Chapter 5
An hour after the gravel went quiet, Sam was done waiting.
Sam stood in the office doorway and watched Blizzard pace the lot.
He was checking the perimeter she'd built—testing the gaps between trailers, scanning the highway, his body restless and wired and burning off the fight in motion the way she was burning it off in stillness.
His cut was dark across the shoulders where Dutch's blood had sprayed, and his knuckles were wrapped in a strip of gauze she'd cut from the first-aid kit under the counter, and he moved through the pink neon light like something wild that hadn't decided yet whether to run or stay.
She'd decided.
She stepped off the concrete and crossed the lot toward him. He heard her boots on the gravel and turned, and she saw his face change when he read what was in hers—the blue eyes going wide and then hot, the restless motion freezing mid-stride, everything in him focusing down to a single point.
Sam grabbed the front of his cut with both hands and pulled.
"Come on," she said.
She didn't explain. She didn't need to. He came.
She walked him backward across the lot to the end unit—her unit, the one she kept for herself, the one room at the Basin Star that was hers and nobody else's.
She got the door open one-handed without letting go of his cut and pulled him through it and kicked it shut behind them, and the click of the latch was the loudest sound in the world.
The room was dark. A sliver of neon leaked through the curtain gap, pink and jumping, enough to see by.
She pushed him back until his legs hit the bed and then she shoved, both hands flat on his chest, and he sat down hard on the mattress with a sound that was half surprise and half something much deeper.
She stood over him. His hands came up to her hips and she felt the heat of them through her jeans, the grip already possessive, already claiming.
"Off," she said, and took his cut by the shoulders.
She stripped the leather off him and tossed it on the chair by the door—careful with it even now, even rushing, because she understood what a patch meant to a man who wore one.
Then his shirt, hauling it up and over his head, her knuckles dragging across his stomach and his ribs and the hard flat planes of his chest. He was lean and wound tight, every muscle held at attention, a body that had never learned how to be still.
She was going to teach it.
She set her weight over him, one knee on either side of his hips, and took his mouth.
He tasted like coffee and copper and the cold desert night, and the sound he made against her lips went through her like a current.
His hands slid up under her tank top, rough and urgent, dragging the cotton up her ribs.
She broke the kiss long enough to pull it over her head and drop it, and when she came back down his mouth was already moving—her jaw, her throat, the hollow behind her ear where her pulse was hammering.
"Sam." Her name came out of him rough and broken and certain, and the way he said it—like it was the only word he'd ever needed to know—made her hips rock against him involuntarily.
His hands found the clasp at her back and freed it, and then his palms were on her bare skin, spreading wide across her ribs, pulling her down against his chest. The contact was electric.
She felt it everywhere—the heat of him, the hard urgency, the way his breathing had gone ragged against her throat.
She pressed him flat. One hand on his sternum, holding him there, and she watched his face as she reached between them and worked his belt open.
His jaw was tight. His eyes were locked on hers with an intensity that made her stomach drop.
His hips lifted to help her and she stripped the jeans down and off and tossed them somewhere that didn't matter.
She stood up long enough to peel out of her own, and when she came back to the bed he reached for her and she let him pull her down.
He flipped her.
Fast—faster than she'd expected from a man who'd been taking a beating an hour ago—and she was on her back with his weight over her and his mouth on her collarbone and the hard length of him against her thigh.
She wrapped a leg around him and pulled him in tighter, and the sound he made against her skin was animal and desperate and hers.
"You sure?" he said into her throat. The last coherent thing either of them was going to say.
She fisted her hand in his hair and pulled his head up to look at her. "I pulled you in here."
He drove into her.
Sam's breath punched out of her lungs. Her back arched off the mattress and her fingers dug into his shoulders and for a moment neither of them moved—just held there, locked together, the fullness of him blanking everything else. Then he shifted his hips and she gasped, and the stillness broke.
He moved the way he did everything—wired and relentless, all that restless energy channeled down to a single driving focus.
She matched him, her hips rising to meet every stroke, her hands dragging down his back, feeling the muscles work under his skin.
His mouth found hers again and the kiss was raw and graceless and exactly right, teeth and heat and the taste of want they'd been swallowing since the moment he'd walked through her office door.
The neon pulsed through the curtain gap. The bed frame protested. She didn't care. She locked both legs around his waist and pulled him deeper and his forehead dropped to hers, his breath coming in sharp bursts against her mouth.
"God—Sam—"
She bit his lower lip and felt his whole body shudder.
Her hands fisted in his hair and held him there, his mouth on her throat, his hips driving a rhythm that was building toward something she could feel gathering low and hot and relentless.
She stopped thinking. She stopped being still.
She moved with him, under him, her scarred hands gripping his shoulders, her back bowing off the bed as the pleasure crested and broke and took her apart in waves that pulled sounds out of her she didn't know she had.
He followed her over. She felt it—the moment his rhythm broke and his arms locked and his whole body went rigid against her, his mouth open against her neck, her name on his breath like a prayer he hadn't known he was saying.
He shook with it. She held him through it, her legs tight around him, her hands in his hair, anchoring all that restless motion to the only stillness that had ever held it.
He collapsed against her. His weight settled onto her chest and she took it, wrapping her arms around his back, feeling his heart slam against her ribs. He was breathing like he'd run a mountain. She was breathing the same way.
The room was quiet. The neon buzzed. Somewhere out on the 395, a truck downshifted and the sound rolled across the desert floor and was gone.
She traced the scar on his jaw with her thumb.
A long thin line from a tree branch at speed—she'd asked about it while they were moving fire extinguishers, and he'd told her the story in a rush of words and gestures that made her almost laugh.
She traced it now in the dark, slow, memorizing the shape of it under her skin.
He turned his head and kissed her palm. A small thing. Quiet. Nothing like the desperate fury of what they'd just done. And it cracked something open inside her that she'd kept sealed shut for years.
"Stay," she said. Not a question.
"Try moving me."
She breathed out. Long and slow and certain. The adrenaline was gone. The fight was gone. What was left was the weight of him on her chest and the heat of his skin and the desert silence pressing down on the little room like a held breath.
He started to roll off her and she tightened her legs and held him there.
"I didn't say move."
He laughed against her throat—a low, warm sound she felt in her sternum. "Yes ma'am."
"What did I say about ma'am?"
"Yes Sam."
She pulled him back down, and his mouth found hers, and the kiss was slow and deep and tasted like the beginning of something neither of them was going to walk away from. His hands started moving again—her ribs, her hips, the dip of her waist—and the heat that had barely banked came roaring back.
She pushed him onto his back and climbed over him.
"Again," she said.
His hands settled on her hips, gripping hard, pulling her down against him.
She took her time this round—slow and deliberate, setting the pace, holding his eyes in the dark while his head pressed back into the pillow and his jaw went tight and his fingers dug into her thighs.
She rolled her hips and watched him come apart under her, all that wired energy finally, finally surrendering to her rhythm.
She leaned down and put her mouth against his ear. "Mine," she whispered, and felt him shudder from his shoulders to his heels.
She rode him slow and steady until neither of them could hold it anymore, and when it hit them it hit together—her nails in his chest, his hands locked on her hips, both of them bowed into each other in the dark with the neon pulsing pink through the curtain and the desert cold pressed against the window and nothing in the world that mattered beyond the four walls of that room.
She dropped against his chest. His arms wrapped around her and held. His heartbeat drummed against her ear, slowing, settling, the restless motor in him idling down to something quiet for the first time since she'd met him.
She didn't move. He didn't let go.
Outside, the Basin Star lot lay dark and raked clean, and the 395 stretched empty in both directions, and the war wasn't over and the morning would come with all its questions and none of its answers.
But in the end unit at the far edge of the motor court, Sam pressed her face into Blizzard's chest and breathed him in—leather and sweat and sage wind and the copper tang of a fight that had brought them here—and she kept him there, and she didn't let go.