The Thing About Love

by Julie James

  “In a minute.” Moving her hips, she rubbed his erection against her and closed her eyes in pleasure. “Mmm.”

  Christ. Palming the condom, he slid his hands to the lacy wisp of fabric at her hip. He gave it a sharp yank, and her underwear fell by the wayside in two pieces.

  Problem solved.

  With a somewhat wry expression, she reached between them to pull out the front half of her underwear, and dropped it to the floor.

  He grinned wickedly. “I did ask nicely first.” Sort of.

  “Speaking of asking questions, I have one for you.” She cocked her head, smoothing her hands up his chest. “Have I ever told you I have this . . . slight oral fixation?”

  Oh . . . fuck, yes.

  “I think you may have mentioned it,” he said, trying to play it cool.

  With a knowing smile, she climbed off his lap and stepped back from the bed. She curled her finger, indicating he should move closer to the edge. He did so, resting his feet on the floor.

  Then she knelt down in front him.

  “Jessica . . .” He trailed off. She hadn’t even started yet, and he was already throbbing. Just seeing her, on her knees like this, was enough to get his blood pumping.

  She took his cock in her hand. “Tell me what you like.”

  Everything about you, said a voice inside his head. “You can start by wrapping those pretty lips around me.”

  Groaning when she slid him into her mouth, he threaded his fingers into her hair. “Take me deeper . . . just like that.” Leaning back, he watched as the sexiest woman he’d ever met licked, sucked, stroked, and teased him with her mouth and hands, bringing him treacherously close to his breaking point.

  “Look up at me.” When her eyes met his, he felt something raw and primal clawing at him. “You are the hottest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Holding his gaze, she teasingly circled her tongue around the head of his cock.

  He needed to be inside her.

  Now.

  “Come up here,” he said.

  She eased him out of her mouth and pressed a soft kiss against his inner thigh, then climbed onto the bed. He grabbed the condom and handed it to her, inhaling sharply when one of her hands brushed against his balls as she rolled the condom over him.

  The saucy minx gave him a coy smile.

  “Turn around,” he growled.

  She did so, getting onto her hands and knees. He smoothed a hand down her back and along the curve of her ass, then gripped his cock and pushed the head into her warm, wet entrance. Looking down, he watched as he sank deeper into her, not stopping until he was all the way in.

  She moaned, her body clenching tight around him.

  Fuck, she felt amazing. He gritted his teeth, forcing himself not to move as she adjusted to him. “Tell me if I go too hard.”

  “You won’t.” She gasped as he slid in and out.

  When he sensed she was ready, he tightened his fingers around her hips and pulled back, then thrust fast and deep. She whimpered in pleasure, so he did it again, and then faster, smacking their bodies together as he took her hard. The sounds of her moans and his ragged breathing filled the room, and when she moved down onto her elbows, letting him take complete control, he groaned at the raw intimacy of the moment.

  “John. Touch me,” she said, her voice thick with need.

  Feeling her body tremble, he leaned down and reached between her legs, the words pouring out of him in a low, possessive growl. “I love when you’re on the edge like this. You’re so goddamn sweet. So mine.”

  She cried out, clenching around him like a glove. He thrust hard and came with her, groaning as his body shuddered in release from an orgasm so strong he thought his eyes might roll back in his head.

  Gasping, he sank against her. Feeling her legs shake, he flattened his hand against the bed to avoid crushing her as he collapsed.

  • • •

  After disposing of the condom in the bathroom, John washed his hands and gave himself a long look in the mirror.

  You’re so goddamn sweet. So mine.

  So, that last part had just sort of slipped out.

  Dirty talk, obviously. He was hardly the first man to get carried away with grandiose words when on the brink of an orgasm. Surely Jessica understood he hadn’t been saying that he thought she was his, his. Pfft. Clearly, that wasn’t the case. He knew their time together had an expiration date—in eight days, he would ride off into the sunset and start a new phase of his life in Virginia. He and Jessica hadn’t had any conversations about what happened after that, nor did he expect them to. She, too, would move on, and this fling between them would become mere memory, a fun time they both looked back on fondly.

  Hopefully, they would even stay friends. He would text her sometime when he was back in Chicago visiting his dad, Nate, and Wes, and he’d meet her for coffee, or a drink. He would tell her about HRT, and she would catch him up on life in the Chicago field office and her newest cases, and maybe even slip in a mention of some guy she was dating, a nice guy who took her to fancy restaurants and made her laugh and had met her family and—

  John relaxed his jaw, which had suddenly clenched tight.

  Anyway.

  He headed back out to the bedroom and found Jessica lying facedown on the bed, her head tucked in one arm. When he took a seat on the edge of the mattress, she propped herself up on one elbow.

  “Everything okay?” she asked.

  In light of the So mine slip-up, he was careful to sound as casual as ever. “After that”—he nodded pointedly at the bed—“everything is definitely okay.”

  Quick to get off that subject, he reached for the room service menu on the nightstand. “Don’t you have some tradition about ordering a glass of wine and dessert after finishing a job? We should follow Todd’s lead and splurge on the good stuff tonight. This was, after all, officially my last undercover assignment.”

  She glanced down at the menu and then smiled.

  “That’s certainly worth the good stuff.”

  • • •

  Later that night, after they’d polished off a key lime torte and a bottle of wine (the latter of which had been consumed, in part, during a sexy tryst in the oversized bathtub), Jessica finished brushing her teeth and came out of the bathroom to find John already asleep.

  With a slight smile, she shut off the lamp on her nightstand and climbed into bed. As she settled in, he rolled onto his side and draped an arm over her hip, his hand coming to rest against her stomach. Probably he was half asleep and barely aware of what he was doing, but still, the intimacy of the gesture felt nice. More than nice, even.

  Ahem, her inner pragmatic said pointedly.

  Relax, it’s just a little cuddling, Jessica reassured the voice. She never claimed she didn’t like John—okay, fine, at least not in the last week or so. They were friends and partners, and there was, admittedly, a strong physical attraction between them. But there was a limit to how deep her feelings could go—a limit to how deep she would allow them to go.

  With him leaving, for good, in little more than a week, she didn’t have any other choice in the matter.

  27

  Thursday evening, John surveyed the small loft condo he’d rented for the summer, satisfied with the progress he, Nate, and Wes had made in just a couple of hours.

  The movers were coming at seven A.M. tomorrow morning to load all of the furniture and kitchen items, as well as most of his clothes and other personal effects, onto a truck that would arrive in Virginia on Wednesday, after the holiday weekend. Given how relatively little stuff he had, particularly after the breakup with Alicia, John doubted it would take the movers long—with any luck, he’d make it into the office by ten o’clock.

  By this point, he’d been phased out of all his cases, so it wasn’t like he had any actual work to do. But he had a
cubicle to clean out, people he wanted to see before he left, and he also had a feeling, given the surreptitious conversations that ended as soon as someone spotted him heading back to his desk, that his squad mates had planned a going-away party for him. Which was exactly what he’d told them not to do, but, presumably, the assholes couldn’t pass up the chance to embarrass him one last time.

  Squad loyalty required nothing less.

  In the flyaway kitchen, Wes taped up a box of glassware and dinnerware and used a Sharpie to write Fragile on the top and sides. John had focused on packing his clothes—with the exception of a week’s worth of stuff that he would throw into a suitcase and take with him—and his brother was in charge of boxing up photo albums, picture frames, and other irreplaceable items that John preferred to transport himself, just to be safe.

  “Check out the dinosaur pajamas on this guy.” Sitting on the living room floor, Nate held up a photo from an album their dad had given John after their mom died.

  John moved closer, grinning at the picture of the two of them with their mom on a Christmas morning about thirty years ago. “Says the guy wearing a onesie with ducks on it.”

  “Dude, I’m, what, eighteen months old there? I make that shit work.” Nate paused for a moment, taking in the photo. “Mom looks so young.”

  John nodded, his expression softening, too. “She does.” Then he pointed to another photo on the opposite page. “Check out Dad’s sideburns. He looks like Wolverine.” As Nate chuckled, John grabbed the last of the garment boxes and stacked it along with the others in the corner of the room.

  He’d gone over to his dad’s house for dinner the night before, one final time before leaving town. That hadn’t been an easy good-bye, but for the most part John had kept things light and positive. Indeed, that had been his modus operandi since he’d returned from Jacksonville: Instead of dwelling on everything he was leaving behind in Chicago, he was keeping his eyes on the prize. By this time next week, he’d be a NOThead, knee-deep in training and on his way to becoming either a sniper or assaulter on the only U.S. law enforcement unit capable of responding on four hours’ notice to terrorist or criminal threats anywhere in the country.

  Servare vitas.

  Hope you saved room to finally put “badass” on your résumé.

  Welcome to the best job in the FBI.

  Hell, yes, he was pumped and ready for that.

  “Well, what do we have here?” Nate said, interrupting John’s thoughts.

  John turned and saw his brother holding another photo album, one he’d dug out of God-only-knew-where, a random collection of photos John had taken while in the Army. Also tucked in there, because he hadn’t known where else to put them—filing skills were hardly his strength—were two class photos from the FBI Academy. The first had been taken at the shooting range, the trainees all dressed in their new agent uniforms. The second was a more formal shot in the auditorium on graduation day, with everyone wearing dark suits, white shirts, and muted ties for the men.

  His brother held one of the two eight-by-ten photos in his hand. “So this is the infamous Jessica Harlow.” He looked slyly at John. “I’m guessing, of the two women in the class, that she’s the noticeably hot blonde.”

  Before John could answer, Wes scurried across the room to check out the photo. “Let me see.” Standing behind Nate, he grinned approvingly. “Ah, now I get why you were crushing on her so hard.”

  John shook his head as he walked over. At this point, it wasn’t even worth responding to their comments. He took the photo from Nate and saw that it was the one taken at the shooting range. “I haven’t seen this picture in years.”

  There they were, all forty-one of them, dressed in their blue polo shirts, khaki pants, and hiking boots. John’s eyes lingered on Jessica, who stood off to the right in the front row.

  Wes peered over his shoulder. “Isn’t she a little short to be a special agent?”

  John smiled. Now that Wes mentioned it, she did look smaller than usual in this photo. It must’ve been the lack of high heels. “You don’t notice it in person. She has a very commanding aura about her.”

  Nate and Wes exchanged a look.

  Pretty sure he didn’t want to know what that was all about, John handed the photo back to his brother. “Think you can fit the rest of that into one box? I’m running out of trunk space here.”

  Determined to keep moving, John grabbed his suitcase out of the closet and began packing the remainder of his clothes.

  • • •

  Two hours, three fist-bumps, and one joking—but solid—man hug later, John stood on the sidewalk in front of his building, watching Wes’s car drive off.

  It still felt weird sometimes, only seeing Wes. Two months ago, if John had been leaving, there would’ve been a bigger send-off that would’ve included Rob, Matt, and Lucas, probably at some trendy bar with a rooftop deck where Rob knew somebody who could get them a table. Rob would’ve made a toast to John that would’ve been funny but surprisingly touching—for all his many flaws, the guy was charismatic, at least—and Matt would’ve gotten drunk and hit on ten girls he had no shot of landing, while Lucas would’ve spent the entire night focused on one girl, whom he did, actually, have a shot of landing, if he hadn’t waited so long to make his move that another guy had beaten him to the punch.

  For a fleeting second, John wondered what the three of them were up to, and whether they’d heard the news, through Wes, that he’d made HRT and was moving to Virginia. He assumed—although he sure as hell hadn’t asked—that Rob was still seeing Alicia, so presumably she knew as well.

  That whole situation seemed like a lifetime ago.

  In the eight weeks that had passed since he’d walked in on Alicia and Rob, he’d been through the hell of Selection, found out that he’d made the Hostage Rescue Team, and had participated in a sting operation targeting the mayor of one of the largest cities in the United States.

  And then, of course, there was Jessica.

  She would be his last good-bye, which, given their history, was perhaps the most surprising turn of events of all. He hadn’t seen her for the past couple days—she’d been in South Carolina, preparing for the undercover op that was going down tonight—but the plan was for him to spend the night at her place tomorrow. He’d made a joke about it, naturally, claiming that he needed a place to crash since his own bed would be halfway to Virginia by then. But the truth of the matter was, there was no one else with whom he’d rather spend his last evening in Chicago.

  Which reminded him . . .

  He pulled his phone out of his jeans pocket. They’d talked about the case before she left, so he knew Jessica wasn’t scheduled to make her Lexington, South Carolina, acting debut until midnight, when the scumbag cop who liked to prey on female victims was back on shift. Right about now, she was probably with the case agents and backup, setting up the hotel room the FBI had commandeered to use as the scene of the alleged domestic assault.

  John could practically see the determined gleam in her eyes as she counted down the minutes until show time.

  Text me when you’re done tonight, he typed.

  She’d be fine. He knew that. He just wanted to hear it straight from her, when this whole thing was over. The undercover agent in him might have been cheering her on from the sidelines, and might even have been a little jealous, professionally, over some of the details of her cover—apparently, they’d hired a special effects makeup artist to give her fake bruises, and that was some cool, sneaky shit—but the man in him seemed to be more focused on the fact that she was over eight hundred miles away and on an assignment where the best possible outcome was that an armed police officer tried to sexually assault her.

  John took a moment to consider that, then added another sentence to his text message.

  Doesn’t matter how late it is.

  He hit send, then headed back
inside. There, he found his brother relaxing on the couch, beer in one hand and checking his phone with the other.

  John grabbed another beer from the fridge and joined him.

  “I’ve been doing some research on your superhero camp,” Nate said, conversationally, as he put his phone away. “Honestly, I’d never heard of the Hostage Rescue Team until you mentioned it. Thought maybe you’d just made it up to sound cool.”

  John took a sip of his beer. “And you’re satisfied now that it really exists?”

  “Yep. And from what I read, it’s the real deal.” Nate paused. “In fact, I read that two HRT operators were killed just a couple years ago, during some training exercise off the coast of Virginia Beach.” He glanced over. “I assume you know about that already.”

  John nodded, his tone turning more sober. “Yes.” Apparently, the two operators had been fast-roping out of a helicopter that had encountered some sort of difficulty, and they’d fallen 150 feet into the water. There were no acceptable losses in the FBI, and every effort was made to prevent such tragedies from occurring—that was why HRT trained as hard as it did. Nevertheless, every operator who joined the team did so with a full understanding of the risks involved.

  Nate looked over and held John’s gaze. “Just be careful and all that.”

  John smiled slightly, not fooled by the faux-casual tone and touched by his brother’s rare display of concern. “I will.”

  With a nod, seemingly glad to have that off his chest, Nate eased back and put his feet up on the coffee table. “Now, about this Jessica with the ‘commanding aura’ you keep talking about.”

  “I’m pretty sure the only reason we keep talking about her is because you keep bringing her up.”

  Nate ignored this. “Kind of a shame that things between you two seem to be heating up right when you’re about to leave.”

  John considered that. “Most likely, it wouldn’t have turned into anything serious even if I weren’t leaving. She just got divorced and isn’t looking for a relationship—especially not with someone she works with. Hell, she even told me she only slept with me because I’m leaving.”