Mated To My Mate's Worst Enemy Chapter 478

JORDAN

The door to Nina's quarters was supposed to open on the first try.

This was a reasonable expectation. Nina's quarters were in the security wing of the main building, which meant the locks were maintained by the security chief herself, which meant they were maintained with the specific thoroughness that Nina applied to everything in her professional domain. The lock worked. The lock always worked.

The problem was that Nina had me pinned against the door with both hands in my jacket and her mouth doing something that was making the basic mechanical operation of finding the handle and turning it significantly more complicated than it had any right to be.

"The handle," I said, against her mouth.

"I know where the handle is," she said, also against my mouth.

"One of us needs to—"

"You're closest to it," she said.

"You're between me and it," I said.

"Then work around me," she said.

"Nina—"

She kissed me again and the handle became a significantly lower priority.

This was the specific problem with Nina in the rare situations when she decided something was happening. When she decided something was happening, it happened, and the logistics arranged themselves around that fact rather than in front of it. I'd known this for years. Knowing it didn't make it easier to navigate.

My hand found the handle.

The door opened.

We went through it with the specific lack of grace of two people who'd been outside the door and were now inside the door and hadn't fully interrupted the activity that had been happening outside the door. Nina got her elbow on the frame on the way through. I got the door with my shoulder. Neither of us acknowledged either impact because acknowledging impacts would have required a pause that neither of us was interested in.

The door closed.

Nina put her back against it from the inside, which I took a moment to appreciate.

"Thank you," she said.

"For what," I said.

"For being available," she said, in the specific flat tone she used when she was being sincere and didn't want to be obvious about it.

"When was the last time I wasn't available," I said.

She looked at me. "Eight months, three weeks, approximately."

I did the calculation. "Since Aria arrived."

"Since Aria arrived," she confirmed. "And before that it was—"

"The border situation," I said. "Before the bond ceremony."

"So essentially," she said, "the past nine months have been—"

"Yes," I said.

She looked at me with the expression she'd had in the botanical garden when the vine had been doing its cataloguing of me — the suppressed version of something that was genuinely funny to her.

"The plants," I said.

"I wasn't going to say it," she said.

"Your expression was saying it," I said.

"My expression," she said, "was saying that it has been nine months and I am glad we have a moment and I'm thinking about your abs."

"Those are very different thoughts," I said.

"They can coexist," she said.

She reached up and pulled me back in.

"I should thank Aria," she said.

"For," I said.

"Getting us fired," she said. "Since we stood by her and got booted out."

"We weren't fired," I said. "We resigned in solidarity."

"Solidarity with a temporary leave of absence that Morrison called for," Nina said. "Semantically that's being fired."

"We chose to leave," I said.

"We chose to leave," she agreed, "because the alternative was watching Morrison dismantle something real in favor of something that made him comfortable, and we'd been watching that possibility build for months.. "But the net result is that we are currently, for the first time in I genuinely cannot calculate how long, not on duty."

"Not on duty," I said.

"I cannot remember," she said, turning back to face me, "the last time I slept in my actual bed."

"You sleep in your quarters," I said.

"I sleep on the monitor rotation," she said. "When I sleep. Which is functionally not my bed." She looked at me with the expression that had the oldest layer of her in it, the one that went back before the curse years and before the intelligence work and before all of it. "I cannot remember the last time I had sex, Jordan. It was definitely before Aria came."

"Aria came eight months ago," I said.

She looked at me.

"Right?" I said. "Eight months?"

"Eight months," she confirmed.

I processed this.

"That's," I said.

"Long," she said.

"Really quite long," I said.

"Stop talking," she said, "and help me with my top."

This was a reasonable request and I was going to fulfill it, and then she added: "Those plants were feeling your torso for way too long. That's mine."

The laugh came out before I could manage it. The real one, the version that bypassed everything I normally maintained, and I crossed the room to her while still laughing because the specific combination of the morning's events and the eight months and the plant and Nina saying that with the complete composed certainty she brought to everything had combined into something that got past all of my defenses simultaneously.

She kissed me when I reached her, the same way she'd kissed me in the corridor, complete and committed, and I got my hands on the hem of her top while she got her hands on my shoulders, and the laughter was still there underneath everything else, warm and present.

She pulled back enough to look at me.

"I feel bad," I said, "keeping this from Ivory and Kael."

"Yes," she said. "It's just going to be rubbing it in their faces now. Especially with the messy situation they've got going on between them."

"Those plants," Nina said, at some point, "were on you for a very long time."

"They were identifying me," I said.

"They were doing more than identifying," she said.

"It was documented as a warm-response behavior," I said.

"Jordan," she said.

"Ivory is going to write a paper about it," I said.

"Ivory," Nina said, "writes papers about everything."

"Including the warmth recognition phenomenon," I said.

"The plants liked you," Nina said.

"They were conducting botanical assessments," I said.

"They liked you," she said. "They were being affectionate. The second one came because the first one sent out signals that you were worth visiting." She paused. "You have fans in the botanical kingdom."

"I'd like to not be the person who has fans in the botanical kingdom," I said.