Chapter 5
The brothers cleared the lot in under an hour.
Nora stood in her shop and watched through the window as they worked — efficient, unhurried, men who had done this before and would do it again.
The sedan and the truck disappeared. The blood on the concrete got hosed into the gravel.
By midnight, her back lot looked like nothing had happened in it except a long shift and a hard rain.
Except for the shattered display rack by the side door, and the glass dust in her hair, and the way her hands wouldn't stop shaking.
Slayer came through the side door last.
He'd sent the brothers home. She'd heard the bikes fire up and pull out one by one, the V-twins fading down Brighton until the block was quiet again. He should have gone with them. He hadn't.
He stood in her doorway with blood on his knuckles and a bruise already darkening along his shoulder where the crowbar had caught him, and he looked at her the way he'd been looking at her since three in the morning in a burned-out lot — like she was something he'd found on ground he'd been watching for years and couldn't walk away from.
"You should get that shoulder looked at," she said.
"It's fine."
"It's not fine. I heard the hit from inside the shop."
"Nora."
"What."
"Stop talking about my shoulder."
The air between them changed. She felt it happen — the shift from adrenaline to something else, something that had been building since he'd walked into her burned-out lot and told her this was his block, since she'd walked into his compound and told him to make himself useful, since he'd put his hand on the small of her back and she'd stepped out of it because she wasn't ready.
Since he'd stood over a man who came to hurt her and put him down with the quiet certainty of a man protecting what was his.
She was ready now.
Nora crossed the shop floor. Glass crunched under her boots.
She didn't stop until she was close enough to see the pulse beating hard in his throat, close enough to smell leather and sweat and gunpowder on him, close enough that the heat coming off his body cut through the cold seeping in from the broken display.
She put both hands flat on his chest and pushed him backward until he hit the workbench.
His breath caught. His hands came up — not to stop her, to grip the edge of the bench behind him, like he was holding himself in place.
"Nora." His voice was rough. Lower than she'd ever heard it. "You just went through a fight. You don't have to —"
"I know what I don't have to do." She fisted the front of his cut and pulled him down to her. "I know what I want to do."
She kissed him.
It wasn't tentative. It wasn't sweet. It was the kiss of a woman who'd been thinking about this since a pair of gray-blue eyes had found hers across a smoking lot, and the adrenaline and the fear and the fierce satisfaction of having held her ground all poured into the place where her mouth met his.
He lasted about two seconds before his hands came off the bench.
One went into her hair — that copper hair he'd been watching come loose all week — and pulled it free from the knot she'd shoved it into before the fight.
It fell heavy and warm over his fingers and across her shoulders, and he gripped it at the base of her skull and tilted her head back and kissed her the way she'd been daring him to since the first night.
Deep. Claiming. A kiss that said mine before his mouth ever formed the word.
His other hand found her hip and hauled her against him, and the sound she made when their bodies met — a low, rough hum of satisfaction in the back of her throat — undid something in both of them.
"Tell me to stop," he said against her mouth.
"Not a chance."
He turned her. One hand still in her hair, the other at her waist, and he spun her so her back was against the bench and he was the one pressing forward.
She felt the edge of the wood against her thighs and his hips hard against hers and his mouth dragging from her lips down the line of her jaw to the side of her throat, where he bit down gently on the spot where her pulse was hammering.
She gasped. Her hands went to his shoulders — the bruised one and the whole one both, and he didn't flinch, didn't pull back, just pressed harder into her throat until she was gripping leather and digging her fingers in.
"Off," she said, pulling at his cut. "This comes off."
He straightened up long enough for her to push the leather vest off his shoulders.
It hit the concrete with a heavy sound and she was already working on his shirt, pulling it up, her hands finding the warm skin underneath and the hard ridges of muscle across his stomach.
He pulled the shirt over his head and she saw the scar — the long one that curved from his right ear down to his collarbone — and she traced it with her fingertips, then followed it with her mouth.
His whole body went taut.
"Nora." Her name came out of him like gravel. He caught her face in both hands and kissed her again, harder, his tongue against hers, and his hands moved from her face to the buttons of her shop shirt, working them open one at a time with fingers that weren't quite steady.
"I've been wanting to do this since you were standing in your lot at three in the morning with your arms crossed and your wet hair and that look on your face." He pushed the shirt off her shoulders. "That goddamn look."
"What look?"
"The one that said the next man who told you what to do was going to lose teeth." His hands slid down her bare sides to her hips. "Made me want to be the man you didn't need to say it to."
She pulled him back to her mouth because she didn't have an answer for that, or she had too many answers, and none of them were words.
He peeled her out of her tank top and stopped, his hands on her ribs, his eyes on her. She stood in front of him in her bra and her work jeans with glass dust in her hair and a cut on her knuckle, and he looked at her like she was the most dangerous thing he'd ever seen.
"Christ," he said. Quiet. Almost reverent. "Look at you."
She reached behind her back and unclasped the bra herself because she was not going to stand here and be looked at when she could be touched. It fell between them and his eyes went dark and his hands came up and covered her and she arched into the callused heat of his palms.
He lifted her onto the workbench. One smooth motion, his hands under her thighs, and she was sitting on the edge with him standing between her knees. She hooked her boots behind his legs and pulled him closer and felt exactly how much he wanted this pressing hard against her through denim.
He bent and kissed her collarbone, then lower, his mouth tracing down the freckled line of her chest until he reached her breast and took her nipple between his lips.
She sucked in a breath and her hands went into his hair — that dark hair shot through with early silver — and she held him there while he worked her with his mouth, his hands at her waist, her spine arching off the workbench.
He kissed lower. Down her stomach, his mouth hot on each rib, his hands working the button of her jeans open, dragging the zipper down.
She lifted her hips and he pulled the denim down her legs and her boots with it, and then he was kneeling on the concrete floor of her own shop and hooking her thighs over his shoulders.
She tried to say something. His name, maybe. It came out as a sound that wasn't a word when his mouth found her.
He was patient the way he was patient with everything — unhurried, thorough, reading her the way he read ground and weather and trouble.
His tongue moved slow and deliberate against her, finding the places that made her hips buck and the ones that made her go still and breathless, and he worked them both until she was fisting his silvered hair and swearing at the ceiling of her father's shop in language that would have made the old man proud.
"God — right there — don't you dare stop —"
He didn't stop. He held her thighs apart with both hands and took her all the way to the edge and held her there, his mouth relentless, until she broke with a sound that echoed off the concrete walls and her whole body clenched around the pleasure of it, wave after wave, his hands the only thing keeping her on the bench.
She dragged him up by the hair before she could think about it.
Kissed him with her own taste on his mouth and felt him groan against her lips, deep and raw.
Her hands went to his belt and she worked it open, then his jeans, pushing everything down until she could wrap her hand around him, hard and thick and straining.
His forehead dropped to hers. His breath was ragged. "Nora. Jesus."
"Now," she said. "Right now."
He pulled a condom from his wallet — she almost laughed at that, the preparedness of it, the fact that he'd walked into her lot tonight carrying one like a man who knew what the night might bring even if he'd never admit it — and she took it from his hand and rolled it on herself, watching his jaw clench, his abs tighten, his hands grip the bench on either side of her hips.
He pushed into her and they both went still.
The breath left her lungs. He filled her completely, the stretch of it sharp and sweet, and for one suspended second neither of them moved.
They just breathed. His forehead against hers.
Her hands on his shoulders. The dark shop around them smelling of gun smoke and glass dust and the cold mountain air coming through the broken display.
Then he moved.
Slow at first. Deep, deliberate strokes that drew all the way out and pushed all the way in, and she gasped on every one, her nails digging into his shoulders.
He watched her face while he did it, those gray-blue eyes holding hers, and she had never in her life been looked at like that while a man was inside her — like she was being claimed and known and wanted all at once.
"You feel —" He didn't finish. Couldn't. His hips drove forward harder and she wrapped her legs around him and matched his rhythm, rising to meet him, the workbench groaning under them.
She pulled his mouth to hers and they kissed sloppy and desperate while he drove into her, his hand gripping her hip hard enough to leave marks, the other braced on the bench.
She broke the kiss to breathe and he put his mouth on her throat and she felt his teeth and the vibration of his groan against her skin.
"Harder," she said. Not a request.
He gave her harder. His hips snapped forward and the bench shuddered and she cried out and pulled him deeper with her heels.
The pace went rough and urgent, both of them past finesse, past patience, past anything except the place where they were joined and the sound of skin on skin in the dark shop.
She came again with his name in her mouth — his road name, the only name she had for him — and the clench of her around him pulled him over too.
He buried his face in her neck and drove into her one last shuddering time and she felt him come apart against her, the sound he made low and broken and completely unguarded, a man who controlled everything letting go of all of it inside her.
They stayed like that. Tangled together on her workbench, breathing hard, his face in her hair and her arms around his shoulders and the sweat cooling on both of them in the cold air from the broken window.
After a long time, he lifted his head. Looked at her.
"You're trouble," he said.
"I've been trouble my whole life." She pushed his sweat-damp hair off his forehead. The silver caught the pole light coming through the window. "You just didn't know it yet."
He kissed her again. Slower this time. The kiss of a man who'd gotten what he wanted and wasn't in any hurry to stop wanting it.
She was still wrapped around him on the workbench, her cheek against the scar on his collarbone, when a single pair of headlights swept slow across the front glass.
They both went still.
Slayer's hand moved to her hip — not pulling away but pulling her closer, one reflexive motion, his body between her and the window before she could draw a breath. Claiming and protecting in the same gesture.
"Don't move," he said.
The headlights passed. Moved on. The block went dark again.
Nora's heart was hammering, and not just from the lights.
From the way he'd put himself between her and the window without thinking.
From the weight of his hand on her bare hip.
From the fact that she was sitting naked on her own workbench with this man still inside her and she didn't want to be anywhere else.
"Club truck," he said after a moment. His hand was still on her hip. "Watch rotation. They're checking the block."
"So one of your brothers just drove past my shop while I'm sitting on a workbench naked."
"They can't see in."
"That's not the point."
He looked at her. In the dim light his eyes were the color of the sky right before a Front Range storm rolls in, and he was almost smiling, and she realized she had never seen him almost smile before and it was devastating.
"What's the point?" he asked.
She looked at him for a long beat. This man. This scarred, quiet, dangerous man who'd put a body in her parking lot an hour ago and then knelt on her shop floor and made her come so hard she'd forgotten her own name.
"The point is you're still here," she said. "And I'm not asking you to leave."
His hand tightened on her hip. One squeeze. A promise and a claim in the pressure of five fingers on bare skin.
"I'm not going anywhere," he said.