Chapter 7 - The Security of the Perimeter
By 1:00 a.m., a light, cold mist had settled over Foxhall Crescent, silvering the slate roof of the main house and dampening the boxwood hedges along the driveway.
Roman stood on the wide stone terrace outside the master bedroom, dressed in a black silk robe, a half-burned Havana cigar held between his pointer and middle fingers. The glowing red tip cast a faint, warm light across his cheekbones and the silver hair at his temples.
Behind him, through the floor-to-ceiling French doors, the master bedroom was lit by a single bedside lamp.
The room was vast—eight hundred square feet of dark mahogany floorboards, cream silk wall coverings, and a king-sized four-poster bed made of carved walnut.
Josephine was sitting on the edge of the bed.
She had taken off the green silk dress and was wearing a simple, long-sleeved nightgown of pale gray cotton that fell to her ankles. Her auburn hair was completely down, spreading across her broad shoulders in a rich, dark copper wave that caught the amber light of the lamp.
She was looking through a stack of blue-bound security logs that Marko had left on the desk two hours earlier.
Roman turned away from the stone balustrade, stepped through the French doors, and closed them quietly behind him, locking the brass bolt with a turn of his thumb.
He walked across the room, his bare feet silent on the silk Persian rug, until he was standing beside her.
"The perimeter guards have been doubled," Roman said, reaching down to take the security logs from her hands and setting them on the nightstand. "Marko has six men on the tree line with thermal scopes. No one comes within two hundred yards of this house tonight."
Josephine looked up at him. Without the dark green silk or the judo gi, she looked different—soft, vast, and heavy in a way that made Roman’s chest feel tight with a strange, dark hunger he hadn't felt in four years.
"I don't need thermal scopes to sleep, Roman," she said softly.
"I do," he said. He sat down on the edge of the mattress beside her. The heavy feather bed sank under their combined weight, bringing their hips together with a firm, inescapable pressure.
Roman reached out, his long, scarred fingers lifting a lock of her heavy auburn hair, smelling the sharp, clean vanilla scent of her skin.
"Why didn't you leave after the first night?" he asked her, his voice very low in the quiet room. "Most women—most people—would have taken their final paycheck and caught the first train back to Boston."
Josephine leaned her head slightly into his hand, her cheek warm against his knuckles.
"I’ve spent my whole life being too big for the rooms people put me in, Roman," she said quietly. "In Boston, I was too heavy for the patrol cars. In the department, I was too strong for the male officers to feel comfortable around me. In the agency, they wanted me to stand behind thin women in Paris and pretend I was a driver."
She turned her face, her grey eyes looking straight into his.
"In this house," she said, "when those men came through that door, no one asked me if I was a size eighteen. No one asked me if I was soft. You looked at me on that camera feed, and you saw what I was."
"An anchor," Roman murmured.
"A wall," she corrected softly.
Roman smiled—a real, dark smile that showed his white teeth. He moved his hand from her hair to the back of her neck, his broad fingers digging into the heavy, thick muscle at her shoulders, pulling her toward him until their mouths were three inches apart.
"I don't need a wall, Josephine," he whispered, his breath warm against her lips. "I have two concrete walls and sixty security guards. I need you."
He kissed her.
It was not a soft, tentative kiss. It was the kiss of a man who spent his life taking territory and holding it against all comers. His mouth opened over hers with a heavy, possessive authority that demanded everything she had to give.
Josephine did not yield. She met his mouth with her own—heavy, warm, and fierce—her broad hands coming up to grip his silk robe at the lapels, her thick fingers pulling him down until his one-hundred-and-ninety-five-pound frame was lying fully against hers on the silk sheets.
His hands slid down her body—down the soft, heavy curve of her ribs, over the broad, deep flare of her hips, and down to the thick, solid muscle of her thighs. She was vast, heavy, and hot under his hands, her body yielding to his weight while simultaneously supporting it like a foundation of stone.
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"You take up so much space," Roman growled into her neck, his teeth catching the soft skin near her collarbone.
"Then move into it," she whispered back, her thick arms wrapping around his broad back, her fingers digging into his muscles until he groaned.
