Ride Dirty (Raven Riders 3.50)

Something flashed behind his eyes, something that said he didn’t agree. But he didn’t voice it. For a long moment, he just stared at her. And it was quite possibly one of the most intimate moments of Emma’s life. Lying in the darkness early on Christmas morning, walls and barriers down so that another person could look into her eyes and see everything she was, everything she wanted, and everything she feared.

Gathering her courage, she forced out the words that told him what she most wanted just then. “Can I lay close to you?”

He groaned and pulled her to him, and then he rolled onto his back so that she was sprawled all along his side, her head on his chest, his arm holding her tight. “I’ll give you anything I can, Emma.”

She hugged herself to his chest, feeling for the first time just how markedly lean he was. “Right now, I just want you, Caine. That’s more than enough.”

Chapter 11

Caine didn’t sleep. Didn’t move. Nearly didn’t breathe.

Because he’d never before allowed another person to sleep with him this way. As a boy, he’d had to share a bedroom with other boys, sure. But at no point in the seventeen years since his fourteen-year-old self had run from that home had Caine ever done this.

His wakefulness now wasn’t because he was uncomfortable, though. Instead, it was because this moment, this…connection? felt so pure, so comforting, so fundamentally good that he didn’t want to miss a single moment.

In what little heart he still possessed, he knew whatever this was wasn’t likely to last. Daring to hope didn’t mean truly believing that a nearly impossible situation would work out the way he wanted. That wasn’t life’s M.O., at least not in his experience. Not ever.

But Emma made him want to try. To hope. To take the risk, no matter how many pieces he’d shatter into if it all went to shit. Scratch that. When. When it all went to shit.

In the meantime, he was going to memorize every second of good he got, in case he never got any more.

Breathing in the scent of strawberries from Emma’s hair, Caine made a mental catalogue of all this good. The slow, regular beat of her heart against his ribs. The heat of her everywhere they touched. The little twitches of her fingers against his chest. The deep, even draws of her breathing. That he could touch her hair and her shoulder and her arm as much as he wanted, and when she reacted at all, it was only to burrow in tighter against him.

Outside of fucking and the occasional handshake, Caine rarely touched another person or allowed himself to be touched. More often than not in his life, touch had been a painful thing. Hateful and hurtful and mean. So, just as he’d done with food and sleep and relationships, he’d shied away from touch, shied away so much that he sometimes wondered if he existed at all. If no one ever touched him, how could they know if he was real? Maybe people were all just twisted figments in each other’s tortured imaginations.

And that kind of jacked-up thinking was just one of the many reasons why all this might fit squarely into the category of felt good but was a really fucking bad idea.

“Then why are you doing it?” he whispered into the still of the night.

Because Emma was the first person who’d truly seen Caine in years. Not the biker. Not the ruthless enforcer of rules and dispenser of justice. Not the ink-and-piercing-covered punk. Each one of those personas its own kind of armor against the darkest sides of life.

But Emma…somehow it was like Emma had looked behind the veil. And, God help him, but it seemed like she hadn’t recoiled at the glimpse of the real him that she’d gotten. She treated him like he was normal, like he was her equal, like he was worthy of her respect. She made him fucking laugh. And, in such a short amount of time, she made him want, and hope, and care. It was almost as if being in her presence was like being pulled out of the darkness into her light, like being plugged into the world of the living, instead of floating as nothingness in the realm of ghosts that he so often inhabited.

Oh, there was more for her yet to see. She had no idea about the dirtiest, filthiest parts of him. He was going to have to tell her, and there was every likelihood that all this goodness would end right then.

But in the meantime, he committed every shred of this to memory.

On a sigh that sounded like pure contentment, Emma drew herself closer, her face slipping in against his neck, her thigh sliding to rest high up on his.