Chapter 25
He'd let her lead every time.
From that first night when she'd grabbed his cut and pulled him through the door, through every fire-lit desperate taking and every slow commanding ride—Sam had set the pace, set the terms, held his eyes and his body and his whole restless self with the certainty that defined everything she did.
He'd given it to her willingly, gratefully, because being held by Sam Delgado was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
Tonight was his.
They slipped away from the party when Bustout started his third toast and the great room was loud enough that nobody would miss two people heading for the mezzanine stairs.
Blizzard took her hand—not her cut, not her shirt, her hand, the way she'd taken his the second time—and led her up the stairs and across the narrow loft to the bunk that was theirs now.
She started to reach for him. The automatic motion, the hands going to his chest, the weight setting—the beginning of Sam taking charge the way she always took charge.
He caught her wrists. Gently. Held them.
"Let me," he said.
She looked at him. Her dark eyes searching his in the faint neon glow from the window, reading him the way she read terrain and threats and the faces of men across a counter—closely, calmly, missing nothing.
Whatever she found made her hands go still.
"Okay," she said. Quiet. A word that cost her something, the woman who held everything giving it up.
He started with the property patch. He unpinned it carefully from her tank top and set it on the footboard of the bunk beside his folded cut. The two patches side by side in the dark. His. Hers. Matched.
Then the tank top. He gathered the hem in his hands and drew it up slow, his knuckles skating her ribs, feeling the goosebumps rise in the wake of his touch.
Over her head. Gone. He reached behind her and unhooked her bra with hands that were steadier than he'd expected, and she let it slide down her arms and drop.
He looked at her. Standing in front of him in the dark, half-bare, her scarred hands at her sides instead of on his chest. Trusting him with the stillness. Trusting him with the lead.
He picked up her left hand. Turned it palm-up.
The scarred knuckles, the calluses, the small square handwriting fingers that had mapped a corridor and held a rifle and fisted in his hair in the dark.
He lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed her palm.
Slow. Then each knuckle, one at a time, his lips lingering on every scar.
Her breath changed. Not a gasp—Sam didn't gasp. A deepening. The sound of a woman being touched in a way she hadn't expected.
He turned her hand over and kissed the back of it.
Then her wrist—the thin skin where her pulse drummed fast and steady.
Up her forearm to the tattoo, the unit ink she'd never fully explained and didn't need to.
He kissed every line of it, his mouth tracing the dark letters and numbers on her skin, and he felt her whole body go quiet under his hands.
He moved to her other hand and did the same thing. Palm. Knuckles. Wrist. The slow, deliberate worship of the hands that had held everything together—the motel, the regulars, the rifle, him.
He undid her jeans and slid them down and she stepped out of them. Then the last of it, his hands drawing the cotton down her hips and off, and she stood bare in front of him and didn't cross her arms and didn't set her weight and didn't reach for him. She just stood there and let him look.
He laid her back on the bunk.
Her head hit the pillow and her dark hair spread across it and she looked up at him with those steady dark eyes, and for the first time he saw something in them that wasn't calm or command or the flat assessment of a woman who'd seen everything.
It was openness. Raw, unguarded, the face under the face—Sam without her armor, trusting him to see it.
He stripped his own clothes off. Fast, nothing elegant about it—he wasn't performing, he was just getting to her as quickly as he could. Then he was over her, his weight on his forearms, and he lowered his mouth to her throat.
He kissed the hollow where her pulse beat.
The side of her neck, slow, his tongue tasting the salt of her skin.
The ridge of her collarbone, one side and then the other.
Down between her breasts, his mouth open and warm, feeling her chest rise against his lips.
He took his time with each breast—his mouth, his tongue, the scrape of stubble that made her hips shift under him.
She made a sound. Not the bitten-off silence of the compound nights.
A real sound, low and warm and unrestrained, and it poured through him like whiskey.
They were past silent now. He could hear the party below them through the floor, the bass thump of music and the roar of brothers celebrating, and it was cover enough for everything.
He worked his way down her stomach. Mouth and hands, slow, tasting the cocoa butter and the clean sweat and the warm skin he knew by heart now.
He kissed the dip of her navel. The sharp jut of her hip bone.
The crease of her thigh, and she shuddered—the full-body tremor of a woman who'd let her guard down completely.
He put his mouth on her.
She arched off the bed. Her hands flew to his hair and held, and the sound she made was his name—"Blizzard"—broken open and desperate, nothing flat about it, nothing held back.
He worked her with his mouth and his tongue, slow and thorough, reading every response the way she'd taught him to read her, and her hips rolled against him and her hands tightened in his hair and the sounds she made got louder and less controlled.
He brought her to the edge and held her there, the way she'd held him so many times—patient, deliberate, keeping her right at the threshold until her thighs were shaking and her voice had gone to pieces.
Then he let her fall. She came against his mouth with her back arched and her hands fisted in his hair and a cry that she didn't try to muffle, and he held her through all of it, his hands on her hips, his mouth gentle now, easing her down.
Before she'd finished shaking he was up and over her. She reached for him immediately—legs opening, hands pulling at his shoulders, her body wanting him inside her with an urgency that had nothing to do with command and everything to do with need.
He drew her legs around him. She locked her ankles at the small of his back and he pushed into her slow—one long, deep, unhurried stroke that seated him fully inside her and pulled a groan from both of them at once.
He laced his fingers through hers. Left hand, then right. Pressed both her hands above her head into the pillow, his fingers woven through her scarred ones, holding her there. Not pinning—holding. The way you hold something precious that you've finally been trusted with.
He set the pace. Deep. Unhurried. The slow, full strokes of a man who had nowhere to go and nothing to prove and all the time in the world. His mouth found her throat and stayed there, breathing her in—leather and cocoa butter and coffee and sage and home.
"God—" she breathed. "Don't stop."
"Not stopping."
"Never stop."
He moved inside her and she moved with him, her hips rising to meet every stroke, her fingers gripping his, their bodies locked together in a rhythm that was entirely his for the first time and felt like everything he'd been running toward since the night he'd walked through her door.
She tightened around him. Her legs locked harder, pulling him deeper, and her back arched and her head pressed into the pillow and she said his name—not the road name, the real one.
"Caleb." Whispered. Certain. The name she only used in the dark, the name that was hers alone to say.
It undid him.
He drove deep and held and the pleasure crashed through him in waves that started at the base of his spine and rolled out to every nerve ending in his body, and he groaned her name into her throat and she held his hands and took him all the way through it, her body tight around his, her fingers gripping his above her head.
He stayed inside her. Didn't move. Didn't pull away.
He unlaced their fingers and gathered her in—both arms around her, pulling her close against his chest, her face in the crook of his neck.
She wrapped around him and held on, legs and arms and her hands flat against his back, and they lay there tangled and spent and breathing hard in the narrow bunk.
The party thumped below them. The neon bled through the window. His heartbeat slowed against hers.
Done moving. Home.
He pressed his lips to her hair. She pressed hers to his chest. Neither of them spoke.
There was nothing left to say that their bodies hadn't already said—that the man who couldn't stop moving had found his ground, and the woman who'd held hers alone had finally let someone in, and neither of them was ever going to let go.
He held her. She held him back. And the bunk was narrow and the pillow was flat and the compound was loud beneath them and it was the best place on earth, because she was in it, and he was home.