Chapter 8 - Havoc #2
She reaches for me. Arms coming up, trying to pull me down, closer, wanting my weight against her, and I can feel her trembling with the effort of it.
I step forward, close the distance, lower myself until her breasts press against my chest and her breath is warm on my face and her arms can finally wrap around my neck properly.
Something clicks.
That's the only word for it. Something that has been loose and rattling around in my chest for years, maybe always, slides into alignment with a click I feel in my sternum.
Her hands on my back. Her breath against my jaw. Her body wrapped around mine in a break room in a casino in Las Vegas while the world continues outside the locked door.
*Click.*
"I'm going to cum," I manage, my voice stripped down to nothing. "I need to—I should—"
I move to pull back, because I'm not the kind of man who makes assumptions—
"No." Her arms tighten. Her legs wrap around my hips, locking at the ankle, and she pulls me in. "Don't. I want—" Her eyes find mine, direct and completely certain. "I want all of you. Inside me. Please."
I am not made of stone.
I've been accused of it. The brothers joke about it, enemies have assumed it, but Ruby Lane has just proven, definitively and permanently, that I am not made of stone at all.
I keep moving. Her legs hold me in place, her nails dig into my back, and when I come it hits me with the force of something long overdue: two shots, deep, buried inside her while she clenches around me and breathes my name against my neck.
*Jake.*
Not Havoc. Jake.
I hold her through it, both of us shaking, and the break room is silent except for our breathing and the distant hum of the casino that owns both our lives and has no idea what just changed inside one of its storage rooms.
I should move. Should start the process of returning to reality. Straightening clothes, unlocking doors, pretending to the rest of the world that nothing has shifted irrevocably in the last forty-five minutes. Ruby has tables to cover. I have a floor to watch.
I don't move.
"Hey," she says softly, against my neck.
"Hey."
"You okay?"
I think about the question seriously, which is not something I usually do when people ask it. Usually okay is automatic, reflexive, the word that ends conversations before they start.
"Yeah," I say, and mean it completely. "More than okay."
She pulls back just enough to look at my face, and whatever she finds there seems to satisfy her because the tension around her eyes eases.
She looks thoroughly wrecked. Hair completely escaped from its tie now, lips swollen, a flush spread across her chest that I'm personally responsible for, and she is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life.
I reach up and push a curl back from her face.
She catches my hand, holds it against her cheek, and turns her face slightly to press her lips against my palm. Such a small gesture. Such a devastating one.
"So," she says, her voice still a little unsteady. "What happens now?"
"What do you want to happen?"
She considers this, her dark eyes thoughtful.
"I want to take Marcus to a park on my day off," she says.
"He's been cooped up in that motel room for four days and he's going insane.
I want to find us an apartment that doesn't smell like cigarettes.
I want to take one nursing class at the community college before the semester ends.
" She pauses. "And I want to see you again.
Outside of this building. If that's something you want too. "
"It is," I say. "All of it."
"All of it?" Her eyebrows lift. "The park too?"
"Especially the park."
She stares at me. "You want to come to the park. With me and my five-year-old."
"Yeah."
"You know what five-year-olds are like, right?"
"No," I admit. "But I'd like to find out."
She laughs. Warm and unguarded, the first one I've heard from her that doesn't have any self-consciousness in it. I decide right then that I'm going to spend a considerable amount of time and effort making her laugh like that as frequently as possible.
"Okay," she says, still smiling. "The park. You and me and Marcus."
"And after," I say, "we find you an apartment."
Her smile dims slightly. "Jake, I can't afford—"
"The club has properties," I tell her. "Good ones. Safe neighborhoods, reasonable rent. I'll talk to Pope."
"I don't want charity."
"It's not charity. It's what the club does for employees who need a hand." I hold her gaze, steady. "It's what I want to do for you. Let me."
She's quiet for a moment, the independence in her warring with the exhaustion of someone who's been doing everything alone for too long.
"One step at a time," she finally says.
"One step at a time," I agree.
She starts gathering herself together: sliding off the desk, finding her clothes and dressing. I pull my own jeans back up, run a hand through my hair, and retrieve her apron from where I threw it.
I hold it out. She takes it, ties it around her waist, and then looks up at me.
"How do I look?" she asks.
Like someone who just had the best sex of my life in a break room. "Fine," I say.
She narrows her eyes. "You're a terrible liar."
"Nobody out there is going to say a word," I tell her. "I promise."
She takes a breath, squaring her shoulders, and I watch her put the Ruby-who-works-here back on over the Ruby-who-just-came-apart-in-my-arms, and I feel something fierce and protective swell in my chest because I know now that both of those women are real. And both of them are mine.
I unlock the door.
She goes first, stepping back into the hallway, back toward the casino floor and her tables and the rest of her shift. She's three steps away when she stops and looks back at me.
"Jake."
"Yeah."
"Don't run this time."
I look at her standing in that hallway. Tired and beautiful and brave in ways she doesn't fully recognize, and something in me settles.
Goes quiet. The particular quiet that I've spent years chasing in the wrong places, the kind that doesn't come from absence of feeling but from the presence of the right one.
Pope found me on a curb with a gun and gave me a reason to stay.
Ruby found me on a casino floor covered in beer and gave me a reason to live.
"I'm not running," I tell her. "I'm done running."
She holds my gaze for one more second, and then she smiles, and turns back toward the casino floor.
I watch her go.
Then I follow, because that's what I intend to do from now on. Show up. Stay. Follow her into whatever comes next with both hands open and no intention of flinching.
It won't be simple. She comes with a kid and a history and walls built from years of people failing her. I come with nightmares and a scar and a club that is my whole world. We are two people shaped by damage trying to figure out if the shapes we've become might fit together anyway.
But I've been in worse situations than this.
And none of them ever felt this much like home.