Chapter 25
The party wound down after one.
Slayer stood in the great room and watched the compound empty in stages.
Diesel was asleep on the couch with his boots still on, which was becoming a tradition.
Trench was wiping down the bar because the kid couldn't leave a room without cleaning something.
Bronco was the last one standing, and he took one look at Slayer's face and grinned and said, "Goodnight, Pres," and disappeared up the stairs without being asked.
Nora was at the bar, finishing the last of the wine one of the old ladies had left.
She had the new patch in her hands, turning it over, running her thumb across the stitching.
PROPERTY OF SLAYER. Block letters on leather.
She'd taken it off to look at it properly, and the way she held it — careful, deliberate, like it weighed more than leather and thread — did something to the back of his throat.
He crossed the room. She looked up.
"Take me to bed," she said.
He took her hand and they went upstairs, and the compound went dark behind them.
Their room. The lamp on the dresser. The quilt her grandmother had made folded at the foot of the bed.
His cut on the chair. Her father's photo on the nightstand beside the box of condoms that had been there since the second week.
A room that belonged to two people who had built something in the middle of a war and were now standing in it, finished, with the leather still warm from the ceremony and the night entirely their own.
She set the patch on the dresser beside the lamp. He stood behind her and watched her do it, and then he put his hands on her shoulders and turned her around.
"I want to do this right," he said.
"You always do it right."
"I mean slow. I mean like it's the first time. Because it is — the first time you're mine with leather to prove it and everyone who matters knowing."
"I was yours before the leather."
"I know. But the leather matters." He traced the line of her collarbone with his finger. "Let me show you how much."
He undressed her the way a man unwraps something sacred.
The black top first, lifted over her head and set aside.
Then the bra, unhooked with steady hands that had stopped shaking hours ago.
The jeans, unbuttoned and eased down her hips, his knuckles brushing the warm skin of her thighs as the denim slid.
She stepped out of everything and stood before him in the lamplight, copper hair loose, freckles dark against her skin, the silver scars on her forearms catching the glow.
His woman. Claimed. Here.
He picked up the patch from the dresser.
She watched him. He pressed it to the bare skin between her shoulder blades — the place where it would ride on her back when she wore it, his name against her spine — and held it there. The leather was cool against her skin and his hand was warm behind it, and she felt both.
"Mine," he said. Quiet. Not possessive the way it had been at the beginning — not territorial, not fierce. Just true. The way the ground is the ground and the sky is the sky. A fact of the world.
"Yours," she said.
He set the patch down and kissed the place where it had been. Pressed his mouth to the warm skin between her shoulder blades and felt her shiver. He kissed down her spine, one vertebra at a time, his hands on her hips, his mouth tracing the path the patch would take.
She turned in his hands.
"Your turn," she said, and stripped his shirt over his head and ran her hands down his chest, over the scar, across the fading bruises.
She unbuckled his belt and pushed his jeans off and he kicked them away, and they were skin to skin in the lamplight, chest to chest, her palms flat against his heart.
"I want to feel all of you," she said. "Every scar. Every mark this war put on you. I want to know where it hurt so I can put my mouth there and make it mine."
He let her. She kissed the scar from his ear to his collarbone, the long line she'd traced with her fingers a hundred times.
She kissed the ribs that Bishop had cracked.
The forearm that had taken the pipe and the crowbar and the bat.
The throat where the chokehold had bruised him dark as ink.
Each mark was a place where the war had touched him, and she claimed it with her mouth the way he'd claimed her back with the patch.
By the time she reached the scar on his hip — the old one, from the bull horn, the one that had been there before any of this — they were both breathing hard and the gentle reverence had caught fire.
She looked up at him from her knees and he pulled her up by the hair, that copper hair, and kissed her deep and lifted her and laid her on the bed.
He stretched out over her. She opened for him, her thighs parting, her arms reaching, pulling him down into the space between her legs.
He braced on his forearms and looked at her — her face in the lamplight, the freckles, the green eyes looking back at him with the total unguarded trust of a woman who had nothing left to defend.
"No condom," she said.
He went still.
"I'm on the pill. I have been since the second week. I just —" She put her hand on his face. "I want to feel you. All of you. Nothing between us."
He searched her eyes. Found certainty.
He pushed into her bare, and the sound she made was different from every sound she'd made before — deeper, rawer, the sound of a woman feeling something for the first time that she'd been waiting for without knowing she was waiting.
He held still inside her. Forehead to forehead. Breathing.
"God," she whispered. "Wade."
He moved.
Slow. Deep. The unhurried rhythm of a man who had all the time in the world and intended to use every second of it.
Her legs wrapped around him and her hands found the scar on his collarbone and held on, her fingers tracing the raised line while he moved inside her, and the combination of her hands on his oldest mark and his body in her most intimate place was an intimacy so complete it felt like prayer.
They rocked together. No urgency. No desperation. No war outside the window and no clock running and no reason to hurry except the pleasure building between them like a tide — slow, warm, rising.
She kissed him and he tasted wine and copper hair fell across his face and her body tightened around him in a rhythm that matched his, and the pleasure climbed and climbed and neither of them rushed it.
"I love you," she said against his mouth. "I love this. I love us. I love that nobody's trying to kill us and I'm lying in our bed with your patch on my dresser and your —"
He kissed her to stop the list, and she laughed against his mouth, and the laughter shifted into a moan as he drove deeper and she arched into him and the rising tide broke.
She came in slow, rolling waves, her body clenching around him bare, and the feel of her without anything between them pulled him over with her.
He pressed his face into her throat and let go, and the release was long and full and complete — not an explosion but a settling, a man arriving at the place he'd been traveling toward since the night he'd walked into a burned-out lot and found a woman who wouldn't move.
They lay in the aftermath.
Tangled, breathing, the lamplight warm on both of them. He was still inside her and neither of them moved to change that. Her fingers drew lazy patterns on his chest. His hand rested heavy on her hip, the possessive weight that had become as natural as gravity.
"So," she said.
"So."
"You mentioned a question."
He lifted his head and looked at her. She was smiling. Not the grin — the other thing, the soft one, the one she only showed him in the dark when nobody else could see.
"I said I'd ask properly."
"This feels pretty proper to me."
He rolled to his side and pulled her against him, chest to back, his arm around her waist, his mouth at her ear.
"Marry me," he said.
Two words. No preamble. No speech. He'd used all his words at the ceremony. These were the only ones left, and they were enough.
"Yes," she said. Immediate. No pause. The fastest she'd ever agreed to anything he'd asked.
"That was fast."
"I told you. Not a patient woman." She laced her fingers through his and held his hand against her stomach. "Yes. Tomorrow, next week, whenever you want. Yes."
He pressed his mouth to the back of her neck and breathed her in — copper hair and warm skin and the woman who'd walked into his compound with a plate number and an attitude and burned her way through every wall he'd ever built.
Claimed. Quiet. Home.
The lamp stayed on. Neither of them turned it off. And the night held nothing but the two of them, and the patch on the dresser, and the answer she'd given him, and the life they were going to build on the ground they'd held.