Page 28 of Smoked

And he roars, following me as he comes, burying himself so deep, my eyes sting.

As I’m coming down, body trembling, he locks his arms around me…almost feral sounds tearing out of him.

We lie there sweating and heaving. He rolls to the side quickly, pulling me with him, tucking me against his chest. I settle my cheek against his chest, and listen as his heartbeat slows.

His hand drifts through my hair, while mine traces the line of the tattoos on his arm.

"What am I going to do with you?" he mutters after a while.

I press my lips to his chest in front of me. "I’m sure you’ll think of something,” I say, as he curls around me.

CHAPTER 7

WADE

I wake up with Tess's hair in my mouth and one of her legs thrown over mine.

The hotel curtains are doing a lousy job. The morning sun is blazing a thick stripe across the second queen bed—the one we never touched last night—and over our bags piled against the wall. The window unit is humming a flat, rattling note, and I glance at my phone.

Thankfully, it’s only eight-thirty, and we have plenty of time before we have to be at the fairgrounds.

Good, because I don't want to move.

She's curled against me, face pressed into my chest, one hand resting on my belly, possessively, as if it’s her favorite pillow.

Last night was out of this world. The woman I've been hiding from in the dark worshipped the part of my body I’m most insecure about, and told me how much my weight and what I can do with it turns her on.

My cock stirs, because just thinking about Tess naked under me, with those big beautiful tits and filthy little mouth, is a guaranteed hard-on.

But I should probably get myself ready.

I press my lips to the top of her head and ease out from under her, slowly enough that she only shifts and sighs. I tuck the blanket around her shoulders.

In the bathroom, I stare at the mirror. Same big gut, same farmer tan, same blue-collar guy. But there are faint pink lines where Tess’s nails raked over me, and there's a mark on my pec from where she bit down when she came the third time, after we’d rested.

I grin like an idiot.

The fairgrounds are a circus when we get there.

I'm backing the rig between two teams in matching T-shirts, their canopies already up, logos printed on everything on their site. The outfit to my left has a trailer with its own generator and a guy who’s doing nothing but wiping down stainless surfaces. The one to my right has four guys in embroidered shirts and a banner that says SPONSORED BY across the top in letters bigger than my truck.

I park my beat-up stick burner between them and try not to estimate what their equipment costs.

Tess is out of the truck before I kill the engine, clipboard in hand. She's got her hair pulled back in two cute buns and she's wearing cutoffs and a fitted T-shirt with the sleeves cuffed.

She’s so much prettier than a smoke chaser as Riley would say. Groupies that hang around the rigs. Except Riley thinks they’re just there for the meat samples. She’s not completely wrong.

"Site sixty-two, east-facing, good draw," she says, reading off the sheet we picked up last night. "Wind's out of the southwest, which means⁠—"

"Smoke pulls right across the walking path. Judges'll smell us before they see us."

She grins. "Exactly."

We work. Canopy up, tables out, the coolers positioned where I can reach them without turning, the Cambros staged for resting. Her color-coded schedule is taped inside the canopy leg before I finish leveling the firebox.

By midafternoon, the Kansas City Barbecue Society officials come through for meat inspection—checking every team's cuts to make sure they meet weight and trimming standards before anything goes on the fire. Then we crowd into the cooks' meeting, a briefing where they walk us through the rules, the turn-in schedule, and remind us that the ten-minute windows are absolute. I already know all of it, but hearing it out loud still tightens something in my chest.

A guy behind me taps my arm during the briefing and points at my tattoo—the crossed meat fork and slotted turner with the flames. "Nice ink," he says. "But you know a pitmaster would never fork a brisket."