Chapter 8
The lot was quiet. Viper had the watch, settled into the shadow by the north fence with the patience of a man who'd spent his life waiting for trouble and never minded the hours between. The regulars were dark in their rigs. The highway was empty.
Sam stood at the office window and watched Blizzard talking to Viper across the gravel, their voices too low to carry.
He was gesturing—he was always gesturing, his hands drawing shapes in the air that his mouth couldn't keep up with—and Viper was listening with that still, dark-eyed attention that made the armorer so good at his job.
After a minute Blizzard clapped him on the shoulder and turned back toward the office, and Sam watched him come across the lot in the neon light and felt something shift in her chest that had nothing to do with adrenaline.
The first time, she'd grabbed him. Pulled him in by the cut and taken what the fight had left them both desperate for. Fast, hard, the two of them burning down the voltage before it burned them.
Tonight was different. Tonight there was no dead man on the gravel and no blood drying on his knuckles and no adrenaline screaming through her veins.
Tonight was just the quiet, and him, and the wanting that had been building all day—through the maps and the shoulder-to-shoulder and his hand on the small of her back and the way his chatter went silent when she looked at him.
She wanted him slow. She wanted to choose it clean.
He came through the office door and she was standing right there. He stopped, reading her face the way he was learning to, and whatever he found made his breath catch.
"Sam—"
She took his hand. Not his cut, not his shirt. His hand. She laced her fingers through his and pulled him out of the office and across the lot toward her unit, and he came with her in silence, his thumb running back and forth across her knuckles, the restless energy in him humming but held.
She got the door open and drew him inside and closed it and turned the lock.
The room was dark except for the curtain-leak of neon, pink and slow. She could hear him breathing. She could feel the heat of him in the small space, close but not touching, waiting for her to set the terms the way she'd set them the first time.
She stepped in close and put her hands on his chest, over the cut.
"Slow," she said.
"Okay." His voice was rough and low and the single word cost him something. She could feel it in the tension under her palms—every wire in him pulled tight, the man who couldn't stop moving being asked to be still.
She slid the cut off his shoulders. Carefully, the way she'd done the first night—respecting the leather, respecting what it meant.
She hung it on the back of the chair and came back to him.
His T-shirt next, her hands gathering the hem and pulling it up slow, her knuckles dragging across his stomach, feeling the muscles contract under her touch.
She pulled it over his head and dropped it and put her hands on his bare chest and just looked at him.
The lean lines of him. The old bruise on his ribs from Dutch's fist, yellowing at the edges.
A scatter of scars she hadn't mapped yet—a pale line across his collarbone, a puckered mark on his shoulder that might have been a branch or a rock or something worse.
His chest rising and falling under her hands, faster than it should have been for a man standing still.
She traced the scar on his jaw. The long thin line from a tree branch at fifty miles an hour, the one he'd told her about while they carried fire extinguishers. She ran her thumb along it from his ear to his chin, slow, and then she rose up on her toes and put her mouth on it.
He made a sound. Quiet, from deep in his throat. His hands came to her hips and gripped, and she felt the restraint in his fingers—the effort of not pulling, not rushing, not flipping the pace to match the current running through him.
"Let me," she murmured against his jaw.
His grip loosened. Not letting go—just opening. Giving her the lead.
She kissed down his jaw to his throat, feeling the pulse slam under her lips.
Down the side of his neck, her teeth grazing the tendon, her tongue tasting salt and sage and the leather smell that lived in his skin.
His head tipped back and his hands opened and closed on her hips, restless even in surrender.
She worked her mouth across his collarbone, tracing the pale scar there with her tongue, then down the center of his chest. She could feel his heartbeat against her lips—fast, hard, a drum she was setting the tempo for.
She kissed the bruise on his ribs, gentle, and felt him flinch and then lean into it, his hand coming up to cradle the back of her head.
She sank lower. Her mouth trailed down his stomach, following the line of muscle, feeling the quiver under his skin. She undid his belt with steady hands and pulled his jeans down and he stepped out of them, and she pressed her mouth to his hip bone and heard his breath leave him in a rush.
She stood and pushed him. Both hands on his chest, firm and unhurried, and he sat on the edge of the bed and looked up at her with those restless blue eyes gone dark and desperate.
Sam pulled her own shirt over her head. Unhooked her bra and let it fall. His eyes tracked down her body and she saw his jaw clench, saw his hands fist in the sheets, saw the control it was costing him to stay where she'd put him.
She liked it. She liked the power of it—this man who couldn't be still for anyone, sitting still for her because she'd asked.
She pushed him flat. One hand on his sternum, pressing him back into the mattress. He went, his back hitting the bed, his eyes not leaving hers.
"Stay," she said.
She stripped out of her jeans and underwear and climbed over him, one knee on each side, and lowered herself until her hips pressed against his through the thin cotton still between them.
He was hard and straining and the contact made both of them hiss.
His hands shot to her thighs and she caught them, pressing them down to the mattress by his sides.
"Slow," she said again.
"You're killing me."
"Good."
She leaned down and kissed him. Deep and slow and thorough, her tongue sliding against his, her bare chest against his, her hips grinding a lazy circle that made his arms flex against her hold.
She kissed him until he stopped fighting the pace, until the tension in his body went from desperate to liquid, until the sounds he was making into her mouth were low and continuous and helpless.
Then she freed his hands and let them roam.
They went everywhere—her ribs, her back, her breasts, her hair—mapping her with the focus of a man who'd spent his life reading terrain and was finally reading the one that mattered.
She arched into his palms and let him feel her respond, let him know what his hands did to her, gave him that.
She reached between them and freed him and sank down onto him in one slow, unbroken motion.
His head pressed back into the pillow. His eyes squeezed shut. His hands locked on her hips hard enough to bruise and she didn't care—she wanted the marks, wanted to feel them tomorrow, wanted proof on her skin that this had been real and slow and chosen.
She moved over him at her own pace. Unhurried. Deliberate. The same way she did everything—weight set, certain, no wasted motion. She rose and fell in a rhythm that built so slowly it was almost cruel, watching his face, watching the control shatter and reassemble and shatter again.
He tried to flip her. His hips surged up and his hands tightened and she pressed down on his sternum and held him there.
"Not yet."
He groaned. The sound vibrated through her palm and up her arm and into every nerve in her body.
She kept the pace. Slow. Deep. Rolling her hips at the bottom of every stroke until his breathing was ragged and his hands were shaking on her skin. She leaned forward and put her forehead against his, her hair falling around their faces, and looked into his eyes from an inch away.
"Now," she whispered.
He rolled her in one smooth motion—onto her back, his weight settling over her, his hips picking up the rhythm she'd set and holding it.
Slow. Deep. Matching her the way she'd taught him in the last five minutes, the wired speed in him channeled into something deliberate and devastating.
Her legs locked around his waist. Her forehead stayed pressed to his.
They breathed the same air, shared the same rhythm, and she could feel every inch of him and he could feel every response in her, and neither of them looked away.
The pleasure built in layers—slow and deep and inescapable, nothing like the first time's frantic blaze.
This was a fire that started in the foundations and climbed.
She felt it gathering in her belly, in her thighs, in the place where he moved inside her, and when it hit she didn't arch or cry out.
She went still. Perfectly, completely still, the way she went when something overwhelmed her, and the wave rolled through her in silence with her forehead against his and her eyes locked on his eyes and her hands gripping his shoulders hard enough that her knuckles went white.
He followed her a breath later. His hips stuttered and drove deep and held, and she felt him pulse inside her, and the sound he made was her name—quiet, broken, reverent, pressed into the space between their mouths like a secret.
He didn't collapse this time. He stayed where he was, weight braced on his forearms, his forehead against hers, breathing hard.
She unwrapped her legs slowly, letting them slide down to rest against his.
Her hands loosened on his shoulders and smoothed down his back, feeling the sheen of sweat, the heat of him, the tension draining out of his muscles one fiber at a time.
He lowered himself onto her carefully, settling his weight along her body, and she wrapped her arms around his back and held him there. His face turned into her neck. His breathing slowed.
The room was quiet. The neon pulsed its slow pink through the curtain. Outside, the lot sat still under Viper's watch, and the highway was dark, and the desert cold pressed against the windows.
Neither of them reached for a reason to move.
She ran her fingers through his hair—the sun-bleached mess of it, always sticking up, impossible to tame. He made a small sound against her throat and his arm tightened around her waist, pulling her closer even though there was no closer to get.
"Sam," he said. Quiet. Not asking for anything.
"Yeah."
"Just that."
She smiled against the top of his head. A real smile, not the almost-smile she gave the world. A smile nobody else would ever see.
They stayed tangled in the dark, her fingers in his hair and his arm around her waist and the slow rise and fall of their breathing the only sound in the room, and neither of them moved for a long, long time.