2. Chapter 2
Rebel
She kisses like she’s still angry with me, like the heat of it doesn’t cancel the score she thinks I owe.
The thought lands first while my hand is still spread over the back of her neck and the storm is still hitting the windows.
She is warm under my palm, and there is nothing uncertain about the way Montana rises onto her toes and takes what she wants like she doesn’t owe either of us an apology for it.
With anyone else, a night like this would have been easy to file where it belonged as nothing more than storm, bad timing, and appetite. I’m good at that part. Most of what I’ve built works because I know how to keep one thing from bleeding into the next.
Montana makes a mess of that instinct almost immediately.
It starts downstairs, if I’m honest. Not with the first look across the bar, but with how little she gives a damn about the things that usually make people easier around me.
Money, authority, the way most people straighten up before I’ve said much and start choosing their words more carefully ... none of it gets me anywhere with her.
She doesn’t lean in, either. She watches me the way she watched the room downstairs, like she knows there’s a weak point somewhere and only has to keep pressing until she finds it.
And now I’m in her room with her hands fisted in the front of my shirt like she’s deciding whether to drag me closer or make me lose ground first. The curve of her presses against me every time she shifts, generous in all the ways a man notices too fast and remembers too long.
I slide my other hand to her waist and feel her pull in one quick breath, her fingers tightening in my shirt before she steadies again.
Her mouth leaves mine just long enough for breath.
“This is the part,” she says, voice roughened at the edges, “where you decide whether you’re actually as controlled as you think you are.”
The room is dim except for the bedside lamp and the occasional slash of lightning through the curtains. Cheap furniture, thin walls, a motel room that should feel smaller once the lights are on. It doesn’t. If anything, everything in it keeps drawing my eye back to her.
“You talk too much,” I tell her.
She smiles, but there is no sweetness in it. “And you don’t talk enough.”
I come closer to laughing than I should.
That’s the problem. With anyone else, I would already know the angle … how much charm to use, how much distance to keep. With her, I keep reaching for the usual control and coming up a fraction short.
My thumb brushes the damp strand of hair stuck to the side of her throat before I can stop myself.
I pull my hand away and regret it immediately.
Her eyes lift to mine. She’s trying not to show it, which is exactly how I know it matters.
“You do that often?” she asks.
“What?”
“Act like you’re the only person allowed to notice things.”
I lean back enough to look at her properly. “You’re making a lot of assumptions for somebody who invited me into her room by choice.”
“My room at a roadside inn during a storm,” she says. “I think the circumstances are doing most of the heavy lifting.”
That gets me. I laugh, low and brief, and surprise flashes across her face before she smooths it away.
Interesting.
Outside, thunder rolls close enough to shake the windowpanes.
She glances toward the sound, then back at me, and I can see her weighing it, even though she tries not to show it.
Want isn’t the question. That part was settled the second she took hold of my shirt.
What’s left is cost, and I can see it cross her face before she smooths it out.
Instead of cooling me off, it makes me think about what she had to push past to stay here, and that is curiosity with nowhere good to go.
I place my palm against the door behind her, caging her in without quite touching her.
“Last chance,” I say quietly. “You can still send me out that door and tell yourself this was just bad weather and judgment.”
Her chin lifts. “And what are you going to tell yourself?”
The question lands harder than it should. The truth is, I still haven’t decided whether she irritates me more than she tempts me, and I don’t like how connected those two things feel.
Lightning flashes white across the wall.
She doesn’t move.
Neither do I.
Then she hooks two fingers into the front of my shirt and draws me down just enough to let her mouth hover a breath from mine.
“You first,” she murmurs.
The challenge in her voice ought to cool something down, but it does just the opposite. I look at her mouth because she’s made not looking impossible. The storm cracks again outside, and she doesn’t flinch. She just waits.
That, more than anything, is what undoes the illusion of anonymity.
Montana gives me almost nothing to work with. She’s wary, yes, but none of it reads coy or uncertain. She’s here because she chose to be here.
I put my hand back on her waist, and her breath changes. “You ask dangerous questions,” I tell her.
She tips her head. “And you answer them like a man who’s used to being obeyed.”
“Not obeyed,” I say. “Underestimated less often than most.”
That earns me a quiet, disbelieving breath. “So that’s the story you’re selling? Rich, controlled, and only mildly intolerable?”
“Only mildly?”
“Don’t get ambitious.”
I slide my hand higher, from her waist to the curve of her side, and feel her go still again, listening.
“You keep waiting for me to do something predictable,” I say.
She studies my face. “And you keep acting like you don’t know whether you want to kiss me or interrogate me.”
“Is that bothering you?”
“Not yet.”
So irritatingly honest.
I laugh once, then lower my head and stop just short of her mouth.
This close, I can feel the heat coming off her, the soft weight of her where she presses into the door, the full curve of her body answering mine every time she breathes.
One of her thighs slips between mine for balance, and the contact shoots straight through me.
She smells like damp denim, warm skin, and sweat drying clean after the storm, and there is nothing neutral left in the room once I take that in.
That is when I kiss her again.
If I let her keep looking at me like that for another second, I may say something I have no business saying to a woman whose last name I do not know.
Her mouth opens under mine with a sound she tries to swallow, and the moment loses whatever thin claim it had to being casual. My hand moves to the back of her neck again. Hers slide up into my hair, not gentle, and the sheer lack of hesitation in it nearly undoes me.
Then her mouth breaks from mine and drags along the side of my neck. The scrape of her teeth is light, almost thoughtful, but when she takes the place where my neck runs into my shoulder between her teeth, every muscle in me locks.
She kisses like she means to win.
I deepen it before I can think better of that, backing her one step, then another, until the backs of her knees hit the side of the bed.
When I break the kiss, it is only because I need air and because she is looking at me now with flushed cheeks and eyes too clear to mistake this for anything harmless.
Good. If this is going to turn into a mistake, I’d rather it arrive honestly than pretend to be anything smaller.
I could stop this. The thought presents itself clearly, professionally, the way I approach every decision. Step back. Maintain the boundary I've spent twenty years constructing between what I want and what I permit myself to take.
Instead, I watch her reach for the hem of her shirt and pull it over her head without hesitation. The bra she wears is plain, black, practical … something chosen for comfort, and not for anyone else’s eyes.
I kneel on the mattress beside her and cup her face in both hands, angling her mouth up to mine.
She meets me with the same ferocity as before, her hands finding my belt, and I let her work it loose while I trace the curve of her waist, the flare of her hip, memorizing her through touch because looking feels too vulnerable.
I push her back onto the mattress and follow her down, settling my weight between her thighs.
She arches into me, and I feel the heat of her through the denim still separating us, the friction of it making my jaw tighten with restraint.
I've always been controlled. Methodical.
My father's chaos taught me that early ...
the damage that comes from taking without counting the cost. But Montana's hands are under my shirt now, palms flat against my stomach, and her touch burns through the discipline I've built like it's paper.
"Slow," I manage, the word rough.
She tilts her head, studying me. "You don't seem like a man who does slow."
"I seem like a lot of things." I hook my fingers in her waistband and tug, feeling her lift to help me. "Most of them wrong."
The jeans come off, then mine, and then there's only skin and the desperate press of her against me.
I slide my hand between her thighs and find her wet, ready, and the sound she makes ...
half surprise, half demand ... goes straight to my spine.
I work her with my fingers, watching her face, the way her eyes lose focus and her lower lip catches between her teeth.
I kiss her then, softer than before, and guide myself into her slowly, feeling her stretch around me.
We move together, finding a rhythm that builds in increments, neither of us leading fully, both of us adjusting, learning.
When she comes, her body tightens around me in waves that pull me over the edge after her, my forehead pressed to hers, my hands framing her face like I can hold this moment in place.