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“Rachel?”
“Hood?” Her voice comes to him more faintly than it did just seconds ago. Bathroom? Balcony? The closet where their suitcases are stored? Jacob can’t be certain, and uncertainty unnerves him.
Even though it’s Rachel.
Perhaps, in part, precisely because it’s Rachel. After more than five years together, Jacob’s used to having her always somewhere in his line of sight, her presence a warm sardonic weight at the edges of his concentration no matter what either of them is doing at the time. Too, he’s accustomed to knowing she’s watching him. Watching out for him.
Not being able to see her—or to know if she can see him—makes things … strange.
Good strange, Jacob thinks, and laughs, finding the small sound surprisingly loud with no movement distracting from his ability to process it. Good strange. What a phrase. Too much time with his sister’s children is having a truly deleterious effect on his vocabulary.
Although, to be fair, his present predicament might also have something to do with that.
He pulls experimentally against the ties leading from the smooth leather cuffs to the lightweight harness anchored to the legs of the hotel bed, less for any practical reason—Rachel put him in them, so they’re guaranteed to be secure—than for the new spike of pleasure that results. The effect of enforced limitation of mobility on the libido of the modern American male… Jacob doesn’t think any respectable journal would publish that article—JAMA, perhaps, or Playboy—but he can’t think of a man who wouldn’t read it. Maybe he should write the Director, ask for a research sabbatical for the purpose… the thought slides away from his fevered brain, too distracted by new input to follow its usual logical paths. If he were in this position, tied and spread and vulnerable and knowing what he knows about himself now, in front of anyone else in the world—even Maggie, at least as they were then—
Well. He wouldn’t be here. There is no soul still alive on this earth to whom he would give this kind of trust except for Rachel.
And that, in some ways, is more frightening than the potential deadly outcomes inherent in every one of the complex crimes they’ve solved together over the five years they’ve been partners.
“Hood.” Jacob jerks, startled out of proportion to the quiet word, and the cuffs’ metal catches emit a faint jingle. She’s so close to him now. How did she get that close without him knowing she’d done so? After everything they’ve done, everything they’ve been through together, he’d have sworn he could recognize her in the dark without hesitation or error, and yet—
“Hood. What is it?” Even closer—and lower, somewhere around the level at which he’s tied down flat on his back. He can feel her warmth all along the sensitized skin of his left side. She must be on her knees by him, must be able to look down the length of his body and see him hard and— and helpless, see everything. He can feel his pulse in his cock.
Dear God.
He twists against the cuffs at wrists and ankles, suddenly desperate for her to touch him, to— to ground him, somehow.
“Hood. Shh. I’m here. I’m right here.” A hand comes down gently on his forehead above the soft black blindfold, brushes his sweat-drenched hair away from his eyes, strokes down the line of his jaw. He turns his head into her touch without volition, almost against his will. How does she know these things about him?
“Okay, listen.” He can hear the wry smile in her voice. “First, this is not a life-or-death thing we’re doing here. There’s nothing you have to get right or wrong, and there is nothing—nothing, Hood—that you have to say ‘yes’ to.”
“To be a true scientist requires experimentation, Rachel.”
“So you’ve told me, more than once. A lot more, actually. That doesn’t change the rule. The rule is, you say stop and this stops. You got me?”
“I do.”
And he does. He knows this about her—about them. He’s known it from their fourth case together.
“Stop,” he’d told her abruptly, holding out a hand to arrest her progress as she stepped, gun drawn, into the unnaturally quiet mall bookstore. And she’d actually stopped, trusting him to have a reason for the request. Which he had—diatomaceous earth had no business being underfoot in the Romance section of a Waldenbooks, strongly suggesting the angry young book clerk for whom they were searching had used it to stabilize the second batch of nitroglycerine he’d made in his college physics lab after the first, fragile one turned his ex-girlfriend’s SUV into a car bomb at rush hour—but she’d had no way of knowing any of that at the time. Unlike his previous handlers, however, she’d trusted him—his word, his knowledge, the very existence of the competence all the others had assumed he entirely lacked. She’d treated their partnership as an exchange between equals, rather than an onerous and unwelcome task.
The partnership has … changed since then. Its essential, balanced nature has not.
He turns his head towards where he thinks she is, the cool fabric of the pillow an arousing shock against his hot face, and says it again. “I do. I understand.”
“Okay. Good.” A sudden kiss, deep and hot and far too brief, leaves him breathless, straining up for more. “Second, you’re hiding in your head again. I distinctly recall telling you to stop that. This is about doing stuff for the sheer fun of it, about letting yourself feel good. I know you know how”—a warm, wet tongue swipes across one nipple, and Jacob moans through gritted teeth—“so how about you do what I tell you to for once?”
It’s not in him to be biddable without at least a token protest, if then. “That’s unfair. I always—”
The hand not in his hair comes down over his mouth. “Shut up, Hood.” The tenderness in Rachel’s voice surprises him, even after all this time. “I have one word for you: Albuquerque.” He feels the blush flame up in his face. More heat for his already overstimulated body to accommodate—if it can. “Okay, so you remember Albuquerque. Glad to hear it. Here are a few more words: New Orleans. Des Moines. The Twin Cities. Toronto. Back of nowhere, New Jersey. Pick your point on the map.”
Jacob can think of no sufficiently propitiatory response to this damning recitation, even if he could make himself heard through the hand over his lips. He settles for licking out at the hand in question, tracing the line between two of Rachel’s fingers with the tip of his tongue, and hears her sudden shaky intake of breath above him. Good, so good to know it isn’t just him caught up in this.
But then, it never is. Equality and equilibrium, in intimate heat and darkness just as in the cold public light of their professional day.
“So no, you don’t ‘always,’ do you.” The tremble in Rachel’s voice is almost inaudible. Such iron will, Jacob thinks, not for the first time. “Try to break your usual pattern tonight, hm?”
“Patterns are usual by definition, Rachel. It’s the nature of the phenomenon.” His voice is thicker than he remembers it being a moment ago, hoarser. Hungrier. Both of Rachel’s hands leave his body abruptly, and he shivers in their absence. “I—yes. Yes. I’ll try.”
“Good.” The promise in that one word sends another wave of heat over him and sharpens his hearing still further, until he can hear the sounds the buttons on her oversized men’s-oxford sleep shirt make as they’re shoved through the buttonholes, hear the whisper of the cloth over her skin and then the soft, diffuse sound of the shirt landing somewhere at the end of her throwing reach.
So close. Almost there.
“Hood. Jesus. I could look at you like this for hours.” Rachel’s voice comes from the foot of the bed this time.
Hours… Jacob’s not sure he’s got all that many minutes left in him. “I— Rachel, please, I— ”
“I know, Hood.” The mattress dips, and he can feel his body tilt towards her as she moves. Four separate points of microtectonic shift—she’s crawling up his body, all wiry strength and hot eyes and focus—why can’t he see, he wants to see this, he wants to put his hands on her and pull her up and turn her over and bury himself in her, he needs—
Rachel’s weight comes down on his groin, soft heat all along the length of his cock as she settles herself astride him, and he groans, arching up involuntarily, rubbing hard against her. He arches again, trying to get more contact, to deepen that maddening touch, and Rachel hisses in pleasure.
“One…more…minute,” she says, voice tight. The muscles in her thighs contract against his hips as she kneels up, her hand closing hard around the base of his cock, holding him steady, and then lowers herself onto him, engulfing him in tight, wet heat. She turns and reaches back over him, once and then again—he can hear her soft grunt as her movements seat him deeper inside her—and a moment later his feet are free, still cuffed but untethered.
“Move your legs, Hood. Bend your knees. Please.” He’s complied before she finishes the command. She leans back against his thighs, and they groan in unison at the sensations the movement engenders. “Ahh. Yesss. Finally.”
Finally.
And then she’s moving on him, strong hips circling, rotating, keeping him deeply embedded in her body, giving him no relief from the sensation of being surrounded.
Jacob feels punch-drunk: swamped in sensation, every nerve afire, rooted in the physical to the near-complete exclusion of the rational mind. His hips thrust up sharply, again and again, so close, so close, over and over and please, please, please, why can’t he get there?
“Rachel— I need— I need— please—” He can’t remember ever sounding like this before, can’t remember ever needing to come this badly in his life. He can’t— he can’t—
“Jacob.”
Her body tightens around him as she leans down, the tips of her breasts grazing his chest. He stills, panting open-mouthed. Her shaking fingers touch his face, push the blindfold up and off his eyes.
All he can see is her.
“I see you, too,” Rachel tells him, voice husky and eyes huge, and only then does he realize he’s said it out loud. “And you can, Jacob. You can. I’ve got you. Let it go, now. Let go.”
His full-body shudder shakes them both. He shoves his hips up into her helplessly, going impossibly deeper one more time, and keeps his eyes on her beloved face until the pleasure finally blinds him.
*****
“Hmm. That was … an experiment worth conducting.”
The deep, almost subvocal rasp vibrates against the thin skin on the side of Rachel’s throat. Wow. She actually made him come so hard he passed out. Cool. She always thought Cosmo made that shit up to sell more copies of the latest makeup ads and recycled sex and diet tips that pass for articles in womens’-mag world. But Hood’s never this hard to hear unless he’s been asleep, that freakish miracle brain of his finally down for the count and taking his already scratchy voice with it … or unless he’s been using that voice hard for a while.
Or both. Yeah, in this case Rachel’s inclined to go with both.
Under the circumstances, she personally would be inclined to call it an experiment worth repeating. Especially considering she didn’t do too badly out of the whole thing herself in terms of, y’know, the coming-her-brains out department. Not to mention that really, the whole bondage thing has some tremendous security advantages, since when Hood’s cuffed to her bed he is demonstrably not out there in the world getting himself shot at or making weapons out of duct tape and lipstick and automatic pencils or drinking poisoned water just to make sure it’s safe or whatever.
Plus the smell of good leather? More specifically, the smell of good leather on Hood? There is really just no lose there.
Still, Rachel thinks, she wouldn’t go getting all scientific about this so soon afterwards—like, within minutes. Not while her body’s still humming like a generator, aftershocks rippling through her unpredictably. Not while Hood is still, for Christ’s sake, cuffed to the head of the bed.
Rachel feels yet another lecture on timing coming on.
“Jesus, Hood.” She pries open the eye closest to him and tries for her patented bad-assed-agent glare. Hood’s wry smile suggest it might be lacking a little of its customary power, which given her post-orgasmic semi-comatose state is not surprising. “Seriously? Sex that good, and that’s your idea of pillow talk?”
“You’d prefer I attempt to describe that astonishing experience in flowery purple prose?” He bends his neck far enough to press a soft, smiling kiss to her forehead, then relaxes back onto the pillow.
Hmm. “Okay, point.” Rachel pushes her hair out of her eyes and shifts her body higher on the bed over Hood’s, despite the protests of her overworked muscles. She reaches his wrists and releases the D-rings that attach the cuffs to the harness tethers on that end.
One of Hood’s strong hands immediately comes to rest in the small of her back. Looking annoyingly awake for someone who came as hard the bruises on his wrists say he did, he picks up one of her hands in his other one and raises it to his lips, kissing each of her fingers in turn. The fingers stretch and curl against his mouth without her asking them to, like the paws of a sated cat. He looks at her the whole time he does it, like the fog has cleared on that absent-minded professor thing he rocks most days and she’s suddenly come square into his focus.
It’s like waking up in the sun. Rachel can’t imagine ever getting tired of it.
Of this. Of what they have.
After a while, his gaze sharpens consideringly, analytically. Rachel’s intrigued, and also a little wary. She knows that look.
“I know that look. You’re on Planet Hood. What’s up?” She pushes up on her elbows against his chest and peers more closely at him.
Long or short, the pauses between his words always tell a story. She wonders what tale’s coming next.
“Hood?” He’s silent, still watching her, intent.
Finally: “The opposite of Hobson’s choice,” he tells her, nodding definitively, that warm slow delighted smile spreading across his face.
...uh-HUH. Rachel raises one eyebrow at him. “Clarify, please?”
“Infinite possibility,” Hood explains, as though the connection should be obvious.
It isn't. Rachel rolls her eyes and opens her mouth to ask, for the eight hundredth time and as patiently as possible—which isn’t very, at the moment, since what she really wants to be doing is sleeping like the dead until it’s a halfway decent hour for conversation—what in the world he’s talking about.
But she doesn’t get the chance. His mouth is suddenly on hers, his hands on her shoulders rolling them over until she’s pinned beneath him against the untidy sheets and then moving to cup her face in his palms so he can deepen the kiss.
“Yes,” he finally says, breaking the kiss and lifting his head, still smiling at her. Then he slides his arms around her, turns his head into the crook of her shoulder, and is instantly asleep.
Rachel shifts her legs to cradle his hips and hides her own smile against his dark hair. She has no idea what he’s agreeing to, let alone what in the hell Hobson has to do with it. Right now, though, she doesn’t need to know.
Hood is safe.
They’re good.
Complications—and explanations, and promises—can wait for later, after coffee and a shower and more coffee and the latest, inevitable scientific impossibility before breakfast.