Chapter 14
TOMMY
The kiss in the donut shop had been a question.
This was the answer.
I had her by the jaw, soft, the way you held something you'd finally been allowed to put your hands on, and she made a sound against my mouth that I felt down through the floor. Not a moan. Smaller than a moan. The sound a woman made when a held breath finally let go.
I broke the kiss and pulled back just far enough to see her face.
Her eyes opened slow.
"Hi," I said.
"Hi."
"You taste like coffee."
"I just got off a shift."
"It's a compliment."
"You taste like bourbon."
"I just got off something else."
She laughed. Quiet, half against my collarbone, the laugh of a woman who had not been expecting to laugh in this exact second and was startled into it.
It was the laugh I'd gotten in the donut shop and the one I'd gotten on the sidewalk and I was going to do whatever I had to do for the rest of my natural life to keep getting it.
I'd known a lot of women.
I had not known many of them.
Rebecca Lynn was a third thing.
I'd been playing her guitar in her living room with her roommates pretending they weren't watching, and I'd looked up when she walked in and the entire apartment had reorganized itself around the fact that she'd come home.
Devon had stopped lying about the television.
Tasha had stopped pretending the chai was the most interesting thing in the room.
Geoff had closed his book without finishing his sentence.
And Rebecca had stood in the doorway in her work coat and her tip money and read the room with one slow look and walked toward me, anyway.
She'd walked toward me when most women in her position would have walked toward the kitchen to give themselves a beat.
She hadn't needed the beat. She'd taken the guitar back with her hand all the way around mine this time, and somewhere between hi and now we'd burned through everything I'd thought I knew about how this kind of thing went.
I should have been somewhere else.
I knew that all the way down.
Out there in the city, Dominic Craine was sitting on whatever Dominic Craine was sitting on.
Lucas was on his way to Paris with a movie star in his lap.
Wyatt and Grant were off the board. There was a war coming for my family the size of which I hadn't begun to draw the edges of, and a deputy director of the FBI had eaten breakfast at my expense this morning, and somewhere in Texas my mother was forgetting another word, and the smart play—the move a serious man would have made—was to be back at The Palmetto Rose with my pistol on the nightstand and a plan in my head.
I was not at The Palmetto Rose.
I was in an apartment with aggressively cheerful yellow curtains and a girl with honest eyes and a hand on my chest, and my pulse was in a place pulses didn't go in operators on the clock.
And here was the thing.
I'd learned in this line of work, the hard way, more than once, that you never knew when you'd clock out.
You did not get to schedule it. The reaper didn't take appointments.
He came on regular days in regular kitchens and on side streets in cities you'd never been to, and the men who'd planned to live forever died next to the men who'd planned to live a week, and the only thing the dead had in common was they'd all run out of later.
I had a now.
I was going to use it.
I tipped her chin up with my thumb.
"You're hard to read," I said.
"Am I?"
"Mm."
"That's interesting." Her hand had moved up to rest against the side of my neck. Her thumb was tracing a slow circle there that was not helping me. "Most people think I'm easy to read."
"Most people aren't paying attention."
"And you are?"
"Trying."
She tipped her head a quarter inch, studying me, the way she'd studied me on the sidewalk before she'd kissed my jaw. Whatever she was working out, she didn't tell me. She was getting better at not telling me. I was finding it interesting.
"What are you trying to read?" she asked.
"What you want."
"From you?"
"From this."
She didn't answer right away.
She took her hand off my neck, slow, and slid it down to the front of my shirt, flat, palm warm through the fabric. Her eyes didn't leave my face.
"I want you to take me to bed," she said.
The room got quiet.
The kind of quiet where you could hear the building settle, and the radiator ticking somewhere down the hall, and the distant low hum of King Street through the closed window, and your own pulse in your own ears like a thing that belonged to somebody else.
I opened my mouth.
I had a line. I had a line ready, the way I always had a line ready, because Tommy Dane responded to incoming intensity with deflection the way other men responded with their fists, and I was about to deliver something useful and dry and just south of devastating to break the moment open and let us both breathe.
"Sweetheart, you don't have to—"
She caught the back of my neck.
She pulled me down.
She kissed me open-mouthed, slow and warm and without any apology at all, and when she pulled back enough to speak, her mouth was a half inch from mine.
"I want you inside me," she said.
She breathed it.
It wasn't loud. It was a confession. The kind a woman made when she'd had to run the math three different ways to get there and had decided she was going to be one of the people who said the thing out loud instead of one of the people who kept it under.
The line I'd been working on died in my throat.
Whatever I'd been about to be funny about, the funny went out of it.
She watched my face change. I watched hers stay where it was.
Her fingers curled into my shirt like she needed something to hold on to.
I rested my forehead against hers and breathed her air for a second.
"You sure?" I asked.
She nodded. Then, said it anyway, quiet but level. "I want you inside me, Tommy. I've been thinking about it since the donut shop."
The honesty in her voice landed somewhere low. Not performance. Just truth. It stirred something fierce in my gut—knowing she wanted me that much, that she'd put it into a sentence and handed it to me like a gift she'd already paid for.
I kissed her again, harder this time, and lifted her.
She wrapped her legs around my waist without hesitation. I carried her down the short hallway and shoulder-pushed the door open. The room was small, lived-in, hers. A cracked-spine paperback on the nightstand. A guitar strap on the back of a chair. Dolly watching from the wall.
I set her on the edge of the bed.
I closed the door behind me with my heel.
Stepped back just long enough to pull my shirt off.
Her eyes tracked over my chest, my shoulders, the scars.
She reached out, fingertips brushing my skin like she was making a record of me.
I let her. There were scars I didn't tell stories about, and tonight, I wasn't going to start.
Tonight, she got to have them without explanations. My fingers wove into her hair.
I knelt between her knees. Unbuttoned her work pants and slid them down with her panties in one slow motion. She lifted her hips to help, breath already coming uneven. When she was bare, I stayed there a beat with my hands on her thighs and just looked.
She started to close her knees, self-conscious.
"Don't," I murmured, easing them apart again, gentle but not negotiable. "You're beautiful. Let me see you."
She let out a breath and relaxed under my hands.
I leaned in and kissed the inside of her thigh. Then higher. Slow, deliberate, the way I did most of the things I did well. When my mouth finally found her, she gasped, one hand flying to my hair.
I took my time.
Licked, tasted, learned exactly how she liked to be touched, how to be kissed. Slowly, I moved, and quickly, she came. One finger, then two, curling inside her while my tongue worked her in steady strokes.
She came the first time with a surprised cry, thighs trembling around my shoulders.
I gentled her through it. Kept going. Built her up again until she was rocking against my mouth, whispering my name.
"Tommy. Please. I need you inside me."
The way she said it—urgent, half-breath, no shame in the want—sent a hot spike through me.
I stood. Got rid of the rest of my clothes. Climbed over her on the bed. My cock nudged her entrance, slick and ready, and I braced on my forearms and looked down at her.
"Look at me."
She met my gaze. Lips parted.
I pushed in slow. Inch by inch. Watching her face the whole time. She was tight and hot and perfect, and her breath hitched as I stretched her, her nails digging into my shoulders. When I bottomed out, we both went still, foreheads pressed together, just feeling it.
"Fuck," I breathed. "You feel good."
She rolled her hips, testing, pulling me deeper.
"Move. Please."
I started slow. Long, deep strokes that let us both feel every inch.
The bed creaked quietly beneath us. Her legs wrapped higher around my waist, heels pressing into my back like she couldn't get me close enough.
I kept the rhythm steady, grinding against her on every thrust, watching the way her eyes fluttered and her mouth fell open.
She got bolder. Met me thrust for thrust. Whispered my name between gasps.
When her rhythm started to falter, I shifted us.
Rolled onto my back and pulled her up so she was on top.
Her hands braced on my chest as she sank down onto me again, taking me to the hilt.
I groaned at the sight of her—long, dark hair fallen forward around her face, breasts moving with every roll of her hips, the private, intent look of a woman who'd decided to get what she came for.
"That's it," I murmured, hands on her waist, guiding her. "Take me."
She rode me harder, chasing it, and I thrust up to meet her, one hand sliding between us to circle her clit.
The other grabbed her ass. She came the second time with a broken moan, clenching tight around me.
The feel of her pulsing dragged me over right after her.
I held her down on me as I spilled deep inside her, groaning her name against her neck.
We stayed like that a long minute. Breathing hard. Skin slick. I stroked her back. Her hair. Pressed slow kisses along her shoulder and jaw.
Eventually, I eased us down onto our sides, still connected, still inside her, and pulled the blanket up over us.
She tucked her face into my chest. One leg slung over mine. Her voice came small and a little awed.
"I didn't know it could feel like that."
I kissed the top of her head. Tightened my arm around her.
"Neither did I."
For once, it wasn't a line.
The city kept moving outside the yellow curtains, and somewhere out there a deputy director of the FBI was sitting on his hands waiting for the sun to come up, and somewhere else my brothers were off the board, and somewhere further my mother was forgetting another word.
In this small room with this small lamp on, all of that could wait.
For tonight, this was enough.
A minute later, we started again.