Chapter 11 #2
"Come home," she says. And the word—home—hits me like it always does.
Like something I don't deserve but can't stop reaching for.
"Twenty minutes."
"I'll be up."
I make it home in seventeen and she's on the couch when I walk through the door.
My t-shirt, her legs tucked underneath her, her hair down around her shoulders.
The TV is on but muted—just light, filling the room so she wasn't sitting in the dark.
A mug of tea on the coffee table, untouched.
She wasn't drinking it. She was holding it. Something to do with her hands while she waited.
She stands when she sees me.
I stop in the doorway. Just stop.
Because she's standing in my living room in my shirt waiting for me to come home from what has to be the most stressful part of being in a club, and the image of it.
This woman, in this house, looking at me like I'm the only thing she was waiting for—does something to my chest that I'll never be able to explain.
"You good?" she asks.
"Yeah." I drop my keys on the table by the door, shrug off my cut, and hang it on the hook. "Everyone's good. No one got hurt."
She crosses the room and puts her hands on my chest.
Flat, warm, her fingers spreading over my sternum.
Checking.
Not my words—my body.
My heart rate, my breathing, the tension in my shoulders.
She's a nurse. She reads bodies the way I read rooms.
"Your heart's racing," she says.
"Adrenaline."
"You're wound tight."
"Hours on the radio listening to your brothers on a run will do that."
She looks up at me. Those Mercer eyes, steady and searching. "Are you going to tell me the long story?"
"Tomorrow." I put my hands over hers, pressing them against my chest. "Tonight I just want to be here."
Something shifts in her face.
The concern softens into something warmer, darker, and I recognize it because I'm feeling the same thing—the post-adrenaline hum, the raw, electric awareness that happens when your body has been on high alert for hours and suddenly drops into safety.
Into warmth. Into the presence of someone who makes the danger feel far away even when it isn't.
"The girls are asleep," she says.
"I know."
"Rookie’s on the porch."
"I know."
She pulls my shirt—her shirt, mine, ours, whatever it is now—over her head in one motion and she's bare underneath and the adrenaline that's been coursing through me all night finds a new channel to pour into.
"Leah—"
"Stop talking." She reaches for my belt. "You just came home from something I can't ask about, and you're standing in your own living room shaking, and I know you won't tell me what happened out there, and I don't need you to. I just need you here. With me. Right now."
I'm on her before she finishes the sentence.
My mouth on hers, my hands around her waist, lifting her off the floor.
She wraps her legs around me and I carry her—not to the bedroom, not past the girls' doors, not tonight.
The couch.
I sit down with her in my lap, straddling me, her hair falling around both of us like a curtain.
She pulls my shirt over my head and puts her mouth on my neck.
I can still smell the smoke on my skin and she doesn't care.
Her teeth find the spot below my ear and I grip her hips so hard I know I'll leave marks, and I don't care either.
This isn't gentle.
It isn't rough like the dresser.
It's something else—hungry, possessive, alive.
The adrenaline turning into heat, the fear turning into need, every hour I spent listening to that radio while my brothers were in danger converting into the desperate, all-consuming need to touch this woman and feel her touch me back and know that we're both here, both breathing, both real.
"You're mine," I say against her mouth. Not a question. Not a discussion. A fact, the way I stated it in Church, the way I stated it to the room.
She's mine and I'm hers and the whole fucking world can deal with it.
"Prove it," she says.
I push her underwear to the side.
She reaches between us and frees me from my jeans, and I'm inside her in one motion and the sound she makes—half gasp, half moan, her forehead dropping against mine—is the only thing I want to hear for the rest of my life.
She rides me. Slow at first, finding the rhythm, her hands on my shoulders and her eyes on mine.
No looking away. No closing her eyes.
She watches me while she moves, and I watch her, and there's something about the eye contact that makes this more intimate than anything we've done—more than the first time, more than the dresser.
This is two people choosing each other in real time, over and over, with every roll of her hips.
"I was scared tonight," she says. Her breath is unsteady, her hips never stopping. "While you were all out there."
"I know."
"Don't—don't make me wait like that again." She grips my shoulders harder, changes the angle, and both of us groan. "Don't make me sit in this house wondering if you're coming back."
"I'll always come back." My hands on her hips, guiding her, matching her rhythm. "Every time. I'll always come back to you."
She kisses me. Deep, desperate, her body tightening around me as the pace picks up. I pull her closer—as close as physics will allow, skin against skin, her heartbeat slamming against mine through the thin wall of our chests.
"Faster," I breathe against her mouth.
She gives me faster.
Her thighs tightening around me, her breath coming in short, broken gasps, her nails digging into my shoulders.
I slide my hand between us and find the spot that makes her fall apart, and I work it while she moves, and her head falls back and she says my name—not Coin, Colton—and the sound of it in her mouth while she's riding me undoes every lock I have left.
"Come for me," I tell her. My voice is wrecked. "Right here. Right now. Come for me, Leah."
She does.
She comes with a cry she tries to muffle against my neck and her whole body shaking in my lap, and I hold her hips down and push up into her and follow her over the edge—burying my face in her hair, holding her so tight I can feel her ribs expand with every breath, coming with her name on my lips and her heartbeat under my hands.
We stay like that. Connected, breathing hard, foreheads pressed together.
Her hands on my face, my hands on her back, the couch cushions probably ruined and neither of us caring.
"You came home," she whispers.
"I came home."
She kisses me once more. Soft this time. Tender.
The adrenaline version of us settling back into the real version.
The one that drinks coffee at the kitchen table and does homework with my kids and sits on the porch in the cold and talks about scars.
We clean up quietly—voices low, footsteps careful, checking the hallway before we move because Wrenleigh's room is fifteen feet away and getting caught half-dressed by my sixteen-year-old daughter is not how I want to end this night.
In bed, she curls against me.
Head on my chest, her hand over my heart, the coin on the nightstand where it always is.
I pull the blanket over us and hold her and listen to the house settle.
The creak of the floorboards, the hum of the heater kicking on, Maddox's steady presence on the porch.
"One down," I say.
She lifts her head. "One down?"
"The pipeline. It's done. At least the operation that was running through here. It's burned. Gone."
"And the other thing?"
The debt. Solis. The photographs. The men who put their hands on her in a parking garage.
All of it still out there, circling, patient, waiting.
"Still working on it."
She puts her head back down. Her finger traces circles on my chest. "We'll figure it out."
There it is again. We.
The word that changed everything.
The word I didn't know I needed to hear until she said it on the back porch with my coin in her hand.
"Yeah," I say. "We will."
She falls asleep before I do.
Her breathing slows, her body goes heavy against mine, and I hold her and I stare at the ceiling and I think.
The pipeline is ash.
That's one victory.
The club did what the club does—we took care of our town, we burned the poison, we sent a message.
But the debt is still there.
Solis is still there.
Angelica is at the Super 8 being checked on by the club, and the quiet in my head that should be relief is whispering something I can't quite hear.
Something about Angelica.
Something about the way she looked at me in my kitchen. Not just sorry, not just scared.
Desperate. Calculating.
The look of a woman who's run out of options and is about to make one up.
I've seen that look before. I saw it the night before she left.
I push the thought down. File it away.
There's nothing I can do about it at two in the morning with Leah asleep on my chest and my girls down the hall.
But the thought stays. Nagging. Pulling.
And somewhere across town, in a Super 8 on University Avenue, I'm willing to bet Angelica isn't sleeping either.
I'm willing to bet she's got her phone in her hand, and she's making the worst decision of her life.
Again.