Declarations in the dark.

Silken sounds.

Subtle sounds.

Words, whispered from the heart.

She awoke to them--and to the tender drift of a man's hands over her naked body--in the small hours before dawn. The dream from which she'd been drawn had been an erotic one. And for a few unsettled moments, she wondered whether she might still be enmeshed in a scenario spun by her over-stimulated subconscious.

Her lover soothed her with a caress as she invoked his name on a husky, questioning note. Her uncertainties about what was real and what was not dissolved like a teaspoon of granulated sugar in a glass of hot water.

The room was pitch-black. She couldn't see anything. But she could feel. Dear Lord, could she feel!

Her bedmate's breath teased across her parted lips an instant before he brushed them with his own. The kiss was as insubstantial as dandelion down, but the sensations it stirred resonated through her with escalating potency. It was akin to the formation of a pearl:

Layer upon infinitely fine and fragile layer building up to create something of incredible, enduring beauty.

She shifted restlessly, the urge to return pleasure with pleasure coursing through her bloodstream like an illicit drug. A moment later she found herself constrained from action with gentle implacability.

Long fingers banded her supple wrists, pinning them firmly against sleep-warmed linen. A subtle flex of well-toned muscles and a small but significant adjustment of position wordlessly communicated the message that although might did not make right, superior size and strength tended to provide their possessor with an undeniable edge in certain situations.

"Lie still," her captor murmured, his tone holding an equal mix of courtship and command. "Let me...please you."

The intensity of his softly accented voice sent tiny shivers of excitement dancing through her hyper-receptive nervous system. So, too, the wanton implications of his words.

Never mind that blind obedience had never been her strong suit. She'd long since come to terms with the fact that with this particular man, there were moments when submission was the best option. Not the only one, to be sure. But definitely the most potentially fulfilling of the lot.

It wasn't that resistance to his will was futile. She knew she could tilt the balance of power in her direction if she really chose. It was more a matter of accepting that, paradoxical though it might seem, it was possible to achieve victory through surrender. By giving in on one level, she was likely to get back on many, many others.

She yielded. Not all at once, of course. It didn't do to make things too easy. As someone had told her years ago, the man she was with didn't crave a readily available companion. He required a quest. The more difficult and demanding, the better. Besides. Quick compliance with *anybody's* bidding was not--had never been--in her nature. Even when quiescence was her ultimate intention, she liked to arrive at it by self-determined increments.

Her deliberately calibrated capitulation netted her a laughter-tinged compliment in rapid, idiomatic French and a nipping kiss to her earlobe--reminders that her partner knew the workings of her mind almost better than she did. She smiled, just a little. She ceded control over herself, rather more.

*Lie still.*

His mouth moved downward, sipping thirstily at the long line of her throat, then searching hungrily at the tightly budded tips of her acutely sensitized breasts. With teeth and tongue, he woo'd and won her. She moaned deep in her throat when he suckled at one nipple, then the other. Something fisted in the pit of her belly, forming a throbbing knot of tension. It flowered open a heady second later, making her gasp with bliss-infused surprise. Her body began to soften like butter in the noon day sun.

*Let me...*

His mouth moved downward again, his kisses delicate and devouring by turns. He behaved as though she were a sumptuous banquet and he the most discriminating of gourmets.

He mapped the trembling flatness of her stomach and explored the shallow indentation of her navel. She quivered at the rough velvet lick of his tongue against her skin. Her eyelids fluttered closed. She could hear her blood thundering in her ears, feel it pounding in the tips of her toes and fingers. A desperate effort to exert some form of discipline over her breathing pattern proved less than successful. Air left her lungs in short, sharp gasps and returned to them in reluctant snatches.

*...please you.*

His mouth moved lower still, touching off a star shower of incandescent sensations within her. His timing was--as nearly always--impeccable. He neither rushed ahead before she was ready nor lingered when she yearned for him to move on. He seemed to know what she wanted him to do and when she wanted him to do it before she did. And he had precious few inhibitions about capitalizing on the advantage these insights gave him.

There'd been a period during their long relationship when she'd been deeply distrustful of his sexual skills. His talents as a lover, in bed and out, went far beyond an innate facility for dealing with women. He'd been taught--no, he'd been relentlessly *trained* to exploit his instinctive understanding of the male-female dynamic. The habit of emotional manipulation had been implanted in his psyche with such insidious thoroughness that it had nearly annihilated his ability to act without calculation.

Those responsible for essentially breaking him down and building him back up to suit their very critical specifications had gauged his professional gifts--and the personal goads that accompanied them--with diabolical accuracy. But for all the merciless effectiveness with which they'd used and abused him, they'd failed to foresee two things.

The first was that their most successful creation would find a way to preserve his true nature by denying its existence. They'd never suspected he'd have the fortitude to inter his soul so deep within himself that even he had despaired of its survival.

The second was that she would become the catalyst for the restoration of his long-buried humanity. Those who had had charge of their fates had perceived of her as a weakeness that could be leveraged against him. They'd never imagined that his vulnerability to her might be transformed into an elemental source of strength. And by the time they'd recognized what was taking place...

Had he genuinely been the kind of "asset" the individuals who'd molded him had intended him to me--or the kind of man he'd very nearly persuaded himself he was--he would have destroyed her without a second thought. Of that, she had absolutely no doubt. He would have crushed her conscience and her compassion, then scavenged through the wreckage for usable parts. But he hadn't. Rather, he'd come frighteningly close to engineering his own obliteration in an effort to keep her whole.

That she'd misunderstood so much of what he'd done for so long was something it still pained her to consider. The only explanation she could offer was that she'd been terrified by the intensity of the response he'd evoked in her. Had her feelings been less overwhelming, her vision of him might have been clearer.

And had his perception of himself not been so darkly conflicted...

He'd never by word or deed indicated that he felt she owed him any kind of restitution for her actions. Indeed, he'd made it plain that he believed her treatment of him had been justified. Still, she'd attempted over the years to atone for her blindness and the behavior it had precipitated.

"I didn't know how you felt," she'd told him once, trying to make some sense of at least a portion of the hurt they'd inflicted on each other.

"Neither did I," he answered with devastating simplicity. "I couldn't--wouldn't--allow it."

She tensed suddenly, her fingers clutching convulsively at the rumpled sheets. The feathering search of his mouth over the sleek skin of her inner thighs made her shudder with anticipation. A second later, she felt the puff of his breath against the petalled flesh of her feminine core. His intent was as explicit as it was intimate.

Yes, she thought dizzily. His erotic expertise was not longer cause for suspicion; it was reason for rapturous celebration. Oh...yes.

And then, he touched her.

Tasted her.

Took her.

Pleasure so sharp in was nearly pain zigzagged through her like a bolt of lightning. She arched up, crying out her lover's name.

*Let me...please you,* he'd said.

Inevitably, ecstatically, she did. And if the world had shattered around her as it happened, she never would have noticed.

****

She dozed off immediately afterward. He didn't.

The reversal of the post-coital cliche amused him a little. It relieved him, too. He welcomed the opportunity to reflect in solitude without actually being alone.

He'd made love to the woman whose bed he shared in many ways over the years. They'd consummated their mutual passion by sunshine and moonbeam, bonfire and candle glow. They'd pleasured each other--fast and fierce, sweet and slow--with every electric bulb within switching distance turned on, as well. And on one duty-dictated occasion, they'd coupled in front of an audience while bathed in the sanguine luminousity created by a red-gelled spotlight.

But sometimes--just sometimes--he felt the urge to avoid illumination and join with his life's partner in darkness. To seek completion by relying on senses other than sight. His response to her physical beauty wasn't dependent on the use of his eyes. Her image was etched in his brain and engraved on his heart. He could watch it like a private movie while he reveled in her sound and scent, her flavor and feel.

He knew she understood that his occasional decision to eschew the light didn't stem from shame or a desire to keep secrets. Quite the contrary. He harbored no reservations about the essential rightness of their coming together. And however much of himself he still chose to hide from the rest of the world, he didn't hold back with her.

It hadn't always been so, of course. It had taken him years to exorcise the guilt he'd felt about having succumbed to his need for her. Longer still for him to rip down the barriers he had so obsessively constructed and face up to his emotions. The process had been a painful one. There had been more than a few moments when he would have welcomed death...or even the oblivion of madness.

His bedmate stirred, mumbling something under her breath that sounded a lot like his name. The automatic tightening of his arms around her was part protective, part possessive. He pressed a kiss to her right temple, breathing in the spice-sweet fragrance of her skin. She quieted immediately, her body curving to fit more intimately with his. A few fine strands of her silken hair tickled beneath his chin.

"Je t'aime," he whispered, savoring the words. That he could say them and mean them was a miracle. He'd lost a great deal during his life. Some of it had been taken from him by force. Some he'd given up in the name of survival, the way an animal caught in the jaws of a trap might chew off its own foot. To have redeemed himself to the point where he could love again...

Eventually, he drifted off to sleep. And as was usually the case when he lay beside the woman who had become his mate in both body and soul, his slumber was peaceful.

************

Nikita's heels clicked out a resolute rhythm against the concrete floor of Section's central corridor. How was it, she asked herself as she surveyed her surroundings, that so much could seem both utterly the same *and* absolutely different?

Two weeks had passed since the man known as Operations had been felled by a massive cerebral hemorrhage. One moment, he'd been in unchallenged command of the far-flung organization that he'd build--as a would-be usurper had once acknowledged--with his own blood and pain. The next, he'd been a lifeless heap. A shell, emptied of all that had made him human. His pale and penetrating eyes had stared out at an eternal nothingness. His mouth had been twisted in a silent scream of protest.

The elegantly enigmatic woman who'd been bound to him in more ways than either of them had ever admitted had been by his side when he'd collapsed. It had been Madeline who'd countermanded the order for emergency medical attention in a voice that had brooked no contradiction. It had been Madeline who'd closed the sightless blue eyes with tender, untrembling fingers. And it had been Madeline who'd violated every tenet of the ruthless self-restraint by which she'd lived and--in full view of witnesses--pressed a kiss to the cold, contorted lips.

Barely twenty-four hours later, the man known as Operations had been buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Unheralded, but very definitely a hero. The modest granite headstone that marked his grave had been in place for several decades. It also bore his real name.

Eight days after the interment, having satisfied herself that the future of Section One was as secure as it could be, Madline had retreated to her office. She'd been found dead at her desk by her designated successor several hours later, precisely as she'd planned. No autopsy had been performed. No death certificate issued. Which was probably just as well. A true coroner's finding--suicide by self-induced cardiac arrest--would have raised more issues than it resolved.

Madeline's body had been cremated, per her very explicit instructions. The final disposition of her ashes was known to only two people.

Nikita was one of those two people. The compelling, black-clad man sitting behind the uncluttered desk in the immaculated organized office she'd just entered was the other.

"Did you get *any* sleep last night, Michael?" she asked as the workspace's gray steel door whispered closed behind her.

"Yes," he responded, his attention locked on the computer screen in front of him.

"How much?"

No answer. Which was, in a way, answer enough.

Nikita crossed to the desk, recognizing that it was pointless to press. She was talking to a man she'd once seen pass out from blood loss ten seconds after pronouncing himself "fine." To expect him to admit to having insomnia...

At least the nightmares were gone, she thought suddenly. Hers, as well as his. While few of her dreams fell into the happily ever after category, it had been several years since she'd awakened with her face wet from tears or her body bathed in a cold sweat.

"There's something I need to know," she said after a moment, preparing to broach the subject she understood with aching clarity that she could no longer defer discussing. Especially not after what had happened in the darkness of her bedroom in the hours before dawn.

"Yes?"

"Was last night a...good-bye?"

Michael's clever fingers stilled. He looked up, his expression impossible to read. "Are you asking whether I believe we should stop being lovers?"

Nikita blinked. Well, actually, yes. That was *precisely* what she was asking. Only she hadn't intended to approach the issue quite so...so...

She felt her lips start to curve upward at the corners. Michael could be as elusive as liquid mercury when he wished, which was a good portion of the time. But every now and again, he resorted to a sledgehammer-style bluntness that left her breathless or blushing. Or both.

She cleared her throat. "That's one way of putting it."

"No," he answered, refocusing on his work.

"No...you don't believe we should stop being lovers?"

"If I thought our relationship might compromise my effectiveness or yours, I'd end it." Michael typed in a long sequence on the keyboard, then raised his gaze to hers once again. The Section 'stare' was gone. The emotions she saw in his gray-green eyes made her heart skip a beat. Clearest among them were love and trust. They were offered openly and without condition. "Assuming you hadn't done so first."

Something deep within her contracted. There it was, she thought. The bottom line of the code by which both of them had learned to live. Simply put: The personal had to be subordinated to the professional because the professional mattered so much to so many people.

The man who'd been called Operations had once told her that Section--and, by extention, the purpose it served--was more important than any one person, including himself. She'd gradually come to accept this judgment. But she'd never surrendered her convictions that individual human beings mattered.

"You have a lot of faith in me, Michael," she finally said, her voice a little husky.

"With good cause."

"I just hope--"

The door to the office slid open. While the casually dressed man who entered had graduated from "whiz kid" status years before, he still exuded a hint of adolescent awkwardness.

"'Morning, Birkoff," Nikita greeted him.

"Uh...hi..." Section's computer guru responded, apparently surprised by her presence. He smiled briefly, the expression flickering on and off like light bulb with a faulty filament.

"You have the preliminary intel from Petropavlovsk?" Michael questioned, skipping the social niceties.

The younger man's seeming uncertainty evaporated. His posture went from slightly slumped to straight-spined; his eyes glinted with self-assurance.

"We have complete containment," he reported.

"Losses?"

"Two dead, one injured. No confirmed ID. There was an anomaly on the primary satellite link. All indications are a non-significant technical glitch--sun spots, probably. But we're switching com protocol pending a diagnostic."

"Good."

Birkoff glanced at Nikita again. She watched his brow furrow. She watched him open his mouth as though he intended to say something, then snap it shut before he uttered a word.

"Anything else?" she inquired levelly.

"Uh...no." A quick back-forth jerk of his head underscored the reply. "I'll beep when the data's ready for download."

"Good." Nikita smiled her approval. While the smile Birkoff returned looked a lot less forced than his previous one, it was not the crooked grin of complicity she was accustomed to seeing. That grin had been a touchstone for her during some very tough times and she wondered with a pang of loss whether it would ever be directed at her again.

"Thank you, Birkoff," Michael said, bridging what could have been a very uncomfortable silence.

"Sure thing, Michael." The two men exchanged looks. Then Birkoff's eyes flicked back to Nikita. After going through the open-the-mouth-but-shut-it-without-speaking routine again, he pivoted on his sneakered heel and walked out.

"He doesn't know what to call me," Nikita observed, her voice tight.

"Yes, he does," Michael contradicted. "He's just having difficulty doing it to your face."

"Behind my back--?" The tightness gave way to a rueful hint of humor.

"No problem."

Nikita drew herself up, smoothing a hand against her sleek, upswept hair. No one had ever said this was going to be easy, she reminded herself fiercely. Just the opposite, in fact.

"What about you, Michael?" she asked, looking the man she loved straight in the eye.

He gazed back, wordlessly affirmed that he was hers, forever. And then, with quiet solemnity, he addressed her by the title she'd earned with her blood and pain...and heart.

************

"--someone else's mess doesn't matter," the poised, polished blonde now known as Operations concluded evenly. "We're going to clean it up."

"Is the Agency expecting real-time intel on what we're doing?" one of the two operatives sitting across from her asked. He was a dark and dangerously attractive man called Dominic.

Nikita repressed a smile, acutely aware that it would be unwise for the new head of Section One to be seen as endorsing the insubordination implicit in the young man's drawled inquiry.

"I think your post-mission report should tell them everything they need to know," she answered, her tone as dry as unbuttered toast.

Dominic traded looks with the amber-eyed, mocha-skinned young woman seated to his right. Her name was Chandra. The product of an exotically mixed background, she was as beautiful as she was brilliant. Where Dominic was street smart flash and intuitive passion, she was aristocratic cool and tutored cunning.

They'd been matched during training. The bond that had formed between them was infinitely more than a matter of opposites attracting. Each was a superlative performer individually. But together...

"Review the profile and the sims," Nikita instructed. "Michael will see you both in--" she looked to the lean, self-contained man standing to her left.

"Thirty minutes," he supplied with a characteristic economy of words.

There was another exchange of glances between Dominic and Chandra. The click of connection was almost audible. After a moment, both operatives nodded.

"Dismissed."

Dominic and Chandra rose as one and exited, side by side.

"Were *we* ever that obvious?" Nikita murmured as the door slid closed behind them.

"Worse."

She started, surprised that her essentially rhetorical question had garnered such a candid response. Her sky-colored eyes arrowed to Michael's changeable hazel ones. She saw humor...and heat. Her pulse pinwheeled. A honeyed warmth spread through her veins. She suddenly flashed back on an audio tape her predecessor had played for her.

"Do you honestly think they think nobody *notices*?" she'd heard a vagualy familiar female voice ask. The quality of the sound--an echo-y hollowness mixed with an odd, rushing hiss--had puzzled her for a few seconds. Then she'd realized that she was listening to a surveillance tape from the women's shower room.

"Do you honestly think they're *thinking*?" a second female voice had countered with a throaty laugh. "My God. If Michael looked at me the way he looks at Nikita..."

"If Michael looked at me...*period,*" a third female voice had chimed in.

"Brain lock."

"Total meltdown."

"And then there's the way *she* looks back at him!"

"Did you catch the eyeball action this morning after the briefing?"

"I thought Birkoff's hair was going to ignite with the glances they were passing over his head."

"That's nothing. You should have seen them in the gym two days ago."

"You watched them work out together?"

"I was practicing hand-to-hand with Jackson."

"And?" The query had been a chorus.

"Jackson's tongue was on the floor. I stomped on it and cold-cocked him."

Nikita smiled, remembering the giggles and "atta girls" that had erupted on the tape. She sobered a moment later, recalling that the "Jackson" who'd been under discussion had ended up in Abeyance. Although he'd accepted reconditioning and been returned to active field status, he'd been killed in a suicide mission short days short of his thirtieth birthday.

Her thoughts shifted to Chandra and Dominic. Whether it would be easier for them than it had been for her and Michael, it was far too early to tell. Although Section's policy about relationships between operatives had evolved over the years, the fundamental code--duty over desire--still applied.

She and Michael had travelled a long, long way--sometimes alone, sometimes in tandem--to arrive at where they now were. They'd both suffered during the journey. But they'd both survived.

And beyond that...

There's been an extended period when they'd restricted their interaction to the purely professional. Section's exploitation of their mutual attraction had been unrelenting, and Nikita had finally found that the only way she could continue functioning was to disengage emotionally. It had been a appalling experience in many ways, but absolutely necessary. Michael had never challenged the decision she'd made. He'd simply shifted into machine mode...and stayed there.

They'd been a perfect operational team. Their attunement in the field had reached a point where they hardly needed to speak to each other. And when they did talk, they tended to say the same thing, simultaneously. Colleagues had admired both of them intensely. They'd also found them more than a little unnerving.

That friendship would blossom between them was something that Nikita had never, ever expected. But it had, following Michael's official designation as Madeline's successor. Although his talents as a cold op were unmatched, his gift for strategic thinking made him crucial to Section's future. Once his promotion had been announced, he'd been pulled from active field status.

Their platonic rediscovery of each other had started with--what else?--a simple suggestion about going out for coffee. They'd had several discussions about who'd made the initial move. They'd eventually agreed that the first step toward reconciliation had been a mutual one.

That Nikita had invited other men into her life--into her bed--over the years was something she couldn't, no *wouldn't* deny. She'd had several romances outside Section. None of them had been serious. All of them had been satisfying, up to a point.

She'd needed to be touched. To be kissed and cuddled, pleased and paid attention to. It was as simple, and as complicated, as that. But she'd never indulged in casual sex. She'd cared for every man she'd been with.

And they'd cared for her. Only none of them had ever really known her. She hadn't been able to be...herself...with any of them.

How much information Michael had had about her outside involvements, she'd never asked. Instinct had always told her that he probably wouldn't have answered if she did. Madeline had interfered in her "private" affairs only once, calmly warning her off a man she'd already decided was going to press beyond the limits she'd established.

As for the issue of whether Michael had had other lovers...again, Nikita had never inquired. To say her feelings on the matter were mixed was to understate the case. But whatever he might have done and whomever he might have done it with, he'd been totally discreet.

It had been Chandra and Dominic who'd brought them back together. Or, rather, Madeline's manipulations of Chandra and Dominic. Chandra had begun as Nikita's material. Dominic had been assigned to Michael. Midway through their training, Madeline had mandated a switch. She'd also "suggested" that the two be mentored as a potential operative team.

The first few days of the "team" training had been an unmitigated disaster. Had Walter been alive, she would have sought him out and begged for his advice. She suspected that the scenarios she'd been envisioning--one of which included locking Dominic and Chandra in an interrogation room and hoping both of them survived the sexual detonation for which they were so obviously primed--would have had him hooting with reminiscent laughter.

"It's not us, dammit!" Dominic had finally flared in the midst of a verbal flaying by Michael. Had there been any doubts about his excess of guts--or his deficit of self-discipline--this outburst had laid them to rest. "It's you two!"

Michael had stared at him, speechless with anger. The look on his face had been lethal.

"Excuse...me?" Nikita had managed, putting a restraining hand on Michael's tautly muscled arm without really thinking about what she was doing. She'd felt something akin to an electric shock as her fingertips had touched his skin. Michael had turned toward her, his eyes flashing a silver-sheened emerald. Her breath had jammed at the top of her throat.

"Ni...ki...ta...?" he'd whispered hoarsely.

"Michael...?" she'd gasped.

"Is that all?" Chandra had calmly interpolated.

Which one of them had said "Yes," Nikita had never been sure. Michael maintained he couldn't remember hearing the word at all. But something had obviously given the two trainees the idea they'd been released for the rest of the day...

Nikita closed her eyes, not even trying to resist the tremor of pleasure that ran through her. What had happened between her and Michael had been indescribable. And afterward, Michael had given her the words she'd lost hope she'd ever hear.

"Je t'aime," he'd said softly. "I love you, Nikita."

"And I love you, Michael," she'd answered, stroking her fingers against his face. "I always have. I always will."

She filled her lungs on a long, slow breath, then exhaled on a carefully controlled sigh. After a moment, she opened her eyes.

One of the consoles beside the briefing table emitted a low beep. Michael moved to it with his trademark fluidity. He studied the data screen for several moments, his brows veeing together.

"Petropavlovsk?" she asked.

He nodded, still scanning the monitor. "Confirmation on the casualties. Grimes and Kumyko are dead. Volker's in serious but stable condition."

"Within mission profile." Her voice was rock-steady.

"Yes," Michael concurred, matching her tone.

There was a long pause. Then:

"My tactical," Section One's chief strategist said.

"My order," the innocent who'd become Operations countered.

Another pause. Nikita turned and walked toward the sweeping expanse of glass that served as one "wall" of the briefing room. Eventually, she felt Michael come up behind her. She resisted the urge to lean back against his strength.

"It's who we are," she murmured, watching the activity below.

"No, Nikita. It's not."

She stiffened slightly, uncertain of his tone. He sounded very much as he had when he'd addressed her by her new title. "I...don't understand."

"This--" he indicated Section's central command and control "--is what we do. How we choose to do it is who we are."

She turned to face him. "'Choose'?" she echoed, testing the word. "You once told me there was no such thing as free will in Section."

"And you showed me many times I was wrong."

Michael's eyes met hers very steadily. She felt the mating of their minds. The merging of their souls. It was as though the final piece of a complicated puzzle slotted into place. Although the completed picture was not the one she would have selected to define her life, she knew she could face it with equanimity.

She turned back to the observation window.

"Perhaps if how we do what we do is good enough," she said quietly, "there'll come a day when there's no more need for Section."

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