Three days and I could still feel her mouth, still feel the heat of her body against mine, the bar between us, the way she'd kissed my palm and my whole world had tilted. The small sound she'd made when I'd kissed her back, raw, honest, a sound that lived in my head now and replayed every time I closed my eyes.
I couldn't shake it. Couldn't sweat it out in the workshop, couldn't bury it under miles of highway. I was restless. Shorter than usual, snapping at Duke when he didn't deserve it, spending hours in the shop grinding away at jobs that didn’t really need doing because my hands needed to be busy or they'd remember what it felt like to hold her face. I'd wake up at three in the morning with the taste of her still on my lips and lie there in the dark, hard and furious with myself. I’d replay the way she'd arched into me, the way she'd pulled me closer by my shirt, the way her body had pressed against mine with nothing between us but fabric and fifteen years of wasted time.
I knew I should stay away from her. She was Lena's best friend. She was bright and warm and good and the world I lived in ate things like that alive. I was the club's enforcer. My hands had done things that a woman like Bree shouldn't beanywhere near. She deserved someone who slept through the night and didn’t have nightmares about war zones, someone whose knuckles weren't scarred, and someone who didn't carry the darkness I had inside me.
I wentto the bar every night anyway. Sat in my booth, watched her work, and told myself I was just keeping an eye on the place. She'd look up and catch me watching and something would pass between us across the room, electric, unbearable, and then she'd look away and pour someone a drink and I'd sit there wanting her so badly my chest ached with it. The way she moved behind the bar, the way she laughed, the way her jeans sat on her hips and her shirt pulled across her breasts when she reached for the top shelf. I noticed all of it. I couldn't stop noticing.
She never mentioned the kiss again and neither did I. We talked in fragments, short sentences, careful words, two people standing on opposite sides of a line neither of us knew how to cross. But the silence between the words was deafening. Every accidental brush of fingers when she handed me a drink. Every time she leaned across the bar and I could see down the front of her shirt and my brain went blank. Every night I waited on the porch while she locked up and watched her walk to her car and didn't say what I wanted to say, which wascome upstairs with me and let me do every single thing I've been thinking about since we kissed.
I was in love with her. I was done pretending. I'd been in love with her for years, since before I'd known what to call it. The kiss hadn't started anything. It had just ripped the cover off something that had been there all along, growing in the dark.
Church gave me something else to think about, at least temporarily.
"Something's off," Rook said. Elbows on the table, voice flat. "The run to Billings last week. Clean route, clean schedule. The Jackals were waiting. Not in force, just a couple of riders at the fuel stop on Route 87. They knew where we'd be, and they were sending a message. Letting us know they were one step ahead.”
The table went quiet.
"Once is coincidence," Rook said. "That supply route change two weeks ago, they shouldn’t have known about that. Now this. Someone is feeding the Jackals information. Could be a phone tap, a tail, someone on the periphery. But the information is specific. Whoever's passing it has access to schedules, routes, timing." He looked at Angel. "We need to find the source before it does any real damage."
Angel nodded. “I agree. Hawk. This is yours."
I started watching. Paying attention to who knew what, who talked to whom, who had access. I watched everyone, like they were all suspects.
She cameto the compound on a Tuesday afternoon.
She’d come to get some extra stock. Cases of bourbon that hadn't made it to the bar yet, sitting in the storage room behind the lodge. I was in the corridor when I heard her coming through.
I should have let someone else help her. Should have stayed in the workshop, kept my hands busy, kept the distance I'd been failing to keep for three weeks.
I found her in the storage room. The door was propped open, late afternoon light falling through the high window. She wascrouched by a stack of cases, checking labels, her hair falling forward, her t-shirt riding up to show a strip of bare skin at the small of her back. The sight of that skin, just a sliver of it, warm and tan against the white of her shirt, hit me somewhere visceral. My mouth went dry.
She looked up when she heard me. And there it was. The same charge, the same heat, amplified by the fact that she wasn't behind a bar this time. She was in my space. The compound, the lodge, the corridors I walked every day. She was inside my world and the intimacy of that was doing something to me I couldn't control.
She stood. Slowly. Her eyes moved over my face and my arms. She swallowed. The flush climbed her neck, spreading across her chest, disappearing under the neckline of her shirt. The room was small, cramped with boxes and shelves, and the air between us felt thick enough to choke on.
"I can manage," she said. Her voice was steady but her eyes weren't. They were moving over my face with the same hunger written on mine, the same barely-contained need that had been building since the night she'd kissed my palm and I'd come apart.
"I know you can."
I didn't leave. I walked into the room. When I stopped in front of her there was barely a foot between us. I could see the rise and fall of her breathing, the flush creeping up her neck, the way her fingers curled against the edge of the case she was holding.
"Hawk." My name, quiet, careful, the voice of a woman standing on the edge of something she knew she couldn't come back from.
"Tell me to walk away," I said. "Tell me to walk away and I will."
She looked at me. Those bright, warm eyes that I'd been watching for fifteen years, the ones that had always seen me, the ones that had looked at me across Lena's living room when she was nineteen and stripped every wall I had down to the foundation. She didn't look away. She didn't tell me to walk away.
"I don’t want you to," she whispered. "I've tried. For fifteen years I've tried and I don’t want you to walk away."
I kissed her.
No hesitation this time. No testing, no careful approach, no war in my head. I put my hands on her face and I kissed her and every year of wanting her went into my mouth on hers, fierce, desperate, total. She grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me in and the sound she made against my lips undid the last shred of restraint I had left.
I lifted her. Her legs wrapped around my waist, her arms around my neck, and I carried her out of the storage room and down the corridor and up the stairs to my room because I was not doing this on a concrete floor surrounded by cases of bourbon. She was light in my arms, her body pressed against mine, her mouth on my neck, my jaw, the corner of my mouth, kissing me like she'd been starving for it, and by the time I kicked the door shut behind us I was so hard it hurt.
I put her on the bed and followed her down, my mouth crashing into hers, and there wasn't any patience left. I kissed her deep, filthy, swallowing every broken sound she made while my hands shoved her shirt up and off. Her bra followed. I pulled back just far enough to yank my own shirt over my head and her eyes dragged down my chest, over the scars, the ink, and the way she looked at me made my blood run so hot I could feel it in my teeth.
I stripped her the rest of the way. Impatient, rough, her jeans and underwear down her legs in one motion. She was bareunderneath me, flushed, breathing hard, and I didn't give her time to think about it. I dropped between her thighs and buried my mouth against her.
