Chapter 11
She couldn't get the smell of smoke out of her skin.
Sam had scrubbed her hands twice in the office sink and run cold water over her face and changed her shirt, and the char was still there—in her hair, under her nails, soaked into the cocoa butter she worked into her knuckles every night.
It was in the walls of the motel and the gravel of the lot and the cold desert air and everything she breathed.
She was wired. Not the sharp, clean adrenaline of the fight—that had burned off hours ago.
This was the other kind. The slow, grinding electricity that came after the damage was done and the boards were up and the old man was asleep and there was nothing left to do but stand in the dark with the anger and the want and the furious refusal to break.
Blizzard was in the office cleaning the cut on his forearm again, peeling back the bandage she'd put on that morning and checking it with the restless attention of a man who needed something to do with his hands.
He smelled of smoke too. It was in his cut and his hair and the gauze wrapped around his arm, and when Sam came through the office door he looked up and she could see the same wire running through him—the energy with nowhere to go, the night sitting on both of them heavy and electric and unsatisfied.
She crossed the room and grabbed his shirt with both fists and shoved him toward the door.
"Now," she said.
He didn't ask where. He didn't ask why. He read her face and his eyes went dark and he came.
She pushed him across the lot to her unit—not pulling this time, not leading him by the hand. Pushing. Her fists in his shirt, driving him backward through the dark, and he went stride for stride, his hands finding her waist and gripping hard while she steered him through the door.
The room smelled like smoke. Everything smelled like smoke. She didn't care.
She slammed the door and shoved him against the wall.
His back hit plaster and she pinned his wrists above his head, both of his caught in one of hers, her body pressed flat against his from chest to thigh.
He was bigger than her and stronger and he let her hold him there, his breathing going ragged, his hips pushing forward against hers.
"Don't move," she said.
He made a sound that wasn't a word.
She kept his wrists pinned and used her free hand to strip his shirt up.
He had to help—she let his hands go long enough for him to drag it over his head and then she caught his wrists again and pressed them back to the wall.
His bare chest rose and fell hard. The bandage on his forearm was white against the dark skin of his arm.
The bruises on his ribs had gone purple and yellow.
She put her mouth on his chest and bit him.
Not hard enough to break skin. Hard enough that his whole body jerked against the wall and a sound tore out of him that was animal and raw and completely hers.
She bit the muscle over his heart and then dragged her mouth sideways, her teeth scraping, her tongue following, tasting salt and smoke and the leather-sage scent that lived in his skin.
Down to the bruise on his ribs—she kissed it this time instead of biting, gentler than she felt, and the contrast made him groan.
She dropped lower. Her mouth trailed down the center of his stomach, tongue tracing the ridges of muscle, teeth grazing the skin below his navel.
She undid his belt one-handed with his wrists still pinned above him and pulled his jeans open and down, and he was hard and straining and she took him in her hand first—a long, slow stroke that made his head fall back against the wall with a thud.
"Sam—God—"
She let go of his wrists. They stayed where she'd put them, pressed against the plaster, his fingers curling into fists. Good. He was learning.
She sank to her knees on the hard floor and took him in her mouth.
He swore. His hands came off the wall and found her hair and she let him hold on—fisted in the short dark strands, not guiding, just anchoring.
She worked him slow and deliberate, her scarred hands braced on his thighs, her mouth taking him deep and pulling back and taking him again, setting a rhythm that built and built until his legs were shaking and the sounds coming out of him were wrecked and desperate.
She pushed him to the edge and held him there until his hands were trembling in her hair and his breathing had gone to pieces. Then she pulled back, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and stood up.
The look on his face nearly broke her resolve. Shattered. Desperate. His pupils blown so wide his eyes were almost black, his chest heaving, his hands reaching for her.
She caught his wrists again and hauled him toward the bed.
She pushed him down and he went, falling back onto the mattress, and she stripped herself bare in four efficient motions—shirt, bra, jeans, everything—and climbed over him.
She planted her scarred hands flat on his chest and settled her weight across his hips and took him inside her in one long, slow, relentless slide.
His back arched off the bed. His hands flew to her hips and locked there, fingers digging into her skin hard enough to leave prints, and the noise he made was somewhere between her name and something that had no language.
She rode him slow and hard.
Not gentle. Not the unhurried tenderness of the night before.
This was need—raw, furious, smoke-stained need, the anger at what had been burned and the refusal to let it break her channeled into something that was purely, savagely alive.
She held his eyes the way she held every man's, the flat unblinking gaze that said I see you and I'm not looking away, and she watched his face while she moved on him and waited for the thing she wanted.
He broke.
His eyes squeezed shut and his jaw went tight and his hips surged up under her and the sound that came out of him was raw and helpless and completely surrendered.
She felt it go through him—the fight leaving his body, the wire snapping, everything he was pouring into the place where they were joined.
She followed him. Her hands curled into fists on his chest and her head dropped forward and the pleasure hit like a wall—not a wave, a wall, sudden and total, and she went rigid on top of him and shook with it in silence, her teeth clenched, her whole body locked down against the force of it.
She came apart on top of him and he held her hips through all of it, his hands the only thing keeping her from flying off the earth.
She collapsed forward onto his chest. Her cheek against his breastbone. Her hands uncurling, going flat, feeling his heart slam under her palm. His arms wrapped around her back and held, tight and close, his face turning into her hair.
She lay there. One leg thrown over his. Her weight on his chest. The smoke smell still in everything, but underneath it—leather and sage and sweat and him, the scent she was starting to think of as home even though she'd never called anything that.
She didn't move. She was in no hurry to move. The wire was finally gone, burned out and spent, and what was left was the weight of her own body and the heat of his skin and the steady drum of his heart against her ear.
His hand came up and traced a lazy line down her spine. Slow. Absent. The touch of a man who had stopped running.
"You're dangerous," he murmured into her hair.
"You knew that."
"I did." His arms tightened. "Come here."
"I'm right here."
"Come closer."
She smiled against his chest—the real one, the one nobody else got—and burrowed into him, and he pulled the tangled sheet over both of them with one hand and wrapped the other arm around her and held on, and the Basin Star sat quiet and scorched and standing around them, and neither of them moved for a very long time.