Chapter 14
Carla didn't knock.
She walked down the hallway with the compound settling around her—her sisters asleep in the room Dana had set up, the brothers bedded down, the great room dark except for the bar lights—and she opened Bustout's door and walked through it with the same energy she'd walked into the chapel that morning.
Done asking. Done waiting. Done with every version of herself that held back.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed, boots off, shirt still on, like he'd been waiting for her or like he'd been sitting in the dark thinking about what she'd done that day.
Either way, he looked up when she came in, and what she saw in his face was the same thing she'd seen across the chapel table—a man watching a woman become something, not just watching but understanding it, seeing the shape of what she was and wanting every part of it.
She closed the door. Locked it.
Crossed the room in three steps and grabbed his cut with both hands and stripped it off his shoulders.
The leather hit the floor with a heavy slap. She grabbed his shirt next, hauling it up, and he raised his arms and let her take it, and she threw it somewhere behind her without looking. Then she put her hands flat on his bare chest and pushed.
He went back on the mattress. Two hundred and sixty pounds of man, and she put him flat on his back with two hands and a shove, and he let her because he understood what was happening.
The same thing that had happened in the chapel.
Carla choosing. Carla taking. Carla planting her feet and claiming what was hers.
She stripped off her own shirt. Unhooked her bra and let it drop. Kicked off her jeans and climbed onto the bed and straddled him, her knees on either side of his hips, her weight settling onto his stomach.
He looked up at her. The blue light from the window cut across his face—the shaved scalp, the reddish beard, the dark eyes that were burning now, all that stillness finally on fire.
"Don't move," she said.
His hands came to her thighs. She pushed them off.
"I said don't move."
His jaw clenched. His hands fisted in the sheets beside his hips.
She watched the restraint cost him—watched the muscles in his arms cord with the effort of staying still, the veins in his forearms standing out—and the power of it, the knowledge that this man could pick her up with one hand and was lying motionless because she told him to, lit something in her blood that was hotter than any adrenaline.
She leaned down and kissed him. Hard. Her tongue in his mouth, her teeth on his bottom lip, her hair falling around both their faces. She bit and he groaned and his hips bucked under her, involuntary, and she felt how hard he was through his jeans and she ground down against it.
"Carla—"
"Shh."
She kissed down his neck. Found the busted-flush tattoo and sucked on it until she felt his pulse hammering under her lips.
Kissed across his collarbone, down his chest, her mouth on the hair and the scars and the bruises that were her history now—Rusk's fight, Talley's highway, the whole violent geography of the last two weeks written on his skin.
She unbuckled his belt and yanked it free. Popped the button on his jeans and dragged the zipper down and pulled the denim off his hips, and he lifted to help her and she let him because she wanted him naked, now, under her.
She took off the last of her own clothes and settled back onto his lap, skin on skin, nothing between them, and the contact was electric—his heat, his hardness pressing against her core, the slick of her want against the length of him.
She reached for the nightstand. Found the condom. Tore it open and rolled it on him with hands that were steady and sure—the same hands that had held a scalding coffee pot, that had packed a bullet graze, that had lain flat on a chapel table while she told a room full of armed men what she wanted.
She rose up on her knees and positioned him and sank down in one smooth stroke.
No teasing. No slow descent. She took all of him at once, and the sound that came out of her was guttural and fierce and completely without apology. He filled her up and she clenched around him and braced her hands on his chest and started to ride.
Hard. Harder than any night before. She set a pace that was fast and deep and punishing, her hips snapping forward on every downstroke, taking what she wanted with the same certainty she'd brought to the chapel.
This wasn't lovemaking and it wasn't fucking—it was claiming.
She was claiming him the way she'd claimed her place in the club, with force and backbone and the absolute refusal to be anything less than all the way in.
He kept his hands off her for as long as he could.
She watched him fight it—the sheets twisted in his fists, his abs clenched, his jaw tight—and then his control snapped and his hands were on her hips, gripping hard, fingers digging into the soft flesh, and the pressure of his grip changed the angle and she gasped.
"Harder," she said.
His fingers dug deeper. She'd have bruises tomorrow—finger-shaped marks on her hips that she'd press in the mirror and feel the ghost of this moment.
She wanted them. She wanted every mark he could leave on her body because every one was proof that this was real, that she'd chosen it, that the claiming went both ways.
She threw her head back and rode him, her hair falling loose down her back, the gold cross swinging at her throat.
The bed was groaning under them, the headboard knocking the wall, and she didn't care.
Let the whole compound hear. Let every brother in the building know that the woman who'd stood in their chapel that morning was taking their Sergeant at Arms apart in his own room.
The pressure built fast. She was already close—had been close since she walked through the door, since the chapel, since the moment she'd shrugged his hand off her back and walked into that room alone.
The whole day had been foreplay. Every minute of standing her ground and claiming her place had been building toward this, and now it was cresting.
Bustout sat up.
One fluid motion—two hundred and sixty pounds of man jackknifing upright with her still in his lap—and suddenly she was wrapped around him, chest to chest, her arms around his neck, his arms locked around her waist. The change in position drove him deeper and she cried out, sharp and surprised, and he swallowed the sound with his mouth.
He drove up into her.
Not gentle. Not slow. He matched the pace she'd set—hard, claiming, the pace of a man who'd been told don't move and had obeyed and was done obeying now.
His hands spread wide across her back, pulling her tight against his chest, and he thrust up into her with a rhythm that was relentless and devastating and exactly what she needed.
She clung to him. Her nails in his shoulders, her face pressed against his neck, her whole body clenched around him.
The orgasm hit her like a fist—sudden, violent, blinding—and she came apart with her mouth against his, a sound torn out of her that was his name and a curse and something that might have been a prayer, all tangled together in the space between their lips.
He held her through it. His arms like iron around her waist, his hips still moving, drawing it out, wringing every last shudder from her body.
And then he followed—his grip tightening on her hard enough to leave marks, his face buried in her throat, a sound torn from him that she felt in her bones—and she held him right back, her legs locked, her arms crushing him against her, both of them shaking.
They stayed upright. Wrapped around each other in the middle of the bed, breathing hard, foreheads pressed together. His hands were still on her back, spread wide, holding her weight against him like he'd never set her down.
"You walked into my chapel today," he said, his voice wrecked, "and took the room."
"I took everything." She kissed him. Slow now, the fierceness spent, just warmth and want and the bone-deep satisfaction of a woman who'd gotten exactly what she came for. "The room. The club. You."
"You had me before the chapel."
"I know. But now I have you on my terms."
His hands tightened on her back. Not possessive—or not only possessive. Something deeper. The grip of a man who'd been claimed by a woman who didn't do anything halfway, and who understood that being claimed by her was the most permanent thing that had ever happened to him.
She didn't unwrap. Neither did he. They sat in the middle of the wrecked bed, skin on skin, her weight in his lap, his arms around her, and the night pressed in through the window and the compound was quiet around them.
"Yours," he said. Low. Certain. A word that cost him nothing because it was already true and had been since a diner counter at three in the morning.
"Yours," she said back. And meant it the way she meant every claim she'd ever made—with her whole body, planted and certain and not going anywhere.
They fell asleep still tangled together, upright, her head on his shoulder and his arms around her back, and the room held them the way the compound held its people—solid and warm and built to last.