The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 409

Chapter 409: 409 | The Ticking Clock [SPACECRAFT BONUS]

I kissed along her jaw, down her throat, across the collarbone that her camisole’s neckline exposed. Her skin tasted like expensive moisturizer and something underneath it that was just her. Warm. Clean. Faintly sweet in a way no product replicated.

"Ahh... hah..." She shuddered when my lips found the curve of her breast above the silk’s edge. Her back arched off the desk and her fingers gripped my shoulders hard enough that I felt her nails through the shirt. The sound she made was higher than her usual register, breathy and unguarded. The sound of a woman who had spent three weeks in a house that remembered what her body sounded like at two in the morning and refused to let her forget.

I pulled back far enough to see her face. Diane Fitzgerald, CEO of the highest-grossing hero PR agency in California, sat on my student desk with her hair falling loose from its careful arrangement and her lips swollen. Her cold blue eyes carried a heat that Read the Room could measure but could never adequately describe. Her cheeks held a flush that her Luster Aspect could not have produced because it was genuine rather than enhanced, spreading from her cheekbones down her throat.

She cupped my face with both hands and pressed her forehead to mine. Her breath came unsteady and warm against my mouth. This close I could see every detail of the blue eyes Sloane had inherited. The same shade but different in context. Older. Sharper. Weighted with decades of decisions I wasn’t present for and couldn’t account for in any read.

"Mommy’s missed you."

The words landed in the inch between our mouths and did something structural to my nervous system. Her voice carried the specific register she used behind locked doors. Part Charleston drawl and part something else entirely. Something built from nine weeks of encounters that nobody else knew about and she intended to keep that way.

My grip tightened on her hips. She made a soft sound and her legs pulled me closer. The desk creaked under us in a way that suggested Gerald’s joinery wouldn’t hold up to repeated stress testing.

"Mmm..." She kissed me again, slower, like she was cataloging the experience. She tasted like expensive lipstick and sweet tea and something underneath both that registered as pure Diane. The taste of a woman who’d spent forty-seven minutes in traffic thinking about exactly this.

Her phone buzzed.

Inside the portfolio. On the desk. Six inches from where her hip had been pressing down.

Diane broke the kiss the way someone pulls their hand back from scalding water. Not slowly. Not with hesitation. The practiced efficiency of a woman who had spent twenty years managing crises and couldn’t shut the reflex off even when every other part of her system was running somewhere else entirely.

She reached for the phone. Her expression shifted from the woman who’d just been whispering mommy against my mouth to the CEO who ran thirty-one Hero contracts and never missed a notification. The transition took maybe two seconds. I watched it happen and couldn’t tell if I was impressed or mourning the loss.

"Odette Reyes has confirmed fourteen hundred. Fourth floor conference room."

She set the phone down with the deliberate care of someone placing something fragile on a surface they no longer trusted. Then she smoothed her camisole with both hands in a motion that took considerably longer than the fabric actually required. Her fingers moved slowly across the silk like she was checking for damage she couldn’t name.

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