Blood & Moonlight

Chapter Seven — His Truck, His Rules

Kendra POV

There were very few things in this world I was willing to categorize as genuinely unfair. I'd grown up watching my mother navigate real difficulty with the kind of grace that made you recalibrate your definition of what qualified as a problem. I tried to keep perspective. I tried to be reasonable about what constituted actual hardship versus what constituted inconvenience dressed up in dramatic clothing.

This, however.

This was genuinely unfair.

Twenty-three hours. I kept doing the math, kept arriving at the same number, kept hoping I'd made an error somewhere that would reduce it to something manageable, like eight. Or four. Or zero, which would require us to already be there, which we were not. We were in the parking lot of a Marriott off an Arizona interstate at seven in the morning, and the next twenty-three hours of my life had been decided for me by the logistics of a packed SUV and my mother's complete immunity to my opinions about it.

I checked out at the front desk in three minutes because I'd packed the night before like a person with a system. Then I stood in the lobby with my overnight bag and my duffel and watched my family load into the SUV with what I could only describe as suspicious efficiency. Kyle had the middle row to himself. My mother had already organized the passenger seat. My father was doing something with the roof rack.

Nobody was suffering.

Just me.

I shouldered my bags and followed Bryan across the parking lot.

The truck was — okay. The truck was objectively, undeniably, almost offensively enormous. A black F-450 Raptor that sat up off the ground at a height that implied it had opinions about lesser vehicles. It was detailed, clean despite the cross-state drive yesterday, the chrome hardware catching the early light. The kind of truck that made a statement whether you wanted it to or not — and with Bryan, who was six foot three and two hundred and seventy-five pounds of the kind of build that made statement-making a passive activity, the whole combination was almost too much.

I looked at it.

I looked at him.

"You know," I said, keeping my voice conversational, the kind of tone you used when you were making an observation rather than a declaration, "when men drive trucks this big, it's usually because they're—" I tilted my head slightly, pressed my lips together in a thoughtful expression. "Compensating. For something."

Bryan didn't stop walking. He also didn't turn his head. But the side of his mouth moved — a slow pull, unhurried, something caught between amusement and a specific brand of confidence that I immediately wished I hadn't started this conversation.

He stopped at the driver's side and turned to face me over the hood of the truck. His eyes were doing the thing they did sometimes — the thing where they went slightly darker and the usual unreadable quality of them picked up something that was very much readable, something that knew exactly what it was doing.

"I'm not compensating for anything, Kendra," he said. His voice was perfectly calm. He reached up and rested one hand on the roof of the truck — casually, just a gesture of convenient height, but the way it pulled the sleeve of his shirt up and shifted the line of his shoulder was not something I was going to comment on. "I'm a big guy." A pause. "With big things."

The heat came up my neck so fast it almost had sound.

I was aware, with acute and deeply irritating clarity, that I had absolutely walked into that, and that I had no one to blame for it, and that the specific reason it landed the way it did was that I had context that most people in this situation would not have. I had a mental filing cabinet labeled things I was not going to think about and he had just knocked on its door from the outside with both fists.

I kept my face neutral. It cost me something.

"Good for you," I said.

He didn't smile. Not fully. But his eyes did the thing.

He moved around to the passenger side without being asked — I watched him come around the hood of the truck, the morning light doing nothing to make this situation easier — and he opened the door. The truck sat high. I was five-five, the step was substantial, and I had two bags and not enough sleep and an attitude that was doing its best.

He held out a hand.

I looked at the hand. Then at his face. I considered the alternative, which was trying to haul myself into the cab with both bags and the full dignity of someone who didn't need help, and the math on that wasn't working in my favor.

I took his hand.

His fingers closed around mine — steady, warm, the easy strength of someone for whom lifting was not an activity requiring effort — and he helped me up into the cab with a single smooth motion that left me settled in the passenger seat before I'd fully processed the transition. He handed up my bags, which he'd taken without me asking him to.

Then he closed the door.

Gently.

I sat in the passenger seat of Bryan Montgomery's truck and looked straight through the windshield at absolutely nothing in particular.

He pulled out of the lot at seven-fourteen. I know because I checked my phone, which I was holding in my lap because I was going to need the entertainment on this drive and I was already loading my playlist with the focused energy of someone building an emotional support structure before a long journey.

The inside of the truck was — I mean, it was nice. I'd known Bryan had money, or more accurately, I'd known our family had money, but the interior of this truck was the kind of nice that was specifically chosen rather than just expensive. The leather was dark and soft and clearly real, the kind that molded slightly to the shape of you when you sat in it. The console was clean, organized, a few things in the cupholder but nothing chaotic. The screen was big, the sound system had already been tested to my knowledge on the drive from Flagstaff yesterday and had clearly passed. There was space — genuine, actual leg room — in a way that the family SUV had never had enough of.

I would not be telling Bryan any of this.

I tucked my feet up under me, which I always did in cars on long drives, and looked out the passenger window as Arizona gave way to the highway. The desert in the early morning had a different quality than it did in the full heat of day — cooler, quieter, the light still sitting low and golden rather than the harsh vertical white it became by noon. I'd grown up in this light. I was going to miss it, probably, at some point. Not right now, because right now I was managing a different problem.

The problem was his smell.

This truck had been his for — I didn't know how long, but long enough. Long enough that the scent of him had settled into the cabin the way a person's scent settles into their own space, into fabric and leather and the air itself, layered and established and deeply unfair to me specifically. I'd noticed it from the moment he'd helped me in, and I'd been hoping that fresh morning air would dilute it. It was not being diluted. It was just — there. The earthy depth of it, like pine and something darker underneath, like soil after rain, something that belonged to the outdoors and had no business being this concentrated in an enclosed space. And underneath that a warmth that was just him — masculine in a way that bypassed thought and went straight to the body's most basic input channels.

I'd always secretly loved that smell.

Not secretly — privately. There was a distinction. Secretly implied something shameful. Privately just meant it wasn't anyone else's information. I had always found that scent calming, that was all. There was no narrative attached to it. It reminded me of the years before things got complicated, when Bryan had been someone I wasn't constantly braced against, when the scent of him meant safety rather than a complex problem.

My body, however, was not accepting the calming framing.

The warmth started around my midsection — that familiar, inconvenient bloom of it — and moved south with an efficiency that I was becoming deeply tired of, settling between my legs as a soft, persistent throb that I addressed by shifting slightly in my seat and thinking very deliberately about literally anything else. Grocery lists. Cheerleading formations. The paperwork I was going to have to file with Crestwood's athletic department.

In my peripheral vision, Bryan's right hand on the wheel.

His jaw.

The way the morning light was doing something specific to the line of his profile that I was absolutely not cataloguing.

I looked at my phone.

His hand on the wheel tightened. I caught the motion in my peripheral — the shift in his grip, subtle, the knuckles setting slightly. He reached forward without a word and rolled down all four windows.

The wind hit me like an announcement.

My hair — which I'd left down, which I had specifically spent three minutes getting to sit the way I wanted this morning, which was doing its thing — immediately had an opinion about the sudden forty-five-mile-an-hour airflow, and that opinion was enthusiastic and destructive. It was everywhere. Across my face, in my mouth, whipping around my shoulders, the entirety of it rebelling against the situation.

I gasped. "Do you mind—" I grabbed at it uselessly with both hands. "My hair is going to knot, Bryan, close the—"

"I want fresh air." He said it like it was a complete and finished sentence. Facing forward, both hands back on the wheel, the picture of a person for whom this decision had been made and was done being discussed. "My truck."

"Your truck—"

"My rules."

I stared at the side of his face for two full seconds.

Then I leaned down, unzipped the front pocket of my bag, and pulled out the hair tie I kept there by habit — by the specific learned habit of a woman who cheerleaded in outdoor stadiums and had learned this lesson more than once. I gathered my hair, all of it, in one controlled motion, twisted it into a bun, and secured it. Tight. Functional. Not cute, because cute was not the vibe of a person making a point.

I sat back.

Crossed my arms in front of my chest.

Stared straight ahead through the windshield at the highway unfolding ahead of us.

The wind moved around the cab, loud and constant, and outside the desert kept scrolling past at seventy miles an hour, and we drove in silence that had a very specific quality to it — the kind that wasn't empty but full, packed with things that neither of us were saying.

I was not going to look at him.

I had made this decision and I was committing to it. The window was there on my right. The side mirror. The desert. The sky, which at this hour was still doing something beautiful that I was going to appreciate on its own terms as a natural phenomenon and not as a backdrop for anything else.

He was in my peripheral vision regardless.

That was the problem with peripheral vision — it collected information whether you wanted it to or not. The line of his shoulder. The way he drove, one hand easy on the wheel, the other arm resting on the console, the position of someone who had done a lot of driving and was comfortable with distance. His jaw, which was doing nothing in particular and managing to be distracting about it anyway. The dark mess of his hair moving slightly in the wind from the windows.

I looked at the desert.

I looked at my phone.

I opened a playlist and put in one earbud — leaving the other out because manners — and selected something that was specifically not romantic, specifically not anything that could be categorized as mood-setting, specifically the most aggressively upbeat pop I had access to, because my body was already making decisions I hadn't authorized and I was not going to give it any additional material to work with.

My body, predictably, did not care about the playlist.

It was warm. The leather was warm. He was warm, a specific radiating warmth that I could detect from the passenger seat, which was something I was going to blame on the Arizona heat outside and absolutely nothing else. The throb between my legs was doing what it was doing and I was ignoring it with the dedicated focus of a person who had a lot of practice at ignoring things and was very good at it.

Twenty-two hours and forty-one minutes to go.

I was going to be fine.

I was absolutely, completely going to be fine.

I looked straight ahead, arms crossed, earbud in, jaw set, and committed to the next twenty-two hours and forty-one minutes with the specific resignation of someone who had run out of alternatives and was making the best of it.

The highway stretched ahead of us in a long, unwavering line.

Bryan said nothing.

I said nothing.

The wind came through the open windows and the truck smelled like him and the desert outside was already starting to heat up under the climbing sun, and twenty-three hours, I told myself, was just a number.

Just a very, very large number.