Page 47 of Diesel’s Desire

“Fuck, Penny.” My wrists strain against the cuffs, every instinct screaming to grab her hips and move her, and I can’t, and that helplessness winds tighter than anything else has all night. “Move. Please.”

She braces both hands on my chest and rides me slow at first, testing the angle, and the sight of her above me, head tipped back, hair falling loose down her spine, does something to my chest that’s got nothing to do with how good she feels wrapped tight around me.

“Look at you,” she says, breathless, picking up her pace, grinding down hard on every downstroke. “All tied up. Can’t do a thing about it.”

“Wouldn’t want to.” I mean it. Whatever this is, whatever tonight cost both of us, this—her taking exactly what she wants off my body while I lie here helpless to do anything but take it—feels like the first clean breath I’ve had since that basement.

She rides me harder, faster, chasing her own release with a single-minded focus that has me straining every muscle in my arms just to stay still, to let her have this, to be exactly what she needs. Her nails drag down my chest, over the ink there, and I buck up into her, unable to help it, and she moans, loud, grinding down to meet me.

“Gonna come again,” she gasps. “Evan⁠—”

“Do it. Take it.”

She shatters around me a second time, walls clenching so tight I nearly lose it right along with her, and the sound she makes—raw, unguarded, my name breaking apart in her mouth—finally drags me over the edge with her, hips jerking up hard as I spill inside her, groaning something that isn’t even words anymore.

She collapses forward onto my chest after, both of us breathing hard, her forehead pressed against my collarbone, and I lie there, wrists still cuffed, entirely spent, entirely hers for as long as she’ll have me tonight.

“Key,” I manage eventually. “Kind of stuck here.”

She laughs, tired and warm, then reaches for the handcuff key I placed on the nightstand and works the cuffs loose, freeing one wrist and then the other. The second I’m loose, I wrap both arms around her, pulling her flush against me, chin resting against the top of her head.

Neither of us says anything about last night. About the basement, about Pemberton, about anything sitting heavy behind either of our eyes.

We don’t need to. Not right now.

24

PENNY

Morris’s office smells like burnt coffee and the same manila folders that have been stacked in the corner since I started here. He’s got his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, a legal pad in front of him with nothing written on it, and when I walk in, he doesn’t tell me to sit. He just slides a single typed page across the desk.

I read it twice before the words actually land.

“You’re resigning.”

“Effective end of month.” He says it plain, no drama, without looking at the page. “Already called the mayor’s office. Already called the county council chairman, for whatever that man’s opinion is worth.”

“Chief—”

“Don’t.” He holds up a hand, and it’s not sharp, just tired, bone-tired in a way I haven’t seen on him even during the worst of the Miller case. “I’ve worn this badge thirty-eight years, Penny. I’ve made calls I wasn’t proud of. Looked away from things because looking away was easier, because the budget said so, because some mayor with a checkbook told me it was safer for everybody involved.”

“You didn’t know what he was doing to those girls.”

“I knew enough to be scared of asking.” He takes his glasses off entirely now, sets them on the desk, rubs at the bridge of his nose like he’s trying to push a headache back through his skull. “Three families. Three separate times over seven years, and I signed off on every one of those case closures without pushing hard enough to find out why the parents sounded so damn relieved and so damn terrified all at once. I told myself it wasn’t my jurisdiction to dig deeper once the kid came home safe. I told myself a lot of things.”

I shake my head. “You didn’t put her in that basement, Chief. He did.”

“No. But I let him keep doing it.” His voice doesn’t rise. That’s what makes it worse. “I can’t be the kind of Chief who makes the calls this job needs made if I already know I’ll cave the second somebody with enough money leans on me. I found that out about myself a week ago, standing in my own office telling you to stay away from a man who was keeping a six-year-old girl in a room made up to look like a dollhouse. That’s not a mistake I get to make twice and still call myself fit to wear this badge.”

I don’t have an argument for that. I want one. I sit there searching for something that would make him take the resignation letter back, fold it up, put his glasses back on, and go back to being the man who taps my desk twice and hands me folksy wisdom I didn’t ask for.

There isn’t one. He’s right, and both of us know it, and that’s exactly what makes it so hard to sit here and watch him do the right thing.

“Who takes over?” I ask instead.

“County’ll appoint an interim. Might be you, eventually, if you want it.” He almost smiles at that, just barely, the ghost of the man who used to tap my desk twice and tell me to think things over. “You’ve got the instincts for it. Better than mine, apparently.”

“I don’t want it like this.”