"I'm not asking you to apologize."
"Then what are you asking?"
"I'm asking you to come with me."
The question hangs between us. She looks at me, and the challenge in her eyes shifts into something warmer and more dangerous.
"That's not a question, Holloway. That's an order."
"Take it however you want."
She picks up the pen, tucks it behind her ear, and closes the notebook. Then she stands and looks down at me with the expression I first fell for in a diner parking lot, the one that saysI see through every wall you've built and I'm coming anyway.
"Lead the way," she says.
We drive to the motel outside Scottsdale where we've been staying since the circuit moved to Arizona. The room is on the ground floor, dim and cool, with the curtains drawn against the parking lot lights. I close the door behind us and turn to face her, and the distance between us is a few feet and shrinking.
She moves first. Steps into my space and puts her hands on my chest, palms flat against my shirt, and the contact sends heat straight down through the center of me.
"Colt."
The way she says my name is different from every time before. The journalist's armor is gone. The cover identity is gone. The careful distance she maintained while lying to me about who she was is gone.
What's left is Kenna Corbin, Grant's sister, the woman who fought her way onto a rodeo circuit alone, and she's standing in front of me with her hands on my chest and her eyes wide open.
I cup her face in both hands. My thumbs trace her cheekbones, the edge of her jaw, the spot behind her ear where her pulse flutters rapid and hard.
"Tell me your name," I say.
"Kenna."
"Tell me why you're here."
"Because my brother was murdered, and the man standing in front of me is the only person in the world who loved him the way I did, and I am done pretending that either of those things doesn't matter."
I kiss her. Not gentle. Not asking. The kiss of a man who's been fighting this for days and just stopped fighting.
I take her mouth the way I take a ride, with my whole body committed and nothing held back. My hands slide from her face into her hair. I fist the dark weight of it at the base of her skull and tilt her head back to get the angle I want.
She makes a sound against my mouth, half gasp and half surrender, and her fingers curl into my shirt and pull.
I walk her backward through the room, not slow, not careful, and when the backs of her legs hit the mattress I don't ease her down. I press, and she goes.
Her back hits the sheets and I follow, one knee between her thighs, my hand still tangled in her hair. My mouth finds the hinge of her jaw, the column of her neck, the pulse point that I've been watching since the kitchen in Creede.
She tastes like salt and the desert air and the last traces of whatever lipstick she put on this morning.
I bite down on the curve where her neck meets her shoulder, not hard enough to mark but hard enough that her hips buck off the mattress and her hands fly to my shoulders.
"Tell me your name," I say against her skin.
"Kenna." It comes out breathless.
"Full name."
"Kenna Corbin." Her fingers dig into the muscles of my shoulders. "You going to ask me that every time?"
"Every time. Until it stops being new." I lift my head and look at her. Her lips are swollen from the kiss, her hair is wreckedagainst the white sheets, and her eyes are dark and defiant and wanting.
