Chapter 5
The shower ran cold before she got out of it.
She stood under the water until there was nothing left to wash off—no powder residue, no gravel dust, no copper smell of blood that had been on her hands since this morning.
The bruise across her ribs where she'd hit the desk edge two nights ago had gone purple and green, and the hot water made it throb, but she stayed until the heat ran out because the cold was what finally stopped her shaking.
She toweled off, pulled on a clean tank top and cotton shorts, and walked barefoot out of the bathroom into the apartment behind the office.
Buckshot was sitting on the end of her bed.
He had the shotgun across his knees—the one she'd fired through the connecting door this morning, the one that had kicked back into her shoulder hard enough to leave a bruise she hadn't felt until an hour ago—and he was cleaning it.
Methodical, unhurried. Barrel, action, stock.
His hands moved over the weapon with the same steady patience she'd seen in everything he did, and he didn't look up when she came out, just kept working, giving her the space to decide what happened next.
Tamsin stood in the bathroom doorway with her hair dripping onto her shoulders and watched him.
He'd taken off his cut and hung it on the back of her chair.
Underneath it he wore a black T-shirt that pulled tight across his shoulders, and the pockmark scars ran down from under the collar on the left side—scattered, puckered, the map of a load of buckshot that should have killed him and hadn't.
His boots were on her floor. His gun was in her room.
His presence filled the small apartment like a physical weight, all heat and leather and the faint smell of gunsmoke that the shower hadn't taken off him.
She'd killed a man today. She'd put a shotgun through a doorway and dropped a stranger three feet in front of her and watched him fall, and the thing she couldn't stop thinking about wasn't the man or the blast or the blood on the carpet—it was the moment after, when she'd racked the slide and called the flanker at the pool fence and Buckshot had turned and fired and the last of them had gone down, and he'd walked straight to her through the smoke and put his hands on her face and said you're mine like it was the only truth in the world.
She crossed the room and took the shotgun out of his hands.
He let her. Didn't resist, didn't speak, just opened his fingers and let her take it, his eyes following her as she set the gun on the floor and leaned it against the nightstand. Then she turned back to him and put her mouth on his.
He tasted like coffee and smoke and the night air outside her door, and the sound he made when her lips hit his—low, rough, somewhere between surprise and hunger—went through her like a current.
She grabbed the front of his shirt with both hands and pulled, and his arms came around her fast, one hand spread wide across her lower back and the other sliding into her wet hair, tilting her head to change the angle, taking the kiss deeper.
She bit his lower lip. Hard enough to make him grunt. Hard enough to taste him.
His hand tightened in her hair and he pulled her head back, exposing her throat, and looked at her with eyes that had gone dark and hot and absolutely certain.
"You sure?"
"I took the gun out of your hands. What do you think?"
He stood. One motion, fast, and he was on his feet with her pressed against him, his hands dropping to her hips and lifting.
She wrapped her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck and he walked her backward until her shoulder blades hit the doorframe between the bedroom and the bathroom, and the impact knocked the air out of her but she didn't care because his mouth was on her neck, open and hot, and his teeth scraped her pulse point and her whole body arched into him.
"Here," she said. "Right here."
He braced her against the doorframe with his hips and pulled her tank top over her head in one rough motion.
His eyes dropped to her bare skin—the bruise on her ribs, the flat plane of her stomach, the swell of her breasts—and something in his face shifted from want to something more dangerous.
Something possessive. He bent and put his mouth on the bruise first, lips tracing the edge of the purple where the desk had caught her, and the tenderness of it made her breath catch harder than the bite had.
Then lower.
His mouth moved down her ribs, across her stomach, and she felt herself dissolving from the center out—the shaking coming back, but different now, not adrenaline but something hotter and more deliberate.
He was still holding her up against the doorframe with one arm, which meant she could feel every muscle in his shoulder and back working to keep her there, and the raw strength of it made her dizzy.
"Bed," she managed.
He carried her there without taking his mouth off her skin. Set her down on the mattress and stripped her shorts off and knelt between her legs, and when she tried to pull him up he put his hand flat on her stomach and held her down.
"Not yet."
"Buckshot—"
"Not yet."
He put his mouth between her thighs and she stopped arguing.
He was thorough the way he was thorough with everything—patient, relentless, covering ground.
His hands held her hips down when she tried to move and his mouth worked her with a slow, devastating precision that turned her breathing ragged and her hands into fists in the sheets.
She got one hand in his hair and held him where she wanted him, and he let her direct it, let her pull and push and set the rhythm until her back came off the mattress and everything went white and tight and she broke apart with a sound she'd never made before in her life.
He didn't stop.
He worked her through the aftershock until she was gasping and pulling his hair hard enough to hurt, and then he kissed the inside of her thigh and looked up at her with that dark, certain look and she hauled him up by his shirt and stripped it over his head.
The scars were worse than she'd thought.
The buckshot pattern covered his left shoulder and upper chest—puckered, scattered, the kind of damage that should have killed a man or at least kept him down.
He hadn't stayed down. She ran her hands over the scarring and felt him go rigid under her touch, every muscle locked, and she understood that nobody had ever done this—nobody had ever touched the damage and stayed.
She pushed him onto his back.
He went, which surprised them both. She unbuckled his belt and pulled his jeans down his hips and freed him, and he was hard and heavy in her hand and the sound he made when she wrapped her fingers around him was worth every second of the last three days.
She straddled him and took him inside her in one long, slow slide that made them both stop breathing.
Full. Stretched. The fit of him was almost too much and she held still for a moment with her palms flat on his scarred chest, letting her body adjust, feeling him pulse inside her.
His hands came to her hips—not guiding, not controlling, just holding on, his fingers digging into her skin hard enough to leave marks she'd find tomorrow.
She set the pace.
Slow at first, rolling her hips in a rhythm that built the pressure back up from the base of her spine. He tried to take it over—his hands tightened, his hips drove up, pushing for more, harder—and she put her hand on his chest and pressed down.
"My speed."
His jaw clenched. His whole body was a coiled line of tension underneath her, and she could see what it cost him to let her lead—this man who spread damage wide, who took control of every room and every fight and every situation through sheer overwhelming force—lying under her with his hands on her hips and his control hanging by a thread.
She leaned down and kissed him. Soft. Slow. The opposite of everything they'd been since the moment he walked into her office with a shotgun. And he kissed her back the same way, one hand coming up to cup the back of her head, and something shifted between them that was more than physical.
Then she sat up and gave him what he wanted.
She rode him hard, hands braced on his chest, her hair falling around her face, and he grabbed her hips with both hands and drove up into her with a force that knocked the headboard against the wall.
The rhythm went from deliberate to desperate in three strokes, and she let it—let him take over, let the pace become his, let the sound of their bodies together fill the small room until she couldn't hear anything else.
He surged up and got his arm around her waist, pulling her flush against his chest, and the angle changed and everything went sharp and bright and she felt the second orgasm building from a different place—deeper, wider, pulling from everywhere at once.
"Look at me," he said.
She opened her eyes. His face was inches from hers, slicked with sweat, his pupils blown wide and his breath coming in harsh pulls against her mouth.
"Mine," he said.
She came apart.
He followed a moment after with her name in his mouth—not Foley, not the last name everyone used, but Tamsin, said like it was the only word he had left—and his arms locked around her and his whole body went rigid and then released, and they collapsed together on the mattress in a tangle of sweat and heat and the sound of their breathing filling the room.
She lay across his chest with her face in his neck and her hand over the worst of the scarring on his shoulder. His heartbeat hammered under her palm. His arm stayed around her waist, heavy, possessive, even now—holding on like he'd claimed something and the reflex wouldn't let go.
"You said my name," she murmured.
"Yeah."
"You don't say anybody's name."
"No." His hand moved up her spine, tracing the bumps of her vertebrae, slow and deliberate. "I don't."
She smiled against his skin. Pressed her lips to the scar tissue under her cheek. Felt him stiffen for a moment—the instinct to pull away from being seen—and then relax, deliberately, choosing to stay.
His breathing slowed. His hand stilled on her back. She listened to his heartbeat settle from a hammer to a drum to something steady and deep, and his arm around her went from possessive to heavy, and she realized he'd fallen asleep.
Tamsin lay across him in the dark with the window open and the sounds of the lot coming through—brothers' voices, low and quiet, the shift change happening, boots on gravel.
She was inside this now. Inside him, inside the club, inside a life she hadn't chosen and wouldn't have chosen and couldn't imagine walking away from.
She closed her eyes.
Outside the window, a truck slowed on the highway. Its headlights swept across the parking lot and caught the office window, and the engine idled at the mouth of her driveway for a long, quiet moment.
Then it pulled away, and the road went dark, and Tamsin slept with her hand on the chest of a man who'd put his body between hers and the world and called her his, and didn't dream at all.