Page 32 of Diesel’s Desire

“You started this.”

“I’m gonna finish it too.”

I get her pants shoved down her hips, get my own belt undone with one hand while the other keeps her right where I want her, and she reaches for me, wraps her fingers around me with a kind of desperate, furious hunger that tells me exactly how many nights she’s spent lying awake telling herself this was over.

“Tell me you want this,” I say against her ear. “Say it.”

“I want this.” Her voice breaks on it, quiet and wrecked. “I want you. God help me, I do.”

I lift her up onto the counter beside the rack, boxes rattling, papers sliding, neither one of us caring. I work her boots and pants off, and when I push into her, slow, watching her face the whole way, her head falls back and her mouth opens on a silent gasp that’s louder to me than any sound she could’ve made out loud.

“Evan,” she breathes.

“Right here.” I still for a second, just to feel her around me, just to remind myself this is real and not something I dreamed up lying alone in my bunk with the club partying through the wall. “Not going anywhere.”

“You have to be quiet,” she manages, even as her hips start moving against mine, chasing a rhythm neither of us is bothering to control anymore.

“You’re the one who’s gonna have trouble with that.”

She proves me right about ninety seconds later, biting down on my shoulder to muffle whatever sound was about to come out of her, nails digging crescents into my back through my shirt, and I drive into her harder, faster, chasing the exact sound I know she’s trying to swallow, wanting it more than I want to be careful, more than I want to remember where we are.

“Right there,” she gasps against my collarbone. “Don’t stop, don’t you dare stop⁠—”

I don’t. I keep the pace punishing, one hand braced against the shelf by her head, the other gripping her hip hard enough to bruise, and when she comes apart around me it’s silent, shaking, her whole body locking up tight while she buries the sound of it in my shoulder, and the feel of her clenching around me drags me right over after her, spilling deep, her name breaking rough out of my mouth before I remember to keep even that quiet.

We stay tangled there a second, breathing hard, foreheads pressed together, boxes of somebody’s worst nights scattered half-crooked around us on the shelf.

“That,” Penny says eventually, voice hoarse, “cannot happen again.”

“Sure it can’t.”

“Evan.”

“Diesel.” I press a kiss to her temple, feel her breath still shaking against my throat. “Come on. Say it. You liked it too much to mean that.”

She laughs, short and helpless, and pulls back just far enough to look at me, hair a wreck around her face, mouth swollen, uniform hanging half off one shoulder where I dragged it loose without either of us noticing.

“You need to leave,” she says. “Before Johnson gets back from his break.”

“In a minute.” I tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, slower now, gentler than anything that just happened against a steel shelf full of somebody else’s evidence. “I’m not sorry, Penny. Not for any of it.”

“You should be.”

“I’m really not.” I kiss her again, soft this time, nothing rushed about it, and she lets me, hands coming up to rest against my chest while I catch my breath. “I’ll see you soon.”

“That’s not a promise I asked for.”

“Didn’t say it was a promise.” I pull back, straighten my belt, watch her do the same with hers, both of us moving slower than we should given how close that door is to opening on somebody who isn’t supposed to see any of this. “Just a fact.”

She doesn’t argue that one. Doesn’t tell me not to come back either, and by the time I’m walking back out through the lobby, folder left behind like the flimsy excuse it always was, I’ve got that same stupid grin working its way across my face that got me an earful from Bone and Tank two days ago.

Let them talk. Let the whole club line up and tell me exactly how this ends.

I’m not walking away from her again. Not this time. Not for seventeen more years. Not for a badge, not for anything Bone’s ledger or Tank’s warnings can put a number on.

18

PENNY