Which is either the most honest thing anyone has ever aimed at me or the best-executed long con in recorded history.
My ability to tell the difference is compromised by the fact that his hands are warm on my waist and have been slowly drawing me closer by degrees. I only notice because my shirt is now touching his chest and there is no counter left behind me.
I walked into all of it completely voluntarily.
"I don't trust this…" I whisper.
"I know."
"I don't trust you."
"I know that too." Something shifts in his face — resolved. "I'm going to spend a considerable amount of time fixing that."
Oh, that's the most dangerous sentence he's said yet.
Because he says it quietly, without fanfare, like a thing already decided. Not a promise designed to get what he wants. A statement of intent with no expiration date visible.
I pull him back in by the collar and this time neither of us pulls back.
His hands slide to my hips and I stop thinking in complete sentences.
His hand in my hair tightens just enough to make my breath go uneven, and his other hand presses flat against the small of my back and pulls, closing the last inch between us.
The full-length contact of his body against mine produces a sound from somewhere in my throat that I will be taking to my grave.
And then the kissing shifts into a different category.
His mouth moves against mine like he's been thinking about this for longer than tonight, thorough and unhurried.
I feel his hand slide from my lower back to my hip, fingers pressing into the fabric of my dress. The pressure of it makes my thoughts dissolve in sequence, one after another, like a controlled demolition.
I slide my hands up the plane of his chest — warm skin, muscle, the faint ridge of his collarbone — and I feel him exhale hard against my mouth when I do it, and that reaction, the involuntary honesty of it, undoes me.
He wants this as badly as I do.
He breaks the kiss to drag his mouth along my jaw, and I turn my head to follow him on pure reflex, chasing contact, which is humiliating and also completely outside my control at this point.
His lips find the soft skin below my ear and I make a sound that is embarrassingly close to a sigh. I feel him smile against my neck, small and private, like he's pleased in a way he didn't plan for.
"You're going to stop overthinking in approximately thirty seconds," he says against my throat.
"I am not…" His teeth graze the tendon along the side of my neck, the gentlest possible pressure, and my sentence evaporates mid-construction. "That's not…"
"Twenty seconds," he says.
I shut up.