CHAPTER FOUR #3
His jaw flexed. "Your father gave me one order. One. Stay away from his daughter. I said yes sir. He gave me my whole life — the Saints, the patch, the only home I've ever had — and the one thing he ever asked me for in return was that I not touch you."
"And you owe him." She nodded slow, like she was hearing him out, because she was.
"You owe him your life and you pay it back by guardin' the one piece of it he set off-limits.
I know how you're built, Darius, I've been watchin' you be loyal to my daddy since I was twenty.
But hear me. I'm not a thing my father loaned you the keeping of.
You can't betray a man by failing to control a grown woman's body for him.
That was never yours to control or his to give.
The only person in this kitchen who gets to decide who touches me is me, and I've decided. "
He shook his head once, the last wall, the real one. "You don't know what comes in my hands."
"Then don't touch me." She stood up out of the chair. She stepped in between his knees so he had to tip his head back to keep her eyes. "I'll touch you."
"Zola."
"It could cost me the club." It came out of him low, the true bottom of it, the thing under all the other reasons.
"You understand that? Not just the order.
If I do this, and he finds out — and he will, he finds out everything — I could lose the patch.
The brothers. The first place anybody ever let me belong.
I've got nothing else, Zola. You're askin' me to bet the only home I ever had on a night. "
"No." She said it gentle, and sure, and it landed harder for being both.
"I'm not askin' you to bet anything. I'm tellin' you what I want, and lettin' you decide what it's worth.
That's different, and you've been handled your whole life by people who never once let you tell those two apart.
" She softened. "And it's not a night. We both know it was never gonna be a night.
It's been seven years of standin' at a door.
I'm just the one finally turnin' the handle. "
"You're not your hands, Knox." She pressed both palms flat to his jaw, his stubble rough against them, and she felt the shudder go through him at that, at being held by the face like something cherished.
"Whatever your daddy put in 'em. Whatever you do with 'em for my father.
I've had your hands on me twice tonight and both times they were the gentlest thing in the state of South Carolina.
You think you're a wall. A thing that just stands there between people and the bad coming for 'em.
" She leaned down until her mouth was a breath from his.
"I don't want the wall. I want what the wall's been guarding this whole time. "
He made a sound she felt more than heard, low, like something giving way under load.
She bent and brushed her mouth over his, barely, a question more than a kiss, and felt the breath go out of him against her lips.
"Last chance to tell me no," she whispered. "And then I'm gonna kiss you for real, and after that neither one of us gets to pretend this was ever gonna be anything else."
His good hand came up slow and spread along her jaw, into her hair, and she felt it tremble there — the famous deadly hand of the Iron Saints' enforcer, shaking against the side of her face like a boy's.
He didn't pull her in. He just held her there, like he was making sure she was real, like he'd walked past this exact door ten thousand times and couldn't believe it had finally opened.
"I've never been able to tell you no," he said, wrecked. "Seven years. That was the whole problem."
He didn't tell her no.
* * *
Seven years went off in him all at once, like a charge that had been waiting in the wall the whole time for somebody to touch the right wire.
She kissed him and Knox stopped being a man who held still.
His good hand came up into her hair and his bandaged one closed on her hip and he stood out of the chair into her so the chair scraped back and tipped and he didn't hear it hit the floor, because she was kissing him like she'd meant every word of the speech and he was kissing her back like a man let out of somewhere, hungry, graceless, all the smooth gone out of him.
She tasted like the cheap tap water and underneath that like something warm that he'd wanted for so long he'd stopped believing it had a flavor.
He walked her backward without deciding to and her back hit the kitchen wall and she gasped into his mouth and arched up off it into him, and the part of his brain that had spent seven years standing guard threw up its hands and walked off the job.
One hand found the wall beside her head, the other went low on her back, and he pressed the whole length of himself against her.
She was warm and soft and fierce against the cool plaster, her fingers fisting in his shirt, her thigh climbing the outside of his.
He'd spent his life being the wall — the flat patient thing that stood between people and what was coming for them and gave nothing back.
Never once had he been the man pinned against one with a woman pulling him in by the shirt.
He hadn't known it could feel like this, like being let inside a place he'd only ever stood guard at the door of.
"Upstairs," she said against his jaw. "There's a bed. I am not doing the first time on a dead woman's kitchen floor."
For a moment he couldn't do anything but kiss her, one hand still braced on the wall, the other mapping the dip of her waist and the flare of her hip through the thin scrubs like he was memorizing a thing he'd been told all his life he'd never get to have.
She bit his lower lip, not gentle, and rolled her hips against the hard line of him, and he groaned into her mouth and gave up the last of his good sense.
He laughed — actually laughed, rough and disbelieving — and got an arm under her and lifted, and her legs came around him like they'd done it a hundred times, and he carried her up the narrow stairs with her mouth working at his throat, her teeth grazing the cord of it, her hands shoving his cut off his shoulders so it dropped somewhere on the steps behind them.
The leather and gun-oil smell of him was everywhere, and under it sweat and the green of the marsh that had gotten into both their clothes, and she breathed it in like she'd wanted to do it for years, which she had.
The lamp was still on in the bedroom. He got her down onto the motel sheets and came down over her and made himself stop, braced on his forearms, looking at her — and there it was, the terror, right on schedule, rising up cold under all the heat.
His hands. He looked at his own hand fisted in the sheet beside her head, the split knuckles, the gauze, the hand that had put three men down before they could blink, and the old voice in him that sounded like his father's said the thing it always said.
That's what those are for. That's all they're for.
She caught his face again. Turned it back to her.
"Hey. Stay here with me." She'd seen it — of course she'd seen it, she saw everything, it was the worst and best thing about her. "Where'd you go."
"My hands are—" He couldn't finish it.
"Give 'em here."
And she took his right hand, the hurt one, the one he was most afraid of, and she brought it to her mouth and kissed the palm of it, and then she laid it flat over her own heart so he could feel it going, fast and strong, and she held it there.
"Feel that," she said. "That's me not scared.
That's me, with your hand on my heart, in a locked house, in the dark, and my pulse is up for one reason and it's got nothin' to do with bein' afraid of you.
" She held his palm flat against her chest and didn't let it go.
"You've spent your whole life waitin' for the person you touch to flinch.
I'm tellin' you it's not gonna come. Not from me.
Not tonight, not ever. Now put your hands on me, Darius, and let me show you what they're actually for. "
Something in his chest that had been welded shut since he was six years old tore loose.
He kissed her like he'd been told he was allowed to live.
He got her out of the scrub top and the plain cotton bra under it and he put his mouth to her breast and she made a sound that he was going to hear in his sleep for the rest of his life, and his hand — the hurt hand — spread open over her ribs and slid down and his thumb found the button of her scrub pants and she lifted her hips up off the bed to help him get them gone.
Bare under the lamp, brown skin gone gold in the spotted mirror across the room where he could see the long line of her — the curve of her hip, the rise and fall of her belly, his own broad hand spread on the soft inside of her thigh, looking too big and too rough against her and not, somehow, being too rough.
Being slow. Being asked for. She pushed his shirt up and he tore it off the rest of the way and she ran both palms over his chest, over the old marks there she didn't ask about, and he held still and let her look as he never let anybody look, because she wasn't hunting for the damage.
She was just learning him. Her hands came back to him soft and unhurried, and that undid him more than anything sharper would have.
"Look at you," he said, low, and didn't know which one of them he meant.
"You too." She had his belt open, his jeans shoved down, her hand wrapping him, and his whole body jerked at the first feel of her palm closing around his cock, her grip sure, working him slow, watching his face the entire time like she was learning him.
"Seven years," she said, wondering, "and you're shakin'. "
He was. His hands were shaking. This was the opposite of the cold stillness, the dam letting go, and for once in his life he let them.