Chapter 23
She left the door unlocked.
It was the first thing she did when they got to the cabin—reached behind her without looking and flipped the deadbolt to open.
A small thing. A nothing thing. Except that every night since she'd come to this compound, she'd locked that door before she took her boots off, because four years in a facility and three years sleeping alone in a motel office had made locking the door the same as breathing.
Tonight, she left it open. Because nobody was coming. Because the road outside was empty and the men on watch were watching for nothing and the world had gone quiet in a way that was real this time, not the wrong kind of quiet that meant something was building.
Buckshot noticed. She saw his eyes go to the deadbolt and then to her, and something moved across his face—not surprise, but the recognition of what it meant that this woman, who locked every door and checked every window and slept with one ear on, had just left a door open on purpose.
"Come here," she said.
He came. And she undressed him the way she'd been wanting to undress him since the first night she'd peeled his shirt off in her motel apartment—slowly, without urgency, without the smell of gunpowder or the residue of violence on either of them.
His cut first. She slid it off his shoulders and hung it on the bedpost the way she always hung it—carefully, respectfully, because the patch mattered and she understood that now.
Then his shirt, pulling it over his head, her hands running down his chest over the scars she could map with her eyes closed.
She unbuckled his belt. Slowly. Working the leather through the loop with deliberate hands while he stood in the middle of the cabin and watched her with those dark, patient eyes.
She got his jeans open and pushed them down his hips, and he stepped out of them, and she knelt to unlace his boots and pull them off one at a time, and the whole thing was unhurried and simple and nothing she'd ever done before had felt this intimate.
He reached for her shirt.
She let him. He pulled it over her head and his hands went to her bra clasp and he fumbled it—actually fumbled it, the man with steady hands, the man who loaded shotguns in his sleep—and she laughed.
She laughed.
The sound of it surprised them both. It came out of her like something uncorked—bright, real, the kind of laugh she hadn't made in this room because every time they'd been together there had been something underneath it.
Adrenaline. Fear. Relief. The desperate need to feel alive after almost dying. But not this. Not joy.
Buckshot looked at her laughing and his face did the thing again—the grin she'd seen in the parking lot when she'd made him ask twice.
Wide, open, unguarded. He got the clasp on the second try and her bra fell and he pulled her against him, bare chest to bare chest, and they were both laughing into each other's mouths when he kissed her.
The kiss tasted like laughter. Like beer from earlier and toothpaste from ten minutes ago and the clean, warm skin of a man who'd showered without needing to wash off cedar needles or gunpowder or blood.
She smiled against his mouth and he smiled against hers and they kissed through the smiling, messy and imperfect and nothing like the desperate, consuming kisses they'd had before.
Better than all of them.
She pushed him toward the bed. He went—willingly, grinning—and sat on the edge, and she stripped her jeans off and straddled his lap. His hands came to her hips, automatic, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him again, deep this time, still tasting the laughter underneath.
"We've never done this," she said against his mouth.
"We've done this plenty."
"Not like this. Not without—" She pulled back and looked at him. "Without listening for something."
He understood. She could see it in his eyes—the recognition that every time they'd come together, some part of both of them had been on watch.
Listening for trucks on the highway. Waiting for the phone to ring.
Counting the seconds until the next crisis pulled them apart.
Even in the best moments—the dock, the shower, the night she'd said his name—there had been something underneath.
A held breath. A door locked against the world.
"The door's open," he said.
"The door's open."
She reached between them and took him in her hand—already hard, already wanting—and sank down onto him with a slow, easy slide that made them both exhale.
No urgency. No desperation. Just the feeling of him filling her, and the warmth of his chest against hers, and the cabin around them quiet and safe.
She rode him slow.
His hands roamed. Everywhere—her back, her ribs, her breasts, her thighs, the curve of her waist, the small of her back. Not clutching, not holding on, just touching. Exploring. The hands of a man who finally had time to learn what he'd been grabbing at in the dark.
She ran her fingers through his hair. Scratched lightly at the back of his neck.
Kissed his forehead, his temple, the bridge of his nose.
He closed his eyes and she watched pleasure move through his face without tension behind it—no clenched jaw, no held breath, just the slow, rolling ease of a man letting himself feel good without waiting for the other shoe to drop.
He sat up underneath her. Wrapped his arms around her back so they were chest to chest, her thighs around his hips, their faces inches apart.
She hooked her ankles behind him and they moved together in a rhythm that was nothing like the frantic, hard, desperate rhythms they'd found before.
This was rocking. Swaying. The kind of movement you could sustain for hours if you wanted to, and for the first time, they had hours.
He kissed her collarbone. She kissed his scarred shoulder.
They traded kisses back and forth like a conversation—slow, specific, each one placed with intention.
His mouth on the scar through her eyebrow.
Hers on the pockmark at the crest of his shoulder.
His on the hollow of her throat. Hers on the corner of his mouth.
The pressure built like a tide—slow, inevitable, rising from everywhere at once. She felt it in her thighs and her stomach and the place where he was moving inside her, a warm, spreading ache that wound tighter with every roll of her hips.
He rolled her under him.
Easy. Smooth. Keeping himself inside her through the turn, settling his weight over her with his forearms on either side of her head and his hips between her thighs.
He took over the rhythm—long, slow, deep strokes that reached places the rocking hadn't—and she arched underneath him and hooked her heels against the back of his thighs.
She was close. He could tell—he'd learned her, learned the way her breathing changed and her nails dug in and her legs tightened—and every time she got to the edge, he stopped.
Kissed her. Long, slow, deep. Waited for the wave to ease. Then started again.
The first time she swore at him.
The second time she grabbed his hair and pulled.
The third time she said, "If you stop one more time I swear to God—"
He grinned against her mouth. She could feel it—the shape of his smile pressed against her lips, the vibration of a laugh held back—and the sight of this man, this serious, scarred, dangerous man, grinning while he tortured her with patience, was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.
"Please," she said, and she was laughing when she said it, and so was he.
He gave it to her.
He drove deep and stayed, and his hand slid between them and found her, and the combination of him inside her and his fingers on her and the laughter still warm in her chest broke the wave for good.
She came hard—harder than the teasing warranted, harder than slow and easy should have produced—with her heels dug into the back of his thighs and her arms locked around his neck and his name in her mouth.
He followed her over. She felt it—the stutter in his hips, the catch in his breath, the groan that started in his chest and ended against her throat—and they finished together with the sheets tangled around their legs and the window open and the cabin full of the sounds they'd made, and the sounds were different tonight.
Lighter. Warmer. The sounds of two people who were happy, which was a word she hadn't used for either of them until now.
He collapsed on her. She took his weight. He tried to roll off and she locked her arms around him and held him there.
"Don't move."
"I'm heavy."
"I know. Don't move."
He didn't move. He lay on her with his face in her neck and his body still inside her and his heart hammering against her chest, and she held him and felt the hammer slow and soften and settle into the steady beat she'd come to know better than her own.
A long time passed. The cabin was quiet.
The compound was quiet. Through the open window—the unlocked door, the unguarded night—the sounds of the cove came through.
Water on pilings. Frogs in the tree line.
The distant, easy murmur of brothers on the deck, talking, laughing, living the life that all of this had been about.
Nothing on the road.
Nothing coming.
Nothing to listen for.
Tamsin fell asleep with the window open and Buckshot's weight on her and his breath warm against her neck, and for the first time since she'd walked into this life, she didn't dream about locked doors.