Page 39 of Riggs
I tip my head back to look at him. “You wedged the door before you kissed me like that?”
“Operational foreplay,” he says, dead serious, and I laugh so hard I have to wipe my eyes.
He kisses the tears from the corners, thumbs gentle at my cheekbones. Then his mouth softens and the joke slides intosomething warm and unguarded. “You do that to me,” he says quietly, like a confession. “The smiling. The… all of it.”
I smooth my hand over his beard, memorizing the scratch and heat. “Good,” I say, because I want him to have this ease forever. “I’ll keep the invoice itemized.”
“Line one,” he murmurs, nosing my hair aside to kiss the sensitive spot behind my ear. “Kisses requiring immediate payment.” Another kiss. “Line two—breath-matching services.” His lips hover over mine. “Line three—existing together.”
“Paid in full,” I whisper, and meet him halfway.
We move to get a drink of water. He hands me the glass and watches me drink like it’s as important as everything that came before. When I set it down, he slides back under the sheet, pulls me against him with that tidy, possessive care that makes my whole body unclench, and we let the room go quiet around us.
Outside, the world goes on. Inside, it’s just skin and breath and the easy weight of his arm banded over my waist.
“Vanessa,” he says, already softer with sleep. “You good?”
I press a kiss to his sternum, right over the steady drum I’ve come to trust. “So good,” I answer. “You?”
“Always,” he says, and the last thing I feel before I drift is his smile against my hair, sunrise warm, like it plans to be here in the morning too.
13
Riggs
Austin feels like a stage that forgot to build a backstage. Music in the air, heat on the pavement, cameras already waiting when we roll up. The hotel’s side lane does its job—clean approach, keyed door—but by the time we clear the elevator and step into the lobby to make it look like we’re normal, the phones bloom like night flowers.
“Eyes up,” I murmur. Vanessa’s fingers find mine. We move.
The lobby’s a show: neon reflection off polished stone, a bachelorette troop in matching boots, two paparazzi with long glass pretending they’re just dudes with souvenirs. We give them twenty seconds. That’s the currency: not access, a sliver of proximity. Vanessa turns her head just enough, and I do the thing I said we would—hand at her waist, angle my body to block half the frame, then tip her chin and kiss her like it’s for them, but really it’s for us.
The crowd inhales, then breaks into cheers so loud the concierge claps.Flash. Flash.Rae in my ear:“Riggs + V is trending with thirteen heart emojis and a lasso.”
I don’t even pretend to know what that means.
Upstairs, I wedge the door, run the lock, test the slider, sweep the bathroom, glance at the closet, notch the chair under the handle. Vanessa leans on the window and watches the city hum. I’m about to move toward her, wrap her in my arms, but there’s a knock on the door.
Brice. He slips in with a breeze of cologne and urgency. “Dinner,” he announces. “There’s a chef who wants to host, and the brand wants five minutes of ‘see you in the wild’—photo op, tiny meet and greet, candids. Nothing crazy.”
“No,” I say.
“Absolutely,” Vanessa says, at the same time.
Brice looks between us.
I cross my arms over my chest. “Anyone who was waiting at the airport is annoyed. Annoyed men get inventive. If we go out, we do it in a box I built.”
“Define your box?” Vanessa asks.
“Private room with two exits and a kitchen door I can own. Cap headcount at twenty-five. No live posts. We control the angle to the street. Driver at the service lane only.” I look at Brice. “And forty minutes, hard out.”
Brice pretends to think and immediately nods. “Done.” He’s already texting.
I sharpen the plan. Lucas hands off to a local driver he trusts—Lalo, former Army MP, eyes like flint. Rae scrubs the restaurant network. Jaxson sets a geofence around the block. Hayes texts:
Hayes: no device chatter near you.
Which means if anything pops, it’ll be feet and faces, not radios.
