Page 28 of The Night Of
Something sparked inside Jonathan, like he’d brushed gas with a naked flame. His breath hitched.
“Tell me what you want, Jonathan. Tell me if you still want me.”
Jonathan was as taut as a violin string, his fingers digging into the stuffing of the back of the couch. He stared, his eyes burning into me, setting me on fire.
“Because I’ll be across this office in a fucking second if you do. I’ll put my hands on you again. I’ll put my lips on you again. Tell me: is that what you want?”
When he spoke, the words seemed dragged from his center of his soul. “Yes.” His breath shook. “I wantyou, Sean.”
I spun him and pushed him up against the couch, then brought our whole bodies together, from ankles to collarbones. I ran my hands down his arms and plucked each finger from where they were making craters in the cushions. “Jonathan.” I was so close I could count his eyelashes.
His eyes were nuclear-bright, impaling me. “I didn’t think you were ever going to come back.”
“Jonathan,” I said again. I took his tie in my fist, wrapping the silk around and around my hand. “There’s nowhere in the world I would ever choose to be, other than with you.”
His lips parted on a puff of air. His eyes darted to my mouth and back up. I watched his pupils dilate. Felt him harden against me, his cock pulsing against my own between our suit pants. He tried to press forward, tried to close the final inches between us. I pulled back, only far enough to keep out of reach.
“Sean—” His voice was strained. “You said you’d kiss me.”
I wrapped my fist around the last inches of his tie. Stared into his eyes. “I said I’d put my lips on you.” I leaned in until my lips found his throat, the hot patch of skin beneath his jaw. His pulse leaped beneath my tongue as I laved his skin.
His whole body shivered. He moaned, squeezed my hand, and pushed into me, rubbing his hips, his cock, against mine. “Sean—”
I bit down on his neck above the starched white linen of his collar. He shivered. Tipped his head back, offering more of himself to me. If I didn’t stop, President Jonathan Sharp was going to be walking around with my hickey on his throat. I groaned.
I wrapped my arms around him and yanked him against me as I seized his lips, and I folded his arms behind his back, trapping him in my hold.
Jonathan poured himself into the kiss, his lips desperate, his tongue frantically seeking mine, a year’s worth of hunger and longing exploding from him as he arched against me. All those sleepless nights and brokenhearted days bled out of me as I tasted him again. I saw starlight in my memories, remembered the shape of his smile. Remembered the touch of his hand on mine, his voice saying,I want to tell you something…
I could have spent the rest of time like that, kissing Jonathan until the walls crumbled around us.
But that wasn’t an option.
A knock sounded on the closed door that led to the outer Oval, where the secretaries and personal aides had their cramped offices. “Mr. President?” Mrs. Reilly, Baker’s secretary, called through the door, knocking again. “Mr. President, we need to prep you for your eleven o’clock.”
Jonathan squeezed my hand behind his back so hard I felt my bones shift. We stared into each other, breathing each other’s oxygen, our lips so close I could feel the heat of his skin. We’d devoured each other a moment ago, and yet this was somehow even more intimate, even more raw.
Damn interruptions. Didn’t the rest of the world know I needed this man? That we needed each other? I wanted to lock the Oval Office doors, tell Mrs. Reilly and the Secret Service and the West Wing that Jonathan was unavailable for the rest of the day, that he was busy, that he and I had unfinished business we had to take care of. But…
Jonathan was the president. I was a Secret Service agent. Our roles slipped around us again as I pressed my forehead to his and brushed our lips together one more time.
More knocking. “One minute, Mrs. Reilly,” Jonathan called.
His fingers gripped my jacket sleeve as I pulled back, like a cat’s claws refusing to give up their possession. There had always been a million things that churned behind Jonathan’s stoic expression, emotions and thoughts that the world never saw a hint of. What was he thinking, what was he feeling, now? Was it anything close to the way my heart was pounding, how my knees were weak and trembling inside my suit pants? Was he thinking this was our second chance to make this work? Or was it our second chance to screw everything up?
Jonathan cleared his throat. “I have the warrant for you. The chief judge signed it under seal.”
Investigation. Warrant. I nodded, forcing my mind to change tracks, to come back to the present. “Okay. Yeah. Good. Thank you. I need that to talk to the White House physician.”
Jonathan nodded.
“Are you able to get me whatever President Baker was working on? The First Lady says she thinks he’d been depressed. Overwhelmed.”
“That was Hardacre.” Jonathan’s frown was back, furrowing his forehead. “I’d never seen Steven so upset about anything before. Hardacre’s disappearance was destroying him. I think it was the very real possibility that Hardacre had turned against the United States and that he was responsible for the deaths of our CIA officers. Someone who had taken the oath and who was supposed to honor and protect this country, turned so viciously against her.”
Our eyes met. Neither of us said a word, but we were both clearly thinking the same thing. Jonathan had just described exactly who we were chasing, too. Someone who had turned against their country, their president, and put a bullet in his brain.
How was Hardacre connected to all of this? Was he a proximate cause, or was he a direct factor? A direct actor, even? And where was he? He hadn’t been spotted anywhere in the world. Could he be here, right under our noses?
