“Nice, huh?” he remarked.
Her heart started pounding again, this time from excitement rather than adrenaline. When she’d been gathering intel about this warehouse, all her sources were unclear about whether it would contain weapons or ammunition. Most depots weren’t equipped to handle both, and it would have been pointless to get their hands on a shit ton of ammo when they had no weapons to use it with.
But Reese’s gut had told her that West Colony’s council members didn’t have enough manpower to guard multiple munitions warehouses, particularly with the new colony that they were supposedly terraforming along the west coast. She’d banked on the council consolidating both weapons and ammo in one place, and her gamble had paid off.
These weapons were hers now. The endless boxes of ammunition were hers. It was all hers.
Her pulse sped up at the thought, but there was no time to bask in her victory. Once the Enforcers they’d killed missed their hourly check-in with headquarters, the city would send backup.
Reese clapped her hands together, and the sharp sound echoed through the massive space. “Load the trucks,” she ordered. “We have fifteen minutes to take as much as we can. Let’s not waste time, people.”
2
Maybe he was a sick bastard, but violence got him hard. Really fucking hard. Which made for a very uncomfortable ride home. Rylan shifted restlessly in the passenger’s side of the pickup truck, did some strategic rearranging down below, and hoped that Xander didn’t feel the need to comment on Rylan’s very noticeable hard-on.
But Xan’s gaze stayed on the dark road beyond the windshield. He’d barely said a word since they’d settled in for the long drive back to Connor’s camp.
Rylan reached into his pack and pulled out two cigarettes. “You want?” he asked, waving an unlit one in Xander’s direction.
The quiet man gave a sharp nod.
Rylan lit the two smokes, took a long drag, and handed one over. Xander puffed his down to a nub before another mile passed. Without being asked, Rylan lit another one. He hoped his friend would pace himself on the second, because he only had one left.
Fortunately, it looked like Xan planned to make this one last, probably so he’d have an excuse not to talk. He didn’t need one, though. Everyone knew the source of Xander’s silence. It had been two months since the attack on Reese’s town, two months since the death of Xander’s best friend, Kade. In those two months, all of Xander’s spoken words could’ve been written on a napkin. He’d never been one to crack jokes or run around with a big grin on his face, but the man’s expression had two modes now—stoic or pained. He winced every time Kade’s name came up.
And for all the success they’d experienced tonight, their excursions weren’t picnics. They were battles with live rounds and a shit ton of ammunition. Rylan wasn’t naive enough to think that Kade’s death was the last they’d suffer before the end—if there was going to be an end.
Reese’s plan to take down the Global Council was dangerous, risky, and only working because the outlaws on her side would rather bet their lives than sit on their asses, hiding from the world. Even Connor, Rylan’s best friend and leader, had been brought around to Reese’s way of thinking.
Strike first, strike often, and strike hard—that was their new motto, because as evidenced by the recent attack on Foxworth, the Enforcers who carried out the will of the GC wouldn’t allow the outlaws to hide for much longer.
Rylan rolled his head around his neck, trying to ease some of the tension, but he knew it wasn’t going away with any car-bound workout. There was only one way the granite in his pants would subside—with his hand working his cock while his mind feverishly played images of Reese.
Though if he were being honest, the solo act wasn’t much fun. He liked active, happy companions. More than one if possible, which was why he’d been a frequent visitor to Connor and Hudson’s bed. There wasn’t anything better in the world than driving a woman crazy in the sack, and he got the most pleasure doing it with another man in the mix. Two men, devoted to one woman’s pleasure, meant everyone had a fan-fucking-tastic time.
But Reese’s pleasure was off-limits to him, apparently. Seemed like she’d rather sleep with anyone but him. And he was good, damn it. He knew that if he had the opportunity, he could rock that woman’s world. He’d do it by himself or they could have Reese’s brick-faced companion join them. At this point, he didn’t give a shit who was there as long as he finally got his hands on her. But the stubborn woman continued to resist his every attempt, every sugarcoated word. And in the last couple months, Rylan’s desire for everyone else seemed to have tapped out like a dried well. His dick was raw from all the hand work it was getting.
He stared moodily out the window. It was cold outside, but there wasn’t any snow. Technically it was still winter, but spring-like weather had come too soon, and with it, endless rain. The truck moved slowly in the mud and slush. He hated it.
After another ten miles of smoke-filled silence, Rylan had had enough. Enough of the shitty weather. Enough of the bleak landscape. Enough of the goddamn quiet. He didn’t want to be in his head thinking about Reese, the weather, or the dire situation that the successful raid would no doubt spark.
“Nice work with the electronics tonight.”
Xander grunted.
Okay, this wasn’t going to work. No way could he survive another two hours next to this sullen soldier, especially when his own thoughts were wandering into melancholy territory. If he stayed in the truck with Xan, the two of them would end up singing dirges and wiping away man tears.
The rumble of a motorcycle roared next to them. As Rylan looked out the window, he made out long red hair streaming out the bottom of a black wool hat, and leather-clad legs wrapped around a man big enough to be mistaken for a mountain.
The fit of his pants became impossibly tight as he stared at Reese, the outlaw queen. There wasn’t a man who saw her that didn’t instantly want to fuck her. Or if there was, Rylan hadn’t met him and didn’t want to. He couldn’t stand ridiculous jackasses who were turned off by a woman as strong as steel.
He wondered if Sloan could feel the heat of Reese’s pussy as she plastered her body against the man’s back. Now that was where Rylan wanted to be. Not cooped up with Mr. Sourface, but out on the open road with Reese wrapped around him. One of her hands would be attached to his dick, which meant they’d have to stop at some point so he could bend her over the side of the bike and fuck her until she was too weak to walk. Then, when they got to Foxworth, they’d shower, fuck again, get into bed, and fuck some more.
His cock couldn’t get stiffer.
“You’re gonna permanently damage something downstairs if you don’t get yourself under control,” Xander remarked.
“Shit, man, the condition of my hard-on is what gets you to talk? Why don’t you reach over and do something about it?” Rylan waved a hand toward his lap. Anything but his own touch would be a welcome relief these days.
“Pass.”
Beside the truck, Sloan gunned the motorcycle’s engine and the vehicle jumped past them, heading for Foxworth. Reese didn’t even look Rylan’s way.
There was a name for men who constantly chased after what they couldn’t have. Scratch that. Several names: Idiot. Fool. Ass.
But Rylan couldn’t turn off his desire, even if he wanted to.
He had options, of course. Jamie might be off the table because she’d finally hooked Lennox—or rather, Lennox had woken the fuck up and realized if he didn’t make his claim, he was going to lose Jamie. But even without Jamie, there were other options at Connor’s camp. Layla. Piper. And Connor and Hudson would definitely invite him to join them. They both enjoyed his company—Connor, because he loved making Hudson happy, and Hudson, because, well, Rylan was shit hot in bed. But afterward, he’d still have to go back to sleep in his cabin and think about the fact that they wer
e starting a war.
Or . . . he could throw himself at the tigress. Who cared if he got scratched up a little? Better than being dead. Besides, Xan was right. If he didn’t do something about the spike in his pants, there was going to be damage. If not to his head, then to his body.
He rolled down the window and looked behind him. Ten lengths back was Beckett’s vehicle. Beck was the mechanic at Foxworth. “Pull over and drop me off,” Rylan told Xander.
The other man tilted his head. “You think she’s gonna say yes this time after months of saying no?”
“You only lose the fights you never enter,” Rylan quipped.
Maybe if he was lucky, Reese would finally throw him a bone.
* * *
Sloan didn’t knock as he entered Reese’s room. She would’ve laughed if he had, telling him he had as much right to the space as she did. But the space he wanted most was in her bed—the one she was sitting on as he closed the door behind him.
Her tanned, toned, bare legs stretched out in front of her as she toweled her hair dry. A faded blue T-shirt clung to her ripe tits. The skin at her throat, around her cheeks, on the tops of her silky thighs, was flushed from the heat of her recent shower. Her body was an unintentional invitation to feast.
He wanted to run his fingers over her legs. No, his tongue. He’d lick his way up, part her thighs, and . . .
Fuck. He shut down those fantasies quick before his wood became too awkward to hide. Then he strode angrily to the far wall and stared out the window—seeing nothing but golden skin, wet strands of red hair, swaying breasts, and whisper-thin cotton that teased rather than disguised.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Is it the raid? It was almost too easy, wasn’t it?”
Her uncertainty shamed him. She was shouldering a huge load, and here he was, feeling sorry for himself like a baby bitch. Swallowing his inappropriate desire, Sloan turned to face her. “No. It seemed easy because you planned it flawlessly.”
She didn’t respond, but he could tell by the look on her face exactly what was going on. She was tunneling deep into her own head, second-guessing herself.
He cursed inwardly, but gentled his voice. “Reese.”
She pressed her lips together for a moment, and then the shield dropped. “I’m scared.”
Sloan’s heart turned over. He was the only one who got to see her like this, the only one she trusted enough to see her uncertain and frightened. Outside this room, she cloaked herself in impenetrable armor. She fought and fucked with verve. There wasn’t a person better suited to lead this rebellion than Reese.
But inside, she quaked at the responsibility. She wanted to save everyone, mourned every loss. Even the ones she made with her own hands.
Her trust made him both the luckiest man alive and the most cursed. Reese would show him her vulnerability, but she wouldn’t allow him to comfort her. And he never put her in the position of having to turn him down. That was one burden Sloan wouldn’t place on her shoulders—the knowledge that he ached for her and her alone.
He knew how she felt about love. How she shied away from commitment and those tender emotions that glowed around couples like Lennox and Jamie or Connor Mackenzie and his woman. Reese would never say it to their faces, but she believed that kind of love didn’t have a place in this world.
She was doing everything in her power to change that. To make it so the young girls and boys in her care would grow up without the need to foster their fierce, angry, wild sides in order to survive.
Still, all that change came at a cost. It meant putting her people in danger. Their lives were in her hands and every mission she laid out had very real consequences.
“They trust me.”
Even though her eyes weren’t red, Sloan suspected some of the water in that shower hadn’t come from the reservoir tanks. “They should.”
“Should they? Should they really? Am I even doing this for the right reasons? We both know I want to bring down the council for my own personal pleasure. It has nothing to do with that pretty ideal of freedom.” Reese’s fingers clenched into a ball.
Sloan crossed the room and sat beside her. She leaned into him immediately, and the need in his blood spiked hard. With ruthless self-control, he tamped it down. Picking up her hand, he pulled her fingers apart, wincing at the sight of the bloody crescents in her palms. Yeah, there’d been plenty of tears shed in that shower, all right.
He allowed himself this touch, just as he allowed himself a million other small tortures. Because these small things were worth all the pain of not having her.
“You can want both—revenge and freedom—and still be on the side of good.” He rubbed her fingers. Hard calluses met hard calluses. Reese was a warrior, not a soft-palmed woman of the Colonies. And the thickened skin at the base of her fingers, the weathered pads of her fingertips, the wind-burned cheeks . . . it all made her sexier than any woman had the right to be.
“I . . . worry that I’m not making the right decisions.”
What she really meant was that she worried that the number of lost lives would be higher than she would be able to live with in the end.
“You’re overthinking this. Listen.” He tipped his head toward the open window. Outside the building, people were starting to gather at the rec hall. Music had been turned on and the sound of laughter and singing and merriment mixed together. All of it existed because Reese was willing to put her neck, heart, and soul on the line.
Yes, there were going to be losses, but it wasn’t healthy for her to sit up in her room and count them when she could be out there with the people she had saved.
“That’s the sound of celebration. We need to have these moments too. All of us.” Sloan pushed to his feet without letting go of her hand. “So get dressed, find a man tonight, and ride his dick until you’re limp.”
3
Sloan was right. She needed to be around people. Needed to let the voices and laughter and music drown out the doubts that were pounding through her brain.
And he was right about the other thing—she needed sex. A hard cock slamming into her until she was mindless would be the perfect antidote to her melancholy.
Any man in this room could help her out with that. It was just a matter of deciding which one to pick.
Her gaze swept over the small crowd as she moved deeper into the rec hall. The old building had once been a place where the long-since-dead residents of Foxworth had come to amuse themselves. Kids would pop in after school to play Ping-Pong and do arts and crafts. There’d been knitting classes and book club meetings, according to the faded flyers on the bulletin board near the door, and aerobics classes in the gym upstairs, though all the equipment was now covered in rust and essentially unusable.
Since nobody had felt like lugging broken treadmills and exercise bikes down two flights of stairs, they’d decided to pretend a second floor didn’t exist. On the main floor, they’d brought in furniture—couches, chairs, a pool table Jake had found in one of the wealthier homes in town.
The thought of Jake made her stomach roil. It was hard to look at anything in Foxworth without thinking of him. He was ingrained in every inch of this town. She was the one who’d found Foxworth and decided to make it a permanent base, but Jake had turned it into something better, something she’d never even dreamed of. It was his idea to raid the nearby factories for sheet metal, his idea to erect the gates around the main stretch of town. His idea to form alliances with the shadier Enforcers, offering them sex and booze in exchange for protection and invisibility.
Foxworth was their creation. He’d been its king, and she his queen. A queen who’d murdered him for the crown.
No, not for the crown. For them—Reese looked around at the thirty or so people filling the room.
A little more than eighty people resided in Foxworth, but not all of them were original members of the group. So
me were nomads who’d wandered up to the gates long after Jake’s death. Others were old acquaintances who’d found their way back to the area. But the ones who’d known Jake . . . the ones who’d suffered at his hands . . . they were the ones she’d saved from the man she’d loved.
Jake had needed to be stopped.
She’d stopped him.
“So who’s it going to be?”
Reese tensed as Rylan came up beside her. He held a tumbler of amber liquid in one big hand, tapping his thumb against the glass.
“Who’s going to be what?” she muttered. As always, his presence threw her guard up a hundred feet.
“The man who’ll be getting the gift of your pussy tonight.” His blue eyes flickered with irritation. “I’d be happy if you chose me, but that’s probably hoping for too much, huh?”
“You’re right about that.”
Rylan chuckled and handed her his glass. “Drink?”
“You trying to liquor me up, honey?”
He blinked innocently. “Nah, you looked thirsty.”
A laugh slipped out, but she still accepted the glass and took a long swig. Bourbon, she noted as the alcohol slid down her throat. She wondered if Rylan had picked it because he knew she had a hard-on for bourbon, or if it was a coincidence.
After another sip, she handed the glass back. “Getting me drunk won’t impair my judgment, you know. I’m even more stubborn when I’m wasted.”
He laughed too, and the deep, husky sound tickled a place she didn’t want associated with this man. She fought a smile, but it broke free when she noticed the very obvious bulge in his pants. Rylan seemed to sport a permanent erection, as if he expected he might have to whip out his dick at a moment’s notice and always wanted to be prepared.