Penance

by Kristin Harte

  But for how long?

  “So, I was thinking,” he said, settling in across from me with his own eggs and toast. “How about we go back to our quid pro quo?”

  Like last night—you take off, I take off. I pointed my fork at him and raised an eyebrow. Just one, because people said I looked dangerous when I did that. “If you wanted me naked, you shouldn’t have shown me all those comfy clothes you’ve been hiding. I may never take these yoga pants off.”

  He coughed a laugh. “Not that, though watching you walk around in those pants for the rest of my life doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. I want you naked whenever you’re ready to remove them temporarily, but I also wanted to ask you something.”

  Oh. That sort of quid pro quo. “Okay. Ask away.”

  “How do you prefer your eggs?”

  That…wasn’t what I’d been expecting. “Over easy. I like to dip my toast in them, but these are delicious.”

  He nodded, loading up his fork. “I don’t think I’ve ever made eggs that way, but I’ll learn.”

  Sweet, sweet Finn. “Scrambled is fine.”

  “I hate the word fine. You deserve better than just fine.”

  I couldn’t deal with that statement. Not right then. “You wasted one of your remaining four questions to ask me about eggs?”

  “That was sort of a warm-up.” He blew out a breath, looking almost nervous. “Can you tell me about your mom?”

  Bomb. He’d just dropped one in my world. One that sent ice exploding throughout my body. “What do you know about my mom?”

  “Nothing except that apparently she’s important in some way.”

  “Of course she is—she gave birth to me.”

  He set his fork down, his plate still half full. “I’m doing this all wrong.”

  “Is there a right way to interrogate someone?”

  “I didn’t mean to interrogate. I just…Parris mentioned—”

  “Ah, so this is Parris’ fault.” I was going to kill that man.

  “Fuck no.” Finn pushed back from the table and tossed his napkin over his plate before sliding closer. Bringing his chair to face mine so he could place his hands on my knees. “Jinx, I want to know about you. That’s all.”

  Knowing about me meant dragging him into something I didn’t think I could get him out of, and that wasn’t going to happen. So instead of answering him, I stood up and closed the distance between us. Straddled his lap right there at the table and pulled him in close. Held on as I let the ice melt and the tension release.

  “Sorry,” I said, locking my past down tight so I didn’t slip up and admit everything to him. So I didn’t drag him into a world he was so much better than. “My mom is a sensitive subject for me.”

  He pushed a lock of my hair over my shoulder and settled one hand on my hip. “I can see that. But I’d like it if you shared that with me at some point.”

  I had a feeling that would never happen. Or at least, we’d never have the time needed to get to that point of trust. I’d never get there, at least. A thought that hurt. “Some point…but not today.”

  “Okay. I’ll wait.” He gripped me tighter as I began to move, to tease, to roll over his lap. “Jinx?”

  “If you ask me to have sex, my answer would be more than just fine.”

  “Yeah?” He pushed up against me, his hands sliding up to cup my breasts over my sweater. “What would it be?”

  “Yes.” I leaned in and bit the side of his neck. “A very enthusiastic yes.”

  He groaned as I rocked my hips over his lap, as I ground myself against where he was so hard for me.

  “So, no quid pro quo today,” he said as he picked me up and lifted me, carrying me easily across the room. “Not right now, at least.”

  “Not right now.” I grabbed his shoulders when he laid me on his counter, holding on to stay upright. “Finn?”

  “Lie back,” he said, his voice deep and sultry, his eyes burning into mine. “Lie back and let me spoil you.”

  Well, that didn’t sound too bad. I did as I was told—lying back along the counter. A sort of human offering in his kitchen. Finn tugged on my yoga pants, yanking them down my hips and legs. Tossing them onto the chair behind him before returning to bring my heels to the edge of the counter and kiss my knees. Exposed, I felt so exposed there. Legs spread and body on display. But this was for Finn, was with him, so that feeling didn’t roll into discomfort. Instead, it morphed into desire. Wantonness. I wanted him to see me. Wanted him to look me over. I wanted.

  “Is this okay?” he asked, rubbing up and down my inner thighs. Pushing my legs farther apart even as he seemed to fight to keep himself restrained. “Are you more than fine?”

  “Yes,” I said, reaching out to grip his hair and tug him closer. “So much more than fine.”

  “How’s your back?”

  “Fine.” I grinned when he glowered at me. “Better than fine. So much more than fine. I’ll let you know if we drop down to fine.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Was I ever. “Yes.”

  “Thank fuck.” He yanked my panties down and off my legs, leaving them hooked over one ankle as he pushed my knees back and brought that talented mouth of his to my pussy. To where I was soaked for him. Tonguing, licking, sucking, biting…he worked me over good. Teasing me with flicks and laps and flat-tongued licks that made me see stars in seconds. Made me come twice before he finally stood and dropped his own pants. Not before digging a condom out of one of the pockets, though.

  “You came prepared,” I said, watching as his long fingers worked the latex down his length. “Were you a Boy Scout?”

  “Not for a single day, but no way was I missing out on feeling you wrapped around me again.” He nudged his way inside, lifting my sweater and sucking on my nipples as he kept up a slow, easy rhythm. As he worked his way deeper and deeper, filling me with an unending patience. Making me claw at his shoulders and chant his name.

  “My lucky girl,” he said, groaning long and deep as his hips finally pressed against mine. “I’d do anything for my lucky girl. Gonna make this pussy feel so good. Gonna make you scream my name again.”

  And he would. I knew that. Felt it. Yet there still seemed to be an end date on our relationship. I had a tiger by the tail, and it was only a matter of time before it turned on me. A beast that would use my sweet Finn as leverage if it knew how much I felt for him. Telling Finn about my mom—bringing him into my life—meant putting him in danger. And there was no way I could do that.

  But I could care for him. I could use my body to bring him pleasure. I could do this.

  “Again, Finn,” I whispered as he thrust harder. “You feel so good deep inside me. Do it again.”

  He did. Over and over and over, pushing me along the counter until I had to hold on to the end of it. Bringing me right to the precipice of pleasure then throwing me over the side of it. Making me come with his body and his words. Shaking and groaning and pressing deep as he came too.

  This I could do. This—sex and playing house and letting him in close to me—was only dangerous to one thing…my heart.

  Chapter Fifteen

  JINX

  I had never been a late sleeper. Growing up, I’d always been up early for school or whatever activities were going on in the neighborhood. As I got older, work had forced my body from bed at an earlier and earlier hour until it was hard for me to sleep past sunrise. I still used an alarm, but it really hadn’t been a necessity in my daily life before I’d gotten involved with the Black Angels.

  Finn obviously woke up even earlier than I did and was a much better alarm clock than any I’d ever used.

  “Oh god.” I arched off the bed, reaching down to fist my hand in his hair as he attacked my clit with his tongue. There was no other word for it—what he was doing was pure aggression. Slashing, licking, flicking, giving me no relief from the impending orgasm heading my way. Waking me up in the most arousing way possible. “Finn.”

  “So sweet
and wet,” he murmured against my flesh as he slipped what felt like two fingers inside me. “I can’t get enough of this pussy.”

  I wanted to respond, to tell him I couldn’t get enough either, that he was going to make me come if he didn’t stop. To beg him not to stop. But words failed me as pleasure crashed through my body. Every nerve firing, every inch of skin and muscle and flesh singed by the explosion within me.

  Tugging hard, I dragged the man up my body, wanting more than his mouth. Wanting to feel him fill me. To see his face as he came with me again.

  “More,” I said, kissing him deeply, groaning as I tasted myself on his lips before pulling away. “I want more.”

  “Anything you want, baby.” He reached into the nightstand and pulled out a condom, taking care of wrapping himself before lining us up. “Anything you need.”

  “Just you. I just need you.”

  He pushed his way inside, filling me as he moaned my name. As he cursed and bit his lip, his eyes locked on mine. The moment almost too intimate to handle. But then he was moving, thrusting into me with harder and faster strokes, and I was lost to the pleasure again. And again. And again.

  “What is this?” I tapped the wooden figures on the shelf in Finn’s dining room. The ones surrounding a carved wooden…something. Was that perhaps a pile of pieces? And the rest… “Is that a llama?”

  “Yeah.” Finn came up behind me, kissing my shoulder and wrapping his arms around my hips.

  “But…why a llama?” Finn’s carvings were all over the house—figurines, handy gadgets, boxes, bowls, coasters. Everywhere sat little works of art. But these were different. Abstract animals, if I had to guess. A handful of them all standing together.

  “My sister had a bit of an obsession with them for a while. I carved a ton of the beasts because of her, so they’re sort of scattered about. These ones represent all my siblings.” He frowned when I turned in his arms, looking completely out of sorts. “It’s weird, I know.”

  “Not weird. What’s the thing in the middle?”

  “It’s a broken Lady Justice. My dad carved it, but somewhere along the way, it broke. I hope to figure out how to fix it someday.”

  Lady Justice…from a man who lived in Justice. Funny. “Your dad was the one who taught you how to do that?”

  “By that, you mean carve things? Yeah, he whittled wood at night while watching the news. It’s a habit I picked up, I guess. Minus the news.”

  “That’s right, you don’t—”

  Before I could finish my sentence, Finn’s phone rang, breaking the silence around us.

  “That’ll be Elijah,” he said, frowning toward where the device sat on the counter. He’d made that same face yesterday when his brother had called. He’d cut that call short as I’d escaped to the bathroom, something I doubted was his normal. I was beginning to understand that look—his habits and rituals were being disrupted. By me. By my presence. That concern was his indecision over what to prioritize—his routines or taking care of me. I couldn’t make him choose.

  “Answer it,” I said, pushing him in the direction he needed to go. “I can always go take a shower.”

  He grabbed his phone off the counter but didn’t let me go, tugging me along with him.

  “Stay,” he said as he tapped the screen a few times. A voice came over the line before Finn could say anything more, the person not bothering to issue a greeting.

  “You’re about to get a nice warm front. I hope you’ll be taking advantage of it.”

  Finn set the phone on the table, pulling me into his lap as he dropped onto a chair. “You have so little work to do that you check the Justice weather reports daily now?”

  “Of course not. I get an email.”

  “There’s an app for that.”

  “Precisely. How’s your day going, brother?”

  Finn grinned, squeezing my thigh. “I’ve got a girl with me, so it’s going great.”

  Silence stretched, pushing at me in a way that felt uncomfortable. Anxiety-inducing. At least until the man on the other end—Elijah, Finn’s twin brother—laughed.

  “Well, well. Is she listening right now?”

  Finn nudged me, so I said, “Hi, Elijah. I’m Jinx.”

  “Good morning, Jinx. What’s a nice girl like you doing with my favorite brother?”

  “I’m not always so nice, but Finn feeds me vegetables and makes me tea.” I grinned down at the man in question before dropping a quick kiss to his lips. “I like that about him.”

  “Vegetables and tea are all it takes to make you happy? She’s a keeper, Finn.”

  “Yeah, I sort of figured that out already.”

  I gave him one more kiss then rose to my feet, laughing when he tried to pull me back down. “Shower,” I whispered as I headed for the hallway toward the bedroom. “I need one.”

  “I could join you,” Finn said, his phone already in his hand. But I knew better—he needed his routine, and that included a morning phone call with his brother. A nice, long one—not like yesterday’s.

  “You stay and chat. I’ll be there when you’re done.”

  “Deal.”

  I was halfway into the bedroom when he hollered, “Dress warm, Lucky. We’ll be heading out for the afternoon to enjoy the weather.”

  Elijah’s voice was the last thing I heard before I closed the bathroom door. “See? It’s a good thing I check your weather reports.”

  Finn definitely liked seeing me naked, though I couldn’t help but notice how his eyes tended to fall to my scars.

  “Stop it,” I said before reaching for a sweatshirt to cover myself with.

  “Stop what?”

  “Looking as if I’m in some sort of pain. They’re not new—they don’t hurt anymore.”

  Finn frowned, reaching out to trace the burn marks on my arm—the perfect circles left by a particularly cruel man. His fingers moved higher, running along the slash marks. Nice, neat, straight lines crisscrossing my arms.

  “What are these from?”

  My stomach rolled, and the half-truth I’d been telling for the past year rolled off my tongue even though it burned my throat. “Cutting. I…used to deal with that.”

  “Used to?”

  Past tense. Before I left the Black Angels the first time. At least, the man who’d given me those scars hadn’t added any new ones since. “Yeah. Not anymore.”

  He tugged the neckline of my sweatshirt to the side and kissed the scar that blew my secret apart. The long, S-shaped one on my shoulder that there was no way I could have done myself. “Okay. I’ll leave it alone for now, but you can revise your story whenever you’re ready to.”

  I did not deserve someone so sweet. I also wasn’t even close to being ready to tell him the truth about the past year of my life.

  “Where are we going?” I asked as I followed him outside to his truck.

  He opened my door for me with a smile. “I figured we could head into town for breakfast, then maybe take a short hike along one of the ridges.”

  “Into the mountains?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “Uh, because there are bikers all around.”

  Finn shrugged. “I texted Deacon my plans. He seemed fine with it.”

  “He did?”

  “Sure.”

  “And what exactly does fine with it mean in terms of Church?”

  “It means he didn’t tell me not to go.”

  “Sounds like permission to me.” I looked out the window at the vista before me. Peaks rose in the distance, creating almost a wall of rock and imposing forests. “I’ve never been in the mountains.”

  Finn turned onto the highway, grabbing my hand once he had a long, straight patch of road before him. “Let’s change that, then.”

  We pulled up outside The Baker’s Cottage within minutes, Finn parking the truck with ease in one of the pull-in spots.

  “Does this place make you scrambled eggs with toast and strawberry jelly?” I asked as he grabbed my hand and led
me to the sidewalk.

  “Of course. I wouldn’t eat here if they didn’t.”

  “Your lack of flexibility in your breakfast choices makes me a little sad.”

  He opened the door, staring down at me with an intense expression as he said, “When you know what you want, there’s no point in trying anything else.”

  My heart dropped then raced, my skin flushing warm under his stare. There was a double meaning there, a subplot to those words. And I liked it.

  “Hey, you two.” Shye—the blonde who’d brought me the best pot roast sandwich ever—hurried over, a couple of menus already in her hands. “C’mon in and snag a seat wherever you like. I’ll grab some coffee for you.”

  “Tea,” Finn said, stopping the woman in her tracks. “Jinx here prefers tea.”

  Shye smiled all slow and sweet, looking from him to me and back again. “Tea, it is. I’ll put on the kettle for you.”

  Finn directed me to a table by the bar, pulling out my chair for me like a gentleman. “I assume this is okay.”

  It didn’t escape my notice that he’d put us in a spot facing the door, or that he had his back to a wall. A lot of the Black Angels did the same—the men who’d seen war. Who’d fought in the military. Finn might not have been a veteran, but he had been to hell. I had a feeling he’d learned to protect his back while inside.

  “This is fine.” I reached for his hand once he took his seat, smiling across the table at him. “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “Being you.”

  Finn looked ready to say something when the bell over the door rang and he glanced up. His smile fell, his expression flattening fast. I turned, not at all surprised to see Alder Kennard striding our way.