Chapter 17
They got back to the compound at four in the morning, and Nora didn't want to sleep. She didn't want to debrief. She didn't want to patch anyone up or sort tools or stand at a window watching the block.
She wanted him.
Not because of the fight. Not because of the adrenaline or the fear or the savage relief of one more night survived.
She'd burned through all of that on the ride home, her face pressed against his leather-clad back, her arms around his waist, the cold highway air scouring the last of the warehouse from her lungs.
She wanted him because she wanted him. Simple as a closed fist. Clear as glass.
The brothers scattered to their bunks. Slayer locked the gate. He came up the stairs and found her sitting on their bed in the dark, boots off, waiting.
"You okay?" he asked from the doorway.
"Close the door."
He closed it. She heard the lock click.
"Nora —"
"I don't want to talk about Delacroix. I don't want to talk about Vasko. I don't want to talk about the war or the block or the plan." She stood and crossed the room to him in the dark. Put her hands on his chest. Felt his heart slamming under the leather. "I want you. That's the whole sentence."
Something shifted in the air between them. She felt it happen the way she always felt it — the moment the world outside the door stopped mattering and the only thing left was the heat between them and the six inches of air they both wanted to close.
He closed it.
His mouth hit hers and the kiss was immediate and deep, no preamble, no slow build. His hands went to her hips and hauled her against him and she bit his lower lip and felt him growl against her teeth, a sound that vibrated through her whole body and pooled hot between her thighs.
"Off," she said, pulling at his cut. "All of it. Everything off. Now."
The cut hit the floor. His shirt. His boots, kicked sideways. She stripped her own clothes while he stripped his, and they met in the middle of the dark room, skin to skin, and the shock of full contact after a night of leather and cold and violence was electric enough to make her gasp.
He walked her backward to the bed. She sat on the edge and he knelt and put his mouth on her stomach and she leaned back on her hands and let him work his way down.
But he didn't go where she expected. He kissed her hip.
Her inner thigh. The crease where her leg met her body.
Then he came back up, his mouth tracing her ribs, her breast, the hollow of her throat, and his hands were everywhere — stroking, gripping, teasing — but never quite landing where she needed them most.
"You're doing this on purpose," she said, breathless.
"Absolutely."
"I will kill you."
"Not yet." He pressed her back onto the mattress and caught both her wrists in one hand and pinned them above her head. She could have broken the hold. He knew it. She knew it. The fact that she didn't was its own kind of surrender, and the heat of it ran through her like current.
He held her there and took his time. His free hand traced down her body, circling her nipple until it peaked and ached, then lower, his fingertips drawing a line down her stomach that made her muscles jump.
He reached the inside of her thigh and stroked the sensitive skin there, never quite touching the place where she was wet and desperate and losing her mind.
"Slayer." Her voice was wrecked. "Please. I swear to God —"
"Please what?" His mouth was at her ear, his breath hot against the side of her neck. "Tell me what you want."
"You know what I want."
"I want to hear you say it."
"Touch me." The words came out stripped of every defense she owned. "Put your hands on me. Your mouth. Everything. I want everything."
He gave her everything.
His hand slid between her thighs and two fingers pushed into her and his thumb found the spot that made her back arch off the mattress, and he worked her with the relentless patience he brought to everything — slow, deep strokes of his fingers while his thumb circled and pressed, his mouth on her breast, her wrists still pinned under his hand.
She came hard, her body bowing off the bed, a sound tearing out of her that was his name and a curse and something wordless all at once. He held her through it, his hand still moving, drawing every last tremor out of her until she was gasping and boneless and pulling at his grip.
He let go of her wrists. She grabbed his shoulders and pulled him up and kissed him, tasting herself on his fingers when he touched her face, and the intimacy of that — the rawness of it, the total absence of pretense — made her want him inside her with a desperation that bordered on pain.
"Now," she said. "I need you inside me right now."
He reached for the nightstand. She heard the foil tear. He rolled the condom on and she started to turn onto her back but he caught her hip.
"Turn over."
Her breath caught. She turned, rising onto her hands and knees on the mattress, and she felt him behind her — the heat of his thighs against the backs of hers, one hand at her hip, the other gathering her loose hair and wrapping it around his fist.
He pushed into her in one long stroke and she dropped to her elbows and moaned into the pillow, the angle impossibly deep from this position, every nerve lit up and singing.
"Oh God —"
He held still for one breath. Two. Then he moved, pulling out slow and driving back in hard, and her hands fisted in the sheets and her back arched and she pushed back to meet him because she was not a woman who was taken — she was a woman who met her man stroke for stroke, and the collision of them was devastating.
His hand tightened in her hair. Not pulling, not hurting — holding. An anchor. His other hand gripped her hip and they found a rhythm that was rough and urgent, the bed protesting under them, the sound of skin on skin filling the dark room.
"Harder," she said, and he gave her harder, his hips snapping forward, and she braced against the headboard and took everything he had and gave it back, pushing into each thrust until neither of them knew who was driving and who was being driven and it didn't matter because they were in this together the way they were in everything together — equally, completely, holding nothing back.
He leaned over her back and pressed his mouth to the place between her shoulder blades and his hand slid around her hip and found her again, his fingers working the swollen flesh while he drove into her, and the combined assault was more than her body could hold.
"I'm coming — oh God, I'm —"
She shattered. The orgasm hit her like a wall, her whole body clenching, her face buried in the pillow, and she felt him follow her two strokes later — his grip tightening in her hair, his hips slamming forward one last time, the groan he made vibrating against her spine as he came.
They collapsed.
Forward onto the mattress, his weight on her for one breathless second before he rolled sideways, and they lay in a sweated heap in the wrecked sheets, both of them breathing like they'd run a mile, and Nora started laughing.
Not because it was funny. Because it was good. Because she was lying in a destroyed bed with a dangerous man who'd just made her scream into a pillow and there was a war outside and she didn't care and the laughter was the purest thing she'd felt in weeks.
He turned his head and looked at her. Sweaty. Wrecked. Grinning the way he almost never grinned — wide and open, the scar on his cheek pulling sideways, the gray-blue eyes lit with something she'd never seen in them before. Joy.
"What's funny?" he asked.
"Nothing. Everything." She rolled toward him and pressed her face into his shoulder. "I just dropped a man's lieutenant and then came home and had the best sex of my life. That's funny."
"Best sex of your life?"
"Don't let it go to your head."
"Too late."
She hit him with a pillow. He caught it and tossed it off the bed and pulled her against him, and they lay tangled together in the dark, wrung out and grinning, her head on his chest and his hand in her hair — not fisted now, just resting there, the weight of it warm and easy.
No pretense. No keeping score. Just two people who'd stopped holding anything back and found that the nothing left between them was the best thing either of them had ever had.