Chapter 8
The great room emptied out in layers. First the prospects, dismissed to their bunks.
Then the brothers who had wives or women waiting, peeling off in twos and threes with boots heavy on the concrete and bike engines kicking to life in the lot.
Then the stragglers—Blizzard racking his cue and stretching, Ratchet finishing a beer he'd been nursing for an hour—until the big room was quiet and the ceiling fan turned overhead in the empty space and the only light came from the bar's under-cabinet strip and the glow of the lot lights through the high windows.
Bustout sat at the bar with a glass of whiskey he wasn't drinking.
Carla watched him from the kitchen doorway.
She'd been cleaning—force of habit, a woman who closed her own floor every night—and she stood there with a dish towel over her shoulder and her hair falling around her face the way it always fell by the end of a long stretch, and she let herself just look at him.
He was beautiful in the worst possible way.
Not pretty—nothing about six-four and two-sixty of shaved scalp and busted knuckles was pretty.
But the way he sat at a bar alone, one hand around a glass, the stillness of him filling the room the way other men's noise would, the bruise on his forearm fading from purple to green—he was beautiful the way a hard landscape is beautiful.
Something shaped by weather and time into exactly what it needed to be.
She dropped the dish towel on the counter and walked across the great room.
He heard her coming. She knew because his head turned a fraction, tracking her the way he always tracked her, but he didn't get up and he didn't speak. He waited. That was his way—stillness and patience and the absolute confidence of a man who knew that the things worth having would come to him.
She came to him.
She walked up behind his stool and put her hands flat on his back, palms against the leather of his cut, and felt the heat of him through it. He went very still under her touch—stiller than his usual stillness, a different quality to it, like a held breath.
She slid her hands around to his chest and pressed herself against his back, her cheek between his shoulder blades, and breathed him in.
Leather. Cigarette smoke from the room. The soap from the shower he'd taken earlier, cheap and institutional, nothing special, and underneath it the warm, clean smell of his skin that was already becoming the most familiar thing in her world.
"Come to bed," she said against his back.
He turned on the stool. Her hands slid to his shoulders and she stood between his knees, looking up at him, and the height difference was absurd even with him sitting—his face still above hers, his shoulders still wider than her whole frame.
"Not tired," he said.
"I didn't say anything about sleeping."
She grabbed the front of his cut with both hands and pulled.
He came off the stool and she walked backward across the great room, towing two hundred and sixty pounds of man by his lapels, and he followed with that unhurried stride, letting himself be led, a half-smile threatening the corner of his mouth.
She backed down the hallway to his room. Shouldered the door open. Pulled him through it and kicked it shut behind them.
His room was sparse—a double bed that his feet hung off, a nightstand, a wooden chair with his spare clothes folded on it. No pictures. No decoration. The room of a man who didn't accumulate things. The window was dark, and the only light was what leaked in from the hallway under the door.
She didn't turn on a lamp. She didn't need to.
She'd been learning his body in pieces since the Lucky Cuss—in the dark, by touch and taste and the sounds he made when she found the right places—and tonight she wanted all of it, slow, without the adrenaline, without the fight, without any reason except wanting.
She pushed the cut off his shoulders. It fell heavy to the floor, leather and patches and the weight of everything it meant, and underneath it he was just a man in a T-shirt, broad and warm and watching her with dark eyes that had gone soft in a way she'd only seen once before—in the room above the Lucky Cuss, after, when she'd asked for his real name.
She pulled his shirt up and he ducked his head to let her take it, and she ran her hands over his chest the way she'd been wanting to all day—slowly, deliberately, tracing every scar and ridge of muscle, the line where his tan stopped at his collar, the coarse reddish hair that covered his chest and narrowed down his stomach.
She found the baton bruise on his forearm and pressed her lips to it, and he made a sound in his throat that was barely a sound at all.
"Sit down," she said, and pushed him toward the bed.
He sat. The mattress dipped hard under his weight, and she stood between his knees again, close enough that her stomach was at his eye level, and she took her time.
Pulled the clip from her hair and let it fall.
Peeled her shirt over her head, no rush, watching his eyes track the movement.
Reached behind her back and unhooked her bra and let it drop, and his hands came up to her waist—automatic, possessive, his fingers spanning her ribcage.
She let him touch. Let his thumbs trace the undersides of her breasts, let his calloused palms slide over curves that had never been small or delicate and didn't need to be.
She watched his face while he touched her, and what she saw there wasn't hunger—or not just hunger.
It was reverence, clumsy and unscripted, the look of a man who was holding something he hadn't known he was missing.
She unbuttoned her jeans and shimmed them down, and his hands helped, sliding the denim off her hips and down her thighs with that same devastating patience.
She kicked them away and stood in front of him in nothing but the gold cross and the fading coffee burns on her hand, and he looked up at her like she was the answer to a question he'd stopped asking.
She climbed into his lap.
Knees on either side of his hips, her weight settling onto his thighs, her arms around his neck. She could feel him hard against her through his jeans and she rocked forward once, slow, and watched his jaw clench and his fingers dig into her hips.
"You're still dressed," she said.
"Half."
"Too much." She reached between them and worked his belt open, and he lifted his hips enough for her to push the jeans down, and then there was nothing between them but heat and skin and the thin cotton of her underwear, already damp, pressed against the length of him.
She rocked again. Slower this time, a long, deliberate roll of her hips that dragged her core along the full hard ridge of him, and the friction through the cotton made her breath catch.
He groaned—a real groan, from deep in his chest, the kind of sound she'd been chasing since the Lucky Cuss because it meant the stillness was breaking.
"Tell me what you want," he said. His voice was rough. Frayed at the edges. His hands were gripping her hips hard enough to bruise and he was letting her set everything.
"I want you to sit there," she said, rolling against him again, "and let me take my time."
She kissed him. Slow this time—no collision, no urgency, just her mouth on his, tasting the whiskey he hadn't finished, her tongue sliding against his.
She kissed down his jaw and found the busted-flush tattoo on his neck and put her mouth on it, sucking lightly, and felt a shudder go through him that started in his shoulders and ended in his hands tightening on her ass.
She reached down and tugged her underwear to the side. Took him in her hand—hot, thick, straining—and positioned him, and sank down.
The sound that came out of both of them filled the small room.
She took him inch by inch, slow, savoring the stretch, her forehead pressed against his.
His eyes were open. So were hers. They watched each other as she took all of him, and when she bottomed out and her hips were flush against his she sat there for a moment, full and still, and felt his heart hammering against her chest.
Then she moved.
Not fast. Not desperate. She rolled her hips with the same unhurried greed she brought to a slow morning or a meal someone else cooked—a woman taking her own pleasure because she'd earned it and she wasn't apologizing.
She set a rhythm that was all hers, deep and grinding, her hands on his shoulders for leverage, and he held her hips and let her ride.
His mouth found her throat. The gold cross.
The hollow of her collarbone. He kissed down to her breast and took her nipple into his mouth and she arched into it, her rhythm faltering, a gasp tearing out of her that she didn't try to muffle.
His hands slid up her back, pulling her closer, his mouth hot on her skin, and she ground down on him harder, chasing the pressure building low in her belly.
She teased him. Slowed down when his breathing got ragged.
Lifted almost off him and sank back down with aching slowness, watching his composure crack one fraction at a time.
The settled man. The still man. The man who never reached for anything, coming apart underneath her with his hands shaking on her hips and his breath harsh against her throat.
"You're killing me," he said.
"Good."
She stopped teasing. She planted her hands on his shoulders and moved—really moved, her hips working in a fast, deep grind, taking exactly what she wanted.
The bed creaked. His hands clamped on her waist and he started meeting her, driving up into her on every downstroke, and the angle was perfect, the pressure right where she needed it, and she felt the orgasm gathering like a wave.
She came with her mouth against his shoulder, biting down, her whole body clenching around him in long, rolling pulses that drew a broken sound out of him she'd never heard before. She rode it out, grinding, gasping, his arms locked around her like he was holding them both together through it.
Before the last tremor faded he flipped her.
She was on her back on the mattress before she registered the movement—two hundred and sixty pounds of man, fast and fluid, and then he was over her and inside her and driving in deep with a focus that said he was done being patient.
She laughed.
Low and breathless and delighted, her mouth against his shoulder, because this was what she'd wanted—to peel the stillness off him and find the man underneath, raw and hungry and completely hers.
He caught the laugh with his mouth and kissed her hard, his hips snapping forward, and she wrapped her legs around him and arched up to meet every thrust.
He was thorough. Of course he was—this was a man who did everything the same way, slow and complete and certain.
He hitched her knee higher and drove deeper, and the change in angle hit something that made her cry out, sharp and surprised, and he did it again.
And again. Until she was clutching at his back with her nails and the laugh had turned into something desperate.
She came a second time—harder, messier, her voice breaking on something that might have been his name, and he followed her over with his face buried in her neck and a groan that vibrated through her whole body.
She felt him pulse inside her, his hips jerking, his arms shaking, and she held him through it with her legs locked and her hands in his hair and a fierce, possessive joy blazing through her chest.
He collapsed. Caught his weight on one arm at the last second, which she appreciated because the alternative was being crushed, and then he rolled to his side and pulled her with him and they lay tangled together in the wrecked sheets, breathing hard, sticky with sweat, limbs too heavy to move.
She laughed again. That low, satisfied laugh. She ran her fingers over his chest, through the hair, across the bruise on his arm, and she felt his heart rate slowly come down under her palm.
"You are the most controlled man I have ever met," she said. "And you just came completely undone."
"Your fault."
"Absolutely my fault." She kissed his collarbone. "I'm taking full credit."
His arm tightened around her waist—pulling her closer, tucking her against his side, his hand splayed across her lower back in that claiming grip she'd come to recognize as his signature. His woman. His grip. His bed.
She stretched against him the way she stretched against the diner counter at the end of a shift, pressing the ache out of her lower back, and the sound she made was the same sound she'd been making for years except now it meant something entirely different.
"Stay," he said. Not a question. Not a request. The word of a man who'd found the thing he didn't know he was reaching for and was done pretending he didn't want it.
"I'm not going anywhere," she said.
And she meant it in the way she meant everything—with her whole body, settled against his, in a room that was slowly becoming theirs in a building she'd walked into two days ago like she owned the floor.