Chapter 23
The party had gone and the lot was quiet and Sam was smiling.
Not the almost-smile. Not the corner-of-her-mouth fraction she gave the world.
A real, full, slow grin that changed her whole hard face into something that made Blizzard's chest feel like it was splitting open.
She was leaning against the office doorframe with a beer in her hand and the neon buzzing above her and her short dark hair messy from the wind, and she was looking at him with an expression he'd never seen on her—easy, loose, unclenched, the face of a woman who didn't have a single threat to read in any direction.
For the first time since the night they'd met, the road was clear.
She pushed off the doorframe and walked toward him and the grin didn't change. It stayed where it was—wide and slow and wicked—and the way she moved was different too. Not the flat, weight-set walk of a woman holding ground. Looser. Hips swaying. A walk that was entirely, deliberately for him.
She took the beer out of his hand and drank the last of it and set the empty bottle on the railing and grabbed his cut the way she had that first night—two fists in the leather, pulling.
"Come on," she said. Still grinning.
"Where are we going?"
"You know where we're going."
She pulled him across the lot to her unit.
Her unit—the end room, the one that was hers, the room where everything between them had started the night she'd killed the waiting and dragged him inside by his cut.
The door was open. The neon leaked through the curtain in its familiar pink pulse.
The bed was made because Sam always made the bed, even during a war, because that was who she was.
She backed him through the door and kicked it shut with her heel and stood there in the dark with her fists in his cut and that grin and the pink light playing across her face.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi."
"Nobody's trying to kill us tonight."
"Noticed that."
"I'd like to take my time."
"Take all of it."
She laughed. The sound hit him like sunlight—short, warm, surprised, a sound she was still getting used to making.
She slid his cut off his shoulders with easy, unhurried hands, taking her time with it the way she hadn't the first time or the second or the third.
She folded it and set it on the chair and came back and pulled his shirt over his head and tossed it somewhere she didn't care about.
She put her hands on his chest. Palms flat. Feeling his heartbeat. The grin softened into something warmer.
"I like this," she said.
"My chest?"
"Your heartbeat when I touch you. It goes fast."
"It does that."
"Every time?"
"Every single time."
She pushed him backward onto the bed. Easy, playful—not the fierce shove of the first night or the deliberate press of the second.
The push of a woman who was enjoying herself and wanted him to know it.
He fell back and she climbed over him, straddling his hips, settling her weight with a contented sigh that was the sexiest sound he'd ever heard.
She stripped her own shirt off over her head. Unhooked her bra and let it fall. She sat above him bare and unhurried and completely at ease, the neon painting her skin pink and gold, and she looked down at him with an expression that was pure, uncomplicated want.
"You're staring," she said.
"I'm observing."
"You're staring." She leaned down and kissed him, slow and smiling against his mouth, and her bare chest pressed against his and both of them sighed into the contact—the warmth, the skin, the simplicity of two bodies that knew each other and were glad to be back.
She worked her way down his body with her mouth.
Not the urgent mapping of the first times or the deliberate tenderness of the compound nights.
Something new. Lazy. The long, luxurious exploration of a woman who had all night and intended to use it.
She kissed his jaw—the scarred side, her favorite.
Down his throat. Across his chest, tongue dragging over muscle, teeth grazing a nipple and smiling when his breath hitched.
Down his stomach, mouth open and warm, taking her time over every ridge and hollow like she was memorizing the geography of a place she planned to live.
She undid his jeans slowly. Drew them off. Ran her hands back up his thighs with a feather touch that made his muscles jump, and laughed again—that short, warm sound—at his reaction.
She took him in her mouth the way she did everything tonight—easy, unhurried, savoring.
Her scarred hands braced on his thighs, her mouth working him with a lazy patience that built the heat so gradually he didn't realize how close he was until his hands were fisting in the sheets and his hips were straining and the sounds coming out of him were wrecked.
She pulled back before he tipped. Kissed his hip bone. Climbed up his body and sat above him again, stripping her jeans off with the casual efficiency of a woman who'd done this enough times now that the clothes were just obstacles between her and what she wanted.
She sank down onto him slow. So slow. Taking him in inch by inch with her head tipped back and her hands flat on his chest and a sound leaving her lips that was half sigh and half groan—the pure, honest sound of a woman who wanted this and was letting herself have it without reservation.
She rode him slow and lazy. Relaxed as a cat in sunlight, her hips rolling in long, languid strokes, her weight settled above him easy and sure.
No urgency. No edge. No fight underneath it and no fear ahead of it.
Just the two of them in the pink neon dark, moving together in a rhythm that had nowhere to go and no reason to rush.
She held his eyes. The steady, unhurried gaze she held every man's with—but this wasn't the gaze that said I see what you are and I'm not looking away.
This was the gaze that said I see what you are and I want all of it.
Warm. Open. The hardest woman he'd ever met looking down at him with something in her eyes that was completely, terrifyingly soft.
He lasted longer than he expected. The slow pace let him hang in the pleasure without cresting, feeling every sensation—her heat, her weight, the grip of her around him, the drag of her hands up his chest, the small sounds she made on the down stroke that she wasn't bothering to muffle tonight because there was nobody to hear and nothing to hide from.
When she started to climb she didn't change the pace.
She just gripped him harder—her hands curling into the muscles of his chest, her breathing going short, her eyes losing focus for the first time.
Her hips stuttered once and then she gave in to it, her head dropping forward, a long shaking exhale as the wave took her and rolled her through it slow and deep.
He felt her come apart around him and couldn't hold anymore.
"Sam—"
"I know. Come here."
He rolled her under him in one smooth motion and she went laughing—actually laughing, her legs wrapping around him, her arms around his neck, pulling him down into her.
He drove deep and she arched up to meet him and locked her legs high on his waist and he finished inside her with his face in her neck and her name in his mouth and the pleasure crashing through him in long, heavy waves that left him shaking.
He stayed. Weight braced, breathing hard, her legs still locked around him. She ran her fingers through his hair—the lazy, absent touch that said she was done with the world for the night and he was the only thing in it.
He lowered himself onto her. She took his weight and wrapped her arms around his back and pulled him in tighter, and neither of them moved to separate.
"Hey," she said into the dark.
"Hey."
"Stay here forever."
"Okay."
She smiled against his shoulder. He felt it—the curve of her mouth on his skin, the real smile, the one that nobody else would ever get.
They lay tangled in the dark in the end unit of the Basin Star motel with the neon buzzing its broken rhythm outside and the 395 stretching empty and safe in both directions, and there was no fight to come down from and no threat to plan for and no one on the highway coming to take what was theirs.
Just the two of them. Just the quiet. Just the warm, loose, unhurried certainty of two people who'd found each other in the dark and were never going to let go.
Sam pulled him closer and kept him there, in no hurry to ever move.