Page 48

I push off the fence. My left side protests, and I let the pain register without adjusting my posture.

Morgan's eyes drop to where the stiffness shows. She reads the guarded breathing with the rapid, quiet assessment of someone who notices damage before she notices comfort.

"You're hurt," she says.

"I'm functional."

Her mouth thins. "That's not the same thing."

"Tonight it is."

I walk toward the motel strip. I don't look back to see if she follows. The choice is hers, and for the first time, the choice is clean.

She has no assignment to work me and no authority to use what happens next to influence my cooperation.

The fairground noise follows me across the lot. A chute gate bangs open somewhere behind the grandstands. Hooves strike packed dirt with the urgency of livestock that knows competition is coming.

Every previous night between us carried the weight of what she was and what she could do with what she learned. Tonight that weight is gone, and whoever follows me in follows empty-handed.

The walk takes less than ten minutes. The motel sits down the frontage road from the fairground, set back where the highway noise drops to a drone. My room faces the lot. I check the vehicles on both sides, scan the walkway, and leave the door open behind me.

I flex my wrists, working out the stiffness competition left behind.

She comes through the door. She closes it behind her. I throw the deadbolt and wedge a motel blanket across the curtains, covering the glass. Neil gets no second photograph.

The lock changes the room from a place I'm staying to a place we're in.

I turn. She's standing against the door with her back to the wood and her arms at her sides. She looks smaller without the operational layers. Just Morgan in boots, jeans, a cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled to her elbows. Her pulse is visible in her throat.

"I don't trust you," I tell her.

"I know."

"That hasn't changed."

"I'm not asking it to."

I close the distance between us. Two strides. My palm flattens against the door beside her head, and the wood creaks under the pressure. She doesn't flinch. Her breathing stays measured, but her pupils dilate when my body blocks the overhead light. The reaction is honest in a way her words have never been.

"I'm choosing this," I say. "Not because I forgive you. Not because the disclosure fixed anything. Because you don't have power over me anymore, and I want you anyway. If this isn't what you want, leave now. If that changes later, tell me and I stop."

"It won't."

My free hand grips her jaw and tilts her face up. The angle is firm, my thumb pressing into the soft skin below her ear, and the pressure is a question she answers by staying where she is. Her eyes stay open. They hold steady, asking for nothing, offering nothing.

Defiance. That's what's in them. Tonight her eyes say something different. I know what I did to you. I'm here anyway.

I kiss her with my fingers locked against her face, and the anger pours through it. Her mouth opens under mine, and the taste of her is coffee, salt from the drive and fairground heat, the tension of someone who drove hours to stand in front of a man she wronged. My tongue finds hers, and the friction is immediate, deliberate, both of us pressing into the contact without giving ground.

I drag her shirt over her head. She lifts her arms to let me, and the compliance is physical, not emotional. Her fingers land on my chest as the shirt hits the floor, pressing into the muscle above my injured ribs.

Pain flashes through my side, and she feels the reaction before I can hide it. Her hand stills. I cover it with mine and press it harder against me. My choice, not hers.

I unclip her bra and strip it down her arms. Her breasts settle against the cooler air, nipples tightening, and I cup one, rolling the peak between my fingers while I work her belt buckle open. She sucks in a breath, her belly contracting under my knuckles as I work the denim past her hips.

I kneel and pull her boots off one at a time, dropping them beside the door. Then I shove her clothes to the floor in one motion. She steps out of them. Naked against the wood, she watches me with those steady, unblinking eyes while I pull my own shirt over my head.

Her gaze lands on the bruising along my ribs, the discoloration spreading from my side toward my back. She doesn't comment. She lifts her chin and waits.