Chapter Nine
Teagan cooled Ginger down with three laps of the yard at a walk, stripped the saddle and bridle, and brushed her out in the corral by floodlight.
The mare leaned into the curry comb the way she always did—eyes half-closed, lower lip drooping, the tension of the day dissolving under Teagan's hands.
She buckled the lightweight blanket over Ginger's back, checked the water bucket, checked the hay net, checked the latch on the corral gate twice.
Stalling. She was stalling and she knew it.
She walked across the compound yard smelling like sweat and leather and horse, her boots crunching on gravel that still radiated the day's heat.
The clubhouse was quiet—a few brothers at the bar, music coming from somewhere, the low murmur of conversation that stopped and restarted as she passed.
She didn't look at any of them. She looked at the hallway that led to the private rooms and the door at the end that she'd never been through.
She knocked once. Didn't wait for an answer. Walked in.
Striker was sitting on the edge of his bed with a pistol in his hands.
Not pointed at anything—field-stripped on a rag across his knees, slide separated from the frame, the sharp smell of solvent cutting through the room's stale air. He looked up when she entered, those pale eyes tracking her the way they always did, and his hands went still on the gun.
Teagan crossed the room in three strides, took the slide from his right hand and the frame from his left, reassembled them with the smooth efficiency of someone who'd done it a hundred times, checked the chamber—empty—and set the whole thing on the nightstand with the muzzle pointed at the wall.
"Growing up in a honky-tonk," she said. "Gun safety before table manners."
Something shifted in Striker's expression. Not surprise—he was past being surprised by her, she thought. Something deeper. Something that looked like a man realizing the ground he was standing on had changed beneath his feet.
"Your mama's bar?"
"The Dusty Boot. Abilene." Teagan sat on the bed beside him, close enough to feel the heat of his body but not touching. Not yet. "She kept a twelve-gauge under the register and a thirty-thirty in the office. I could clear a jam before I could drive."
"Sounds like a hell of a woman."
"She was a woman who did what needed doing.
" Teagan looked at her hands—calloused, roughened, a fresh scrape across her knuckles from the corral posts.
"My daddy drank the ranch dry. Every penny he made training cutting horses went into a bottle, and when the money ran out, the horses went next.
He sold them one by one to fund a habit he was too proud to call what it was. "
She felt Striker go still beside her. Listening. Not the way most people listened—with half an ear and an answer already forming. Listening the way he watched a battlefield. Total attention.
"Mama took me and left when I was nine. Moved us into a apartment above the bar and worked doubles six days a week to keep the lights on.
" Teagan's jaw tightened. "I helped. Waited tables at twelve, worked the door at sixteen.
I was roping calves and breaking colts for neighbors' ranches on weekends because every dollar I earned went into a coffee can under my bed. "
"For the horse."
"For the horse." She almost smiled. "The coffee can took four years to fill.
I bought Ginger as a green-broke three-year-old from a ranch outside Sweetwater that was going under.
She was spooky, underweight, and wouldn't load in a trailer.
" Teagan paused. "She was also the fastest thing I'd ever sat on.
I knew it the first time I put her through a barrel pattern. She was born for it."
"Like you."
"Like me." She turned to look at him. "The first time I realized the only thing I could control was how fast I rode, I was thirteen.
Daddy was in the stands at a jackpot rodeo in Cisco, drunk before the first event.
I watched him stumble and knock over someone's gear and I thought—I can't fix him.
I can't fix Mama's tired. I can't fix any of it.
But I could ride faster than anyone in that arena. That was mine."
The room was quiet. Just the hum of the compound at night and the faint sound of Ginger shifting in her corral outside.
"Southie," Striker said. The word came out rough, like it cost him something to say it. "Three-decker on Dorchester Ave. My old man worked the docks when he was sober, which wasn't often. When he drank, he swung. Didn't matter at what."
Teagan watched his hands. They were resting on his knees—big hands, scarred hands, knuckle tattoos faded from years of friction and use. They weren't moving. Weren't fidgeting. Just still, the way a man holds himself still when the thing inside him wants to shake.
"My mother left when I was eleven. Couldn't blame her—she'd taken enough hits for a lifetime. But she left me with him, and that—" A muscle jumped in his jaw. "That I blamed her for. For a long time."
"And your old man?"
"Got worse. Faster hands, meaner drunk, fewer reasons to stop.
I learned to fight because the alternative was learning to bleed.
" He flexed his fingers. "Enlisted at seventeen because the Army was the only fight that came with a paycheck and a purpose.
Ranger school. Three tours. I was good at it—the planning, the execution, the violence that had a reason behind it.
For the first time, the thing inside me that wanted to hit had somewhere to go. "
"And then you hit the wrong person."
His grin was sharp and humorless. "Superior officer gave an order that would've killed four men in my squad. I told him it was wrong. He told me to follow it. I told him again." Striker's eyes went flat. "He told me a third time, and I broke his jaw."
"Good."
The word came out before Teagan could think about it. Striker looked at her—really looked, the way he had in the fairground parking lot, the way he had in the motel room, like she was the only solid thing in a world that kept shifting.
"They gave me an honorable discharge because the officer's order was wrong and everyone knew it.
But the Army doesn't keep men who solve problems with their fists, even when the fists are right.
" He shrugged, but the motion carried weight.
"Drifted west. Found Hatchet. Found the club.
Found a place where the violence isn't a problem—it's the point. "
"And that's enough?"
"It was." His voice dropped. "Until about five days ago."
The air in the room changed.
Teagan felt it like a shift in barometric pressure—the space between them compressing, heating, becoming something that couldn't be ignored.
Striker was looking at her with those pale eyes gone dark, his body angled toward her like gravity had rearranged itself, and the distance between them on the bed shrank from inches to nothing.
She kissed him first.
Because she'd been the one to knock on his door. Because she'd been the one to take the gun from his hands. Because Teagan Duvall didn't wait for permission from anyone, and she wasn't about to start with the most dangerous man she'd ever met.
His mouth was hot. His hands found her waist and pulled her in, not gentle, not rough—urgent, like a man who'd been holding himself back for days and had just run out of reasons.
She grabbed the front of his shirt and twisted, hauling him closer, and the sound he made against her lips—low, raw, somewhere between a groan and a growl—sent heat flooding through her so fast it burned.
"Teagan." Her name in his mouth was a claiming. A brand. He said it like it belonged to him, like he'd been carrying it since the fairground and was only now letting it out.
"Shut up." She pushed him back on the bed and followed him down, her knees bracketing his hips, her hands fisting in his shirt. "You've been watching me for five days. Watching me ride. Watching me build. Watching me from every fence and every doorway in this compound."
"Yeah." His hands slid up her back, rough palms dragging against her skin where her shirt had ridden up. "I have."
"Then stop watching."
His control broke.
He flipped her—one motion, effortless, his body covering hers and his mouth finding the curve of her neck.
Teagan gasped, arching into him, her fingers raking into his hair.
He was everywhere—hands on her skin, mouth on her throat, the weight of him pressing her into the mattress like he was trying to memorize the shape of her through contact alone.
She pulled his shirt over his head because she needed to see him.
Needed her hands on skin instead of cotton.
The tattoos she'd glimpsed at the edges of his clothes covered his chest, his shoulders, his arms—ink and scar tissue woven together like a map of every fight he'd ever survived.
She traced a scar along his ribs, and his breath hitched.
"These hands," he said, catching her wrist and pressing his lips to her palm. His voice was wrecked—shaking, barely held together. "You build corrals and swing lead ropes and hold a horse steady through gunfire with these hands."
"And right now they're on you." She freed her wrist and pulled him back down. "Patrick."
His whole body went still.
She felt it—every muscle locking, his breath stopping, his forehead dropping to hers. The name hit him like a physical blow. The real name. The one that belonged to the kid from Southie, the soldier, the man under the road name and the patch and the grin that promised violence.
"Say it again."
"Patrick."
He kissed her like she'd unlocked something inside him that had been sealed shut for years. Desperate, consuming, his hands shaking against her skin—the most dangerous man she'd ever met trembling because she'd used his name. She wrapped herself around him and held on.
They were loud. The walls were thin, the bed frame was old, and neither of them cared.
Teagan was not a quiet woman—not when she was angry, not when she was riding, not when a man's hands were pulling sounds out of her she didn't know she could make.
And Striker—Patrick—was not a gentle man, but his roughness was reverent, every touch a question and an answer at the same time, every kiss pressed against her skin like he was writing something there he wanted her to keep.
She said his name again. And again. Each time it cracked something open in him, and each time what came through was something fiercer and more tender than the last.
When they finally lay still, tangled together in sheets that had been half-dragged off the bed, Teagan pressed her face into his chest and breathed him in.
Sweat and leather and gunpowder and the warmth that was just him.
His arm was heavy across her back, his hand spread flat between her shoulder blades like he was holding her to the earth.
"That was—" she started.
"Yeah." His voice was raw. Destroyed. "It was."
She lifted her head and looked at him. The grin was gone. The sharp edges were gone. What was left was a man with tired eyes and rough hands who was looking at her like she'd just rearranged every plan he'd ever made.
"I should go back to my trailer," she said. "Check on Ginger."
"Ginger's fine."
"I should—"
"Stay."
One word. Not a command—a request, and the fact that it was a request from a man who didn't make them told her everything his hands had already said.
"Fine." She rolled over, taking the pillow with her—his pillow, the one that smelled like him—and tucked it under her head without asking. "But I'm stealing this."
"You're stealing my pillow."
"I'm stealing your pillow."
His arm hooked around her waist and dragged her back against his chest. She felt his laugh—silent, shaking his ribs against her spine—and the last of the tension she'd been carrying for weeks drained out of her like water through a cracked dam.
She fell asleep in his bed, wearing his scent, breathing his air, the sound of the compound settling around them like a heartbeat she was learning to trust.