Chapter 25
He got her into the cabin with the party still going down at the water.
The fire pit threw orange light up the hillside and the sound of voices carried across the cove—laughter, music, someone telling a story loud enough that the punchline echoed off the bluffs.
His family. Their family. Doing what families did when the danger was past and the night was warm and there was nothing left to fight.
Buckshot closed the cabin door and put Tamsin against it.
His hands on either side of her head, palms flat against the wood, his body close enough that he could feel the warmth coming off her skin through the white shirt she'd worn for the ceremony.
Her gray eyes looked up at him in the dim light—the lamp on the nightstand, the only light in the room—and she was still, waiting, the way she waited when she knew something important was about to happen.
He looked at her.
His old lady. The words were still new in his head, still settling into the shape of what they meant.
Not his woman—he'd been calling her that since the parking lot.
Not mine—he'd said that with his hands on her face while bodies cooled in the gravel.
His old lady. The formal thing. The permanent thing.
The word that meant she wore his patch and carried his name and stood inside a circle that the whole club would defend.
He reached for the property patch on her shoulders.
Lifted it off her. Carefully, the way she'd handled his cut when she undressed him—with respect for what it meant. He carried it to the bed and hung it on the bedpost, leather against the wood, where they could both see it from anywhere in the room.
Then he came back to her.
"Don't move," he said.
She didn't move.
He unbuttoned her shirt. One button at a time, the way she'd unbuttoned his on the dock that night—slowly, deliberately, making each one a separate act.
The white cotton parted over her chest, her stomach, and he spread it open with his hands and looked at her the way he hadn't let himself look during the ceremony.
At the curve of her waist. At the flat, strong line of her stomach.
At the scar on her ribs from the desk edge that had faded to a pale line and would probably never disappear.
He kissed it. Bent down and put his mouth on that scar—the first mark this life had put on her—and felt her breath catch above him.
He kissed the next inch of skin. And the next.
Working his way across her ribs, his lips mapping the territory between her hipbone and her collarbone, finding every scar and every freckle and every unmarked stretch of skin and claiming it with his mouth.
He pushed the shirt off her shoulders and it fell to the floor and he unhooked her bra and it joined the shirt, and he went back to the work of learning her.
She stood against the door and let him. Her hands came to his hair—threading through, not pulling, just holding—and her head tipped back against the wood and her breathing went shallow.
He kissed her throat. The hollow where her pulse beat fast under his lips.
The ridge of her collarbone. The curve of her shoulder where the patch had rested.
He kissed between her breasts, slowly, and took one into his mouth—gentle, teasing, his tongue circling until she arched into him and her hand tightened in his hair.
He went lower. Down her stomach, his hands working her jeans open, pulling them over her hips.
He knelt in front of her and took the jeans down her legs and she stepped out of them, and he unlaced her boots and pulled them off and set them beside the door.
She stood naked against the wood with the lamp throwing her in warm light and shadow, and he stayed on his knees and looked up at her.
"You're the most dangerous thing I've ever loved," he said.
Her eyes went bright. She opened her mouth to answer and he put his mouth between her thighs and she grabbed the doorframe instead.
He took his time. Used his tongue the way he'd used it on the dock—broad, slow, finding the center of her and working it until her leg hooked over his shoulder and her hand was white-knuckled on the frame and the sounds she was making were the sounds of a woman who'd stopped trying to be quiet.
He held her hip with one hand and worked her with the other, two fingers sliding inside while his tongue kept its rhythm, and she came against the door with his name—his road name—breaking apart in her mouth.
He didn't stop.
He kept his mouth on her through the aftershock, gentler now, easing her down and then building her back up.
Different pressure, different angle, his fingers curling to find the place that made her hips jerk and her breath stutter.
She tried to push his head away—too much, too sensitive—and he caught her wrist and held it against her thigh and kept going.
The second orgasm rolled through her in waves. He felt it in the clench of her body around his fingers and the shake in her leg and the sound she made—not a cry, not a moan, but a raw, breaking exhale that came from somewhere she'd stopped guarding.
He stood. Picked her up. Carried her to the bed and laid her down beside the bedpost where the property patch hung, and she lay in the warm light and looked up at him with her hair spread across the pillow and her body flushed and her eyes full of something that had no defenses around it.
He undressed himself. Standing at the foot of the bed, watching her watch him, taking off his cut and his shirt and his boots and his jeans with the same deliberate slowness he'd used on her.
She propped herself on her elbows and her eyes moved down his body—the scars, the muscle, the evidence of everything he'd survived—and the way she looked at him made his hands shake for the first time all day.
He came over her. Settled between her thighs. Hooked his arms under her knees and lifted, spreading her wider, opening her, and she let him—let him arrange her body beneath his with the trust of a woman who'd stopped holding anything back.
He pushed into her.
Held himself there. All the way in, as deep as he could go, his hips flush against hers and his arms trembling with the effort of holding still. He looked at her face—the catch in her expression, the way her lips parted, the way her hands came to his forearms and gripped.
"Mine," he said.
Not the way he'd said it in the parking lot—fast, unplanned, pulled from somewhere primal. This was different. This was a man saying a word he'd already spoken in front of his entire club, saying it again in private because the private version was the one that mattered.
"Yours," she said. And then, soft: "Earl."
He began to move.
Slow. Long strokes that withdrew almost to the tip and pressed back in deep, each one complete, each one a separate claim.
Her knees were hooked over his arms and she was open to him completely—no leverage, no control, nothing to do except feel him and hold on.
Her hands slid from his forearms to his shoulders to his face, pulling him down, and he went, lowering himself until his chest brushed hers and his mouth found her mouth.
She pulled him closer. Locked her arms around his back, her heels crossing behind him, drawing him in. The angle deepened and she gasped into the kiss and he swallowed the sound and gave it back.
He kept the pace slow. Even when she arched underneath him, even when her nails dug into his back and her hips tried to push for more, he held the rhythm because tonight wasn't about urgency.
Tonight was about putting his mouth on every piece of the woman he'd claimed and making her feel it in a way that had nothing to do with speed and everything to do with permanence.
The pressure built between them like a held breath.
He could feel it in her body—the tension climbing, the tremor in her thighs, the way she held his face and looked into his eyes and refused to close hers.
He could feel it in himself—the tightening at the base of his spine, the heat spreading through his chest, the overwhelming desire to let go that he held back because he wasn't done yet.
He shifted his angle. Pressed deeper. Found the place that made her whole body lock and her mouth open in a silent sound, and he stayed there—right there—stroking into her with a precision he'd never used in anything, because this one thing, this one person, deserved it.
She came with her arms around him and her eyes on his and her whole body pulling tight around him like a fist. He felt her everywhere—the clench, the shake, the broken sound of his road name in her mouth—and he let go.
His mouth found her throat. Her name came out of him—Tamsin—the way it always came out, like the last word he had, the only word that mattered.
He buried himself deep and pulsed inside her and her arms tightened and her heels dug into his back and they held each other through it, shaking, breathing, the bed creaking underneath them and the fire pit noise carrying through the open window from the cove below.
He didn't move off her.
Not for a long time. He lay with his face against her throat and his hand finding its way to her stomach—the same place, always the same place, his palm spread wide and warm across the skin below her navel.
She covered his hand with hers. Laced their fingers together the way they'd done on their sides in the dark, the way they'd done on the dock, the way they always ended—his hand on her, hers on his, joined.
The fire pit crackled below. The laughter had gone soft.
The music had stopped. The cove was settling into the deep, easy quiet of a compound going to sleep, and the two of them lay tangled in sheets that smelled like both of them with the property patch hanging on the bedpost and the window open and the stars visible through the glass.
"I'm not going anywhere," she said.
He turned his face against her neck. Pressed his lips to her pulse. Felt it beating there—steady, strong, the heartbeat of a woman who'd decided where she belonged and wasn't leaving.
"I know," he said.
He already knew.