Chapter 8
She found him on the dock past midnight.
The compound had gone quiet an hour ago—brothers rotating through watch, the clubhouse dark except for a light in the chapel where Still was still sitting with the map.
The lake lay flat and black beyond the cove, and the only sound was water lapping the pilings and the low chirr of frogs in the tree line.
Buckshot sat in an Adirondack chair at the end of the dock with a beer in his hand and the sawed-off propped against the armrest, looking at nothing.
His cut was off. His boots were untied. He looked like a man who'd been told to sleep near his guns and had decided to do it somewhere he could breathe.
Tamsin walked down the dock barefoot. The boards were warm from the day's heat and rough under her soles, and the whole thing swayed slightly with each step, and she didn't announce herself because he already knew she was there.
She could tell by the way his shoulders shifted—not tensing, settling.
The opposite of a man reaching for a weapon.
She didn't say anything.
She took the beer out of his hand. Set it on the dock boards. Straddled his lap in the chair and settled her weight against him, her knees on either side of his hips, her hands coming up to frame his jaw.
He looked at her.
The moonlight caught the scar through her eyebrow and the sharp line of her cheekbone and the gray of her eyes, and she could see him in it too—the scatter of pockmarks across his shoulder where his shirt had pulled open, the tension in his jaw, the way his hands came to her thighs and rested there, waiting, letting her decide.
She kissed him slow.
Not the way she'd kissed him after the fight—hungry, desperate, adrenaline pouring through both of them like gasoline on a fire.
This was different. This was her mouth moving against his with intention, her tongue tracing his lower lip, her teeth catching the fullness of it and pulling gently. A conversation, not a collision.
He kissed her back the same way. His hands slid up her thighs to her hips, and his thumbs traced circles against the bare skin where her tank top had ridden up, and she could feel him holding himself still underneath her—all that coiled force, all that overwhelming energy he carried in everything he did, held back because she was setting the pace and he was letting her.
She pulled back. His eyes were half-lidded, dark, watching her with a patience that cost him more than she could see.
"Don't talk," she said.
He opened his mouth. She put her thumb across his lips.
"Not tonight. Not one word."
Something moved behind his eyes—surprise, challenge, the heat of being told what to do by a woman sitting in his lap—and then he nodded, once, and his hands tightened on her hips.
She unbuttoned his shirt.
Slowly. One button at a time, her fingers working down his chest while the lake lapped underneath them and the dock swayed.
She spread the fabric open and looked at him—the broad, scarred expanse of his chest, the pockmark damage running across his left shoulder and down, the muscle underneath it.
She'd seen it in the dark. She'd felt it under her hands.
But she hadn't done this—hadn't taken her time with it, hadn't given it the attention that damage like this deserved.
She put her mouth on the first scar.
He went rigid.
Every muscle in his body locked. His hands on her hips turned to iron, his breath stopped, and she could feel his heartbeat spike under her lips—fast, hard, the kind of acceleration that had nothing to do with arousal and everything to do with being touched in a place nobody had ever touched him.
She didn't stop.
She kissed the second scar, and the third, and the fourth.
She traced the pattern of them with her mouth—the scatter map of a load of buckshot that had hit him years ago and never quite healed, not because the skin hadn't closed but because nobody had ever put their lips against it and stayed.
She could feel him shaking under her, a fine tremor that ran through his whole body, and his hands on her hips loosened and then tightened and then loosened again, like he couldn't decide whether to pull her closer or push her away.
She kissed the worst one. The deep pockmark at the crest of his shoulder, puckered and white, the one that must have been closest to the center of the spread. She put her open mouth on it and let him feel the heat of her breath and the softness of her lips on the ugliest thing his body carried.
His hand came up and fisted in her hair. Not pulling. Holding.
She lifted her head and looked at him. His eyes were wide open, bright in the moonlight, and there was something stripped raw in them—no armor, no control, no spreading the damage wide to keep anything from getting close.
Just a man sitting in a chair on a dock with a woman's mouth on his worst scars, coming apart in a way that had nothing to do with sex.
She kissed his mouth. Tender. Slow. Felt him breathe against her, shaking, and held his face between her hands until the tremor eased.
Then she pulled her tank top over her head and pressed her bare chest against his, and the sound he made—wrecked, grateful, hungry—was the most honest thing she'd ever heard from him.
He stood.
He lifted her out of the chair with her legs still wrapped around him, one arm banded under her ass and the other spread across her bare back, and carried her down the dock toward the boathouse.
The boards creaked under their combined weight.
The lake caught the moonlight in long silver ripples.
She locked her ankles at the small of his back and put her mouth against his neck and bit, and he stumbled on the last board—just barely, just enough—and the loss of his perfect control sent a bolt of heat through her.
He got her against the boathouse wall. Rough wood against her shoulder blades, his body pinning her there, his hands pulling at her shorts.
She unwrapped her legs long enough for him to strip them down and she kicked them off one ankle, and then his hand was between her thighs and his fingers slid into the slick heat of her and she swore into his neck with her nails digging into his shoulders.
He worked her with his hand—two fingers, deep, his thumb finding the spot that made her vision blur—and he watched her face while he did it, his forehead against hers, his eyes holding hers from inches away.
She was shaking, riding his hand, her back scraping against the rough wood, and when she got close he stopped.
She made a sound that was half fury, half plea.
He turned her.
She faced the wall with her palms flat against the boards and his body behind her, and she felt him free himself and then the blunt press of him at her entrance, and she pushed back into it before he could ease in—took him in one hard stroke that made them both grunt.
His arm banded across her chest, hand splayed between her breasts, pulling her back against him. His mouth found her ear.
She remembered her own rule. No talking. But she broke it herself because this was the moment that needed words.
"Don't hold back," she said.
He didn't.
He drove into her with the full force of everything he'd been holding—his hips snapping forward, his arm locked around her, his mouth hot and open against the curve of her neck.
The boathouse wall shuddered with each stroke and the lake slapped the pilings underneath them, and she braced her forearms against the wood and pushed back into every thrust, meeting him, matching him, refusing to let him do this to her without doing it right back.
He was rough and she wanted it rough. He was relentless and she wanted him relentless.
Every time he drove deep she felt the sound he made vibrate against her spine, and the pressure built from the base of her body outward, winding tighter with each stroke until she was panting against the wood and her legs were shaking and the only thing keeping her upright was his arm across her chest and the wall against her hands.
His free hand slid down her stomach and between her legs, and his fingers found her where they were joined, and the combination of him inside her and his hand on her was too much.
The orgasm hit like a wave breaking—not building, not climbing, just crashing through her all at once—and she cried out against the boards with her whole body clenching around him.
He followed two strokes later, burying himself deep and going still with a groan that she felt in her bones, his forehead dropping to her shoulder, his arm tightening until she couldn't breathe and didn't want to.
They stayed like that against the wall. Breathing. The lake underneath them, the dock swaying, the frogs going in the tree line like nothing had happened.
His hand unclenched from her chest and moved to her stomach, spread wide, palm flat. A possessive hold that had become as automatic as breathing. She put her hand over his and laced her fingers through, and he pressed his mouth to the back of her neck and just breathed.
After a long time, he pulled out of her gently and turned her around and picked her up like she weighed nothing. She wrapped around him, her face in his neck, and he carried her up the dock and across the gravel lot and into his cabin without putting her down, without speaking, without letting go.
He laid her on his bed. Pulled the sheet over her. Lay down beside her and gathered her against his chest with his arm around her waist and his hand in her hair, and she hooked her leg over his and pressed her mouth to the hollow of his throat and felt his pulse beating there, steady now, slowing.
She slept in his bed for the first time.
Not her motel apartment, not the room she'd built and owned and controlled. His bed, in his cabin, in a compound full of armed men on a cove where the water went silver in the moonlight and the world outside the gate was getting darker by the hour.
His breathing deepened. His arm went heavy around her. She lay in the dark and listened to the lake and the frogs and the distant sound of a brother's boots on gravel—the watch, the rotation, the men who stayed awake so the rest of them could sleep.
She closed her eyes and let his heartbeat carry her down.