It doesn’t.
This is exactly where I’m supposed to be—well, minus a crazy Russian wanting to kill me.
“That just happened,” I muse, rubbing a palm along the smooth skin of his back. He twitches inside me, a reminder that we’re still intimately connected. I wish we could stay like this forever.
“Without protection,” he says softly. No recrimination. No regret either.
“I’m on the Pill.”
He doesn’t reply, but what else is there to say? Neither of us is in danger of hurting the other as there’s no way we would’ve done what we did without a condom if we weren’t safe.
Pregnancy would’ve been the only worry, and I’m protected. Dozer knows I’m on the Pill. It’s the nature of our relationship—he knows far more about me than he doesn’t.
And yet, he mentioned it.
“I won’t get pregnant,” I say, feeling the need to reassure him of… something. I’m just not sure what.
Dozer pulls his head back so he can look at me. “I’m not worried about it.”
“You’re not?” I ask curiously.
“No. I mean… it’s the last thing we need right now, but…” His voice trails off, and he closes his eyes a second. When they reopen, he stares at me intently. “We have a lot of scary stuff hanging over us right now, and the nature of our relationship just changed.”
For a split second, I panic. I sense he’s about to spill some regrets, so I blurt out, “We don’t have to do this again. We can chalk it up to things just being crazy and—”
Dozer kisses me to shut me up. When he pulls back, his expression is chastising. “We’re not going backward. I’ve wanted this for… well, forever… and I’m not giving it up. I’m just saying, we get Borovsky out of our lives for good, then we can talk about whether you getting pregnant scares the shit out of us or not.”
I bring a hand to his face. This sweet, wonderful, beautiful man. I think he’s saying that maybe we could have children together someday, but he’s right. That’s not something to get into right now. It’s enough for me right now that he wants to keep going forward, just as I do.
“Speaking of Borovsky,” I say hesitantly, because he’s the wall that stands between us and the future. “I know you said that y’all are leaving it up to law enforcement to bring him down, but that doesn’t seem like you to sit back and wait.”
“What do you mean?”
I shrug, eyes dropping to his chest. It’s a great chest, and while I’ve seen it many times before, it’s inherently more beautiful now that it’s mine to touch as I want. Such as I do now. “I know you and Bebe have some of the best tech wizardry in the world. I know you have things that regular law enforcement doesn’t. It’s how you knew he’d escaped so fast. So I just figured you were doing… something.”
“Of course, we’re looking. Bebe’s employed facial recognition software, and she’ll use it in as many feeds as she can hack to cast a wider net. But chances are, he’s going to lie low and use his goons to try to find you.”
“At least we’re hundreds of miles away from him now… safe here with you.”
Dozer doesn’t say anything, and I glance up at him. His face is inscrutable, but I sense something is worrying him. “What’s wrong?”
He shakes his head. “Not a thing.”
“Don’t lie,” I chastise. “I can tell when—”
My words are cut off by his mouth on me again. He brings a palm to my breast and squeezes.
Blissfully blank… that’s where my mind goes, forgetting all about my concerns that something is troubling Dozer. Instead, I redial back into the man with his hands and mouth on me again and let myself slip away into pleasure where I can pretend we don’t have major problems outside of this bedroom.
CHAPTER 12
Jessica
I slip out the door of Dozer’s apartment and into the hallway. He left for the gym about ten minutes ago with a soft kiss to my throat before rolling out of bed.
We got little slumber last night. Dozer made love to me for a second time, and rather than fall asleep after, we talked. Same old talks we used to have, neither of us ever failing to have something to say. We laughed and teased. We marveled that it had taken us so long to get here. We talked about memories, and we made love again after that.
What we didn’t talk about was the future… because we just don’t know.
It’s only quarter till seven when I sneak into our apartment, a time when Thea should still be asleep since she’s been up later than normal the last few nights. My mom is a night owl, so I expect her to be asleep too. But when I open the door, I pull up hard to see her standing there waiting on me, arms folded over her chest.