19. Diesel
DIESEL
Iclock her ride the second I roll past Mac’s, tucked between a rusted Silverado and somebody’s boat trailer. Her own truck, not the cruiser, but I know it the way I know my own hands. I’ve spent three weeks memorizing every inch of her life I can get close to without spooking her off completely.
I should keep riding. Head back to the clubhouse, deal with the shit Jenson’s got piled on my desk. Instead I swing into the gravel lot and cut the engine, and my boots hit the ground before my brain finishes arguing with me about it.
Inside, the jukebox is playing something twangy and half the regulars are hunched over their beers, minding nobody’s business but their own. I hear her before I see her—that clipped, controlled voice she uses when she’s two seconds from losing her patience and refuses to let it show.
“—tired of men in suits worrying about overtime budget,” she’s saying to the bartender, who nods along like a man who’s learned it’s safer not to comment. “Just give me the whiskey, Ronnie. Neat.”
I slide onto the stool two down from her before I let myself think better of it.
“Put that on my tab,” I say.
Ronnie’s eyes flick to Penny like he’s asking permission. She turns her head slowly, and when she sees me, her jaw goes tight enough to crack walnuts.
“I don’t need you buying my drinks, Cole.”
“Didn’t ask if you needed it.”
She glares at me for a long three-count, the kind of look that would’ve sent lesser men out the door. I’ve never been a lesser man where she’s concerned.
“Fine,” she says. “One drink. Don’t make it weird.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Ronnie pours. I nod him off when he hesitates about mine, and he sets a beer in front of me and disappears down to the other end of the bar like he wants no part of whatever this is.
“Rough week?” I ask.
Penny stares into her glass like it owes her answers. “Rough case.”
“The Miller girl.”
She exhales through her nose and takes a slow sip, like she’s deciding how much to give me.
“Five days. No ransom call, no sightings that check out, nothing. And every lead I chase dries up before I can prove it’s a lead at all.
” Her fingers tighten around the glass. “I keep thinking about her parents’ faces.
Not the paperwork, not the pressure from the higher-ups. Just... their faces.”
I tilt my head. “You’ll find her.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” I say. “But I know you. You don’t stop till you do.”
She looks at me like she wants to argue and can’t find the footing for it. For a second the bar noise fades out and it’s just her and me and all those years compressed into the space between two stools.
“You look like hell,” I tell her, because it’s true and because somebody needs to say it. Dark circles under her eyes. Shoulders pulled up around her ears like she’s braced for a hit that never stops coming.
She rolls her eyes. “Thanks. Really boosts my confidence.”
“Wasn’t an insult.” I turn my beer bottle a quarter turn on the bar top. “C’mon. Take a ride with me.”
She blinks. “A ride.”
“On the bike. Get some air, clear your head for twenty minutes. You’ve probably been staring at the same case files so long you’re not gonna see anything new tonight anyway.”
“I have my truck—”
“It’ll still be here when we get back,” I interrupt.
She hesitates, and I watch her run through every reason she should say no—her job, the case, the years of good sense that’s kept her upright and careful her whole life. I see all of it cross her face. Then she sets her glass down, empty, and something in her shoulders drops an inch.
“Twenty minutes,” she says.
“Twenty minutes,” I echo.
I settle her tab and mine both before she can argue about splitting it, and she doesn’t fight me on it this time, which tells me more about how tired she is than anything she’s said out loud.
Outside, the night’s gone cool and clear, stars scattered thick over the ridgeline behind Mac’s.
I swing a leg over the bike, and she stands there a second, studying it like she’s never sat on the back of one, though I know for a fact she has.
Two decades ago, plenty of times, her arms locked around my ribs and her chin hooked over my shoulder, laughing into the wind.
She climbs on behind me without a word.
Her hands find my waist, tentative at first, then settle in like they remember the shape of me even if she won’t admit it. It feels right in a way that scares me a little—familiar enough that I have to remind myself she only agreed to twenty minutes.
I pull out onto the county road, headed away from town, away from the station and the case files and every version of tonight where she says no.
She doesn’t ask where we’re going. Maybe she already knows.
The turnoff’s grown over more than it used to be, brush scraping the bike’s undercarriage as I ease us down the old logging trail.
It opens up onto the bluff above Sutton Creek all at once, the trees falling back and the valley spreading out below us, moonlight laid flat and silver across the water a hundred feet down.
We used to come here at seventeen, sneak off after dark with a six-pack we weren’t old enough to buy and no plan past sitting on the hood of whatever car I’d borrowed, talking about a future neither of us got to have.
I cut the engine. The quiet rushes in loud after the ride.
“You remember this place,” she says. Not a question.
“Never forgot it.”
She slides off the bike first, walks to the edge where the rock drops away, arms wrapped around herself against the chill. I watch the wind catch pieces of her hair that have slipped loose from where she’d pinned it back for work, and something in my chest goes tight and hungry at the same time.
“We used to think we had it all figured out up here,” she says, not looking at me.
“We were kids. Kids think they’ve got everything figured out.”
She exhales slowly. “You proposed to me at eighteen.”
“I remember.”
“I said no.”
“I remember that too.”
She turns then, and the moonlight softens the tired lines around her eyes, and for a second she’s eighteen again, standing in a gravel lot telling me she can’t do this, she can’t be a club girl, she needs more than a patch and a promise.
“Evan,” she says, and my whole body responds to my own name in her mouth like it’s a command. “What are we doing?”
“Whatever we want.”
I close the distance before she can talk herself out of whatever’s building behind her eyes. She doesn’t step back. Her hands come up to my chest instead, not pushing me away, just resting there like she’s checking my heartbeat’s as wrecked as hers.
“This is a terrible idea,” she says.
“Probably.”
“I have a case. A missing girl. I shouldn’t be up here with you.”
“Probably not.”
“Shut up and kiss me, then.”
I don’t need telling twice.
Her mouth is soft and furious at once, all those years of wanting crammed into the first press of her lips against mine.
I fist a hand in her hair, tilt her head back, and she makes a sound low in her throat that unravels something I’ve kept knotted tight since the day she drove away from that clubhouse without looking back.
“God, I hate how much I want you,” she breathes against my mouth.
“Hate it later.” I walk her back until her spine hits the bike’s saddle, and she gasps when the seat presses against the backs of her thighs. “Right now, let me have you.”
She yanks at my shirt, drags it up over my head, her hands going flat and greedy against my chest, tracing the ink that wasn’t there seventeen years ago. “You got more tattoos,” she says, breathless, fingers skating over a scar on my ribs.
“You got more scared of wanting things,” I say. “Look at you now.”
“Shut up, Evan.”
“Make me.”
She grabs the back of my neck and drags my mouth down to hers, and I lift her by the hips, settle her onto the leather seat of the bike, her legs falling open around me like they were built to.
I get my hands under her shirt, drag it up over her head, and the sight of her in nothing but a plain white bra under starlight does something violent to whatever’s left of my restraint.
“Off,” I growl, working the clasp until it gives, and she shivers when the night air hits her bare skin, nipples pebbling tight before I even get my mouth on them.
“Evan—”
“Say it again.”
“Evan,” she moans, arching into me when I close my lips around one peaked nipple and suck, hard enough to make her fingers dig into my shoulders. “God, that’s—don’t stop.”
I don’t. I work down her body, unbuttoning her jeans, dragging them and her panties down her legs in one rough pull until she’s bare from the waist down, thighs trembling in the cool air, and I drop to my knees on the gravel because I’ve wanted to do this since she climbed onto the bike and I’m nowhere near done wanting her.
“Evan, we’re outside—”
“Nobody’s out here but us and the crickets.” I hook her knees over my shoulders, drag her hips to the edge of the seat. “Now shut up and let me eat this pussy like I’ve been dreaming about since the day you left me.”
She doesn’t argue after that. Her hand fists in my hair the second my mouth covers her, and the sound she makes echoes off the rock face behind us, filthy and unguarded in a way I’ve never heard from Officer Carpenter, only ever from Penny.
“Fuck,” she gasps, hips rolling against my tongue. “Don’t—God, don’t stop, Evan, please—”
I go harder. I work her with my mouth, my fingers, until she’s shaking apart above me, thighs clamped tight around my ears, her release rolling through her in a long, broken cry that carries out over the valley below.
I’m not done. I stand, wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, and she’s already reaching for my belt, fumbling it open with fingers that haven’t steadied yet.
“Need you inside me,” she says, low and wrecked. “Right now.”
I free myself, line up against her where she’s slick and swollen and ready, and I drag the head of my cock through her folds slow enough to make her whimper before I finally push in, both of us groaning at the fit of it.
“Christ, Penny.” I bury myself to the hilt, forehead dropping against hers. “You feel so good.”
“Move,” she demands, nails biting into my shoulders. “Evan, move, I swear to God—”
I do. I fuck her hard against the seat of my bike, one hand braced on the metal beside her hip, the other gripping her thigh to keep her open for me, and she stops trying to keep quiet.
“You like that?” I growl against her throat. “Like getting fucked on the back of my bike like some club girl?”
“Only because it’s you,” she pants. “Only ever you, you asshole—”
“Damn right it’s me.” I snap my hips harder, and her back arches, tits bouncing with the force of it, and I lean down to drag my teeth along her collarbone. “Nobody else gets to touch you like this. Nobody else ever will again.”
“Evan—” Her body goes tight around me, spine bowing, and I feel her clench down hard, milking me toward the edge right along with her. “I’m gonna—”
“Come for me,” I order, thumb finding her clit, circling rough and fast until she shatters, crying out into the dark, and the clench of her finishes me off half a second later—my own release tearing through me on a groan I don’t bother swallowing, hips jerking as I spill deep inside her, both of us shaking against the frame of a bike that’s seen a lot of things but never anything like this.
We stay like that a long minute, breathing hard, her forehead resting against my collarbone, my hand smoothing slow up and down her spine like I can’t quite convince myself she’s real.