by Rie Warren
It was two, maybe three rooms. There were sheets for walls, a hotplate for a stove, and a fireplace for heat.
“Didn’t know you lived so rustic, girl.” I accepted a glass of—I sniffed it—vintage I Love Lucy wine. I sipped it slowly. It wasn’t half bad.
Janice turned from her hot plate brewing up smells that burned my nostrils. She set a bottle of spring water and a glass in front of Cat who sat at the small table. “Money means nothing. You know that, Nicky. I got the land, the love. All of the Goddess’s creatures.”
“It’s beautiful out here.” Cat took a long drink from her glass.
“It really is. Frees me up from having to run the rat race, living out here. Sure, I like my twitter and all that, but if it wasn’t for this peace right here, chances are I’d have never found my writing chops. I have just enough, and exactly what I want.” Janice took her pot off the hob and plated up. “You should’ve seen Jacqueline when she visited. She questioned my sanity. Do it yourself, no nail parlor, hairdryer, or HDTV. Now that was some funny shit.”
As if in cahoots with Janice, my iPad went off with a trumpet noise.
“Your girlfriends are pinging you again.” Cat sat back with a grin.
“Gimme that here.” Janice foraged for the device. She aimed it at our joined hands where the new ring shone on Cat’s finger. “Hashtag lucky @LoveN in love.”
I caressed Cat’s cheek. She flushed as her eyes flitted to mine.
Janice put away my iPad and slapped three plates on the table.
“Got that out of your system?” I asked.
Janice picked up her fork. “Mm hmm. To think you didn’t tell me you were engaged. Nothing but nothing escapes my attention.”
“It just happened. I didn’t think Cat would say yes.” I smiled over my own plate of . . . A skeptical frown burrowed into my brow. “What’s this?”
Cat kicked my ankle under the table, miming a bite of her food. “It’s delicious, I’ve got to get the recipe.”
I took a timid bite.
Not.
“Mexican goulash!” Janice exclaimed.
“Isn’t it supposed to be Hungarian?” I forked up a second bite and inspected it.
“You know how we Steampunk gals thrive on inventing things.”
Yep. One ‘invention’ that should never be patented. I kept my mouth shut, only opening it long enough to dig into the questionable Mexican Goulash.
After decidedly not eating our fill, Cat and I retired to our quarters, one weatherworn curtain away from Janice in her humble abode.
I shucked off my clothes and dragged my hands through my hair. “Sorry, darlin’. I didn’t know she couldn’t cook.”
She broke down in hushed giggles that made me laugh. Falling onto the creaky bed, we couldn’t stop.
Cat hunched over. “No more! I can’t laugh anymore. My stomach hurts.”
“I think it’s growling because it’s hungry.”
She dropped back, gasping.
I crawled on top of her. “Shhh.”
Kissing her softly and slowly, for a long time, we moved within each other’s arms. Our mouths parting, Cat ran her fingers through my hair. My rigid cock prodded her hip. The hut was so small, we heard Janice rustling in the next “room”.
“So, no romancing tonight, hon?” Cat asked with another quiet laugh.
I eased her around so I could spoon against her back. “Probably not. Just cuddling.”
“I like cuddling just fine.”
“Me too, with you.” Closing my arms around her, I felt her relax into sweet sleep.
****
On the twenty-fourth of December, we continued through Arizona on our leisurely loop back to South Carolina. That night we camped along the Red Cliffs. We sat in front of an open fire. The flames flickered shadows on the stony formations surrounding us, creating a private sort of haven. We snuggled beneath a blanket. Cat sat in front of me between my legs, and my back rested against a boulder.
“Have you thought about taking up dancing again?”
In profile, her brow hitched up.
“Not that kind of dancing. Unless it’s for me.” I clarified.
“I’d thought about maybe teaching kids. A class or two a week?” she said quietly.
“I’d like to see that.”
“Do you think I could do it?”
Nuzzling the side of her neck, I murmured, “I know you could.”
We sat contentedly awhile longer, watching the fire dance and the sparks fly.
I played with the ring on her finger—the large diamond set deep into the band—it was edgy and different, just like her, with a piece of my history. “So you’ll move in with me?”
Her eyes twinkled as much as the stars above. “I’m really moving in with Viper.”
She turned and stroked my jaw. Cat cupped my neck to bring me closer. Her kiss was a sweet opener. She gasped when I teased her tongue into my mouth.
“I’ll move in with you, since you’re going to make an honest woman of me.”
“Damn right I am.” I fitted my cheek against hers.
“I’ll talk to my realtor about putting my house up for sale when we get back.”
I hauled back to look at her. “No safety net?”
“I don’t need one. I’ve already fallen all the way for you.”
“Did I say I love you yet?”
“Maybe.” Cat stretched her arms up, opening herself to me.
On Christmas Eve, Catarina Steele, my Wildcat, was the early present I unwrapped. Her shirt came off when I rolled it up her body and over her arms. I knocked my boots away, and hers slid off her feet.
We skimmed away the past as we lost our clothes.
There were some things meant to be remembered. Her parents and her loss, in the tats I licked and kissed until she dropped both hands to my hips, whisking off my jeans. My brother, Daniel, as she pursed her lips on the inked ring on my bicep.
Revealing each other.
Cat touched my mouth and I kissed her fingertips. A tear dropped from her eye. I caught it. Her self-hate, my inability to love because I was too scared to lose someone else . . . it was all gone.
Life had no guarantees, but our love did.
I kissed down Cat’s body. I licked her nipples until the piercings shimmered in the firelight and her tips were plum pink. I sucked at the indent of her waist, nibbled her hips, tongued across her belly.
Before going any further, I leaned up to brush my mouth against hers. “I want you.”
“I love you.”
There wasn’t a Christmas tree or sparkly lights or piles of gifts waiting to be opened. Just the rugged red ochre cliffs and tumbleweed terrain, the endless black dome of the sky above. The bright constellations of stars and Catarina in my arms.
Licking up one of her long legs then the other, I spread her.
God, she’s wet.
I put my mouth to her. Greedy, I wanted everything at once. Cat’s belly leaped beneath my hand. Savoring every kiss and lick and suck, I spread her silkiness over my fingertips and so damn slowly over her clit. Her hips pushed up, and I smiled against her thigh. I ate her out from clit to dip and then I darted my tongue in and out.
She came in my mouth. One hand pulled at my hair, the other pushed her breasts together when I looked up. Her husky yell echoed off the hills and her tummy and thighs trembled.
Moving on top of Cat, I bit her bright nipples and sucked her neck. My cock nestled against her.
She wet the underside of my shaft with slick undulations.
“I need in.” My voice against her ear was a deep rumble.
Cat reached down to open her pussy to me. She was so wet, she shined.
I dipped into her. Tight as a glove, hot as an oven, Cat arched with a whimper.
“Okay, darlin’?”
Red dust glinted in her hair. Her gaze fever-fueled and icy hot, she grasped the backs of my thighs and scratched blunt nails over my ass to the small of my back. “Perfect.”
I made love to Cat as slowly as I could. I watched my cock sucked inside her, the ridge of my head appearing again. My fingers wound into her hair. Our mouths meshed together. Lying fully on top of her, my chest scraped against her breasts, the hardness of my stomach against her belly.
Her breath sped. Her eyelids fluttered down. Her lips gasped open as my hips circled. Tension tightened my muscles, making me moan against her mouth.
Her eyes opened. “God. I love you like this, Nick.”
My hips flexed faster as the slow burn became bright hot. I took long deep lunges in and out of her. “Like that?”
She nodded silently, her lip caught between her teeth.
I pushed deep and rotated my hips. Withdrew and plunged hard. The wicked rhythm grew wilder. Arching her back, Cat drew red lines down my throat and chest. She came, fisting me in silken heat the likes of which I’d never known.
Pumping faster, I ground my teeth. My neck thrown back, hips punched forward, I bowed over her. “Oh fuck, fuuuuck, Cat.”
My whole body snapped tight before bursting apart. Pressed up on my arms, I drove inside of her, crying out as each thick spurt exploded from the head of my cock.
My muscles loosened, one at a time. Cat lay beneath me, her hips rolling up to accept every last pulse of my come. Her lips and teeth were at the cords of my neck, making me shiver in post-orgasmic awesomeness.
I collapsed to my side and drew her against me. “Woman,” I groaned.
“Think I’ve been tamed by Love?” she purred, patting my damp chest in long sweeping strokes.
“Not by a long shot, darlin’.” And that’s just how I want her. “I won’t ever try to tame you, Wildcat.”
Keep reading for the first chapter of
Steele, Into Your Heart
Carolina Bad Boys #3
Coming in April 2015
He’s a badass biker dude.
She’s a sexy police officer with an attitude.
Their bad blood runs deep. But after they hook up at a wild biker week, can they keep their pact? What happens at the rally stays at the rally.
Yeah, right.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/new/23593564-steele-into-your-heart
http://www.riewarren.com/books/steele-book-iii/
Chapter One
Suck, Bang, Blow
MAY. MYRTLE BEACH, SOUTH Carolina. Bike Week. Destination Suck, Bang, Blow bar.
I hadn’t been here for five years, about the time my folks died, Cat almost killed herself, and Boomer tried to make it all better.
Fuck yeah. I loved this. I needed this. I rode down the strip of multi-colored lights with the seabreeze off the shore sending salt across my skin. The road into Myrtle Beach was one big bitching battle of hogs and Harleys and MC hotheads ready to tank back a beer and do the charity thing. Rough thugs, bearded dudes, and men with handlebar mustaches to rival the handlebars of their rides.
Nicky Love might ride a beautifully restored ’46 Chief—hell, he rode my sister, not that I wanted to think about that—but I handled hot metal like it was an extension of my cock. I muscled my low-slung Harley with the new angel emblems and polished ape bars through the forest of black leather, bright bandanas, and honeys slinging their bikini tops off at every stoplight.
I reached into my saddlebag for a brew, cracked it open with my teeth and got ready to glug it while I sat at the last red light between the Suck Bang Blow Roadhouse and me. As the light turned green, I took a left and slipped into a sweet slipstream that landed me in the last ounce of space amid my home away from home. The parking lot was congested with cigarette smoke, motorcycles, the noise of laughter, and RPMs that tore up pavement.
An unlit cigarette dangled from my lips as I throttled down and feathered off the clutch. I eased off my Harley and lifted the black half helmet from my head. I’d had it custom made and detailed to say: FUCK IT. I’m late. But fucking off takes a lot of time.
I tapped my Marlboro Red on my wrist before lighting up. I only lit up when I planned on toking up. That I planned on doing this week, charity ride or not. As well as getting laid, every way imaginable as long as I was the one in the driver’s seat.
I blew smoke rings and fucking sailboats with each tug, ambling through the crowd. I drew deep from the beer in my hand.
“Hey, Steele!”
“Brodie, dude.”
“Where the fuck ya been?”
During my walk toward the ramshackle roadhouse I was offered beer, coke, pussy, cock, joints, and more pussy. Armloads of pussy.
I shook them all off. At least half of my fellow road warriors were dumb enough to ride unprotected. I didn’t have that hero cannot-die complex anymore.
When your younger sister went off the rails and your folks died . . . When you were the one left standing to identify their bodies so they could be properly buried, you figured out pretty fucking fast how fragile life was.
You learned where and when to take your risks. A needle full of dope or a noggin brained in the middle of the road were not odds I’d ever play with.
I took another tug from my cig.
It was so hot the black tar stuck to my boots. The parking lot of the SBB bar was a thousand times busier than the basement at that girl Belinda’s house in high school. For two bucks a pop, she’d let anyone feel her up. She made a killing off her size 38DDs. Whatever happened to Busty Belinda?
The scorching parking lot may have been hot, but the women were even hotter. Okay, not that grandma-type over there. Her bikini top barely covered her sagging titties beneath the beaten-to-shit, hell-to-leather jacket she wore.
Fuck me. My eyes.
But whatever, her hog was bigger than mine.
Maybe the one in her pants, too.
Nah.
The parking lot was thirty-bikes deep in orderly columns that stretched as far as the eye could see. It was a gleaming, glittering, rumbling heaven. The road roared with metal machines.
I swaggered through the beer-drinking, pot-smoking, loud-talking crowd until I reached the saloon-style doors that led to Hell on wheels on earth.
It was dark inside Suck, Bang, Fuck. Damp. Dim. The perfect place to commit some secret perversion you’d been dreaming about all year long before you returned to your real life that included work, worries, and shit-gone-sour.
Concrete and come. Road tar and grease. That’s what it smelled like inside the roadhouse. Loud rock tunes blasted from the speakers. Every charter in South Carolina and beyond was represented from Lesbian Leathers to the Asheville hippies to Sand Hill’s Sons O’Bitches. The two-story joint couldn’t have been more different from the fancy downtown Charleston bullshit I’d been subjected to.
Pool cues knocked against balls.
The bar was heaving. The crowd cheering.
A leather-clad honey held the dance floor. She worked that shit like she was earning cash instead of ear-bashing “bring it on!” yells.
My balls knocked in my pants.
She looked familiar. So did the bottle of beer Tuck pushed into my hand as soon as I drained my first. He was with the Presidents of Retribution MC. I was the VP. Boomer the Prez. Tuck was the moneyman. Tuck, as in Friar Tuck, plus his real name was Tucker. He was as round and bald as the Robin Hood money launderer, except for the wicked handlebar mustache he waxed to two points. Hey, we might be goons, but we weren’t fucking illiterate. We had a brain cell or two left and some of us even knew the classics. Like the Costner version of Robin Hood during which that Alan Rickman Snape-dude stole the evil show.
Tuck was like a grandfather to Boomer, Cat, and me. He’d held our wrecked family together after our folks died.
He didn’t wear a brown cassock but a Big and Tall Retribution MC cut unzipped over the round belly that matched his round face. The patch on the back of his leather was identical to mine: a bony white skull weighing down the scales of justice.
Tuck knocked his bottle against mine. “Good ride up?”
“Yeah. Fucking perfe
ct. Open road between Mt. Pleasant and Georgetown. I just had to avoid those speed traps.” I turned and set my elbows on the bar. “I swear, Tuck, every time I see a cop on a moped, I think it’s Kingston out to bust my chops.”
“You gotta get over that shit. The past is the past. What’s done is done. Besides, Kingston never arrested you. She nailed Cat, and that was Cat’s wake-up call to get cleaned up.” He gripped the back of my neck. “If you ask me, Officer Kingston did you a solid.”
“Not to my folks though.”
“She had nothing to do with their deaths, Veep.”
I shrugged off his hand. “They wouldn’t have been on that stretch of road, heading to the rehab center, if Kingston hadn’t arrested Cat in the first place.”
“And Cat would probably be dead from smack or worse by now, if Kingston hadn’t done what she did, boy.”
“Who we talkin’ about?” Handsome asked from beyond Tuck’s shoulder.
“Your momma.”
“Bent over a Buick,” Tuck added.
“Getting fisted,” I grinned into Handsome’s hair-covered face.
“Cool. Guess I was too busy bangin’ Tuck’s bitch Maid Marion to notice,” Handsome riffed.
I bumped his knuckles. “Boss.”
Handsome—so-called because he was anything but—on his best days probably looked butt-ugly. Tall, rangy to the point of skinny, my friend just needed to put on fifty pounds or so and get his fucking hair cut. Didn’t matter. Handsome had the biggest, most giving heart, was loyal to a T, and I’d kick anyone’s ass who dared to look at him crossways. Surprisingly, the ladies always gravitated to him, as if they knew deep down he was the real keeper of the club.
We were trading MC smacktalk—who was going Nomad, who was dissolving, who was being hounded by the pigs—when Tail stepped out of the murky depths of bike club nirvana.
“Yo, don’t go getting fuckin’ phil-oh-sophical on me tonight. I ain’t doing that shit. I’m Zen. I am in the zone.” He shuffled up to the bar and rapped his three heavy gold rings onto the surface to get some service.
“Yeah. Fucking Buddha material you are not.” Tuck aimed his trigger finger at Tail.
