Strength & Courage (The Night Horde SoCal Book 1) (25 page)

Ignoring that sign of his discomfort, she traced the scar with her fingertips. She’d never asked about it. Now was as good a time as any. “How’d you get this? It must have been a terrible wound.”

“Outlaw shit. Didn’t kill me, doesn’t matter.”

“Same with the scars on your leg?”

“Cost of doing business.”

She was surprised how little his blasé attitude about his obviously grievous wounds affected her. She was surprised, too, at the contrast between his lack of concern for himself and his surfeit of concern for her.

“No lasting damage?”

He shrugged. “My back stiffens up after a few hours on the bike. Nothin’ I can’t handle.”

“How far did you ride today?” He’d been gone hours.

She massaged her way up again, and he groaned with more enthusiasm when her thumbs massaged his neck. “Around Santa Barbara, a little north of there. I sat on the beach for a while. Thought some things out.”

Santa Barbara was a hundred and fifty miles away. North of there was farther. He’d ridden more than three hundred miles. It seemed like a lot to Sid.

“And the result of all that thinking was to try to bail on us? That was a waste of gasoline and beach time.”

Again, that single, dry chuckle. “Maybe.”

“Definitely.” She patted his arm. “Lie down. I’ll rub your back properly.”

He caught her hand in his and looked over his shoulder. “I love you. I can’t handle you getting hurt, too.”

She leaned up and kissed his cheek. “There’s only so much control we can have, Muse. The rest is just…hope.”

He smiled; it was sad but sincere. “That’s pretty mellow for somebody who wasn’t sure about us just last week.”

“A lot’s happened. I’m sure now. I love you.”

“Enough?”

“More than enough.”

With a wry smirk, he said, “Me, too.”

He turned, took her face in his hands, and kissed her. Before he could deepen it, though, she pulled back. “I was going to rub your back.”

“No.” He plucked at her t-shirt, lifting the hem. She raised her arms and let him discard her top. When he covered her breasts with his hot, rough hands, she arched into the touch. “I want to be inside you. I want to be home.”

The words he’d said, and the way he’d looked at her when he’d said them, made Sid’s heart roll. She backed off and wriggled out of her pajama bottoms, and he stood and dropped his jeans. When he went for the drawer of her dresser, she said, “No. Don’t.” The words were out of her mouth before they’d been thought.

He stopped and looked at her. His cock was already impressively hard. “I haven’t been tested yet. And it hasn’t been a week since you…I thought we had to wait a week before the pills…”

Though it hadn’t been her plan, she understood that she didn’t want to take it back. “I trust you. And I feel reckless. Be reckless with me. I want just you inside me. After the past few days, I don’t want anything between us, not even that.”

Muse stared at her for another couple of seconds, and then he closed the drawer and came back to her. Lying on his back, he pulled her to lie on top of him. For a few minutes, they only kissed. His hands wound into her hair and held her close, and his tongue searched and caressed every part of her mouth.

His long, broad body under hers, his sculpted muscles moving against her, his strong arms framing her, his hard cock pressed between them, the hair on his legs rasping against the smooth skin of hers—Sid moaned, overwhelmed by the brilliant, beautiful sensation of it all.

At the sound, he let go of her hair and grasped her hips, dragging her fully onto him, settling his legs between hers. He turned his mouth, breaking their kiss. Looking up into her eyes, the blue of his deep again with more than just sadness, but with love, too, he murmured, “Ride me, hon. Put me in you. I need to be in you. But go slow. Been a long, long time since I went in unwrapped.”

“I love the way you talk.”

He smiled and kissed her, sucking gently on her lip, until she put her hands on his chest and pushed herself up. Lifting off of his hips, she wrapped one hand around him at his base and then hovered over him, moving slowly downward, keeping his eyes trapped with her own.

When the tip of his bare length touched her clit, she rubbed it back and forth, moaning and fighting the need to close her eyes. When she saw the muscles in his neck begin to cord up, she eased down, taking him inside.

“Fuck, Muse.
Ohhh
,” she breathed. “Oh.” Keeping a steady, snail-slow pace, feeling every inch, every millimeter of his cock sheathing inside her, feeling the swell of his glans move deeper and deeper, feeling him grow even larger, she settled onto his hips, taking him fully into her.

“Sweet Christ,” he gritted, his jaw locked shut. “Don’t fuckin’ move, hon.”

Enjoying seeing him on the tattered edge of control, she rolled her hips. He hissed and arched his neck, his fingers digging brutally into her hips.

“I need to move. It’s too good.” She rolled her hips again, and he groaned as if he were in pain.

He took a deep breath, then blew it out through pursed lips. Then did it again. “Fuck, you feel…” He stopped; words seemed to have eluded him now. Another breath and a blow. “Okay, hon.” He released her hips and moved a hand to her neck, pulling her back down. “Do what you want.” And he kissed her. With his free hand, he pinched a nipple, and she moaned and began to move.

She had had sex without a condom often in her life. She’d had boyfriends, and she’d been on the Pill until she’d gone off after Mark, mainly because she’d then gone into an ‘I hate men’ phase and decided there was no reason to stay on it. But it was just different with Muse. Maybe because he was bigger—though it felt like more than that. Or maybe she was just being stupidly romantic. It didn’t matter. Having Muse inside her like this was a feeling incomparable in its emotional and physical intensity.

As she felt her orgasm building, demanding more from their connection, she tried to sit up again, but Muse wouldn’t let her go. One hand was clamped around her neck, holding their mouths together; the other had moved from her breast when she’d tried to push back and was now locked over her back. He was taking over, even from this position, holding her still as his hips thrust upward, driving himself into her from below.

At first, she wanted to protest, to fight him; he tended to take control during sex, and while she liked that, she also liked being in charge once in a while. But then her orgasm was on her, and it was huge. The arm locked across her back moved, and that hand grabbed her ass and lifted her, widening her legs and resituating her across his hips. That slight change of position made him hit inside her in a new way, and it was over. She came—moaning, nearly screaming, into his mouth as he drove upward even harder into her.

He tore his mouth from hers, breaking their kiss to nearly shout, “Fuck! I can feel you coming on me! Fuck, Jesus fuck!” He rolled them, putting her underneath him, and pounded into her, bellowing as he came.

Panting, he dropped his forehead to hers. “I don’t want to be without you.”

She kissed his nose. “Then stay.”

He nodded and rolled to his back, still hard inside her, bringing her with him. He pulled the comforter over them, and they fell asleep like that, Sid on top of him, their bodies still connected.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Muse woke the next morning with Sid still sleeping on top of him. His back was stiff from the ride the day before, and from lying in the same position all night, but he was in no hurry to move. She was warm and soft, her body in perfect repose, her head nestled against his neck. He took a deep breath and, with it, took in the lingering coconut scent of her shampoo.

She had a whole set of coconut-smelling stuff in her bathroom—shampoo, some kind of gel soap she used a puffy thing with, even a candle. It had gotten to the point that the scent made him hard, automatically and instantly. If Bibi served coconut cream pie at Thanksgiving, he was in trouble.

The day before Carrie died, he and Sid had talked about Thanksgiving. Her birthday was the day after, and she said she had to spend it with her parents. She wanted him with her, but her twisted delight in her certainty that her parents would hate him—a delight and certainty she’d still expressed sober—had given him pause. He didn’t want to be some kind of piece in a game she was playing with her family. He wanted to go to Hoosier and Bibi’s and spend it as he had all the years he’d been in Madrone, with his family. They’d had something like a couple’s quarrel about it.

And finally, they’d agreed to a ridiculous plan to have two Thanksgivings. Bibi served her meal in the early afternoon; Sid’s mother in the evening. While his brothers were getting down to the serious drinking, he’d be sitting in some mansion in Newport Beach, probably eating with the wrong fucking fork.

And they were spending the fucking night there. If that wasn’t love, he didn’t know what was.

But he loved her, no question. Her calming touch on him last night, her body resting contently on his now—she had eased him, helped him make sense.

At some point in the night, probably not long after they’d fallen asleep, he’d slid out of her. They were both still slightly sticky; he ignored that, too. How long had it been since he’d been unwrapped inside a woman? Ten years? At least. Since Debra, in Billings.

He’d probably been closer to serious with Deb than he’d been with any other woman, until now. He’d seen her maybe five, six times a year, for five or six years, and sometimes he’d stayed with her for a week or more. Most of his regular fucks during his Nomad days had been P.O.T.s he’d favored. One, in Vegas, had been a working girl, though she’d fucked him recreationally. Deb was just a normal chick, a clerk at a grocery. Cute, and a nice, slim body, but nothing special in the looks department. She’d been funny, her humor cutting, and he’d enjoyed sitting with her and listening to her take down whatever person or topic had her fired up at the time. She was a lively fuck, too. A year or so in, she’d said she had an IUD. She’d told him she wasn’t fucking anybody else, and if he promised to stay wrapped with anybody else, he could stop using condoms with her. And that had been spectacular.

But Deb had gotten tired of being his occasional, on-call fuck and found herself a local guy. Muse figured she’d gotten married and started spitting out babies. When he’d pulled up that last time and a guy had opened Deb’s door, he’d been disappointed, but not much more than that. He’d wished them well and headed back to the Billings clubhouse of his former club.

Since then, until last night, he’d kept his dick hermetically sealed. But last night…fuck. To be that close, that connected, to a woman he loved? It had been more than physical. It had been a revelation.

He hoped that she’d been on the Pill long enough, because he did not want to be a father—but when she’d asked him to be reckless with her, he hadn’t cared, and even now his resistance to the thought of parenthood was more measured than usual. He shouldn’t be a father; he was sure of that. He would be forty-three in a few days, and he was an outlaw again. More than that, he just wasn’t wired to be a father. Neither his past nor his present had made him a man who should raise a child. Yet the idea felt different in his head. Not right, but different.

He wasn’t good enough, or strong enough, to be a role model. He’d put his baby sister in the ground yesterday, because he hadn’t been there for her when she’d needed him. Carrie was the only person he’d ever had to take care of, and he’d failed her.

Sid moaned prettily in her sleep and stirred, not waking but sending electric currents of need through his body as her skin slid over his. His cock went hard between them.

What he felt for this woman—he didn’t even bother to try to understand it. She fulfilled him in some way, made him feel sated. He didn’t see how he could offer her the same. If he were a better man, maybe he’d still get up right now and pack off back to his crappy house. Leave her be, let her find somebody more in her league. Somebody with an education, somebody with a future.

But she didn’t want him to go, and he didn’t want to leave. He wasn’t strong enough to be on his own—not now, not knowing that this, she, was here for him. He’d felt desperate and bleak, yesterday and the days before it, empty of everything. And then, when he’d been ready to give up, she’d held onto him and filled him back up.

Not yet two months had passed since that early October night when she’d pointed a gun at his head. But everything had changed.

Cliff got up from his fancy new dog bed and set his nose on the mattress next to Muse’s arm.

“Hey, buddy,” Muse muttered, not wanting to disturb Sid. But the dog needed to go out, so he was going to have to end this peaceful moment.

He rubbed his hands down the length of her back, loving the way her ribs, just palpable under her silky, unblemished skin, played against his palms. She stirred again, her hand snaking around his waist and pushing between his back and the mattress, and he kissed her head. “Wake up, hon. I gotta let Cliff out.”

Moaning, she slid to his side, and he rolled with her, unable to resist at least a kiss before he attended to his dog. He lifted her chin and put his mouth on hers before she’d opened her eyes. He kissed her, running his tongue lightly over her soft lips, sliding gently between her teeth, until she finally, really woke and kissed him back. After a few more seconds of indulgence, he pulled back and smiled at her sleepy, beautiful face.

“Morning.”

She brought a hand up and scratched lightly at his thickening beard. “How are you?”

Turning into her touch so that he could kiss her palm, he answered, “Better. I’ll be okay.” When she shifted under him so that his cock bumped against her pussy, hot and already noticeably wet, he lifted his hips away. “I gotta let Cliff out. Then I’ll be back.” With a quick peck to her cheek, he sat up. “Stay put.”

Not bothering with clothes, he let Cliff out and left the door open, then filled the dog’s bowls. As he filled the water bowl, he stared at the large box on the floor near the back door. Carrie’s things from her room at the center. Photographs, cards, and posters. Books. Their grandma’s hairbrush. He didn’t know what to do with it all. He couldn’t even open the box—or, for that matter, touch it. It had been sitting where it was for days.

He shook off the shrouded thoughts that wanted to enclose his mind, and set Cliff’s bowl in the stand.

When he got back to the bedroom, Sid had tossed the comforter and top sheet to the floor and was propped up on the pillows in the middle of the bed, her legs bent and open, her pert tits and pretty pussy right out on display.

He stood at the end of the bed and took her in, his eyes moving from that heart of her up to her face. Her hair framed her, cascading down over her shoulders and arms. When their eyes met, she smiled.

“Do you know how beautiful you are?” His voice sounded gruff even to his own ears.

“I feel beautiful to you.”

“You are.” He climbed onto the bed and lay down between her legs. “You are the most beautiful thing in my life.” She purred and shimmied her hips, and he bent his head and tasted her. “And you taste like coconut. I could live eating nothing but you.”

She writhed at his words, and he grabbed her hips and held her in place so he could have his way. Fuck, he loved her bare pussy, so smooth and tight. He’d watched her shave once; she had this pink electric razor, and watching her move it all over between her legs, slowly, the little thing buzzing in her hand, had been erotic as hell. When he’d asked if he could help, she’d laughed and said absolutely not. But he’d fucked her on the bathroom floor as soon as she was done.

Now, he buried his face as deep as he could between her thighs. He hadn’t lied—she did taste like coconut, the smell of her soap surrounding him as his tongue lapped at her sweet juices. She tasted like their sex, too, and the sultry mélange made him painfully hard. She arched up, whimpering, when he sucked on her clit, catching the bud gently between his teeth.

“Muse!” she gasped.

In response, he released her clit and looked up, sliding two fingers inside her, pushing until he found the spot deep in that made her clench around his fingers. “Yeah, hon?”

“God! I need you up here.”

With another deep suck of her, he pulled his body up over hers, running his tongue up her skin from her pussy, pausing to lave her perfect navel, and continuing up until they were face to face. He kissed her, letting her taste herself on his lips, his beard. Her hands came up and combed through his hair, tugging gently on the part that had fallen forward to brush his forehead. She shifted her hips, drawing her legs up along his sides, and all he’d have to do would be to flex forward, and he’d be inside her.

He lifted up and nipped lightly at her lip. “Condom, or are we still being reckless?” It was Friday, still a couple of days before the week was up and they were safe.

For a moment, she was quiet, her brown eyes dark and thoughtful. “I don’t think I can go back to them. Not after last night.”

“Me, either.” He nipped at her bottom lip again, letting his tongue smooth over it.

“And if something happens?”

He pushed into her, and it took him a moment before the power of speech returned. Fuck, no. Nothing between them, not ever again. “I need this. I need you. It feels…important.” It did. It felt crucial, and he didn’t know why. “Let’s just play it out.”

Sid nodded and closed her eyes. “Yeah, okay. Just fuck me. God, just fuck me.”

Muse complied.

~oOo~

Three Sheriff’s Department cruisers, including the Sheriff’s, a county fire engine, and a reporter from the Madrone
Sentinel
were outside Virtuoso Cycles when Muse got there later that morning. The entrance to the showroom had been cordoned off, and a crowd had massed at the other side of the tape.

When he’d gotten the call, he’d collected Sid and Cliff, put them in her silly pink car, and followed them to the clubhouse. He was at her door before she could open it, and he pulled them both into the clubhouse as quickly as he could. He was grateful that, though she was curious, she didn’t fight him. He’d told her he needed to keep her safe and, on furlough that day, anyway, she’d gone with him.

They weren’t locking down, but Hoosier had wanted family called in until they had a handle on the situation, whatever that was. Muse still didn’t know much, and he was in a hurry to find out.

Once he knew they were ensconced with the other old ladies and the kids, he went to find his brothers, who, Missouri and SoCal alike, were in the shop. A few hadn’t shown yet, but Muse knew they were on their way.

Hoosier and Connor were standing with the Sheriff. Muse saw Bart talking with Sherlock and Dom, the Missouri IO. He went to them. “What the fuck happened?” The smell of smoke and burning meat was strong; Muse couldn’t make sense of it. There didn’t seem to be fire damage.

Bart turned to include Muse in the circle. “Van pulled up onto the sidewalk, threw a fifty-five-gallon steel drum through the showroom window. There were holes punched in the lid, and smoke was pouring through. We had a shop full of people dropping off and picking up. Civilians. We evacuated. Somebody called it in as a bomb.”

“It wasn’t?”

Sherlock shook his head. “No. They finally opened the drum about fifteen minutes ago. It was the severed head of a foal—a baby horse. They’d set it on fire and closed the drum.”