Chapter 11
She came into his cabin still smelling like smoke.
It was in her hair, in the creases of her knuckles, in the cotton of her work shirt—the chemical burn from room nine that no amount of scrubbing at the kitchen sink had taken out.
She'd been awake for twenty-two hours. She'd held hemostats in a man's leg and sat on a dock until dawn and walked a president through a war map, and she was past tired and into the clear, bright space on the other side of it where everything felt sharp and true and very simple.
Buckshot was standing at the window with his back to the door, looking out at the cove. He turned when she came in, and his eyes moved over her—the soot still in her hair, the exhaustion in her face, the set of her shoulders—and whatever he saw made him take a step toward her.
She pulled her shirt over her head before the door was shut.
He stopped.
She stood in the middle of his cabin in her bra and jeans and boots, and she watched his eyes go dark and his hands curl at his sides, and she understood something she hadn't understood before about the way this man worked.
He would wait. He would stand three feet from a woman pulling her clothes off and he would wait for her to tell him what she wanted, because control was the thing he held onto when everything else went wide, and giving it up was the hardest thing he did.
"Come here," she said.
He crossed the room in two strides. His hands went to her waist—big, warm, the calluses catching on her bare skin—and he lifted her onto the dresser like she weighed nothing.
Her legs parted around his hips and he stepped between them, and his mouth found the curve of her throat and she tipped her head back and let him have it.
He kissed down her neck. Slow. Open-mouthed.
His lips tracing the tendon, the hollow at the base, the ridge of her collarbone where the bone ran close to the surface.
He unhooked her bra with one hand—easy, practiced, the kind of thing a man only learned by wanting to get to what was underneath—and let it fall and put his mouth lower.
She arched into him. His mouth was hot on her breast, his tongue circling, his teeth grazing, and she braced her hands on the dresser behind her and let her head fall back against the mirror.
The glass was cool on her scalp and his mouth was warm on her skin and the contrast made everything sharper.
He kissed between her breasts. Down her sternum.
Across her ribs, where the bruise from the desk had faded to yellow and green.
Down her stomach, his hands working her jeans open, pulling them down her hips while his mouth kept moving lower.
She lifted off the dresser and he stripped her jeans and underwear off in one motion, and then she was sitting on his dresser in nothing but her boots and his hands were on her thighs, spreading them wider.
He went to his knees on the floorboards.
She looked down at him. This man—scatter-gun build, pockmark scars, the kind of man who walked into a room and took up all the air in it—kneeling on the hardwood floor of his own cabin with his hands on her bare thighs and his mouth inches from the place where she was already wet and aching.
The image of it hit her somewhere deeper than arousal.
He put his mouth on her and she stopped thinking.
His tongue was slow and deliberate, tracing her in long strokes that started broad and narrowed until he found the center of her and stayed there.
His hands held her thighs apart when they tried to close, and the strength in his grip—the easy, effortless power of a man holding her open—sent heat flooding through her in waves.
She knotted one hand in his hair. Held him where she wanted him.
He let her guide it, responding to every tug and pull, his tongue working in the rhythm she set with her hand.
His fingers slid into her—two, curling, finding the spot that made her hips jerk off the dresser—and the combination of his mouth and his hand was too precise, too relentless, too good.
She braced her other hand behind her on the dresser and her back arched and she came against his mouth with a sound that was half his road name and half something wordless.
He worked her through it, his mouth never stopping, his fingers never slowing, and she shattered against the mirror with the glass rattling behind her head.
He started to stand. She put her foot on his shoulder and pushed him back down.
"Again."
His eyes came up to hers. Dark, blown, a man on his knees being told to stay there. The corner of his mouth moved against her inner thigh.
He did it again.
The second one built slower and broke harder, pulling from deeper, and when it hit she grabbed his hair with both hands and shook apart on his dresser with the mirror banging the wall and her heels digging into his back.
He stayed with her through the whole thing, his mouth gentle now, easing her down, and when the aftershocks stopped she was breathing like she'd run a mile and her legs were trembling against his shoulders.
He stood. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Looked at her with those dark, patient, absolutely wrecked eyes.
She grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him in and kissed him.
Tasted herself on his mouth. Got his shirt off over his head and unbuckled his belt with shaking hands and freed him.
He was hard against her palm, hot, and the sound he made when she wrapped her hand around him and stroked was low and broken.
She pushed him backward toward the bed.
He went. Sat on the edge, then lay back when she climbed over him, and she straddled his hips and reached between them and guided him inside her.
The stretch of him after two orgasms was almost too much—she was swollen and sensitive and every nerve ending was lit—and she sank down on him slow, inch by inch, watching his face.
His jaw clenched. His hands came to her hips. His eyes started to close.
"No," she said.
His eyes opened.
"Look at me."
He looked at her. She held his gaze and began to move—slow, rolling her hips in a rhythm that was nothing like the first time, nothing like the boathouse wall.
This was face to face and eye to eye and nowhere to hide, and she could see everything in him—the want and the fear and the thing underneath both that he'd been circling since the night he put his hands on her face and said you're mine.
She leaned down. Her forehead touched his. Her hair fell around their faces like a curtain, and inside that space it was only them—his breath and hers, his body and hers, the slow, deep rhythm of their hips moving together.
"Earl," she said.
His whole body jerked. His hands spasmed on her hips.
Nobody called him that—not the brothers, not the compound, nobody since before the buckshot and the patch and the road name that had become everything he was.
She watched his face crack open at the sound of it, a fracture line running through all that control, and what came through was raw and unguarded and terrified.
"Say it again," he whispered.
"Earl."
He surged up and wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in her neck, and she held him while he shook. Not from the sex—from the name. From being seen in a place so deep that he'd bricked it over years ago and forgotten it was there.
She rolled her hips against him, slow, deliberate, and he moved with her. His mouth found her shoulder and he kissed her there, soft, and his hands slid from her hips to her waist to her back, roaming, touching everything like he was making sure she was real.
He rolled them. Gentle, easy, putting her on her side and following, staying inside her, one arm under her head and the other wrapped around her waist. His hand spread wide across her stomach, warm, heavy, possessive even now—especially now.
They moved together on their sides, face to face, slow and deep.
His forehead against hers. Her fingers laced through his against her stomach.
She kept her eyes open and so did he, and the vulnerability of it—no hiding, no control, no spreading the damage wide to keep anyone from getting close—was the most intimate thing she'd ever done.
She felt the pressure build again, different this time, deeper, rising from the place where his hand was spread on her stomach and his body was moving inside her.
She didn't fight it. She let it come, let it roll through her, and when she tipped over the edge she said his road name—Buckshot—because that was who he was to the world and Earl was who he was to her and both of those things were true at the same time.
He came a breath after her, his arm tightening, his face pressed into the curve of her neck, and she felt the groan move through his chest into hers.
His hand flexed on her stomach and his fingers squeezed hers and his whole body went rigid and then loose, and they lay tangled together on the sheets with the window open and the lake sounds coming through.
Neither of them moved.
She turned in his arms and put her mouth against the worst of the scarring on his shoulder. Traced the pockmarks with her lips the way she'd done on the dock, but slower now, more deliberate. Mapping them. Learning the geography of the damage like it was a place she intended to come back to.
He let her.
His breathing changed. His hand stilled on her back. The arm around her went from holding to heavy, and she felt the moment his body gave up on staying awake—a slow loosening, a settling, the surrender of a man who hadn't fallen asleep first with anyone in years.
She noted that.
She lay in his arms with her mouth against his scarred shoulder and listened to his breathing deepen and his heartbeat slow, and she understood what it meant that this man—who kept everyone at spread distance, who put damage wide instead of precise so nothing could get close enough to matter—had closed his eyes with her mouth on the worst of him and let go.
She didn't sleep for a long time. She stayed awake in the dark with her fingers laced through his and his breath warm on the top of her head, and the cabin was quiet and the compound was quiet and outside the window the lake lay still under a sky full of stars that neither of them was looking at.