Page 142 of Silver Elite

Or maybe I don’t. It’s bad enough that I’m attracted to my enemy. Maybe it’s better if I don’t catch these glimpses into his humanity.

It’s hard to focus with these conflicting emotions warring inside me. I wouldn’t be having this problem if Hadley was supervising me. Then again, the idea of having to sit on Hadley’s lap makes me nauseous.

I prefer Cross’s lap.

A little too much.

Breaking eye contact, he touches his ear to reactivate the comm. Then, before I can blink, his hand slides beneath the hem of my dress and his mouth finds my neck.

I break out in shivers. It takes all my willpower not to moan out loud as his lips travel over the column of my throat. Kissing. Tasting.

“Fucking delicious,” he mutters. He kisses his way up to my neck, my ear, then says, “Now push me off you. Tell them you can’t do this, you’re not ready for this line of work, and leave.”

But I don’t want to.It feels so good here in his lap. He’s warm and hard and kissing my neck. I want to stay here forever, and I hate myself for it.

“Go to your drop zone and return to base.”

He cups my chin and turns my face toward his lips, millimeters from mine.

“Push me off.”

I slap his face away and scramble off his lap.

Anger sizzles in his eyes. “Get back here.”

“I’m sorry.” I snatch my bag and hurry to the bar where Shenise stands. “I’m sorry,” I tell her, anguished. “I can’t do that. I just can’t. I’m not…Maybe one day, but not…not tonight. I can’t.”

I don’t give her the opportunity to speak. I spin on my heel and leave the bar as ordered. My heels slap the pavement as I head toward the alley from which I came. The black car is still there, waiting.

I don’t even know what the purpose of this op was. If I did well or not. All I know is that my body is still burning from Cross’s touch.

As I slide into the back seat, I hear his voice in my earpiece.

“Dove. Report to my office for a debrief.”

Chapter 32

I wait in his office.

It’s late. I want to change into my sleep clothes and slide into bed. I want to shut off my brain so I can stop obsessing over my body’s traitorous responses to him.

But his majesty, Captain Cross, wants a debrief.

I wander around the large space, not shy about being nosy. There are no personal items on his desk. Just a holoscreen and a tablet. The conference table was cluttered the last couple of times I was here, but tonight there’s very little on it, only a stack of maps.

Papermaps, which I find fascinating. A projector sits in the center of the table, so I assume they use holo-maps as well, but the fact that there’s any paper in here at all is odd to me.

Cross doesn’t seem like an Old Era guy. And while I’m not an Old Era girl myself by any stretch of the imagination, I think it would be incredible to own a paper book. Flip through real, tangible pages. It’s nearly impossible to procure paper products unless you’re willing to pay through the nose for them. The Last War destroyed so much of the planet, and over a century later, lumber still isn’t readily available. The trees that were replanted never quite grew as tall as they shouldhave. There are entire “forests” east of the Blacklands that are nothing more than a sea of flimsy twigs.

The door swings open.

Cross notes me leaning against the map table. His eyes drift down my bare legs, my ankles, the low heels strapped to my feet. Then he raises them to my cleavage. I realize my left strap is falling off my shoulder and push it back up. He tracks that, too.

“You did good,” he says, surprising me with the compliment.

“Really? Because I feel like I did nothing.” Self-reproach darkens my mood. “I asked for a job and then blew it.”

“You did exactly what you were supposed to do.”

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