Chapter Eleven
She was making biscuits when the bikes came back.
Not because anyone had asked for biscuits.
Not because biscuits were what the situation called for.
Because her hands needed flour and her mind needed the rhythm of cutting butter into dough, and if she stood still for one more minute thinking about Foxfire riding alone into a warehouse full of armed men, she was going to take the skillet off the wall and drive to the Vicksburg highway herself.
The rumble hit the compound walls first—that particular bass-note vibration that came through the brick before the sound reached the windows. Then the engines, one after another, cutting off in the lot outside with the staggered rhythm of a formation parking.
Patty's hands stopped in the dough.
She counted the engines. Matched them to the number that had left. Came up one short, recounted, and then the last bike growled into the lot and she realized she'd been holding her breath since six o'clock this morning.
Nine hours. Nine hours of flour and biscuit dough and the kind of silence that ate a woman from the inside.
Boots in the hallway. Brothers' voices—low, charged, the sound of men running on fumes and adrenaline. She heard Crossroad first, then Hollow's particular silence, then the quick hard footsteps that she could pick out of a hundred because no one else in this compound moved that fast.
Foxfire came through the kitchen door like a man who'd been shot out of a cannon.
He was still running on it. She could see the speed in every line of his body—the coiled energy, the sharp edges, the way his eyes swept the room in the first half-second and found her in the next.
His knuckles were split. Blood on his forearms that wasn't his, dried brown against the knife scars.
A bruise darkening along his jaw where someone had gotten close enough to land something.
He was vibrating. The whole man was vibrating, standing in her kitchen doorway like a live wire someone had pulled from the wall and forgotten to ground.
"Landis is dead," he said. "Warehouse is done."
"I know." Crossroad had called an hour ago with the short version. "Sit down."
"Can't."
"I didn't ask if you could. I said sit down."
He didn't sit. He paced. Three steps to the refrigerator, three steps back, his hands opening and closing like they were looking for something to grab.
The restless energy that she'd learned to read over the past weeks was different tonight—hotter, wilder, a current running through him that had nowhere to discharge.
She'd seen this before. Not in him, but in the highway workers who came into Harmon's after a bad wreck on the road.
Men who'd pulled bodies from metal, who'd spent hours running on adrenaline and authority, and then walked into a twelve-seat diner shaking because the crisis was over and the body didn't know how to stop.
Foxfire wasn't shaking. Foxfire was burning.
"How many?" she asked.
"Landis and two workers. The rest ran." He reversed at the refrigerator, came back toward her. "Hit the staging point in the gap between runs. Ten-minute window. Three minutes inside."
"Three minutes."
"That's all it took." The grin tried to surface—that sharp, reckless flash—but it didn't land right. Too much heat behind it. Too much of whatever was driving his pacing.
Patty wiped the flour off her hands. Slow. Deliberate.
"Come here."
"Patty, I'm—" He gestured at himself, at the blood and the bruise and the energy pouring off him like heat from a stove she couldn't see. "I'm not— I can't slow down right now. I need to—"
She stepped into his path.
The same way she'd stepped in front of every man who'd ever moved too fast through her kitchen. Planted herself between the refrigerator and the counter, feet apart, shoulders square, blocking his circuit the way a levee blocks a river.
He pulled up short. Inches from her. Close enough that she could smell the fight on him—sweat and copper and the sharp bite of adrenaline that came off a man's skin when his body was still ready for a war that was already over.
"You're done fighting tonight," she said.
"I know that."
"Your body doesn't." She put her hand flat on his chest. His heart was slamming against his ribs like it was trying to break free. "You walked out of a warehouse where you killed a man three hours ago, and you're still in that room. I can feel it."
His jaw clenched. The pacing energy coiled tighter under her palm, his whole body rigid with the effort of standing still.
"I don't know how to come down from this." The admission was rough, almost angry. "Every fight I've ever been in, I just—keep moving until it burns off. Run, ride, find another fight. I don't know how to—"
"Stop talking."
She grabbed the front of his cut with both hands and pulled him down to her.
The kiss was nothing like their first. Their first had been slow and searching, two people finding the edges of something new.
This was collision. His mouth crashed into hers and the sound he made was almost a growl, raw and desperate, his hands fisting in the back of her shirt like he was grabbing a lifeline.
She bit his lower lip. Hard.
He slammed her back against the counter.
The impact knocked the air from her lungs and she didn't care—she was already pulling at his cut, shoving the leather off his shoulders because she needed skin, needed the proof of him alive and whole and here.
The cut hit the floor. His shirt followed, and her hands found the bruises and the scars and the heat of a body still running at combat speed.
"Patty—" His voice cracked against her throat.
"Don't slow down." She dug her nails into his back and felt him shudder. "I told you once. Don't slow down for me."
Something broke loose in him.
He lifted her onto the counter in one motion—fast, graceless, pure street-fighter strength—and she wrapped her legs around his waist and pulled him in because the counter had always been hers, every counter, and she was claiming this one with him on it.
His mouth found the hollow of her throat and the sound she made filled the kitchen.
His hands were everywhere—rough, urgent, the same hands that had killed a man three hours ago now mapping her body like it was the only territory that mattered.
She felt the split knuckles catch against her skin, the scrape of calluses, and the rawness of it made her gasp because this wasn't gentle and she didn't want gentle.
Gentle was for women who hadn't spent nine hours making biscuits while the man they wanted rode into a war.
"Mine." He growled it against her collarbone, his teeth grazing skin. "Say it."
"Make me."
The challenge hit him like a match to gasoline.
He pulled her off the counter and they hit the kitchen floor together—hard, graceless, her back against the tile and his weight pressing her down.
She shoved against his chest, not to push him away but to push back, to meet force with force, because Patty Harmon had never once in her life let a man handle her without handling him right back.
He caught her wrists. Pinned them above her head. His eyes were wild—dark and desperate and burning with something that went deeper than adrenaline.
"I killed three men today." His voice was ragged. "I walked into a warehouse and I didn't hesitate. Didn't think. Just moved."
"I know."
"And the only thing—" He pressed his forehead against hers, his breathing harsh. "The only thing I thought about after was getting back to this kitchen. Getting back to you."
She freed one hand from his grip and grabbed his jaw, forcing him to look at her.
"Then be here. Stop being in that warehouse and be here."
She kissed him. Not soft. Not sweet. She kissed him with every hour of fear she'd swallowed since the bikes rode out, every biscuit she'd cut while imagining the worst, every minute of the nine-hour silence that had almost driven her out of her mind.
He responded like a man drowning. His hands found her hips, her waist, the hem of her shirt, and the urgency between them built until the kitchen was nothing but heat and breath and the sound of two people trying to consume each other alive.
"Jake." She said his real name against his mouth and felt his whole body seize. "Jake, I'm right here."
"Again."
"Jake."
He buried his face in her neck and the sound that came out of him was broken—not pain, not pleasure, something between. The sound of a man who'd spent his whole life outrunning everything and had finally been caught by something he didn't want to escape.
She held him with the strength of a woman who'd hauled cast iron since childhood. Her arms locked around his back, her legs around his waist, every inch of her body pressed against every inch of his because the space between them was an insult and she was done tolerating it.
They moved together on the kitchen floor like a fight and a surrender happening at the same time.
His speed, her steadiness. His desperation, her certainty.
The street fighter who won every battle by moving first, met by the diner woman who'd never once backed down from a man who came at her too hard.
She matched him. Challenged him. Refused to let him treat her like something fragile, because a woman who'd swung a skillet at Marco Rios's head didn't break under a man's weight—she pushed back until the weight became balance.
And he answered. Harder when she pushed. Fiercer when she pulled. His hands gripping her like she was the only solid thing in a world that kept spinning too fast, his mouth finding hers again and again between ragged breaths.
"Don't let go," he said.
"I haven't let go of anything since I was old enough to hold a spatula." She pulled him closer. "I'm not starting with you."
The kitchen tile was cold against her back and his body was a furnace above her and the contrast was everything—cold and hot, still and fast, the woman who'd stayed in one place her entire life and the man who'd never stopped running, finding the exact point where those two forces met and turned into something neither of them could survive alone.
Afterward, the kitchen smelled like flour and sweat and the kind of heat that had nothing to do with stoves.
Patty lay on the floor with her back against the base of the oven—the oven she'd claimed, in the kitchen she'd claimed, in a compound she was starting to think of as hers—and Foxfire's head was in her lap.
His eyes were closed. The vibration that had driven him through the door was gone, replaced by a stillness so complete she almost checked his pulse.
She ran her fingers through his hair instead. Slow. The speed he never used.
"Nobody's ever done this," he said. His voice was quiet. Scraped raw.
"Had sex on a kitchen floor? I find that hard to believe."
The laugh came out of him soft and surprised. "Fed me at midnight without wanting something back. Every meal I've ever gotten from someone else came with a price. A favor. A debt. Something I'd have to pay for later."
Her hand stilled in his hair.
She thought about her mother. Twenty-two years behind a counter, feeding everyone who walked through the door, never once attaching a string to a plate of eggs.
"The only thing I want back," Patty said, "is you at my counter at five AM tomorrow."
He opened his eyes. Looked up at her from her lap with an expression she'd never seen on him—not the sharp grin, not the restless energy, not the cold focus of a man in a fight. Something open. Something still.
"Five AM," he said. "I'll be there."
"You better be. I'm making the biscuits I didn't finish tonight, and if they're cold by the time you show up, I'll hit you harder than Rios did."
His hand found hers. Laced their fingers together. Held on.
Somewhere in the compound, she knew the brothers could smell the breakfast she'd started before the bikes came back—the biscuits half-mixed on the counter, the butter she'd left out, the coffee grounds she'd measured into the pot before the engines cut off and the kitchen became something else entirely.
Nobody came to investigate.
The compound had learned: when Patty was cooking late, the kitchen belonged to her and the man she was feeding.
She leaned her head back against the oven and held his hand and listened to his breathing slow, and thought that a woman who'd spent her whole life behind a counter had finally found someone worth coming around to the other side for.