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“Ma’am?” That question was accompanied by the tiniest quirk at the corner of KC’s lips.

“Follow me.” Having crammed all the haughtiness she could manage into that command, Yardley began walking down the hallway.

She couldn’t quite pull it off and had to check that KC was following her.

Twice. But she was, so it had worked. Yardley took a small passage she’d noticed earlier, probably for caterers and service people, and followed it until she spotted a brass handle fitted into a door that was hidden in the wall. “In here.”

She opened the door. A light automatically clicked on, harsh in the small room lined with shelves stacked with dozens of folded white linens.

KC let the door shut behind her. Yardley reached over and turned the lock, then smoothed her hands down the front of her thighs, nervous in a way she was not accustomed to.

She’d walked into some of the diciest possible situations in the world, but she had never been nervous.

The stakes had never promised so much and had so much power to take everything away.

“I just thought before tonight we should say something.” But her nerves had made this statement sound like a question.

Say something about what, Yardley Lauren Bailey Whitmer?

She closed her eyes, trying to find words that would put her and KC in a place that they could come back to after this mission, a place different from the one they’d started in after KC had pulled her off Mirabel’s gun in the middle of Starbucks.

“About us. About what went wrong. A talk where we don’t blame our work, because we’ve both acknowledged there was more hurting us than our secret lives.”

KC leaned against a linen shelf. “You want to officially break up.”

Yardley did not. She’d have liked to stipulate they already had, repeatedly, but it seemed too direct to say any such thing at such a delicate moment.

“I want us to try to agree to what we had, name our part in it, good and bad, and I want to”—Yardley looked around the tiny room—“try to leave this linen closet on terms we agree are kind and fair, so we know what happens when we touch down at Dulles.”

KC studied Yardley for a long time, making her stomach flip and flip, making her feel so many things at once, she couldn’t breathe. “Okay. You start.”

“I don’t have to. You can start.”

KC smiled. Cataclysmic. “Absolutely not. This is a terrifying plan, but I concede it is a very mature one.”

Yardley’s legs felt dangerously weak. She looked around frantically, and then saw a rolling hamper with a wooden lid and yanked it over to sit on. “All right. Okay. I will start by saying that we never had a plan. I never made a plan that had you in it, KC, and that was doing us a disservice.”

KC shoved over a tied-up bale of towels and sat on that. “You’re saying we just let us happen to us.”

She wondered if the linen closet had a radiator in it some where, because her lower back had broken out in sweat, and she could feel her hair curling at the nape of her neck.

“Yes. That. And it meant there were conversations we didn’t have.

The kind of talks I think other couples, couples who make it, must be working through constantly, about what kind of home they want to make together and how their love will grow. ”

“Yeah. Some of those walks past the playset in the park were more than a little fraught.”

Yardley let out a nervous laugh. “Yes. Sure. Kids. I mean, not that I wanted to have a conversation about kids, but I mean, yes, kids were at the park that we walked past, and kids have a way of making one think of the future.” That had been unbearably awkward and difficult to say.

Yardley congratulated herself on managing it.

“Because they’re young. And we’ll die first.” KC had a very small tone of teasing her. Fair, but enraging. This was incredibly difficult, and Yardley didn’t remember KC having initiated this talk. No sir. That would be Yardley Whitmer who’d brought them to this moment.

“What I mean is that I can understand in retrospect why we both may have avoided that conversation. But this mission, and the things you told me on the Darkhorse, and the argument we had at the safe house, the briefing—I think I’m getting a glimpse of what it would have felt like to really plan something with you. I wish we’d had a chance to do that.”

The teasing look on KC’s face mellowed into kindness.

“I wish we had, too.” She brushed her hands over her knees.

“You’re right that I should’ve shared more with you.

There was a lot more margin in my cover to be honest than I pretended.

I guess I’d say that not one person I’ve known has asked me to share my life with them or indicated that sharing or being there for each other was even a thing people did.

Even if they loved them.” KC nodded. Nodded too much.

She was doing the nod that meant she was trying not to cry.

She rubbed her hands hard beneath her eyes, which was even worse.

“You can’t cry,” Yardley said in the voice of an autocrat. “Because then—”

“You’ll cry.” KC laughed. “I know. For the record, I think we had a lot more good than bad, Yardley Whitmer. I’m a better person because of you. I can’t regret any of it, even how it…”

“Exploded? Collapsed? Fell apart like a pier in mud?”

KC pointed at her. “Yes. In the end. And, listen, I know tonight’s mission is delicate.

But I don’t think it’s impossible, or even difficult, to have a good result, and that’s because of you and your skills and your planning, which I admired before I even knew you.

I also admired it when it was directed at one of the miniatures you put together in the basement, not just when you were trying to keep the world safe.

I look forward to working with you in the future.

” With this solemn declaration, KC’s smile returned. “Look at us. Talking about the future.”

Yardley laughed, but she had to press the heels of her hands against her eyes. She was too hot, too worked up, too sad, too grateful. “I wouldn’t have anyone but Tabasco on my team.”

There was a click, and the closet went pitch black.

“Dang it,” Yardley said. She couldn’t see a thing. The automatic light must be on a timer.

“Maybe it’s got a motion sensor,” KC said. “Wave your arm around.”

When Yardley did stand and lift her arm, however, it was captured halfway up by fingers around her wrist, circling her gold watch, and then gently lowered but not let go of.

KC’s body had somehow gotten close, very close, to hers.

Yardley could hear KC breathing, but her eyes hadn’t adjusted to the total darkness of the closet, so breathing was all she had to go by.

KC’s breath, the petrichor-like whiff of ozone mixed with herbal shampoo, and how firmly KC held her wrist.

So firmly that Yardley realized KC was guiding her backward.

She’d only said half of what she wanted to. There were other things that felt like they really must be impossible to say aloud, at least without some encouragement from KC, but she couldn’t not try. “Listen.”

“Shh,” KC breathed. Yardley could hear the smile in her warning, and then she was so elated in the dark with KC’s body almost pressing against hers, with any choice she had taken away from her by KC’s wildly erotic hold on her wrist, that she was certain she would shatter into a million glowing pieces.

It was more encouragement than she’d hoped for.

“ KC. ” Her back hit something—soft, starchy linens by the feel and smell—and for a moment she was at her nan’s, at a party, hiding under a table with a long tablecloth, looking at everyone’s fancy shoes.

Then KC’s cheek was against hers, immediately transporting her to a different familiar place, every one of her senses so turned up that there was very nearly feedback, electric static, everything an ache or a throb or a hot pulse.

“I promise,” KC murmured against her cheek, as her other hand, the one not holding Yardley’s wrist, was suddenly raking through her hair, sending delicious prickles over her scalp, “I have things I want to say, too. I want to talk about trust. I want to talk for a whole day. Maybe more. I want to see if we can even do that.”

Oh. Oh, if that wasn’t the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to her. It turned out Yardley had been longing for KC to talk about the future. It meant they had a future, or at least that they might.

It meant she really could start to hope for something different than the ending they’d been headed toward.

“I can do that,” she said. “I may need to take a few breaks, but I will try my hardest.”

“Probably this isn’t a good idea,” KC whispered. The word this was punctuated with a small press of her hips against Yardley’s.

“It’s true,” Yardley said, letting the feelings in her body melt against her overwarm skin, “that generally this kind of thing can confuse a woman. So let’s get any confusion out of the way.”

“About?” KC asked this question with her lips against Yardley’s neck.

“Your intentions.” Yardley couldn’t say this without infusing the phrase with prim tartness that made KC ease back.

“We just broke up again. I thought, this time, with a lot of emotional intelligence.” There was laughter in KC’s voice.

“But we also implied that we would like to give more talking a try. And I should correct myself, because I don’t think we’ve done this before. We’ve let ourselves get caught up, but we haven’t gone in fully knowing how we both feel.”

“Which is?”

Yardley bit her bottom lip. There was something serious in KC’s voice, and there should be.

She was still holding Yardley’s wrist, which had the gold watch on it, reminding Yardley that her own intention wasn’t to hang on to the keys KC had given her but rather to trade them for something that did a better job of encompassing what she thought she could feel for KC Nolan, given the chance.

“I think we feel like there’s more to our story. ”