The turn throws me against the passenger door. Gravel sprays under the tires, and the truck bounces through a washout that lifts me off the seat. The road narrows to a single lane, fenceposts whipping past the windows close enough to touch, and Colt threads the gap without slowing down.
The headlights behind us overshoot the turn. I watch them streak past on the county road, brake lights flaring red, and then they reverse and swing onto the gravel behind us.
"They're still there," I say.
Colt doesn't answer. He kills the headlights again, and the world drops to starlight and the pale ribbon of gravel in front of us. He's navigating by instinct now, reading the road by the way it feels under the tires, and I press my back into the seat and trust him because the alternative is panic, and panic won't help either of us.
A T-intersection appears out of the darkness. He cranks right, accelerates for half a mile, then kills the engine entirely and pulls off behind a stand of juniper thick enough to swallow the truck.
We sit in the dark. The engine ticks as it cools. My pulse is so loud in my ears I'm sure it's audible outside the cab.
Headlights appear on the road we just left. They sweep past the intersection without slowing, and the sound of the engine fades into the distance until there's nothing left but crickets and my own ragged breathing.
Colt waits a full two minutes before he starts the truck again. When he pulls back onto the road, he keeps the headlights off for another mile before finally clicking them on and letting out a breath that sounds like it's been locked in his lungs since the office window.
His right hand leaves the steering wheel and finds mine in the dark space between the seats. His fingers lace through mine and hold on, and the grip is firm and steady and warm.
The silence after the chase is enormous. My body is vibrating with leftover adrenaline, a full-system flood that hasn't found its exit.
My skin feels electric. Every nerve ending is awake and screaming for something to do with the energy that the flight response dumped into my bloodstream.
Colt drives without speaking. The hand holding mine doesn't let go. His thumb traces a slow line across my knuckles, a gesture so quiet and deliberate that it stands out against everything else he's done since we met.
The dominance, the intensity, the raw possessive energy he brings to every interaction, all of that is absent from the gentle arc his thumb draws across my skin.
This is different. This is tender, and the tenderness is more disarming than anything else.
He pulls off the road at a property marked by a metal gate and a cattle guard. It's a friend's place, he says, a barrel racer he came up with on the amateur circuit who's out of state for the summer.
The house is dark and the barn is locked, but there's a bunkhouse in the back with a door that opens when Colt turns the handle.
Inside, there is a single room with a wood stove, a bed with a striped blanket, and a window that looks out onto nothing.
The space shrinks to four walls and the two of us and the adrenaline still coursing through my blood.
I turn from the window, and Colt is there. He's close. The distance between us has been closing all night, and the chase burned away whatever gap was left.
"They know my name," I say. "They're going to come for me."
"They're going to try."
"Colt."
"Nobody touches you." The words are simple and absolute, delivered with the same flat certainty he brings to the chute. They aren't a promise. They are a statement of how the world isgoing to work. "I don't care what they've done before. I don't care what they think they can do. Nobody touches you."
The possessiveness in his voice should frighten me. It should set off every alarm I've trained into my professional instincts, every red flag that says this kind of intensity isn't safe.
Instead it reaches into the place where the fear lives and wraps around it and holds it still.
I close the distance between us. My hands find his chest, the hard wall of muscle under his shirt, and he goes still under my touch the way a predator goes still before it strikes.
"I need this," I say. "I need to not think about that ledger."
"I can make sure you don't."
His mouth finds mine, and the kiss is different from last time. Last time was desperate and grief-driven, two people drowning and reaching for the nearest body. This one starts with the same urgency, with the adrenaline channeling itself into heat, but underneath the urgency is something more deliberate and more territorial.
He kisses me like he's staking a claim, his tongue sweeping against mine, his teeth catching my lower lip hard enough that I taste copper.
