Free Beyond Happily Ever After: Blank Canvas (Beyond #6.6) by Kit Rocha

Blank Canvas
    Ace had never been more than a dozen miles past the outer boundaries of the sectors before. Hell, he'd rarely been outside of Sector Four, except for those tense, uncomfortable years when his job had been to charm the panties off the rich ladies in Eden.
    They'd left the sectors behind hours ago. Eden wasn't even visible in the rearview mirror—though that probably wasn't distance. No, the only goddamn thing in their rear view was a string of almost identical giant hills and baby mountains, but Cruz had been maneuvering around and between them like he had a map lasered on the backs of his eyelids.
    “We're getting close,” Cruz murmured as he nodded ahead of them. The mountains gave way to something more familiar on their left—abandoned buildings with caved-in ceilings and trees growing through them. Bent signs leaned precariously next to the cracked road, too rusted to give a hint about where they were or where they were going.
    “Close to where, though?” Rachel leaned forward from the back seat, then braced one hand on Ace's shoulder and climbed over to settle between them. “You haven't told us anything.”
    Cruz's lips twitched. “That's how surprises work.”
    Ace shifted to make room for Rachel and then ruined it by dragging her close to his side. “I think he's developing a sense of humor, Rae.”
    “An evil one,” she agreed. She nudged Cruz's thigh with her knee, then traced one of the tattoos flowing down his arm with her thumb. “At least give us a hint. Surprises work that way, too.”
    If anything was likely to get him to open up, it was Rachel giving him big eyes and coaxing touches. But Cruz's smile only grew as he steered the car around a giant crack in the road. “I'm taking you to a ghost town.”
    Ace snorted and jerked his thumb toward the window, where the size of the abandoned buildings had gone from one and two stories to four and five. “That's not a hint. We're already in one.”
    And it was true. Cars sat abandoned and rusted out in some of the lots, but most were stripped bare, with tires and even doors missing. Windows were shattered, the strewn glass catching the slanting afternoon light as Cruz wove them deeper and deeper into town.
    Rachel stared. “It's worse than Three ever was.”
    “Eden's fault.” Cruz turned off the wide street onto a narrower side road cluttered with garbage and more shattered glass. “The city that used to be here depended on water from a river, but the Base diverted it right after the Flares in order to irrigate the communes. Some people held on here for five, even ten years. But now it's just scavengers.”
    That sounded like Eden, all right. Use whatever they could get their hands on, and fuck whoever else needed it. Ace cuddled Rachel a little closer just to make himself feel better.
    And then he teased Cruz, because that made him feel better, too. “Are we there yet?”
    “Ace—”
    “Are we there yet?”
    Cruz made that hot-as-fuck little frustrated growly noise, and Ace hid a smile against Rachel's hair. She laughed, a muffled noise that she covered with a cough.
    Then her hand fell on his knee, slid up his thigh. “Behave,” she whispered.
    “Why?” Ace retorted, covering her hand and inching it higher. That might get their lover moving—Cruz hated not being able to watch when Rachel got her fingers around his dick. “He loves growling at me.”
    “Mm-hmm.” She stilled her hand. “But he needs to concentrate on driving.”
    “It'll be worth the wait,” Cruz murmured. Then, because he was getting evil, he laid his arm across Rachel's shoulders and curled his fingers around the back of Ace's neck. Not rough, but firm, and his thumb made little circles on Ace's skin that held all kinds of filthy promise.
    Didn't mean he had to give in easy. Especially with Rachel's fingers so close to his dick, which was already the kind of hard that made him less interested in ghost towns and surprises and more interested in how