Chapter 17
She wanted him. That was all.
Not because the fight was singing in her blood.
Not because the fire had left her wired and furious.
Not because the dead man on the asphalt had sent adrenaline screaming through her body and this was the only way to come down from it.
She'd come down hours ago. The adrenaline was gone, the highway was quiet, Carl was asleep on the couch downstairs with Dana's blanket over him and the radio playing low.
Sam wanted Blizzard because she wanted him. Simple. Uncomplicated. The cleanest thing she'd felt in months.
He was sitting on the mezzanine steps with a beer he'd barely touched and the new bruise on his cheekbone turning purple and his sun-bleached hair sticking up in six directions, and he was staring at nothing with the unfocused look of a man whose body had stopped but whose mind was still running laps.
She sat down beside him. Took the beer out of his hand. Drank it.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey." She set the bottle on the step and looked at him. "Come to bed."
Not come here or I need you or any of the things she'd said before when the wanting was tangled up with other things.
Just come to bed. Plain and direct and entirely about the fact that she wanted his body against hers and his mouth on her skin and the particular sound he made when she took him apart.
His eyes found hers and warmed. The restless, unfocused look drained away, replaced by the thing that happened when he stopped looking at the world and started looking at her—everything in him going still and focused and absolutely present.
"Yes ma'am," he said.
"What did I say."
"Yes Sam." The grin. The slow, dangerous, wired grin that she'd been addicted to since the first night. "Whatever you want, Sam."
She stood and held out her hand and he took it, and she led him up the last of the mezzanine steps to the bunk she'd claimed as hers. The compound was dark below them. The ceiling fan turned. The Reno neon leaked through the window in its slow pink wash.
She turned to him and put her hands on the front of his cut. His breathing changed immediately—deeper, faster—and she liked that. She liked knowing that her hands on his chest could do that to him, every time, without fail.
She slid the leather off his shoulders and laid it on the footboard of the bunk. Folded, careful, the way she always handled it. Then his shirt—pulling it up slow, her palms flat against his stomach, feeling the muscles tighten under her touch. Over his head. Gone.
She looked at him. The lean planes of his chest in the faint window light.
The yellowing bruises from fights she'd watched him win.
The scar on his collarbone. The fresh purple mark on his cheekbone where Tibbet had caught him.
Every mark a story she knew now, every scar a part of the man she'd chosen.
She pushed him back onto the bunk.
He sat, then lay back when her hand pressed his sternum—easy, willing, his eyes on her face with that open, wanting look that made her stomach drop every time. She climbed onto the bunk and settled between his legs, her hands on his belt.
She undid it slow. Drew his jeans down and off.
Ran her hands back up his thighs, feeling the muscle and the warmth and the tension building under his skin.
He was already hard, straining against the cotton, and she took her time pulling the last of his clothes away because the way his breathing fell apart when she made him wait was one of her favorite sounds in the world.
She started at his throat. Her mouth, open and warm, tracing the tendon on the side of his neck.
Down to his collarbone, kissing the scar.
Across his chest, her tongue flat against his skin, tasting salt and soap and the faint ghost of leather that never fully washed away.
His hand came up to her hair and she let it rest there—not guiding, just holding, his fingers gentle in the short dark strands.
She worked her way down his stomach. Slow.
Mouth and tongue and the occasional graze of teeth that made his abs clench and his breath hiss through his teeth.
She kissed the hollow of his hip. The crease of his thigh.
Everywhere except where he wanted her, making him wait, making his hand tighten in her hair.
When she finally took him in her mouth he groaned—a low, broken sound that he tried to swallow and couldn't. His hand fisted in the sheet with the other and she worked him slow and thorough, varying depth and pressure, reading every twitch and shudder the way she read terrain.
He was close in minutes—she could feel it in the tension of his thighs, the way his hips tried to lift—and she kept him there, drawing it out, until his fists were white in the sheets and his breathing was ragged and his whole body was shaking.
She released him and climbed up.
She stripped her own clothes off—quick, practical, no performance in it. She straddled him and sank down and took him inside her with a slow, steady motion that pulled a groan from both of them at once.
She set her hands on his chest. Palms flat, weight forward. Her scarred knuckles against his bruised skin. She held his eyes and started to move—unhurried, rolling her hips in long, deep strokes that built heat like coals banking.
He looked up at her with those blue eyes wide open and stripped of everything, and she held his gaze the way she held ground—steady, unwavering, daring him to look away.
He didn't. He couldn't. She moved over him and watched the pleasure take him apart piece by piece, watched his jaw go tight and his hands grip her hips and his eyes go dark with the effort of holding on.
"Give in," she said. Not a whisper. A statement. Quiet enough that the room below wouldn't hear, firm enough that it landed.
His hands tightened on her hips. His breath left him in a rush.
And she saw it happen—the surrender, the release, the moment he stopped fighting the pace and gave himself over to her rhythm completely.
His body went loose beneath her, his hips matching her motion instead of fighting it, and the look in his eyes shifted from desperate to something so open and trusting it made her chest ache.
She leaned down and kissed him, deep and slow, still moving, and his arms came around her back and held.
Then he rolled her.
Smooth, strong, one arm locked around her waist as he flipped them on the narrow bunk.
Her back hit the mattress and his weight settled over her and she wrapped her legs around him, high on his waist, her ankles locked at the small of his back.
He drove into her and the angle changed everything—deeper, fuller, the pleasure spiking through her in sharp, bright waves.
He matched the pace she'd set. Unhurried.
Deep. Each stroke deliberate and complete, his forehead against hers, his breath mixing with hers in the small space between their mouths.
Her legs tightened around him and she pulled him closer, deeper, her nails dragging down his back in long slow lines that made him shudder.
The pleasure built from the inside out—slow and massive and impossible to stop, nothing like the frantic first-time blaze or the tender compound silence. This was want stripped of everything else. Plain. Honest. Two bodies that knew each other now, finding the rhythm that was only theirs.
She came with her face pressed into his shoulder and her legs locked around him and her hands flat against his back, feeling every muscle in him work as he drove her through it. Silent. Waves rolling through her that went on and on, pulling sounds from deep in her chest that she buried in his skin.
He followed her two strokes later—deep, holding, his whole body going rigid against her. She felt him pulse inside her and held him through it with her legs and her arms and the quiet certainty of a woman who had finally stopped holding her ground alone.
He stayed inside her. Forehead to forehead. Breathing hard. His weight braced on his arms, trembling with the effort of not crushing her, and she pulled at his shoulders until he gave in and settled his weight down onto her chest.
She wrapped her arms around him. Her legs loosened but stayed draped over his. Her hands smoothed up and down his back—the long slow strokes she'd learned he needed after, the touch that brought the restless motor in him down to idle.
They lay still.
The compound breathed below them. The ceiling fan turned. The neon bled pink through the window. Somewhere in the great room, Carl snored softly on his couch, and the sound of it—small, human, safe—made Sam close her eyes and press her face into Blizzard's hair and hold on.
No fight behind it. No aftermath in it. Just this. Just them. Just the plain, clean wanting of a woman who'd found the thing worth stopping for, and the man who'd stopped.