Chapter 23
Nobody was trying to kill them.
Nora stood in the doorway of their room and felt the reality of that settle into her body like a hot bath.
No watch rotation. No engines gathering down the boulevard.
No armed men across the spur, no watchers at the tortilla factory, no sedan idling at the end of the block.
The compound was quiet the way a home is quiet — the creak of old timber, the murmur of the bar winding down, Bronco's laughter fading as the brothers drifted to their rooms.
Just quiet.
Slayer was sitting on the edge of the bed, pulling off his boots the way he did every night.
She watched him from the doorway — the silver in his hair catching the lamp, the scar from his ear to his collarbone, the bruises going yellow and green, the broad hands working the laces with the unhurried patience he brought to everything.
She crossed the room in three steps and dropped into his lap.
His boots were still half on. His hands came up automatically to catch her hips, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him and started laughing against his mouth, and the laughter was the purest thing she'd felt in weeks — bubbling up from somewhere deep, the kind of laughter that only comes when the thing you were afraid of is gone and your body finally believes it.
"What —" he managed.
"Nothing." She kissed him again, grinning into it. "Everything. Nobody's trying to kill us."
"Nobody's been trying to kill us since last night."
"Yeah, but now I believe it." She put her hands on his face and looked at him, really looked at him, without the filter of fear or adrenaline or the constant hum of danger that had been the background noise of their entire relationship.
Just him. Gray-blue eyes and the scar and the almost-smile and the quiet, stubborn, possessive man underneath all of it, the man who'd built a club out of loss and held ground for a woman who wouldn't move.
"Hi," she said.
"Hi."
"I want you to take my clothes off and not rush."
"I've still got one boot on."
"Then take the boot off first. I'll wait." She climbed out of his lap and sat on the bed beside him, grinning, and he looked at her like a man who'd been given something he wasn't sure he deserved and had decided to keep it anyway.
He took the boot off. Then the other one.
Then he turned to her and put his hand on the side of her neck, his thumb resting on the pulse point, and he kissed her the way he'd kissed her on Lookout Mountain — slow, complete, a man with nowhere to be and nothing to fight and all the time in the world.
She sighed into his mouth and melted against him, and his hands went to the hem of her shirt and lifted it over her head in one easy motion. No urgency. No desperation. Just a man undressing the woman he loved because he could, because the night was theirs and nobody was coming to take it.
He unhooked her bra and slid it off her shoulders, and she shivered — not from cold but from the way his eyes moved over her in the lamplight, the same way they'd moved over her in the dark of the projects room and the firelight of the shop, but different now.
Softer. A man looking at something he no longer had to protect from the world, just enjoy.
"You're staring," she said.
"I'm appreciating."
"Appreciate faster."
"No." He pushed her gently back onto the bed and stretched out beside her and ran his hand down her body, slow, from the curve of her shoulder to the dip of her waist to the swell of her hip.
He followed the path with his mouth — kissing her collarbone, the freckles on her chest, the soft skin below her navel — and she lay there and let herself be touched without urgency for the first time since this had started between them.
Every other time had been driven by something. Adrenaline. Choice. Survival. Hunger. Now there was nothing driving it but the simple fact that she was lying in a bed with a man she loved and the night was long and empty and theirs.
He unbuttoned her jeans and worked them down her hips, and she kicked them off and pulled him up by his shirt, stripping it over his head so she could put her hands on his chest. She traced the scar.
Kissed the bruise on his ribs that was finally healing.
Ran her fingers through the dark hair on his chest and followed it down his stomach to the waist of his jeans.
"These too," she said.
He stripped them. They were naked in the lamplight, and she pulled him down over her and wrapped her arms and legs around him and just held on for a moment. Skin to skin, heartbeat to heartbeat, his weight on her solid and warm and real.
"I love you," she said into his shoulder. "I don't say it enough."
"You say it every time you hand me a wrench or steal my shirt or argue with Diesel about clutch cables." He lifted his head and looked at her. "I hear it."
She kissed him and pulled him closer, and he reached between them and touched her, his fingers gentle and knowing, finding the places he'd learned over five weeks of nights together — the spot that made her breath catch, the rhythm that made her hips roll, the pressure that built heat in her belly slow and sweet and inevitable.
She let it build. No rushing. No demanding harder or faster.
Just the steady, patient pleasure of his hand on her, his mouth on her throat, his body warm and heavy over hers.
The orgasm came like a sunrise — not crashing, not shattering, just rising, filling her with warmth from her center outward until she was arching against him and breathing his name and holding his shoulders and letting the wave carry her.
He kissed her through it. Held her through it. And when she opened her eyes he was looking at her with that expression she'd fallen in love with — the absolute, unguarded certainty of a man who knew what he had.
"Come here," she whispered, and reached for the nightstand, and he let her roll the condom on with hands that were steady and sure and unhurried, because there was nothing to rush anymore.
He slid into her and they both exhaled.
Slow. So slow. He moved inside her with long, deep strokes that she felt in her whole body, and she wrapped her legs around him and matched his rhythm and they moved together like two people who had learned each other completely and were still discovering that the knowing made it better.
She ran her hands down his back and felt the muscles flex under her fingers with each stroke.
He braced on one arm and cupped her face with his free hand and watched her while he moved, and she watched him back, and the intimacy of that — eyes open, nothing hidden, two people seeing each other completely while their bodies spoke a language that didn't need words — was more intense than any adrenaline-fueled collision they'd ever had.
"You feel like home," he said. Quiet. Almost to himself.
She pulled him down and kissed him because there was no answer for that except her mouth on his.
The pace didn't change. Didn't need to. They rocked together, easy and deep, and the pleasure built between them like a conversation — each stroke an exchange, each breath a word, both of them listening and responding.
His hand found hers and their fingers laced on the pillow beside her head, and she held on and felt the second orgasm gather, slow and inevitable as the first.
"Together," she said. "This time together."
He shifted deeper. She gasped and her hand tightened on his and she felt him trembling with the effort of holding back, waiting for her, and the patience of it — the love of it — was what pushed her over.
She came and he came and neither of them made a sound except each other's names, quiet, private, a secret between two people in a room where no one was listening and no one was coming and the night was entirely their own.
They lay in the aftermath, tangled and loose-limbed and grinning.
He was still inside her. She didn't want him to move. She wanted to stay exactly like this — warm, connected, his weight on her and his face in her hair and his hand still holding hers on the pillow.
"We should do this more often," she said.
"We do this constantly."
"I mean the not-being-shot-at-first part. This is much better without the not-being-shot-at-first part."
He laughed into her hair, and she felt it vibrate through her chest, and she decided that the feeling of this man laughing against her body was the single best sensation in the world and she would spend the rest of her life engineering opportunities to experience it.
"All night," he said. "We've got all night. Nothing to defend. Nowhere to be. Just this."
"Just this," she agreed.
She fell asleep with his arm around her and his breathing slow at her back and the lamp still on because neither of them had turned it off, and for the first time since the vans burned, the night held nothing but warmth and the easy silence of two people who were finally, completely free.