He breaks the kiss just enough to speak. His voice is low, rough, barely holding together. "Bedroom or here, Hadley?"
"Bedroom."
He doesn't waste a second.
One arm hooks under my thighs, the other bands across my back, and he lifts me like I weigh nothing.
The kind of move a man makes when he's done being patient, but not done being careful.
I wrap my legs around his waist without thinking and feel the hard muscle of his chest against mine, the heat of his skin through our clothes.
He carries me down the short hall, and when he shoulders open the closed door—the one I haven't looked at since I started coming here—I feel a shiver run through me.
The bedroom is plain. A bed with a dark grey quilt. A nightstand. A small window with the blinds drawn against the sun slicing through the slats in warm blades.
He sets me down on the edge of the bed, but he doesn't step back.
He kneels in front of me. Eye to eye.
He takes his hat off at last and sets it on the nightstand, and I see his hair is rumpled, a lock falling across his forehead.
He runs a hand through it, then rests his palms on my knees, thumbs stroking the inside of my thighs through my jeans. "Tell me if I do somethin' you don't want."
His voice is steady but I can hear the want underneath it, ragged at the edges.
"I will. I promise."
He leans in and kisses me again—slower this time, deeper.
His tongue brushes my lower lip and I open for him, let him taste me.
His hands slide up my thighs, over my hips, settling at my waist. Then he reaches for the hem of my shirt and pauses, eyes locking on mine for the ask.
I lift my arms.
He pulls it off slow. Deliberately. Tugging the fabric up, letting his knuckles brush my ribs, the curve of my bra. The air hits my bare skin and I feel my nipples tighten beneath the lace.
He doesn't look away from my face until the shirt is gone, and then his gaze drops, and he takes me in.
The gold chain at my throat. Garrett's ring riding just above my cleavage. He sees it. I feel the weight of that look.
But he doesn't ask me to take it off. He doesn't flinch. He lowers his head and presses a kiss to the hollow of my throat, then another just below, his lips dragging down to my sternum, right above where the ring sits.
The breath I let out shudders out of me, shaky and raw.
Then his cut and shirt come off.
I watch it happen. The way he pulls the fabric down his arms and over his head, the way the muscles in his shoulders flex, how the light catches the ink of his arms.
For the first time I see them up close—the full sleeves of black and grey, the Shotgun Saints patch inside his forearm, the single black dots on his knuckles, the low scar across his ribs that I've wondered about.
I reach out and trace it with my fingertips. A question I don't have to ask.
He answers anyway. "Lubbock."
"I know," I whisper.
He lays me back on the dark grey quilt, and the mattress gives under us.