Chapter 4
CHAPTER
FOUR
Cage
We had a name on the rider now. Toller. Cross Bone runner, moving product up from the interstate.
Reap had brought it to me that afternoon—came within a quarter mile of my fence line, sat a while, moved on.
Wrench was doubling up on that stretch till I said different.
And Preach had cornered me after Church, quiet enough that nobody else heard it, telling me I was pulling county records over an unclaimed woman and putting the club in the middle of a Hutchens fight.
He wasn't wrong. Preach hasn't misread a risk since before I was patched. She was a complication. She was also mine, had been for weeks, and I'd made that call before I ran a single goddamn number. Same math that cost me Gabriel.
Ledger had left the parcel maps on my desk and I still hadn't matched Hutchens's filing against the originals. One more hour. Maybe two.
I was cross-checking property lines under the office fluorescent when the knock came. Two knuckles on the side door, the one that opens to the lot between the garage and her shop.
Addie stood there in a flannel shirt three sizes too big and boots she hadn't laced, bare legs under the hem like she'd crossed a cold lot at midnight without once thinking about it, holding two mugs, one toe over my threshold and the rest of her not sure it was allowed.
I checked past her shoulder first, old habit with new reasons. Her lot dark, no sedan on the street, nothing sitting up on the ridge. Then I let myself look at her, which was a different problem.
"Saw your light on," she said. "It's chamomile. Don't make a face."
I took it. Made a face. She almost smiled, and my cock jumped.
The flannel hanging off one shoulder, her hair loose from whatever had held it all day, all of her soft and warm in my doorway and no idea she already belonged in it.
Weeks of not touching this woman, and my self-control was a fucking joke.
She stepped past me into the office and I let her. Whatever line I'd drawn about her had been dead for days, and I was done pretending I gave a damn about redrawing it. Her eyes swept the desk, the invoices, the county maps. Landed on the jacket.
Echo's jacket. Denim, lined, the left pocket torn where he'd caught it on a toolbox lid the week before it all went sideways. Two years on that hook. Nobody touched it. The last brother who reached for it got a look that cleared the room.
"Whose is that?" She'd clocked it the second she walked in and made herself wait this long to ask.
My throat closed. I set the mug down before I dropped it.
"My brother's. We called him Echo."
"Called?"
I sat on the edge of the desk because standing had stopped being an option. I'd kept it down through Mercy asking and Reap not asking, and now it was coming up whether I let it or not, nowhere to go but her.
"If I tell you this, it stays in this room. Not Louetta. Not a friend back in Lexington. No one, ever."
"Cage." She said it quiet and didn't move. "You can trust me. I know a little something about kept secrets."
The air went out of me.
"His real name is Gabriel. He's in witness protection.
He saw what he shouldn't have, and the only reason he was in that room—" I stopped.
Started over, worse. "Ledger was training him, the watching-and-listening side of the business, and I handed him a job I swore up and down was nothing.
Sit, watch, drive back. I did that. Nobody did that to him but me.
He was twenty-seven and he trusted me, and now he can't use his own name, he can't come home, he can't even stand at our mother's grave on her birthday because somebody might be watching it.
So the jacket stays. Everything else is gone. The jacket stays."
"Gabriel." She said it soft, eyes on the jacket. "It doesn't leave this room. I've had practice."
No pity anywhere in it. Pity I'd have known what to do with. The mug went onto the cabinet and she faced me full, four feet away.
"You hold on to everything," she said. "The club. The town. The jacket."
"That's not what this is."
"Cage." Like she was tired of both of us lying.
"You fixed my door. You stood between me and Hutchens.
It's midnight and you're running county maps for my shop.
" Her eyes drifted to the desk, the parcel lines spread under the lamp.
"Gran always said her and your daddy settled that lane themselves.
Handshake deal, she called it. Said they wrote it down somewhere official, but Gran was never much for filing things where they belonged.
" She shrugged like it was nothing. "Don't you think we should be honest about what this is? "
She was right. Standing there being right in that flannel, and every plan I had for keeping my hands to myself quit on the spot.
"I know what it is," I said. Low. "I've known since I watched you go at Hutchens armed with nothing but paper and a bad mood."
"Then say it."
"Mine." It came out of me like a lug nut breaking loose. "That's what this is. You've been mine for weeks. I was waiting on you to catch up."
Her breath shortened. "That's a hell of a thing to decide without me."
"You're all caught up now."
She crossed the room herself. That's the part I'll keep till I die. I didn't reach for her. She came to me, put her hand flat on my chest like she was checking whether the engine was running, and tipped her chin up.
"Slow," she said. Her terms.
"Slow." I slid my hand up the side of her neck, thumb at the hinge of her jaw, giving her all the time in the world to change her mind. She grabbed a fistful of my shirt and pulled me down instead.
She tasted like chamomile and every bad idea I'd ever defended.
The kiss started slow because I'd promised, and then her teeth caught my lip and slow died in a ditch.
I slapped the fluorescent off on the way past the switch, walked her back through the flood-glow coming off the lot, got my hands under her thighs, and set her up on the desk, the maps crumpling under her.
"Off." My mouth at her ear, my hands parked on her hips until she decided.
She pulled the flannel over her head herself.
Cotton underneath, nothing fancy, and the sight of her still knocked the air loose in me.
Every curve of her a place my hands already knew they were headed.
I put my mouth on her shoulder, her collarbone, the swell of her breast through the thin cotton, taking the scenic route while she pulled at my shirt.
Built like something a man would wreck his life over, and she'd been hiding it under canvas aprons and other people's opinions. Criminal.
"Look at you. I pictured this every night for weeks and I still shorted the estimate."
She laughed, nervous at the edges, and hooked a finger in my collar. "You going to stand there doing appraisals, or?—"
I went to my knees.
I kissed the inside of her knee, then higher, checking her face at every inch, nothing about me ever coming at her fast. My thumbs hooked her underwear. "Yes?"
"If you stop, I will never forgive you."
I worked them off over her unlaced boots and put my mouth on her.
She was already soaked, sweet and salt on my tongue, and I told her so.
"Fucking drenched. All of this is mine." I licked into her, spread her open with my thumbs, found her clit and worked it how her hips told me to, soft, then flatter, then not soft at all.
She swore at me and got both hands in my hair, pulling me in harder.
When she started holding her voice down I pulled back just long enough to say, "Louder. No one's here to hear you but me," then sucked her clit until her heels dug into my back and she came on my tongue with my name in it.
I stood up and she was already pulling me in by the belt, fingers quick, cheeks flushed, still trembling from my mouth and reaching for more anyway.
"I'm covered," she said. "Don't make me wait."
"I'm clean." The words were rough. Bare had consequences and I wanted every fucking one of them. Nothing between us, no trace of anyone but me on her. I wanted her wrecked and smelling like me and knowing it.
"Eyes on me, then." I pushed into her by inches, watching her chin come up, her mouth falling open around a sound she didn't plan. She was tight and hot and mine, and the noise I made saying so wasn't a word in any language. "I want you knowing exactly whose hands are on you."
"I know whose." Her heels locked behind me. "Move."
So much for slow. I got a fistful of her hips and fucked her exactly how she'd asked, deep and hard, the desk legs scraping the floor under us, the lamp going over, her tits bouncing loose under that thin cotton until I shoved it up and got my mouth on one.
She hung onto my shoulders and gave it back as hard as she got it, starving on her side of that fence line same as I'd been on mine.
Somewhere in the middle of it she framed my face in both hands and made me look at her. My rhythm broke. She felt it and didn't look away.
"Hey," she whispered, thumb dragging my jaw. "Stay with me."
"Ain't anywhere else."
She pulled me closer, mouth at my ear, and I worked a hand between us and rubbed her clit in time with every stroke until her thighs started shaking again. "Still good?"
"Better than." Her voice frayed. "Cage?—"
"That's it. Come for me." She came hard, clenching around me in waves, and they took me down with her. I emptied everything I had into her, face buried in her neck, her name wrecked in my throat.
She stayed wrapped around me while the rest of the world took its time coming back, her heartbeat banging into my chest, sweat cooling wherever we were skin to skin.
"So," she said, breathless, into my shoulder. "Mine. That's the whole speech?"
"Short version." Her fingers found the ink on my forearm and traced it. Road dates, most of it. Echo's initials worked into the middle, if she looked close enough.
"Clear your calendar for the long one," I said, and her laugh came out low and wrung out and landed in my spine, and then a single headlight raked the office windows.
Cold hit me all at once. I knew that sweep. High beam from the ridge, angle wrong for the road. Somebody sitting above the tree line, looking down. Toller.
I grabbed her and pulled her off the desk, sideways, hard, into the shadow behind the filing cabinet where the light couldn't reach, her flannel snatched off the floor and shoved into her arms, my hands clamped on her shoulders.
Too tight. I knew it and I didn't let go until the sweep passed and the dark came back.
Her breath had caught. I dropped my hands and stepped back into the desk.
"I'm sorry." My voice was shredded. "I didn't?—"
"Stop." She was pressed to the metal, eyes huge, the flannel clutched to her chest. "That scared me."
I waited. Couldn't breathe enough to speak.
"It wasn't the grip." Her voice dropped to almost nothing. "It was how much I liked it, you putting me somewhere safe. I didn't know hands could do that."
My hands opened. Closed.
"Get dressed, baby,” I said. "I'm walking you home."
While she dressed I thumbed a text to Mercy. The ridge was getting eyes on it till sunup, even if they had to be mine.
She didn't argue about the escort. I checked the lot first, then crossed it with her tucked under my arm, my eyes on the ridge the whole eighty feet.
Her hair was a wreck and her boots were still unlaced and she walked that gravel like she owned it.
Far as I was concerned, she did now. At her back door she stopped, half-turned, the floods picking out every red strand she had.
"For the record," she said, "I'm clearing my calendar."
I leaned in and pressed my mouth to her forehead, long enough to feel her lean into it. Then she was gone, the lock turning behind her.
A creak from Addie's back porch. Louetta Byrd, foil-wrapped plate balanced on one hip. She took one look at me walking away from that door, one look at the light flipping on behind Addie's curtain, and her whole face said everything her mouth was about to.
"Mm-hmm," Louetta said.
I kept walking. Grinning where she couldn't see it. Again.
I rode back to the clubhouse with her still on my skin and that high beam burned into the back of my eyes, and I sat on the bike a long while after the engine died.
Toller was circling what was mine now. Let him circle.
I'd put him in the fucking ground on that ridge before he got close enough to learn her name.