Chapter 1: Breathless in the Dark
The rusted metal shaft yawned open like a predator’s maw, its jagged edges catching the sickly glow of flickering fluorescent lights from the warehouse below. Patrick Jane’s fingers, usually so graceful, scrabbled at the corroded frame.
“In. Now,” he hissed, his voice barely audible over the hum of machinery and the distant, terrifying clatter of boots on the concrete floor above them.
Teresa Lisbon didn’t need telling twice. The white mini A-line cocktail dress, chosen by him for this undercover farce, was a ridiculous liability. So were the three-inch heels. In that moment of raw adrenaline, she forgot them entirely. She clambered up, the metal scraping her palms, and shoved herself headfirst into the dark opening.
The ventilation maintenance tunnel was a tomb of warm, stale air that reeked of oil and decades of mildew. She scrambled forward on her hands and knees, the rough metal biting into her skin, until the space abruptly narrowed. She curled into a fetal position in the far corner, just before the tunnel constricted to a duct the size of her arm, her back pressed against the cold wall. A shudder ran through her. They were trapped.
Jane followed, a fluid shadow squeezing his larger frame in behind her. He pulled the grate back into place with a soft, definitive click. Darkness, near-total, swallowed them. The only light was a slivered glow from the hallway vents far below, casting distorted lines across the space.
They held their breath.
The footsteps rounded the corner. A pair of legs in brown pants passed the vent grate. Stopped. Teresa’s heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic drum against the silence. The legs returned, passed again, paced. Her muscles screamed from the cramped, curled position. The legs finally disappeared around the corner.
The silence that followed was heavier than the noise.
They remained frozen, breathing hard in the thick, electric-scented air. Minutes stretched. The adrenaline bled away, leaving a sharp, grating awareness of their predicament.
“This,” Teresa whispered, the anger rushing in to fill the void left by fear, “is the worst plan you have ever had. And that is saying something.”
“We’re alive,” he murmured back, his voice unnervingly close in the dark. She could feel the heat of him, a solid presence in front of her.
“Barely. I’m in a dress shorter than your attention span at a budget meeting, heels that are useless for anything but breaking an ankle, and we’re hiding in a metal box. This isn’t a plan, Jane. It’s a panic attack with stakes.”
She tried to shift, to find some fraction of comfort. The dress, already short, rode higher up her thighs. The silky fabric pulled taut across her breasts with every strained movement. She tried to keep her knees together, to yank the hem down, but there was no room. It was a futile, maddening dance in the dark.
“Would you stop fidgeting?” he breathed, tension edging his usual calm.
“I’m uncomfortable.”
“We’re hiding from armed men who want to turn us into abstract art. Comfort is optional.”
“Easy for you to say in a suit,” she shot back, struggling again. The cramped curl was agony on her spine. She tried to straighten a leg and her heel dug into his shin.
He let out a sharp grunt. “Lisbon.”
“What?”
“Stop. Moving.”
She huffed, but went still, listening to their ragged breathing sync and then fall out of rhythm. The discomfort was a living thing now, coiling in the space between them. Her neck ached. Her legs were going numb. The awareness of her own exposed skin, of the ridiculousness of her situation, boiled over.
“This is impossible. I can’t stay like this. My knee is in my ear.”
Patrick Jane sighed, a long, resigned sound in the dark. Then he shifted. It was a slow, deliberate reorganization of limbs in the impossible space. His hands found her hips, his touch firm and startling through the thin dress.
“What are you—“
He didn’t answer. He just rotated her, using his own body as a lever. It was ungainly and awkward, a clumsy ballet of elbows and suppressed curses. When it was done, she was no longer curled against the wall. She was lying on top of him, her body pressed along the length of his, her face buried momentarily in the wool of his suit jacket.
She pushed herself up on her hands, which were now flat on his chest. “Oh, fantastic. This is so much better. Now I’m a human blanket.”
“Give it a second,” he said, his voice oddly strained.
She tried to find a position that didn’t involve full-body contact. She pushed up higher, trying to straddle him to distribute her weight, but the tunnel ceiling was too low. She ended up braced on her forearms, her chest hovering just above his. Her legs fell naturally to either side of his hips. It was the only geometry that worked.
It was worse.
Now she could feel everything. The solid, unyielding plane of his chest under her forearms. The heat of his body seeping through her dress and his clothes, a furnace in the stagnant air. The hard line of his thighs beneath hers. She was painfully aware of the neckline of her dress, gaping slightly with the angle, and of her own frantic heartbeat.
She stared down at him. The slivered light from below caught the sharp angle of his jaw, the blue flash of his eyes. But his gaze wasn’t on her face. It was fixed lower, locked on the neckline of her dress where the fabric gaped, where the shadowed curve of her breasts threatened to spill free with every shallow, rapid breath she took.
Heat flooded her cheeks, a mortifying burn that had nothing to do with the stifling air. Of course he was staring. She was practically smothering him, a clumsy, sweating weight in a stupid dress. His silence was pure, studied discomfort. Her own body, traitorously, was humming, every nerve ending lit up where it pressed against the solid length of him. The ache between her legs was a low, insistent throb she hadn’t authorized.
Flustered, she brought a hand up, intending to yank the fabric closed. The movement shifted her balance, plunging her weight down onto him more heavily.
He made a sound. A rough, punched-out groan that seemed to vibrate through his chest into hers.
Damn it. She’d hurt him. Panic, clean and sharp, severed the awkward tension. “I’m sorry, I—” she gasped, and before he could speak or stop her, she was moving. She pushed herself up onto her hands and knees, scrambling over him, crawling the short, clumsy distance toward the grate at the tunnel’s entrance. Freedom. Air. Space. She needed it now.
Her palms hit the cold metal grate just as his hands closed around her hips.
“Lisbon, don’t—”
She ignored him, bracing her shoulders and giving the grate a desperate, furious shove. It didn’t budge. Not a millimeter. The lock on the outside held fast.
“Damn it,” she swore, the words a choked whisper of frustration.
And that’s when she felt it. A new, shocking awareness. The heat between her legs wasn’t just internal anymore. It was concentrated, specific. The air under her short skirt was… different. Warmer. Occupied.
She glanced down, her brain struggling to process the image. She saw the white fabric of her skirt, flared out around her. She saw her own trembling thighs. She did not see Patrick Jane’s head.
Because his head was under there. His face was buried in the dark, intimate space between her spread knees, his body still lying prone beneath her.
A bolt of pure, unadulterated panic electrified her spine. She tried to shove herself backward, but his hands shifted instantly, moving from her hips to cup the full curves of her ass through her underwear, his fingers splaying, holding her firmly in place against his mouth.
“Jane!” The name burst from her in a shocked yelp. She clapped a hand over her own mouth, her eyes wide and unseeing in the dark, terror of discovery momentarily overriding everything else.
Then she felt it.
A warm, wet, devastatingly deliberate pressure through the thin lace of her panties. The flat of his tongue. A slow, seeking stroke right over the center of her, where she was already swollen and sensitized.
“Oh, God—” The moan was ripped from her, muffled by her own fingers. Her arms gave out. She threw her hands out to either side, bracing against the tunnel walls to keep from pitching forward onto her face as her head fell forward. Every muscle in her body coiled tight, then went liquid.
He did it again. A long, lavish lick that soaked the fragile lace, the heat and friction so obscenely good it blurred her vision. His nose nudged against her clit as he traced her entrance, and her hips jerked involuntarily, a tiny, desperate thrust against his mouth.
A low, approving rumble came from him, the sound vibrating against her most tender skin. It unraveled her completely.
His tongue became more insistent, painting wet, circling patterns over the lace, his breath scorching hot through the fabric. She was dripping, the lace clinging, transparent. He hooked his thumb into the sides of her panties, and she didn’t stop him, couldn’t have formed a coherent word if her life depended on it. He pulled the wet fabric aside, and then his mouth was on her, naked skin to skin.
The first direct touch was a white-hot shock. His tongue, sleek and relentless, found her slit and delved deep, tasting her. Teresa bit down on her hand to stifle a scream. Her body bowed, every nerve firing at once.
“Patrick,” she sobbed, the name a broken prayer.
He answered with a growl, one arm locking around her thighs, his hand splaying possessively over her lower belly to hold her still. He feasted on her. His tongue lashed her clit in tight, rapid circles, then flattened to draw long, slow pulls from her opening up to that aching nub. He fucked her with his tongue, deep then shallow, a filthy, wet mimicry of what she suddenly, desperately needed him to do for real.
She was coming apart, her braced arms shaking, sweat slicking her skin. The world narrowed to the brutal, exquisite skill of his mouth, to the calloused grip of his hand on her stomach, to the raw, animal sounds he was making as he drank her down. She was so close, a tight, screaming coil of need at the base of her spine.
Then, from somewhere in the warehouse below, a voice echoed. Muffled, but distinct. Human.
Her eyes flew open. The reality of where they were—the danger, the professionalism she’d set on fire and tossed aside—crashed back into her. The orgasm that had been seconds away receded, replaced by a new, sharp terror.
He felt her stiffen. His mouth stilled, though he didn’t pull away. His breath came in harsh, hot gusts against her soaked, throbbing flesh. He was waiting.
The voice echoed again, followed by a laugh. It was moving away. Down the hall. Fading.
Teresa remained frozen, suspended above him, every muscle locked. The terror was a cold splash, but underneath it, the heat he’d stoked still pulsed, a second heartbeat between her legs. Shame and want warred, a dizzying cocktail that left her breathless.
He was waiting.
She didn’t move. The voices melted into the hum of the warehouse.
With a low, possessive growl that vibrated through her core, Patrick’s hands tightened on her. He didn’t ask. He pulled her back down, his mouth finding her with unerring accuracy in the dark.
His lips closed around her clit and he suckled, hard.
The sensation was so direct, so devastating, that a broken whimper tore from her throat. At the same moment, she felt the blunt, insistent pressure of his finger at her entrance, slick with her own wetness. He pushed inside, one long, slow slide that made her gasp, her inner muscles clamping around him. Before she could adjust, a second finger joined the first, stretching her, filling her with a breathtaking, delicious fullness.
He kept his hand still, buried deep inside her. He was a statue beneath her, only his mouth working, sucking and laving her swollen flesh with a focused, maddening rhythm. The contrast was exquisite torture: the furious, pinpoint stimulation of his mouth and the profound, stationary penetration of his fingers.
He was waiting. For her.
Teresa, trembling, tried to hold still. She couldn’t. The need was a physical ache, a demand for friction. A tiny, involuntary shift of her hips rocked her back onto his hand. The movement sent a shockwave of pleasure up her spine.
That was all it took.
A hungry sound escaped him, and as she began to rock more firmly, taking his fingers deeper on each small thrust, he finally moved with her. His hand became a piston, driving up into her body in time with her desperate rhythm. He fucked her with his fingers, curling them on each upward stroke, finding a spot inside that made her see stars.
His mouth never released her. He sucked and licked, orchestrating her ruin, keeping her trapped in the raging focus of his tongue. The world dissolved into sound—the wet, filthy sounds of his mouth on her, the slick slide of his fingers, their ragged, shared breathing, and her own choked, pleading curses.
“Oh, fuck, Patrick… right there… don’t stop…”
She was babbling, mindless, riding his hand with abandon, her own fingers tangled in his hair now, not pushing him away but holding him to her. The coil inside her wound tighter, tighter, drawn to a single, screaming point of light by the dual assault.
He sucked harder. His fingers thrust faster, deeper.
It broke her.
The orgasm ripped through her, violent and silent, a seismic convulsion that locked her throat and shattered her vision into white fragments. Her body clenched around his fingers in rhythmic, pulsing waves, milking them as she shook apart above him. He rode her through it, his mouth gentling to soft, relentless kisses, his fingers working gently, prolonging the tremors until she collapsed forward, her forehead resting against the cool metal wall, utterly spent.
For a long moment, there was only the sound of her trying to remember how to breathe.
Slowly, carefully, he withdrew his fingers. The loss made her flinch. His hands lingered on the backs of her thighs, a touch that was now shockingly tender. She couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Every cell in her body hummed.
Teresa stayed where she was, her forehead pressed to the cool metal, trying to reassemble her mind and slow her breathing. Her thighs trembled against the sides of his face. Patrick was softly kissing her inner thighs now, gentle, absent-minded presses of his lips against her shaking skin, as if soothing a spooked animal. The tenderness of it was almost worse than what had come before. It implied a continuum, an aftermath. It promised a tomorrow.
What the hell just happened.
The thought was a dull echo in the vault of her skull. She wasn'tt sure what to do now. Move? Speak? Acknowledge that her professional partner had just eaten her out in a air duct while armed criminals patrolled below them? Her body was liquid and sated, but her mind was a screaming riot of protocol violations and terrifying, glittering possibilities.
A sudden, foreign noise cut through the fog.
Boots. Many of them. Crisp, official-sounding strides replacing the lazy patrol of the guards. Then voices, clear and amplified.
“FBI! Search the premises! Everyone on the ground!”
The raid. It was over.
Relief, sharp and clean, warred with a bizarre pang of loss. The world was crashing back in, and with it, the rules. She blinked, adjusting her eyes to the slivers of light. A figure walked past the grate, a familiar silhouette backlit by the hallway fluorescents. The glint of a badge on a belt.
“Hey!” she called out, her voice raspy and unfamiliar to her own ears. She rattled the metal grate with a weak hand. “In here! Open it!”
The agent stopped, crouched, and peered through the slats. “Holy shit—Lisbon? Jane?”
“Just open it,” Jane said, his voice calm and steady from beneath her, as if he were commenting on the weather.
The lock was busted from the outside with a sharp crack. The grate swung open, flooding their cramped tomb with sterile light. Teresa squinted, suddenly horribly aware of her position, of her skirt rucked up around her waist, of the man still lying beneath her. She scrambled backward, a clumsy, graceless crawl, pulling her dress down as she went. She couldn’t look at him.
Strong hands helped her out, down onto the warehouse floor. Her legs nearly buckled. An agent handed her a standard-issue grey blanket from a responder kit. She wrapped it around her shoulders like a cloak, clinging to its coarse texture. It smelled of dust and generic detergent. It was real.
Patrick emerged a moment later, fluid and unruffled. He ran a hand through his tousled hair, gave his suit jacket a slight tug to straighten it, and offered the stunned agent a mild smile. “Took you long enough.”
Soon, she found herself standing with Patrick by the line of FBI vehicles in the cool night air. The warehouse was a hive of controlled chaos—flashing lights, shouted commands, perps in cuffs being led away. The chill was a shock to her system, pebbling her skin under the blanket. She focused on the cold, on the concrete under her bare feet—she’d lost a heel in the conduit—on the tactical details Agent Abbott was reeling off to her.
“—initial sweep suggests the majority of the ledger data is on the server in the office, we’ll need you to sign off on the seizure paperwork before you go, but anything else can wait for tomorrow,” Abbott said, his face etched with concern. “You okay, Lisbon? You look… shaken.”
“I’m fine,” she said, the words automatic and brittle. “Just cramped. And pissed off.” She forced a thin smile. “Long night.”
Abbott nodded, clapping her on the blanket-covered shoulder. “Go home. We’ll debrief at ten.”
He walked away, barking orders at a forensics tech. Teresa stared at the cracked asphalt, trying to anchor herself in the procedure, the next steps, the chain of custody. She concentrated on the weight of the blanket, the murmur of radio chatter, the distant wail of more sirens approaching.
She did not think about the heat, the taste of oil in the air, the feeling of his tongue.
A presence materialized behind her left shoulder. She didn’t need to turn to know it was him. She felt him in the air, a change in pressure.
He leaned in. His lips brushed the edge of her ear, his breath a warm contrast to the night. His voice was a low, private murmur, a thread of dark silk woven through the official noise.
“You better be on your bed, naked, when I get there tonight.” The words weren’t a question. They were a statement of fact. “Because I’m going to lick your pussy again until you come. But this time,” he paused, letting the promise hang, “I’ll be able to see your face when I take you apart.”
He straightened up. She didn’t move, didn’t breathe.
With that, he sauntered past her, towards his Citroën, whistling a little tune as if nothing out of the ordinary had just happened.