Page 103 of Reckless Hearts

I sleptlike the dead last night.

Somewhere between the whiskey and the dancing and the slow, heated looks that said everything words couldn’t, the three of us tilted off axis.

Somehow, when the morning comes, we don’t tilt back.

The room feels too quiet afterward, like the silence is alive.

Colt shifts beside me, his fingers trailing lazily down my arm, tracing invisible lines like he’s mapping me into memory.

Maverick’s breathing is slow and steady behind me, his chest pressing into my spine with every rise and fall.

Nobody says anything.

We don’t need to.

Every nerve in my body feels raw, scraped clean and left open to the air, but it’s not a bad feeling. It’s the kind of rawness that means you transcended something.

That youearnedit.

I blink up at the cracked ceiling, counting the fading shadows from the broken blinds, and wonder if this is what peace feels like.

Colt’s hand finds mine, his thumb rubbing slow, lazy circles over the back of it.

I squeeze back, just once.

Maverick lets out a quiet, contented sound, half sigh, half hum.

It drags a sleepy smile out of me, and before I know it, my whole body is sinking deeper into the mattress, into their touch, into this impossible, perfect thing we’ve built between us.

Luke bangs on the motel door just after sunrise, yelling something about breakfast burritos and the best coffee west of Texas.

Colt groans, and Maverick flings a pillow at the door without even lifting his head. Colt shifts behind me, sleep-warm and heavy, his arm tightening instinctively around my waist.

Maverick’s hand finds mine in the tangle of sheets, his fingers curling around mine like a promise he doesn’t know he’s making.

The motel hums around us, distant traffic, the low thrum of an ice machine down the hall.

I close my eyes and pretend the world outside doesn’t exist.

Sitting cross-legged, fresh from the shower, I braid my still-damp hair. Maverick yanks one loose as he passes, grinning when I curse at him. Colt steals the last clean towel, and Maverick steals Colt’s hat in revenge, jamming it onto his head backward and smirking like a satisfied cat.

It’s ridiculous and messy and chaotic.

And it’s perfect.

We pile into Maverick’s truck because none of us trusts Luke’s sense of direction or his sense of speed this early in the morning.

The windows are down. The air smells like dust and sun and the faint sweetness of hayfields baking in the heat.

Maverick props his boots on the dash despite Colt’s half-hearted threats to break both his legs. I curl into the seat between them, my bare knees brushing theirs, too content to care where we’re going.

“This is dangerous,” Colt says, lazily draping his arm over the back of the seat behind me. “Three idiots, one truck, no supervision.”

I glance at Maverick. “When have we ever needed supervision?”

He huffs a laugh, tipping his head back. “Good point.”

We find a breakfast joint that looks like it’s been standing since the sixties, tucked on the side of a dirt road nobody uses anymore.

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