“Unh-unh.” He shook his head, pressing his body into mine as the electricity snapped and sparked through the room. “I am not the DEA’s resident prostitute with a dick,” he growled. “The play I made with Darla was my choice, a long job, a sacrifice I decided I had to make ’cause the life I was livin’ bein’ under that cover I had to get out of. It was sucking me under. It was suffocating me. That shit, those people I had to spend time with, no contact with clean air, decent living, good folk, it was dragging me down. I had to make a Statue of Liberty play and I made it. And the fuck of it was, I made that sacrifice and the whole thing got fucked in a bad way, Tess, where I had to watch those morons take a good man down and almost take him out.”

His face dipped closer and he kept going.

“You were not that. My assignment with you was light cover. Getting close. Nosing around. They investigated your finances, your bakery, and they knew you were less likely a suspect involved in his operation and more likely a possible witness and knew he was jacked. But the amount of communication and your name on his accounts, they had to be sure. I took it where it went because, after about an hour with you, I knew you were clean and I knew where I wanted to take it after the investigation was over. I came in late on this one because I’d just come off that last one. And when I took that job, you were the light of a warm, sunny day, Tess. Darla was the dead of a cold, dark fuckin’ night.” His face got even closer and his voice got low when he finished. “It felt good to feel the sun again.”

I stared into his glittering eyes.

Then my mouth whispered, “Your job is pretty intense, Slim.”

He stared into my eyes. The sparks disappeared, the warmth invaded, and he rolled to his side, back to the back of the couch, taking me with him, his arms tight around me, his legs tangling with mine.

“Yeah, baby, it is. And it can fuck with your head. That’s why when I met a woman whose house always smells like there’s a cake in the oven, who holds tight and presses her tits to my back when she’s with me on my bike, who looks at me like I can make the rest of the world melt away and for her its only me, I know I wanna hold onto that woman.”

To those sensational, warm gushiness-inducing words, I blurted, “It’s in my belly.”

I watched him do a slow blink before he asked, “What?”