Chapter 14
The bunk was theirs now. Officially.
Nora stood at the foot of it and looked at the evidence — her bag on the floor, her spare boots under the frame, a flannel shirt of Switchback's hanging on the bedpost next to his cut, the quilt they'd tangled and kicked off three times this week folded at the foot.
Her soap in the utility sink. Her screwdriver on the shelf beside his knife.
Two people's things in a space built for one, and it looked right.
She heard him come up the mezzanine stairs.
Slow steps, the creak of the old wood, the sound of a man who'd been watching her run his garage all day and hadn't said a word about it because there was nothing to say — she'd claimed the shop the way she claimed everything, by being the best person in the room to run it, and the room had agreed.
He stopped at the top of the stairs.
She was standing in the low light from the window in a tank top and nothing else, her brassy hair down around her bare shoulders, and she watched his eyes travel the length of her the way they always did — slow, deliberate, the same careful read he gave the sky before a storm.
Except tonight there was no storm coming.
Tonight there was just a woman who'd moved in for real, who'd split her keys and signed a whiteboard and sat at a table with men who killed people, and who was standing at the foot of his bed with her chin up and her eyes daring him to come take what was his.
He crossed the mezzanine in four strides.
He kissed her hard. Both hands on her face, fingers in her hair, his mouth hot and demanding against hers like he'd been holding it back all day — through the garage, through the chapel, through the hours of watching her belong to his world with her name on the board and grease under her nails.
She kissed him back with the same heat, fisting the front of his T-shirt and pulling him toward the bunk.
They hit the mattress together. He came down on top of her and the springs groaned and her back sank into the quilt and his weight pressed her into the narrow bed and she loved it — the solid, heavy fact of him, the warmth of his body over hers, the way his hips settled between her thighs like they'd been designed for the space.
He grabbed her wrists.
Both of them, one in each hand, and pinned them above her head against the mattress.
She sucked a breath through her teeth. His grip was firm — not painful, not rough, just sure, the grip of a man who'd decided where her hands were going to be — and the feeling of being held down by him sent a bolt of heat straight through the center of her.
"Don't move," he said against her mouth.
"Make me."
His eyes went dark. He held her wrists pinned with one hand — his fingers wrapped around both, large enough to hold them — and used the other to pull her tank top up.
He didn't take it off. He shoved it up over her breasts and left it bunched above them, leaving her bare from the ribs down and trapped in the fabric above, and the combination of exposed and restrained made her hips rock up against his.
His mouth found her throat. The spot below her ear that made her breath go shallow, then the long line down to her collarbone, then lower — the freckled slope of her chest, the curve of her breast, the stiff peak that he caught between his lips and sucked until she arched off the mattress and pulled against his grip.
"Aaron—"
"Not yet." He moved to the other side. Took his time. His mouth warm and unhurried, his hand still pinning her wrists, his body weight keeping her hips pressed into the bed while she squirmed and pulled and made sounds she couldn't control.
He worked his way down. Her ribs. The flat of her stomach.
The dip of her navel. His free hand hooked the waistband of her underwear and pulled them down her legs, and she kicked them off and lay bare under him with her wrists still pinned and his mouth still moving south and every nerve in her body screaming.
He kissed her hip bone. The crease where her thigh met her body. The inside of her thigh, moving inward, his breath hot against her skin, and she was so wet she could feel it and she didn't care.
Then he stopped. Looked up at her from between her legs with those hazel eyes full of heat and something darker underneath — possession, ownership, the look of a man who was about to make a woman his in a way that had nothing to do with ceremony and everything to do with the fact that she was in his bed and she'd chosen to be there.
She snapped.
She wrenched her wrists free — he'd been holding firm but not hard, and she twisted out of his grip with a strength that surprised them both — and got a leg hooked around his hip and used the leverage to flip him.
He went over onto his back and she came with him, landing on top of him laughing, low and breathless, and the surprise on his face was the best thing she'd ever seen.
"My turn," she said.
He let her win it. She could see the choice in his eyes — the moment he decided to let go of the control and hand it to her, and the heat in his face when he did.
She sat up straddling his hips and pulled the bunched tank top over her head and threw it, and she was bare on top of him and he was still dressed and the power imbalance made her drunk.
She stripped him. T-shirt first — hauled it up his chest and over his head while he lifted for her, and the route map was right there under her hands, the ink she'd memorized in the dark, the roads she'd traced with her fingertips in three different beds now.
She ran her nails down his chest and he hissed and his hips bucked under her.
Belt. Button. Zipper. She peeled his jeans down and he kicked them off, and then it was skin on skin, the full length of her stretched along the full length of him, nothing between them but heat.
She took him in her hand. Stroked him slow while she watched his face — the jaw clenching, the eyes going heavy, the way his hands gripped the sheets beside his hips like he was keeping himself from grabbing her.
She liked that. She liked the control, liked knowing she could make a man who pinned her wrists lose his own.
She rose up on her knees and sank down onto him.
Slow. Taking him inch by inch, watching his face the whole way, and the sound he made when she settled fully onto him was low and raw and ruined. She planted her hands on the route map across his chest and started to move.
She set the pace the way she set everything — hard and sure and exactly how she wanted it.
She rode him with her brassy hair swinging loose around her face and her hips rolling in a rhythm that built with every stroke, and his hands finally broke — they came off the sheets and onto her hips, gripping hard, fingers digging into the flesh the way they had on the folding table the first night except this wasn't desperation, this was claiming.
"Nora." His voice was wrecked. "God, Nora—"
She leaned down and kissed him. Messy, open, teeth and tongue, and she ground down against him and felt the angle shift and gasped into his mouth.
He sat up under her. Wrapped both arms around her back and pulled her against his chest, and suddenly they were upright, her in his lap, face to face, chest to chest, as close as two people could get.
They moved together. Not her pace, not his — theirs.
The rhythm they'd found over three weeks of fighting and working and sleeping in a narrow bunk, the rhythm of two people who'd chosen each other with their eyes open and their hands dirty.
She wrapped her arms around his neck. He gripped her hips.
Their foreheads pressed together and their breath came in the same ragged pulls and she could feel every inch of him inside her and against her and around her.
She shuddered. The orgasm hit her like a wave breaking — not the sharp, cresting peak of the first time or the deep, rolling tide of the third, but something that felt like falling and being caught at the same time, and she shook apart in his arms with her face buried in his neck and his name on her lips.
He followed. Drove up into her twice, hard, and came with her name in his mouth — Nora — the syllables broken and raw against her shoulder, and she felt him pulse inside her and held on tight.
They collapsed.
Sideways onto the bunk, tangled in the sheets, legs intertwined, her head on his chest and his arms still locked around her. The quilt was on the floor. The pillow was somewhere. Neither of them moved to fix any of it.
She lay there listening to his heartbeat slow down under her ear, her fingers drawing lazy lines across the route map on his chest, and she realized what was different about tonight.
She wasn't listening for the lot.
Not for a car on the curb. Not for footsteps in the dark.
Not for the sound of a man coming for her door.
For the first time since the night two collectors walked into the Ace High with a piece of paper and a name she didn't know, Nora was lying in a bed with nothing outside it that needed her fear.
"I'm not listening," she said.
His arms tightened. His chin rested on top of her head. "I know."
"For the first time. I'm not listening for anything."
"That's what safe sounds like." His hand moved up her spine, slow. "Quiet."
She pressed her lips to the route map. The summit road. Donner Pass. The place where the road topped out and there was nothing but sky.
"This is mine now," she said. Not asking. Telling. Her hand flat on his chest, on the map, on the man. "This bunk. This compound. You."
"Been yours since the towels," he said.
She smiled against his skin and closed her eyes, and the compound was quiet around them and the mezzanine was dark and the bunk was theirs, and for the first time in her life Nora fell asleep without listening for what was coming next.