Chapter 5
The room above the Lucky Cuss smelled like old wood and beer from the bar below and the faintest ghost of cigarette smoke that no amount of cleaning would ever get out of the walls.
It was small—a bed, a chair, a window that looked out onto Fourth Street's dead neon—and Bustout had to duck through the doorframe to get in.
Carla stood in the middle of the room with his cut still around her shoulders and her hands still shaking and the adrenaline still screaming through her body like a current looking for ground.
He closed the door. Locked it. Turned around.
They looked at each other across six feet of bare floor.
He was enormous in the small room, filling the space the way he filled every space, and there was blood on his knuckles and a bruise already forming on his forearm where the baton had landed.
His chest was still rising and falling hard from the fight.
His eyes were dark and steady and fixed on her like she was the only thing in the room, the only thing in the building, the only thing on the whole godforsaken highway.
"Your hands," he said. "Let me see."
"They're fine."
"Carla."
The way he said her name—low, unhurried, certain—went through her like the engine had on the ride up. Like a vibration that started in her ears and ended somewhere much lower.
She held out her hands. He crossed the room in two steps and took them, turning her palms up to the light.
The burns from the coffee pot were angry and red, blistered across the heel of her right hand where she'd gripped the handle.
He ran his thumb along the edge of the worst one, barely touching, and the gentleness of it after the violence of the last hour cracked something open in her chest.
"You threw a full pot of coffee into a man's face," he said.
"He was pulling a gun."
"I know." His thumb traced the burn again. "You saved Culver's life."
"I saved my floor."
He looked up from her hands. The distance between them was nothing—his head bent over her palms, her face tilted up to his, and the space where they weren't touching was charged and humming and impossible.
She was done waiting.
Carla pulled her hands free and reached up and grabbed the front of his shirt with both fists—burns and all, she didn't care, the sting was just another frequency in the current already running through her—and she pulled his mouth down to hers.
The kiss landed like a collision. His lips were warm and dry and tasted like coffee and copper and the cold desert air, and she opened her mouth against his and felt him make a sound low in his throat that was nothing like the quiet, controlled man who ordered black coffee and watched rooms from corner booths.
His hands found the small of her back—the spot she was always pressing against the counter, the spot that ached by hour six, the spot that made her groan when she stretched against the Formica—and his fingers spread wide and pulled her into him.
She went. Pressed herself flat against his chest with his cut still hanging off her shoulders and her fists still twisted in his shirt, and the heat of him through the cotton was shocking, a furnace, a man who ran hot under all that stillness.
He lifted her.
Both hands under her thighs, her full weight, like it was nothing.
Like she weighed the same as the coffee mug he'd been drinking from.
She wrapped her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck and felt his hands tighten on her thighs—not gentle now, possessive, the grip of a man who had picked something up and was not putting it down.
"Bed," she said against his mouth.
He carried her across the room and laid her out on the mattress, and the springs protested under both their weight and she didn't care.
He came down over her, braced on his forearms, and the size of him above her should have been overwhelming but it wasn't—it was exactly right, exactly the weight she wanted pressing her into the sheets.
She pulled his shirt over his head and put her hands on his chest. Broad and scarred and warm, the skin tight over slabs of muscle that had nothing to do with a gym.
She ran her palms down his ribs and felt him draw a sharp breath, felt the barely leashed thing under his control shudder once, and she wanted that—wanted to find the place where his stillness ended and the man underneath it started.
He lowered his mouth to her throat. Kissed the hollow below her ear, then the line of her jaw, then the place where the gold cross lay against her collarbone.
His beard scraped against her skin and she arched up into it, and the sound that came out of her was the same low sound she made at the end of a double shift when she stretched against the counter—except this time it had his name in it, a shape her mouth made without her permission.
His hands found the hem of her shirt and peeled it up, slow, knuckles dragging against her ribs.
She lifted her arms and let him take it, and then his mouth was on her skin—her collarbone, the swell of her breast above the plain cotton bra, the soft curve of her belly that she'd stopped being self-conscious about sometime around thirty because her body worked hard and looked the way hard work looked and any man who had a problem with that could find the door.
He didn't have a problem with it. He put his mouth on every inch of her like he was memorizing her with his lips, slow and thorough and unhurried the way he did everything—the way he drank coffee, the way he crossed a room, the way he'd put his hands on Rusk and ended it without rushing.
She reached behind her and unhooked the bra and his mouth was there before the straps cleared her shoulders. She gasped at the heat of it, the scrape of his beard against the sensitive skin, his tongue drawing a slow circle that made her hips lift off the mattress.
"Off," she said, pulling at his belt. "All of it."
He stood and stripped in the dim light from the window, and she watched him from the bed—the heavy build, the scarred knuckles, the ink at his neck, the way he moved like a man who had all the time in the world.
She shimmied out of her jeans and kicked them to the floor and lay back against the pillows in nothing but the cross at her throat.
He looked at her. Really looked, the way he looked at a room he was about to take responsibility for, measuring and careful and wanting—except this time the want was bare on his face, undisguised, a crack in the stillness that went all the way down.
"Come here," she said.
He came down over her again, skin to skin this time, and the full contact pulled a groan out of both of them.
She was warm everywhere he touched—his chest against her breasts, his hips settling between her thighs, his forearms caging her head on the pillow.
She could feel how much he wanted her pressing against her, hard and urgent, and the contrast between that urgency and the patience in his hands made her dizzy.
She reached between them and took hold of him and his whole body went tight, a shudder running through two hundred and sixty pounds of settled, controlled man like a fault line cracking.
She stroked him once and he dropped his forehead to her shoulder and exhaled a word she didn't catch, and she did it again and felt his hips push forward into her hand.
"Now," she said. "I don't want to wait."
He reached for his jeans on the floor—condom from the wallet, a practical moment that somehow didn't break the current—and then he was back, settling between her thighs, braced on one arm while the other hand hooked under her knee and opened her wider.
He pressed into her slow.
Carla arched off the bed. He was big everywhere and this was no exception, and the stretch of it pulled that sound out of her again, low and involuntary and real.
He stopped halfway, his jaw clenched, every muscle in his body locked against the urge to move, and he waited for her the way he waited for everything—still and certain and completely focused on her.
"Don't stop," she breathed.
He slid the rest of the way in and she took all of him and felt her body adjust around him, the fullness of it enormous and perfect and exactly what the survival high was crashing into.
She pulled him down by the back of his neck and kissed him hard, her tongue in his mouth, her hips rolling up to meet his.
He started to move. Slow, deep strokes that she felt from her toes to her throat, his hands gripping her hips, his mouth never leaving her skin.
She set the pace with her body—faster, then deeper, then a roll of her hips that made him groan into her neck—and he gave it to her.
Whatever she asked for with the arch of her back or the grip of her thighs or the sound of his name in her mouth, he gave.
The fight was still in them. She could feel it—the adrenaline, the fury, the we-are-alive-and-they-are-not electricity that turned every nerve ending into a live wire.
She raked her nails down his back and he drove harder, and the bed frame hit the wall and she didn't care.
She was loud and she didn't care about that either—this man had killed for her tonight and she was going to take what she wanted from him and give it back with interest.
He shifted his angle and hit something inside her that made her vision white out. She cried out and he did it again, relentless and patient and brutal in the best way, and she felt the pressure building like a wave she couldn't outrun.
"Right there," she gasped. "Don't you dare stop."
He didn't stop. He braced both hands on the headboard and drove into her with a focus that was devastating, watching her face, reading her the way he read every room—knowing exactly when to push and when to hold and when to give her what she was reaching for.
She broke apart.
It hit her like the desert cold had hit them outside the Silverline—sudden and total, a full-body thing that started where he was buried inside her and radiated out until she was shaking under him, her back arched, his name coming out of her in a voice she didn't recognize.
He held her through it, his hands on her hips, his body moving with hers, and when the wave crested and she pulled him down into her with both arms he let go.
She felt him come—the shudder, the groan buried in her neck, the way his hands tightened on her hard enough to leave marks she'd find tomorrow—and she held him through it the way he'd held her, her legs locked around his waist, her burnt fingers in his hair, pulling him as close as physics allowed.
They lay still.
His weight on her was crushing and perfect. She could hear his heart slamming against his ribs, or maybe that was hers—at this point they were close enough that it didn't matter whose was whose. His face was buried in her neck and his breath was hot against her skin and neither of them moved.
After a long time he shifted his weight to one side, pulling her with him, and she ended up draped across his chest with her cheek against the place where his heart was still pounding.
His arm came around her back—heavy, warm, the arm that had put a man through a counter tonight—and settled there like it had always been there.
She traced the busted-flush tattoo on his neck with one finger. He caught her hand and kissed the burned palm, gentle, and the tenderness of it after everything else made her throat tight.
"That wasn't the adrenaline," she said.
"No."
"That was—"
"I know what it was."
She tipped her chin up and looked at him. His face was different in the aftermath—softer, the hard lines around his mouth eased, his eyes warm and dark and looking at her with something that had nothing to do with reading a room or filing a threat.
"Tell me your name," she said. "Your real one."
He was quiet for a beat. Then: "Max."
She said it once, feeling the shape of it. "Max." Simple and short and nothing like the man it belonged to, and she liked that—liked that the real name was quieter than the road name, the way the real man was quieter than the one the world saw.
She put her head back down on his chest and closed her eyes and let her body go heavy against him, boneless and warm and used up in the best way. His arm tightened around her. His lips pressed against the top of her head.
The bar noise from the Lucky Cuss rumbled through the floor, and somewhere on Fourth Street a car alarm went off and stopped, and the desert wind pushed at the window like it wanted in.
Carla slept. For the first time in days, she slept without checking the locks or listening for footsteps or holding a name in her throat like a stone.
She slept because the man beneath her was warm and solid and awake, and because she knew without being told that he would not close his eyes until he was sure she was safe.
And because this had not been the adrenaline talking, and they both knew it, and neither of them was going to pretend otherwise.