I kissed back up her body. She reached for my belt with urgent hands, pushed my jeans down, wrapped her hand around me. Firm, certain, her grip steady, her thumb sliding over the tip. I closed my eyes. Let the sensation of her hand on me crack through the last of my defenses. When I opened my eyes she was watching my face and the look on hers was fierce, possessive, a woman learning what she could do to a man who'd been invisible to everyone but her.
"I want you," she said. Simple. Direct.
I settled between her thighs. Pushed into her slowly. The feeling of her around me was the same and entirely different from before. In the corridor I'd been losing a fight. Here I was choosing. Every inch, every second, deliberate. She was warm, ready, tight around me, and I sank into her until there was nothing between us, and I held myself there. Looked at her face. Let her see mine. No mask. Just the man underneath, exposed, terrified, refusing to look away.
I pulled back slowly. Pushed in again. She gasped, her fingers tightening on my shoulders, her hips lifting to meet me. I set the pace. Slow, deep strokes that made her breath stutter. Face to face, chest to chest, her hands on my back, my arms braced on either side of her. The softness of her breasts pressed against my chest. The grip of her thighs against my hips. The wet heat of her around me, tightening with every stroke.
She wrapped her legs around me, pulling me deeper, and the sound she made was open, nothing held in reserve. Her back arched off the bed. I bent my head, took her nipple into my mouth, sucked gently while I moved inside her, and the combination made her cry out, her fingers raking through my hair, holding me against her breast.
"I've got you," I said against her skin. "I'm here."
I lifted up on my arms. Looked down at her. Her hair fanned across my pillow, her lips parted, her body moving with mine in a rhythm we'd done a thousand times and were only just discovering. I shifted the angle, deeper, and her mouth fell open.
"Ethan..."
My name, stripped bare of everything else. In her mouth, while I was inside her, and the sound of it broke the last thing I’d been holding together.
I moved faster. She met me. Her nails on my shoulders, her heels pressing into my lower back, pulling me in with every thrust. I kissed her throat, her jaw, back to her mouth. She was tightening around me, her whole body winding toward release, the tremor in her thighs, the hitch in her breathing coming faster and shorter.
I reached between us. Found her with my thumb, circled, pressed. She shattered. Her body clenching around me in waves, a cry that filled the room, her back lifting off the bed, her hand gripping the back of my neck so hard I felt her nails break skin. I watched the pleasure take her. Watched her let go of everything she'd been carrying for seven weeks. The trust of it undid me.
I buried myself deep and came hard, her name on my lips, my forehead against the curve of her shoulder, my body shaking with the force of it.
We lay there. Her head on my chest, my arm around her, the room quiet.
"We're going to figure this out," I said. "Your father. The clubs. All of it."
She nodded against my chest. She was already drifting, the weight of seven weeks lifting, her body going heavy with sleep.
I held her in the dark and listened to her breathe.
One night of peace. One breath before the storm.
I lay with her sleeping on my chest, and for the first time in forty-one years, the room felt right.
FIVE
LOLA
Three days of waking up in Ghost's bed, in his room, behind the Angels' gates. Three days of learning the shape of a life I hadn't known I wanted.
Coffee in the morning with a man who said more with a look than most people did with a paragraph. The compound was calm, ordered. Nothing like the Jackals' clubhouse with its noise, its constant performance, the energy of men proving they belonged. Here the brothers moved with purpose and left space for silence.
Bree brought me food the first morning. She paused in the doorway of Ghost's room with a plate, a warm smile, the easy kindness of a woman who'd shown up somewhere she didn't belong and remembered it.
"Eat," she said. "You're growing a whole person. That takes fuel."
Evie found me in the corridor on the second day, her arms full of towels. She stopped, looked at me direct. More curiosity than judgment. “You're staying?” she asked. I said yes. She nodded, satisfied, and walked on.
Nobody interrogated me. Ghost's face had settled the question before anyone could ask it, and whatever the brothersthought about their VP bringing the Jackals president's daughter behind their gates, they kept it behind their teeth.
Ghost was different behind a closed door. Still spare with his words, but the space between us had changed. It wasn't the charged, careful energy of two strangers circling each other across a bar. It was the ease of two people learning to share a room.
He made breakfast. That was the thing that surprised me, this big, scarred man standing at the stove in sweatpants scrambling eggs with the same methodical attention he brought to everything. He cooked the way he talked. No wasted motion, no flourish, just steady hands producing something solid and warm.
"You cook," I said, sitting on the counter with my feet dangling.
"I eat. Cooking is a prerequisite."
