Chapter 8
Rainey's asleep in the passenger seat with her head against the window and her camera bag wedged between her knees like a security blanket.
The highway unspools ahead of us, flat and straight and endless in the way that only New Mexico highways can be, and I drive with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on her thigh because I can't stop touching her.
Pathetic. Grant Corbin, ranked third on the Southwest Circuit, afraid of losing physical contact with a woman he's known for about a week like she might evaporate if he lets go.
About a week. That's all it's been. A handful of days since a photographer with good hands and dangerous eyes showed up behind the chutes and refused to leave when I told her to.
A handful of days of running and violence and sex that takes me apart and puts me back together wrong, rebuilt around a person instead of a purpose.
I should be focused on Las Cruces. On the plan Flint helped us put together, the one that involves copies of every photo and record stashed in three separate locations, Flint's FBI contact at the Albuquerque field office standing by with the full evidence package, and a ride on whatever bull Merrick's people drug for me.
The plan is simple. Ride the bull. Survive the wreck they're engineering. Let the whole thing play out on camera, on Rainey's camera specifically, while Flint calls the feds with enough evidence to get Merrick arrested before he can try again.
The plan is more likely to kill me than save me.
I've taken worse odds on bulls.
We stop at a motel outside Socorro because Rainey needs to eat and I need to feel her against me one more time before we drive into whatever Las Cruces is going to be.
The motel is called the Desert Rose, which sounds romantic and looks anything but.
Pink stucco peeling off the walls, a pool that hasn't held water since the Clinton administration, and a clerk who hands us a key without looking up from his phone.
Room nine. Ground floor. Single bed with a mattress that sags in the middle and sheets that smell like industrial bleach.
Rainey sets her camera bag on the dresser and turns to look at me. She's been quiet since Santa Fe, processing, the way she does. Working through the variables, the risks, the probabilities. Turning the situation over in her mind like a problem she can solve if she finds the right angle.
"Tell me we're going to be okay," she says.
I should lie. Tell her it's handled, tell her the plan is solid, tell her Merrick doesn't stand a chance against a stubborn bull rider and a photographer with a grudge. That's what she needs to hear. That's what a better man would say.
"I don't know if we're going to be okay," I say instead. "I know I'm going to do everything I can to make sure you are."
"That's not the same thing."
"No. It's not."
She crosses the room. Stands in front of me, close enough to touch, not touching. Her eyes are amber in the lamplight, and the fear in them is the kind that comes from understanding exactly how bad things are.
"Grant." Her voice drops to something I haven't heard before. Stripped. No armor, no defiance, no sharp edges. Just her name for me and everything it carries. "If something happens in Las Cruces..."
"Don't."
"If something happens, I need you to know—"
"Rainey. Don't say it like a goodbye."
"Then what should I say it like?"
I pull her to me. Wrap my arms around her, chin on the top of her head, her face pressed against my chest. She fits against me like she was designed for the space between my arms, and I hate that I'm noticing this now, cataloging the details of her the way she catalogs the world through her lens.
The freckles on her left shoulder that form something close to Orion's belt.
The scar on her right knee from a fall off a fence when she was twelve, a story she told me in the truck with her boots on the dashboard and her voice soft with memory.
The way she smells like sunscreen and darkroom chemicals and the particular desert dust of the Southwest Circuit.
"Say it like a promise," I tell her. "Say it like I'm coming back."
She looks up at me. "I love you."
The words land in the center of my chest and detonate. Not because they're unexpected, but because they're true, and because I've been holding the same words behind my teeth for days, afraid that saying them out loud would make this real in a way I can't survive losing.
"I love you," I say back. "And that's why you're not going to be anywhere near the arena when I ride in Las Cruces."
Her expression shifts. The softness calcifies into something harder. "We already discussed this."
"I'm undiscussing it."
"Grant—"
"You're going to be at Flint's. With copies of everything. If the plan works, you don't need to be there. If it doesn't, you need to be alive to make sure the evidence reaches the right people."
"You're asking me to let you walk in there alone."
"I'm asking you to survive. That's the only thing I'm asking."
She's quiet for a long time. I can feel her resistance, the fundamental stubbornness that defines her, the refusal to be sidelined or protected or told what to do.
But I can also feel the practical mind working underneath the emotion, calculating the odds, recognizing that I'm right even if she hates it.
"If you die," she says, "I will never forgive you."
"Fair."
"I'm serious, Grant. If you ride into Las Cruces and let them kill you because you were too stubborn to walk away, I will spend the rest of my life being furious at you."
"Also fair."
"Stop agreeing with me."
I kiss her. Not gentle. Thorough. The kind of kiss that says everything the words haven't covered, that presses my entire argument into her mouth and swallows her objections.
She kisses me back with the same desperation, fingers fisting in my shirt, pulling me closer like proximity can protect us from what's coming.
"One more night," she says against my lips. "Give me one more night where we don't talk about Merrick or the plan or Las Cruces. Just us."
"Just us."
She pulls my shirt open. The snaps pop. Her hands find my chest, my shoulders, the ridges of scar tissue that map a decade of getting thrown by animals. She traces each one with her fingers, then her mouth, learning me with the same attention I've been giving her.
I shed the rest of my clothes then I undress her slowly.
Every layer peeled back is another piece of armor removed, another wall that comes down between who she shows the world and who she is in the dark with me.
The boots, the jeans, the cotton shirt with a coffee stain on the sleeve that she never bothered washing out.
Underneath all of it, just Rainey. Skin and freckles and the lean muscle of a woman who carries heavy camera equipment for a living.
"Look at me," I say.
She does. And I see her. All of her. The fear and the courage and the grief she carries for Tyler and the love she's decided to risk on a man who might not come home.
This time is slow. I take her to bed and lower her onto the mattress like she matters more than anything I've ever held.
I start at her wrists, kissing the thin skin where her pulse thrums against my lips, and work inward.
The bend of her elbow. The soft underside of her arm.
The curve of her shoulder where freckles scatter like thrown dice.
She reaches for me and I press her hands back against the pillow. Not pinning. Asking.
"Let me," I say. "Just let me."
She leaves her hands where I put them.
I take my time with her breasts, cupping the weight of them, dragging my thumb across one nipple while my mouth closes over the other. She arches into me, a soft sound leaking from her throat, and I stay there until both peaks are swollen and sensitive and she's squirming under the attention.
Then lower. My mouth tracing the dip of her waist, the ridge of her hip bone, the soft skin of her inner thigh where she flinches when my stubble drags across it. I spread her legs and settle between them, hooking one thigh over my shoulder, and press my mouth against her.
She tastes like salt and heat and the specific sweetness of wanting someone past the point of reason.
I lick her slow, long strokes of my tongue from her entrance to her clit, and feel her thighs tremble on either side of my head.
Her hands leave the pillow and find my hair, gripping, not directing, just holding on.
I circle her clit with the flat of my tongue, then suck gently, and her hips lift off the mattress.
I slide two fingers inside her, curl them forward, and stroke while my mouth works her over with patient, relentless precision.
She's wet enough that the sound of my fingers moving inside her fills the quiet room, and the moan she lets out when I find the right rhythm is low and broken and honest.
"Grant. God. Right there."
I stay right there. Give her exactly what she asked for, steady and unhurried, until her thighs lock around my head and her back bows and she comes against my mouth with her fingers twisted in my hair and my name spilling out of her like a prayer she didn't mean to say out loud.
I work her through it, slowing but not stopping, letting the aftershocks roll through her body while she catches her breath. Then I kiss my way back up, tasting her skin at every stop, the salt of sweat on her stomach, the flutter of her pulse at the base of her throat.
She pulls me up the rest of the way, guides me between her legs. I press against her entrance and pause, forehead against hers, the head of my cock nudging into her slick heat.
"Stay with me," she whispers. "Right here. Don't go to Las Cruces yet. Stay with me."
"I'm here."
I slide into her, and the slow push takes my breath apart.
She's still swollen and sensitive from the orgasm, and every inch of the entry is tight, wet friction that I feel in my spine, in my chest, in the backs of my eyes.
She wraps her arms around my neck and pulls me deeper, and the sound she makes when I bottom out is quiet and raw and meant only for this room.
I move in her slowly. Long, deliberate strokes that let me feel every ripple of her body around mine. No urgency yet. Just the patient rhythm of two people trying to memorize each other with their bodies because words aren't enough and time is running out.
Her legs wrap around my waist. Her hips tilt to meet each stroke, and the angle shifts, and she gasps and clutches my shoulders and I know I've found the place inside her that makes her forget how to breathe.
I stay there. Roll my hips against that spot while my mouth finds hers, kissing her deep and slow while the pressure builds between us like a storm neither of us can outrun.
The pace changes on its own. Neither of us decides it.
One stroke comes harder than the last, and she answers it, and then we're moving faster, her nails cutting into my back, my hand gripping the iron headboard for leverage.
The bed creaks and shifts beneath us, and her breathing goes ragged, and I can feel her tightening around me again, the flutter and clench that means she's close.
"Look at me," she says, echoing my words back, and her hands cradle my face, holding me in place so I can't turn away.
I look at her. She looks at me. And I watch her come apart with her eyes open, her orgasm rippling through her body while I'm inside her, while I'm watching, while there's nowhere for either of us to hide.
Her lips part and her eyes go bright with tears she won't let fall and she says my name once, quiet, like she's writing it down somewhere permanent.
I follow her. The orgasm pulls through me slow and devastating, nothing like the sharp detonation of the other times, more like being taken apart one piece at a time and set down gently.
I empty into her with my face pressed against her neck and her heartbeat against my chest and the taste of her still on my tongue.
Afterwards, she lies against my chest and traces patterns on my skin with her fingertip. I play with her hair, winding auburn strands around my fingers and letting them slide free.
"You've got your copy of everything," I say. "Flint's got his. Vic's confession is on my phone. If something goes wrong, you and Flint take it to Torres at the FBI field office in Albuquerque. Public corruption unit. She's expecting it."
"Stop briefing me like a soldier."
"You are a soldier. You've been one since the night you showed up behind the chutes."
"I showed up because I had a good angle on the bull pens."
"You showed up because you don't know how to walk away from a story. Same reason you're not walking away from me."
She tilts her head up. Looks at me. "You're the best story I've ever told, Grant Corbin. Don't you dare give me a bad ending."
I kiss the top of her head and hold her tighter and don't make promises I might not be able to keep.
Outside, the desert wind scratches sand against the window.
Somewhere on the highway, a truck downshifts, the engine note dropping like a groan.
The world keeps moving. It doesn't care about two people wrapped around each other in room nine of the Desert Rose, trading their bodies for borrowed time.