Chapter Fifteen
The breast collar had torn at the worst possible spot—right where the leather crossed the chest and took the full force of a hard stop out of a barrel turn.
Teagan sat on the top rail of the compound corral with the damaged tack across her lap, a leather punch in one hand and a length of waxed thread clamped between her teeth.
Ginger grazed in the corral below her, nosing through a scatter of hay, her tail flicking at flies in the last light of evening.
The compound was quiet. The kind of quiet that came after violence had been handled and the men who handled it were resting.
Striker sat beside her on the rail. Not helping—he didn't know leather work, and she hadn't offered to teach him. Just sitting. His shoulder against hers, his weight settled, watching her hands move the way he watched everything she did. Like he was memorizing it.
She punched a hole through both layers of leather, threaded the waxed cord, and pulled it tight. The stitch drew the torn edges together—not pretty, not invisible, but strong. It would hold through a full-speed run. It would hold through nationals.
"I've been thinking," she said around the thread in her teeth.
"Dangerous."
She elbowed him. He didn't move. She hadn't expected him to.
"I've been thinking about what happens after." She pulled the thread from her teeth and set another stitch. "After the qualifiers. After nationals. After all of this."
Striker was quiet. She felt him listening—that total-attention stillness that had nothing to do with calm and everything to do with a man who understood that some words were worth more than others.
"I want to qualify," she said. "I want to go to Las Vegas and run the best pattern of my life and prove that everything—the trailer, the borrowed barns, the years of scraping by—meant something." She pulled the stitch tight. "And then I want to come home."
"Home."
"Here." She looked at him. "This compound. This corral I built with salvage lumber and quick-set concrete. This place where my horse sleeps behind a wall instead of in a parking lot." She set the leather punch down. "You."
The word landed between them like a stone dropped in still water.
"I've been living out of that trailer for three years," she said.
"Before that, I lived above my mama's bar.
Before that, I lived on a ranch that my father drank out from under us.
I have never in my life had a place that was mine—a place I chose, not a place I ended up.
" Her throat tightened, and she let it. "I want this to be that place.
I want to qualify for nationals and then come back here and park my trailer and know that the road goes both ways. "
Striker's hand found her knee. Warm, steady, his thumb tracing a slow line along the inside of her leg.
"I don't know what that looks like," he said.
"What do you mean?"
"Permanent." The word came out rough, like it scraped something on the way up.
"I've never planned past the next operation.
The Army was mission to mission. The club is job to job.
I'm good at the thing in front of me—the assault, the plan, the fight.
" His fingers tightened on her knee. "But after the fight?
When the fight's done and there's just...
life? I don't have a playbook for that."
"You think I do?" She almost laughed. "I've been chasing qualifiers since I was twenty-two. My whole life is built around the next event, the next pattern, the next fifteen seconds in an arena. I don't know what comes after any more than you do."
"But you want to find out."
"I want to find out with you." She turned on the rail to face him fully. "That's the part that scares me. Not the future. Not the unknown. The fact that I want to walk into it with a man I've known for twelve days who kills people for a living and grins while he does it."
"Eleven days."
"What?"
"Eleven days. The fairground was a Friday. Today's Wednesday."
"You're counting."
"I'm counting." His eyes held hers, and she saw it—the thing he kept behind the grin and the violence and the tactical precision.
The thing she'd glimpsed when he trembled the first time he touched her, and when he held her after the assault, and when he watched her mend a breast collar like it was the most important thing happening in the world.
Need. Not the physical kind—something older, deeper, the need of a man who'd been moving his whole life and had just found a reason to stop.
"I never planned past the next assault until you," he said. "You walked into that fairground with a lead rope in your hand and fire in your eyes, and I thought—" He stopped. Started again. "I thought, that one. Whatever she's chasing, I want to be standing at the finish line when she gets there."
Teagan's vision blurred. She blinked it clear, because she was not a woman who cried on fence rails, and picked up the breast collar.
"Help me down," she said.
He dropped off the rail and held his hands up. She swung her leg over, set her palms on his shoulders, and slid down against him—his hands catching her waist, her body pressed to his for one long second before her boots hit the ground. She didn't step back. Neither did he.
"Take me inside," she said.
His room was dark and warm. She'd spent enough nights here now that it smelled like both of them—leather and horse and the clean soap she'd started keeping in his shower. His bed was unmade. Her pillow—the one she'd stolen and never returned—was on the left side where she slept.
She set the breast collar on his desk and turned to face him.
This was different.
The first time had been a slow fuse catching—tender, trembling, two strangers learning each other. The second had been adrenaline and laughter, bruised bodies and a bed frame cracking the wall. This was neither.
This was a woman who knew exactly what she wanted, standing in front of a man she'd chosen, with no emergency driving them together and no audience they were performing for. Just the two of them and the decision to be here.
She unbuttoned his shirt. Slowly. One button at a time, her fingers moving down his chest while his hands stayed at his sides, letting her set the pace. She pushed the shirt off his shoulders and pressed her palm flat over his heart.
It was hammering.
"You're shaking," she said.
"I was shaking the first time, too."
"I know." She rose on her toes and kissed the corner of his jaw. "This time you know what's coming, and you're still shaking. That's better."
He exhaled—a sound that was half laugh, half surrender—and his hands came up. Found her hips. Pulled her close with a gentleness that surprised them both.
They undressed each other slowly. No urgency.
No desperation. His hands on her skin like he had all the time in the world and intended to use it.
Her hands on his scars and tattoos like she was reading a story she already knew but wanted to hear again.
They'd mapped each other twice before—in hunger, in heat—and this time the mapping was different. This time it was confirmation.
Here. I know this. This is mine.
He lifted her, and she wrapped around him, and they made it to the bed without breaking the kiss. He laid her down like she was something he'd built with his own hands and was terrified of breaking, and she pulled him over her and told him with her body that she wasn't breakable and never had been.
They moved together slowly. The rhythm was unhurried—deep, deliberate, each motion a statement rather than a question. She arched into him, her fingers digging into the muscles of his back, and he pressed his forehead to hers and breathed her name like a prayer he'd only recently learned.
"Patrick." She said it against his mouth. Not a war cry this time. Not a brand. A name. His name, spoken by the woman who'd earned the right to use it, in the voice she used for things that mattered.
His breath caught. His rhythm faltered, then deepened. His hand found hers on the pillow and their fingers laced together—his scarred knuckles against her calloused palm, grip tight, holding on.
The intensity built slowly. Not the explosive crash of adrenaline or the combustion of first contact—something steadier, like a tide coming in, each wave reaching further than the last. She felt it in her chest, in her spine, in the place behind her ribs where she kept the things she was afraid to want.
He was there. In all of it, with all of it, giving her something she'd never had from anyone.
Certainty.
When it broke, it broke them both. She gasped his name and felt his whole body shudder against hers, his face buried in her neck, his hand crushing hers on the pillow.
They held each other through it—through the fall and the landing and the long, slow quiet that came after, when the world narrowed to the sound of breathing and the feeling of skin on skin.
They lay tangled together, her head on his chest, his hand tracing absent patterns on her shoulder. The compound hummed its nighttime song—generators, wind, the occasional stamp of Ginger shifting in the corral.
"Three qualifiers left," Teagan said. "Three runs. That's all I need."
"And then nationals."
"And then nationals." She turned her face into his chest and breathed. "That's the mission, Striker. Qualify. Get to Vegas. Run the best fifteen seconds of my life."
"And come home."
"And come home."
His arm tightened around her. She felt his chest expand under her cheek—a deep breath, held, then released with something that sounded almost like peace.
"Then that's my mission too." His voice was low. Certain. "And I've never lost an operation."
She smiled against his skin and closed her eyes.