Chapter 13
The rain started at nine.
It came in off the coast without warning — a wall of warm tropical water that hit the compound like a fist, drowning the bonfire and driving the brothers indoors and turning the courtyard into a river in under a minute.
Thunder rolled over the ocean and the lights in the bunkhouse flickered once, twice, and held, and the compound settled into the particular hush of a Florida storm that meant to stay awhile.
Dana sat on her bunkhouse bed and listened to the rain hammer the roof and tried to think about anything other than what she was about to do.
Throttle had called a brief meeting after dinner — not full church, just the principals — and the word had filtered through the compound within the hour.
They'd found Owen's primary stash house.
A rented warehouse on Daytona's industrial edge, where the stolen inventory was catalogued and stored.
The hit was two days out. The plan was forming.
The danger was coming, and it was coming soon.
Two days.
In two days the men who'd built a cage around her life would find out what it felt like to be cornered, and the brothers who'd absorbed her into their compound would ride out to do the kind of violence she'd only seen the aftermath of.
Clutch would ride out. The steady man with the scarred hands and the taped eyebrow and the quiet way of standing between her and everything — he'd walk into a warehouse full of armed thieves because she'd called a garage in a panic and he'd answered the phone.
She'd spent the last three days pretending the tension between them was manageable.
That the heat she felt every time their eyes met across the courtyard was circumstantial, a product of proximity and adrenaline and the particular intimacy of being protected by someone who moved through danger like it was weather.
She'd pretended the way his hand hovered at the small of her back was professional.
The way his eyes tracked her through a room was practical.
The way her pulse kicked every time he said her name was just biology, and biology could be managed.
She was done pretending.
Dana stood up, pulled on a clean tank top and the shorts she slept in, and walked barefoot down the bunkhouse hall to his door. The rain was deafening on the roof — a solid roar that swallowed her footsteps and her heartbeat and every rational thought telling her to go back to her room and sleep.
She knocked once.
The door opened, and Clutch stood in the frame wearing a T-shirt and jeans and the expression of a man who'd been expecting this knock and dreading it and wanting it in equal measure.
His room was dim — a single lamp on the nightstand, the window streaked with rain, his cut hung over the back of the chair.
Without it he looked different. Not smaller — nothing could make him smaller — but unarmored.
The club identity peeled back, just the man underneath.
"Dana."
"Don't tell me to go back to my room."
"I wasn't going to."
"Don't tell me this is a bad idea."
"It's a terrible idea."
"I know." She stepped past him into the room and heard the door close behind her, and the rain swallowed the click of the latch. "I don't care."
She turned to face him. He hadn't moved from the door, one hand still on the knob, the dim light cutting shadows across his jaw and the healing line above his eye.
He was looking at her the way he'd looked at her across the bonfire — like she was the most important thing in the room and he was deciding whether he was allowed to reach for her.
"The club's hitting the warehouse in two days," she said.
"I know."
"You're going."
"Yeah."
"And I'm supposed to sit here and wait and not think about what happens if you don't come back."
Something moved behind his eyes. "Dana —"
"I'm not here because I'm scared." She closed the distance between them by half, and his hand fell from the doorknob.
"I'm not here because of adrenaline, or because you saved me, or because this compound is a pressure cooker and you're the closest warm body.
I'm here because I want you, and I've wanted you since you climbed into my van like it was the most natural thing in the world, and I'm done waiting for a perfect moment that doesn't come with a body count. "
The rain hammered the window. Thunder rolled somewhere over the ocean, low and long. Clutch stood in front of her with his chest rising and falling, and she could see the war on his face — the control he wore like a second skin fighting the thing underneath it, the discipline cracking at the edges.
"I'm not careful with things I want," he said. His voice was low, rough, stripped of the flat calm he wrapped around everything. "I hold on too tight. I don't let go."
"Good." She reached up and put her hand on his chest, flat over his heart, and felt it slamming against her palm. The steadiest man she'd ever known, and his heart was running like he'd just sprinted a mile. "I don't want you to let go."
His control broke.
His hands came up and framed her face — those massive, scarred, grease-lined hands cradling her jaw like she was made of something precious and volatile — and he kissed her with the full weight of everything he'd been holding back since the motor court.
It wasn't gentle. It wasn't tentative. It was the kiss of a man who'd been drowning in patience for two weeks and had just given himself permission to stop.
Dana grabbed fistfuls of his shirt and pulled him closer, rising on her toes to meet him, and a sound came out of his chest that she felt more than heard — low, involuntary, the noise a man makes when the thing he's been denying himself is suddenly in his hands and it's better than he imagined.
He walked her backward without breaking the kiss, one arm banding around her waist, his mouth on hers hot and certain and consuming.
Her back hit the edge of the bed and she pulled him down with her, and his weight settled over her — carefully, even now, even with the control shattered, some part of him calibrating so he didn't crush her — and Dana arched against him and whispered, "Stop being careful. "
He made that sound again. Deeper.
His hands found the hem of her tank top and she felt his fingers against her bare skin — rough, warm, shaking.
Shaking. This man who didn't flinch at violence, who sat still while she stitched his face together, who'd killed a man with a tire iron and walked away steady — his hands were trembling against her ribs like he was holding something he was afraid to break.
"Garrett," she breathed, and his whole body went taut at the sound of his real name in her mouth.
He pulled back just enough to look at her.
Dark eyes, pupils blown wide, breathing ragged, the discipline he'd built his entire identity around dismantled by a woman in a tank top who'd said his name.
She held his gaze and let him see everything — the want, the choice, the clear-eyed certainty that this was exactly where she intended to be.
"Yours," she said. "Tonight, I'm yours. Show me what that means."
His forehead dropped against hers. His breath came in rough pulls against her mouth. Then his hands stopped shaking and started moving, and the last distance between them disappeared.
He was slow the way a man is slow when he wants to learn every inch of something he intends to keep.
His mouth traced the line of her throat, the hollow above her collarbone, the curve of her shoulder where the tank top had slid aside.
His hands mapped her body with the same deliberate attention he brought to everything — methodical, thorough, devastatingly patient — and Dana burned under it, her fingers digging into the muscles of his back, her breath coming in gasps she couldn't control.
"Clutch —"
"Garrett," he corrected, his lips against her skin. "Here, like this — it's Garrett."
She arched into him and said his name again, and the sound of it unraveled something in him.
The patience burned away. His hands gripped her hips hard enough to feel the strength he held in check every other moment of his life, and Dana matched him, pulling him closer, wrapping herself around him with the fierce determination of a woman who'd decided this man was hers and intended to prove it.
The rain drowned everything — the compound, the war that was coming, the frame that was still closing around her life.
The world narrowed to one room and one bed and the overwhelming reality of his body against hers, his hands in her hair, his mouth finding hers again and again between ragged breaths and broken words.
He said her name like a man saying a prayer he'd forgotten he knew.
She said his like a promise. And when he finally stopped holding back — when the last wall between them came down and there was nothing left but heat and skin and the raw, shaking vulnerability of two careful people choosing to be reckless — Dana understood for the first time what it meant to be claimed by someone who'd been afraid to want anything for himself.
He was everywhere. Around her, above her, inside every breath and every heartbeat, the steady man turned desperate and the desperation was the most honest thing she'd ever felt from another person.
She met him there — not surrendering, not yielding, but matching, claiming him back with every arch of her body and every whispered word and the nails dragging down his spine that made him groan against her throat.
"Mine," she breathed, and felt him shudder.
"Yeah." His voice was wrecked. "Yours. All of it."
The storm peaked above them. Rain slammed the roof in sheets and thunder cracked close enough to rattle the window, and neither of them heard it.
The world outside the room had ceased to exist — the war, the warehouse, the frame job, the brotherhood, all of it irrelevant in the face of two people who'd found each other in the wreckage and decided to hold on.
When it was over — when the trembling had quieted and the breathing had slowed and the rain had softened from assault to murmur — Dana lay against his chest and listened to his heart settle back to something approaching steady.
His arm was around her, heavy and warm, his fingers tracing absent patterns on her shoulder blade.
The lamp on the nightstand cast gold light across the bed and the tangled sheets and the scars on his hands, and the room smelled like rain and sweat and the leather that had soaked into everything he owned.
She tilted her head up to look at him. He was watching the ceiling with an expression she'd never seen on his face — open, unguarded, the walls he carried everywhere dismantled piece by piece and lying in ruins around him.
He looked younger without them. Lighter. Like something heavy had been set down.
"Hey," she said.
He looked down at her. His thumb brushed her shoulder. "Hey."
"You okay?"
The corner of his mouth did the thing that wasn't quite a smile. "I'm so far past okay I don't know the word for it."
She pressed her face into his chest and breathed him in, and his arm tightened around her.
Outside the rain whispered against the compound, gentler now, the storm spending itself over the ocean.
The bunkhouse was quiet. The world was quiet.
Everything except the heartbeat under her ear, steady again, the rhythm of a man who'd spent his whole life cleaning up other people's messes and had just let someone clean up his.
"Whatever happens with the warehouse," Dana said against his skin. "Whatever happens with Owen and the frame and all of it. This was mine. This was real. Nobody takes this."
His hand stilled on her shoulder. Then he pulled her closer — tight, deliberate, the grip of a man who'd heard a promise and intended to hold her to it — and his mouth pressed against the top of her head.
"Nobody takes this," he agreed, and the words hummed through his chest into hers like a vow spoken in a language only two people in the world understood.
The rain drummed on, and Dana closed her eyes against the heartbeat of the man she'd chosen, and slept without dreaming for the first time since her world had come apart.