Contracted Wife to the MC President

Chapter 8

Harper POV

The command hung there, heavy in the freezing air.

I looked at him. Shirtless, chest rising and falling steady, that white gauze taped over his ribs the only proof of what we'd just survived.

I didn't argue. I was too tired to, my body running on nothing after the adrenaline crash.

I sat on the edge of the mattress and worked the laces of the boots loose, letting them drop to the floor. My trousers were beyond saving anyway, stiff with mud, ash, blood that wasn't mine. I unbuttoned them and stepped out, kicking the ruined silk aside.

That left me in lace underwear and his t-shirt, hem hitting mid-thigh, doing nothing against the cold coming through the walls.

He watched all of it. His eyes tracked down my legs and back up to my face, jaw tight, but he didn't say anything.

He climbed in first, taking the side near the door, gun set on the floorboards within reach. Flat on his back, shoulders taking up more than his half of the bed, bandaged ribs facing the ceiling.

I got in beside him.

The mattress was small enough to be a joke. Old springs groaned under both of us, the middle sagging toward him no matter how I tried to fight it. I pressed my back to the wall, put maybe three inches of space between us, and pulled the thin quilt to my chin.

He reached over and killed the lantern.

Dark, total. I lay there rigid, staring at nothing. Every breath he took shifted his arm against my shoulder, and every time it happened something jolted through me that I didn't want to examine.

Hours went by.

The stove died down to embers, and the cold crept in through the walls, finding my legs, working up my spine. I curled tighter, knees to my chest, biting my lip to keep my teeth from chattering. Didn't work. A shiver hit hard enough to rattle the bed frame.

"f**k this," he muttered.

His hand closed around my waist before I could say anything, and he pulled, no asking, just pulled me back until I hit the wall of his chest.

"Reaper." I grabbed his forearm on instinct.

"Stop fighting it," he said, voice rough with sleep, right against my ear.

He angled his bandaged side away and wrapped his arm around me anyway, hooking a leg over mine, pinning me against his good side. The heat coming off him was immediate, overwhelming, a furnace against the cold. His heartbeat thudded steady against my back, his face buried in my neck, stubble scraping my skin.

I was tangled up in the bed of a man who solved problems with bullets. I should've been afraid.

Instead the weight of him settled something in me. My muscles unlocked one by one. The shivering stopped. Cedar and leather and heat, and somewhere in there my exhaustion finally won and pulled me under.

I woke up to dust and gun oil.

Gray morning light through a filthy window, long shadows on the floor.

I couldn't move. Sometime in the night we'd turned, and now I was facing him instead of the wall, cheek against his chest, his shirt bunched up around my thighs, my bare legs tangled with his denim ones. His arm was locked across my back like it had never planned on letting go.

I lay still, just absorbing it.

His breathing was slow and even under my cheek. Ink and scar tissue against my skin, the hard line of his stomach against mine.

Then it hit me. I'd slept through the whole night. No nightmares, no jolt awake. For the first time in my life I'd felt completely safe.

That terrified me more than the gunfire had. He wasn't safety. He was a weapon I'd hired to point at bigger threats.

I pressed my palms to his chest and tried to ease back, tried to slide my leg free.

His arm tightened instantly.

"Don't move."

I froze. Looked up.

His eyes were already open. Watching me. He hadn't been asleep at all.

His voice came out wrecked, low enough to feel more than hear. He didn't loosen his grip, just let his thumb drag slow against my spine, and heat pooled low again despite everything.

The space between us had nothing left in it. I could feel his breath on my mouth. His eyes dropped there, dark and wanting.

I couldn't move. Couldn't breathe.

Then it broke.

His jaw locked, the heat in his eyes going cold and calculating in half a second. He pulled his arm back and sat up, putting real distance between us, wincing when it pulled at his ribs.

Cold air rushed into the space he'd left.

I sat up too, tugging the shirt down over my thighs, heart still slamming.

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stared at the dead stove.

"They knew exactly when to hit us." Flat. No trace of the man from a minute ago.

"What?" My brain was still catching up.

"The mercenaries." He looked at me over his shoulder. "They didn't just hit the compound. They hit the gates three minutes after the chaplain pronounced us. They knew the perimeter. Knew the guard shifts."

I went cold. "You think my father had the blueprints?"

"Your father doesn't have my blueprints." His eyes had nothing warm left in them. "This was an inside job. Someone in my club, or someone close to your father, sold us out."

He stood, picked his gun up off the floor.

"And whoever it is," he said, racking the slide, "is going to bleed for it."