I can’t take the restraint anymore, so I get off the bike and strip off the jeans. I’m still commando from this morning’s modeling job, and His Highness is ready for battle. I sit back down and look down at her pu**y. It’s so wet her juices are almost flowing out onto the black leather bike seat. I grab her hips and pull, bringing her beckoning sex within easy reach of my throbbing cock. “Lie back, baby. I’m gonna take you now. I’ll get to your tits and your mouth later, but right now I’m gonna f**k you good. I’m gonna make you squirt. Are you a squirter, Bombshell?” I push her until she falls back against the tank. “I bet I can find out right now.” I slip two fingers inside her and thrust, fast and hard. She buckles and screams, wiggling against my palm, which probably stimulates her more. I pull my fingers out quickly once her muscles begin to clamp. “You are, baby. You are most definitely a squirter. But I’m not gonna let you off that easy. If you want that, you can ask for it next time.”

“Oh. My God,” seems to be her standard answer tonight. I’ve got her off balance. She’s not sure what to make of me, but her wet pu**y says she’s OK with that for now. I ease forward and she moans out, “Please, Spencer, just f**k me! Please!”

I do f**k her on the ’56 Blackbird. She screams my name four times. We almost topple the damn thing over with our antics and I could care less. That bike can be repaired, but this first dirty f**k with my Bombshell, that’s never gonna happen again.

It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

It’s a change-my-life-forever thing.

It’s a falling-in-love-and-lust thing.

It’s a recognizing-my-best-friend thing.

And it’s the day I decide—this girl is mine.

Forever.

Chapter Seven

I pull myself out of the past and sigh. It’s not going to end this way, that’s for damn sure. It’s not. I’ve been planning for my moment for years and that shit is just about in reach. I refuse to submit to circumstances.

I glance up at the clock on the wall and realize it’s already ten o’clock. I might as well go back into town early, just in case Ronnie thinks she can duck out and evade me at closing time. I grab my keys and my phone and head down to the buildings on the far end of the property where I keep the surveillance van. Ford’s robot shit is in there and I won’t have time to come back to the house before meeting him at midnight.

I key open the garage and walk into the darkness. A stray beam from the outside security light bounces off a chrome fender and distracts me for a moment. I reach over to the wall and flip on the light.

My old Chevy truck—the same one I drove around town when I first moved out here, the same one I met Ronnie in—is staring back at me. One of my mechanics borrowed it last week when his truck was out of commission. He must’ve parked it in the wrong bay.

I suddenly have an overwhelming need to drive this truck into town to see Ronnie. Maybe I can talk her into going for a drive and it will spark a memory in her? A memory that reminds her that we’re good together. I fish around in a drawer where I keep an extra set of keys, then reach inside the surveillance van and pull out Ford’s case. I think there’s a computer in there, but I really have no idea. He locks that shit up tight. It’s not really a briefcase, it’s a portable safe. You’d break whatever’s inside opening it up without a key, and even if you ever did access Ford’s computer, he’s got an automatic kill switch on the drive if you get the password wrong just once. We learned our lesson the last time his shit was breached. Almost cost us life in prison. We don’t make the same mistakes twice so the password kill is more than a just-in-case precautionary measure. And Ford never forgets a password. There is no need for a second chance.

I check the back of the van for anything else we might need, but it’s clean back here, so I get in the old Chevy, set the case down on the passenger seat, and pull out of the garage.

The ride back into FoCo is nothing but a whole lot of time to stew in all the mistakes I’ve made over the past few years. I’m second-guessing everything. The team, the jobs, the revenge, the bailouts. All of it had consequences we never saw coming.

But there’s nothing we can do about that now. We just need to move forward and clean it up as best we can.

The only thing I don’t regret is how I’ve handled Ronnie. In her case, I did everything right. I made sure of it. I covered all my tracks, I left no trace, I have kept her as far from me as possible for as long as possible. New Year’s was the first time I slept with her in months. And that was a private party. We stayed the night in Rook’s old garden apartment. We never left the building together. I made sure I was gone in the morning when she woke up.

The time before that it was just after Rook spilled her guts about her life on national TV and got more than a hundred people arrested in the process. People lined up outside Chaput Studios with giant signs. One proclaimed her a lying whore. And that was one of the nicer signs. She wasn’t even living there, she was here with me. But as soon as those monsters found that out, they parked at the end of my driveway.

I smile. They made the mistake of assuming that the road leading up to my house was public. It’s not. It’s my road, all three miles of it. It’s on my f**king land, which makes that land my f**king home. Which means I can shoot those f**kers if the right situation arises and it’s totally legal according to Colorado law.

I never got my chance to shoot anyone, but I did beat the shit out of a reporter who was hiding in the trees near the river in back of my house.