“Lock on your door doesn’t work. I’ll fix it tomorrow.”
Her chin lifts. Her mouth opens, closes. “You don’t have to do that.”
“The door should lock.”
She nods and disappears into the guest room. The door clicks shut. She’s ten feet away. In my house. Behind a door I could open in four steps. And I can’t touch her.
I stand in my hallway and stare at that door. At one time, I knew everything about this woman. Where to put my mouth to make her come. What she looked like at two a.m. when she couldn’t sleep. How she took her coffee. And that she always wanted kids.
Now I don’t know where she’s been, who put that kid in her, or why she left without a word.
I go to my room and close the door. And I sit on the edge of the mattress with my hands locked around my knees until my knuckles ache.
This is not how tonight goes. She’s broke, jobless, and sleeping under my roof with a kid that belongs to another man. I don’t get to want her right now.
I want her anyway.
Forty minutes later, the pipes creak. She’s in the shower. And I lie in the dark and picture it. Water on her collarbones. Her head tipped back. Her hands pushing wet hair off her face. The same hands that used to dig into my shoulders when I fucked her deep enough to make her forget her own name.
My hand wraps around my cock, and I’m gone.
Eyes closed, jaw locked, and every memory I’ve spent years burying crawls out of the ground at once.
Her on her knees in front of me, looking up with those blue eyes and her lips stretched around my dick, and the sound she’d make in her throat when I’d fist her hair and push deeper.
Her bent over the kitchen counter at her old apartment, shorts around her ankles, my hand flat between her shoulder blades holding her down while I fucked her.
Her riding me at two a.m., half-asleep and grinding slow, my hands on her hips bruising her skin, and the noise she made when I’d thrust up hard enough to break her rhythm. That noise.
Wrecked and raw and mine. Nobody else got that sound out of her. Nobody.
My fist tightens around my dick. My hips lift off the mattress. I picture her in that shower again, water running between her tits, down her body. She’s naked ten feet from where I’m lying, and the thought alone puts me over the edge.
I come hard, my body locked up tight, and it’s not enough. It’s never been enough. Not with my hand, not with the sweetbutts, not with anyone who isn’t her.
Afterward, I stare at the ceiling and think about the man who put that kid in her. Whether she bit her lip for him. Whether she made those sounds for him. Whether his name sounded as good in her mouth as mine used to.
If I’d asked her to be my Old Lady earlier, would she have left? If I hadn’t waited for the perfect moment, the right dinner, the desert sky. If I’d pinned her against the kitchen counter and saidyou’re mine, and I’m keeping you.
Would she have stayed?
Would that kid be mine?
The house goes quiet. A door closes. A mattress creaks through the wall.
She’s so fucking close.
I don’t sleep.
Church is at noon at the clubhouse.
Saber lays it out. Crimson Warriors have been rolling through Ash Valley. Not picking fights and not pulling guns. They’ve been talking to business owners—five in the last two weeks.
The message is the same every time: you didn’t see us, you don’t know us, and if the Kings come asking questions, you don’t know anything.
“Nitro’s moving product through our territory,” Razor says. “And he’s buying silence on the ground, so we can’t track it.”
This isn’t new. Nitro’s been probing our territory for months. Now he’s done probing.