Lock grunted.
“Figured that,” he said. “Just thought it was majorly fucked up that I was getting them.”
“Hopefully you don’t get anymore,” she admitted. “And if he does, he steps over a boundary that I can actually do something about it.”
Lock stood up and offered Detective Sage his hand, then I did the same.
Downy followed suit and then we were all out the door and headed back to the parking lot.
“Between the shit with your mom and this shit, I’m starting to become very concerned about the world that we’re living in,” Downy muttered darkly as he came to a stop beside his police cruiser.
Lock grunted an affirmative.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “I’m so fuckin’ ready to get this shit over with.”
“I’m coming,” I said. “To show support.”
Downy flashed me a grin.
“She’d like that.” He paused. “But it’s not necessary. And it’s in the middle of the day, and she’ll need you to open her pride and joy.”
I deflated. “You’re right.”
“But thank you for thinking of her,” Downy said. “I don’t think we’re going to need any extra support, though. Kid’s not getting shit, and from what our lawyer has told us, we’re going to get there, and the judge is likely going to be pissed that the kid is even wasting his time.”
God, I hoped so.
***
Later that night, I was making love to Lock, slowly.
His cock was inside of me, and I was riding him, up and down, all the while with my forehead resting on his.
His hands were clenched on my hips, and our breaths were intermingling as I rode him.
“I’m close,” he breathed, his breath fanning against my wet mouth.
I leaned down and bit his lip.
“Me, too,” I whispered against them.
“You better hurry then,” he said. “Or slow down.”
“If l slow down, I’ll lose it,” I told him bluntly.
He scoffed and pushed me up, forcing me to sit up so that he could reach my clit.
The angle changed, becoming deeper, starting to put the orgasm I’d been building toward further and further back. But then he touched my clit, and it was right back there, hovering at the surface.
Things went fast after that.
My orgasm hit me, and soon, I was riding Lock so hard that I couldn’t breathe, let alone realize that he was on the verge of coming, too.
It was as I was coming down from the high that only Lock could give me that I heard him grunting, felt the wet pulses of his release bathing my insides as he came.
I opened my eyes to see the most tortured expression on Lock’s face as he released inside of me, again and again.
I smiled, working my hips slowly now, watching him come back to himself.
His eyes slowly peeled open, and then he was smiling.
I collapsed onto his chest, and we laid like that for what felt like forever.
“Sometimes,” he said, his chest rumbling underneath my face. “I think that I have my life together. That I know what I want.”
I patted his chest, right above his nipple, and said, “You don’t know what you want?”
He made a disagreeing sound.
“Not really,” he admitted. “Well, I know one thing for sure.”
I lifted up until I could see his face.
“What’s that?” I wondered.
“That you’re there, in every scenario,” he said. “I always wanted to follow my dad’s footsteps. Become a hostage negotiator. Work on the SWAT team…but I like my job right now. Love it, actually.” He paused. “It’s steady. I know when I get to come home every day. I don’t have to leave any time at the drop of a hat. I know that every single day, almost at the same time every day, I’m going to walk out of the department, get on my bike, and come home to you.”
I leaned forward and pressed a kiss to his cheek.
“Move in with me,” he asked.
I blinked. “I’m already in with you.”
He trailed his fingers up the length of my spine.
“True,” he agreed. “But you’re also not ‘in.’ All of your stuff is still in boxes. You’re checking in with the contractors that started as if you want them to hurry up. But…I want you to stay. I want you to be here when I get home from work. I want to go to the grocery store with you every week, then come home and unload it into our shared refrigerator.”
I trailed my hands down the length of his beard.
He’d trimmed it today.
It was closer to his face than usual.
I could almost make out the squareness of his jaw.
“Okay,” I said finally. “I’ll move in with you.”
His hands squeezed my hips, and I felt his not-all-the-way-softened cock start to fill with blood again.
“You’ll move in,” he said. “Really?”
I pressed a kiss to his nose.
“Yes, really,” I said. “On one condition.”
Chapter 13
I may act like I’m okay, but deep down inside, I’m hungry again.
-Lock’s secret thoughts
Lock
“Yes, sir,” I said to Kettle. “I will, sir.”
“Now let me talk to my daughter,” he ordered gruffly.
“One more thing,” I said.
“What?” Kettle sounded miffed.
He did not, under any circumstances, like that I’d moved in with his daughter—or more correctly, his daughter in with me.
Even more so, he wasn’t happy that I’d told him that I cared for his daughter.
“I love her, sir,” I said. “I love her a lot.”
Saylor blinked owlishly at me and my words.
“You better love her,” Kettle grumbled. “If I had thought you didn’t, I wouldn’t have said yes. Now let me talk to her. Oh, and make sure y’all are down here this weekend. There’s a party that I want you both to attend. No is not an option.”
I chose not to tell him that I was working this weekend.
One of the other guys would cover for me just as I’d done for all of them when they’d asked.
“Have a good one, sir.” I bit my lip and handed the phone to Saylor, who was watching me go through practical hell as I told her father that she was moving in with me.
Saylor’s eyes weren’t full of mirth any longer when she pressed the phone to her ear and said hello.
They were unreadable as she spoke softly to her father.
Thinking they could use the privacy to talk without me listening in, I went outside and used Saylor’s phone to place a call to my mother.
She answered on the first ring.
“Saylor?”
“It’s me,” I said. “How’d it go?”
Mom sighed.
“He didn’t get anything,” she muttered. “Thank God.”
“Good news,” I said.
“The kid was kind of sad, actually,” she admitted. “He looked rough. He’d changed a lot since he’d come in for that job interview. I’m glad that you convinced me to hire Saylor first. I’m kind of concerned on what would’ve happened had I given him a job.”
My dad muttered a ‘fuck yeah’ in the background, and I raised a hand to scratch my head.
Looking over my shoulder, I saw that Saylor was now waving her hands around in the air as she talked to her dad, switching the phone back and forth as she spoke heatedly about something.
Turning back, I took a few more steps down into the yard as I said, “Hey, Mom?”
“Yes, baby?” Mom said, sounding distracted.
“Will you go ring shopping with me tomorrow?”
There was a long pause, and then my mother started to screech like a lunatic.
“Jesus Christ, Memphis,” Dad said. “We’re at the fucking courthouse for God’s sake. Tone it down.”
“Your son
just asked me to go ring shopping with him!” Mom cried. “Excuse me for being happy, jack wad.”
I grinned at my mother’s colorful language, it never failed to make me smile.
She’d tried to clean up her mouth when she’d had kids.
Dad, on the other hand, hadn’t given a shit.
Which was why my sisters and I were saying curse words at a very young age. At least to each other.
“I can do it tomorrow on my lunch break,” she said. “I’ll just tell Saylor that I’m going out to lunch. Oh, how did her day go today?”
I told her about Saylor’s uneventful day. How two people had no-showed on her, and one had come in but hadn’t been able to stay due to a hurt child at school.
“That one she said that she’d reschedule,” I said. “She said the girl’s daughter fell down at the playground and broke her arm.”
“Oh, no,” Mom said. “That’s awful. Of course, we’ll reschedule with her. It’d make us look like dick bags if we didn’t.”
I agreed.
It would.
“You don’t work tomorrow, do you?” Mom asked.
Something caught my eye down the street, and I watched as an old car with bright green, shiny rims drove slowly past my house.
My eyes narrowed.
“No, I don’t,” I told her. “Just have to run. I’m doing that with Pace around five in the morning, though. So, I don’t doubt that I can meet you for lunch. Unless we decide to run for six hours.”
She snorted. “You can’t even run for two.”
That was true.
Though, at this point, it wasn’t that I couldn’t run for two, but that I hadn’t needed to run for two.
I was doing a half marathon. And I was already running it under two hours.
My endurance hadn’t been tested beyond that point yet.
The door opened behind me and Saylor came out, looking mutinous.
“I gotta go, Mom,” I said. “Saylor’s giving me the stink eye.”
“Uh-oh,” Mom tittered. “Better make up for whatever you just did to piss her off.”
“What makes you think it was something that I did to piss her off?” I asked curiously.
Saylor’s eyes narrowed even more.
“Because more than likely, it’s always the man that fucks things up. Never the woman,” Mom declared.
“Bullshit,” Dad countered from the background. “Your stubborn ass has had more than her fair share of fuck ups over the course of our relationship.”
Deciding to leave them to their bickering, I pressed end on the phone and headed Saylor’s way.
The car that was slowly driving past the house finally made it past, but not even it could sway my attention away from the woman staring at me like I’d done her wrong.
“What happened?”
She made a disgruntled face.
“Dad’s been dealing with more shit than I thought,” she said. “He’s having some trouble that he was trying not to tell me about but ended up thinking that I needed to know.”
I fronted.
“What?” I wondered.
“At first, it was little stuff,” she said. “A few problems here and there, nothing too big. But those little problems went from being little to being obvious that something was being done. A flat tire here. A dead bird there. All of a sudden it went from could be a coincidence to there’s something wrong. Last week my dad’s truck was stolen. Today, he got a letter in the mail.”
“What kind of letter?” I asked.
“The kind of letter that has a man’s dick jacking off to a picture of me and you fighting in the front yard.” She winced.
I remembered the fight.
Though, it hadn’t been a fight for long.
It’d been a disagreement on whether or not she should help pay for the repairs on the pool house. After she’d gotten her argument out, I’d completely rendered it invalid, and I’d ushered her inside where I’d then gone about showing her just who was in charge.
But, obviously, someone had been watching our argument.
And had liked that we were arguing.
“Fuck,” I said, sounding disgusted. “Was he able to get any prints pulled off of it?”
She shook her head.
“No, just like the ones sent here. Nothing.” She clenched her teeth. “I don’t like this.”
No, I didn’t either.
I gestured for her to go inside, which she did moments later.
“We’re going to assume,” I said stiffly. “That there’s someone that’s out to punish us for something we’ve done…even if we don’t know what that thing is. That means no more standing outside giving whoever is watching us something to masturbate to.”
She made a gagging sound in her throat.
“I think we should leave tomorrow night after I get off of work,” she said. “Tomorrow being Friday, I should be able to bail out at three…I’m assuming that you’re going to be asking one of the guys to cover your shifts?”
I nodded my head.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll get started with that now.”
She nodded and tossed me back my phone.
I took it as she started to strip her clothes from her body.
She was still wearing her scrubs from work, and I couldn’t help but watch her progress as she moved toward the bathroom.
I quickly dialed the first one that I’d covered for last and pressed the phone to my ear.
All the while I watched Saylor undress down to her panties and underwear, then redress in a baggy t-shirt of mine from my high school days, and a pair of sleep pants that looked way too hot to be wearing yet.
But, as she liked to say, I kept it as cold as Antarctica in the house, so she had to dress accordingly.
“Hello?” Logan rumbled, sounding distracted.
“Can you cover my shift Saturday?” I asked without preamble. “I have to go ask for Saylor’s father’s permission to marry his daughter.”
Luckily at that point Saylor was busy doing something in the bathroom, allowing me to speak candidly.
“No problem,” he said. “Can I use your truck or bike, though? Katy has a thing she has to do this weekend—some convention for other weird people like her—and I have my bike going into the shop for some work.”
“Done,” I said. “I can drop it off to you tomorrow. My bike. I’m going to be using my truck this weekend, though.”
“Works out anyway,” Logan mumbled. “I wasn’t sure what the fuck I was going to do with myself without Katy here, anyway.”
After a few more moments of chatting about the newest member of the KPD Motorcycle Patrol, I hung up and watched as Saylor absently packed her bag, and then mine.
“I don’t need eight pairs of shorts like you do,” I teased.
She looked up, embarrassed.
“You never know,” she said. “You might get them wet. Seven times.”
I laughed and held out my hands for her.
She dropped my pants on top of the bag that she was packing our belongings in and then headed my way.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said softly.
She squeezed me hard back.
“I know.” She leaned back until she could stare up at me. “Between you and my father? I don’t think anything that meant me harm would stand a chance.”
No.
No, it did not.
Chapter 14
Every woman’s nightmare is getting married for the first time late in life. Wrong. My worst nightmare is getting bit on the vagina while I’m peeing.
-Saylor’s secret thoughts
Saylor
I wasn’t sure what woke me.
But I definitely knew what kept me awake.
Worry.
The moment my brain switched on, there was nothing to turn it back off again.
So, I laid there for what felt like hours before I finally decided to get up a
nd go to the bathroom.
Carefully pushing the sheets off of me so I didn’t wake the man sleeping soundly beside me—making the cutest little snoring sound I’d ever heard—I stood.
Creeping quietly to the bathroom, I didn’t bother turning on the lights.
As quietly as I could, I closed the door, used the bathroom, then washed my face off in the sink after cleaning my hands.
When I was done, I opened the bathroom door, surprised to see the difference of light between the two rooms.
One look at the window catty-corner to the bed and I realized why.
The moon was out in full force tonight.
It was even more likely that it was a full moon due to the brightness.
Walking over to the window, I spread the curtains open wide and stared out, forgetting momentarily that I wasn’t alone.
There was a shift on the bed behind me, and I looked over my shoulder to see Lock now resting on his back instead of his side.
I licked my suddenly parched lips when I got my first good look at him in the moonlight.
It was like a spotlight was shining straight through the window and pointed straight at him where he lay on the bed.
And suddenly, my head was no longer focused on what was going on with my dad—and with me and Lock. Instead, it was totally focused on Lock. More importantly, on Lock’s anatomy.
I turned and leaned my ass against the windowsill, eating him up with my gaze.
He was naked underneath the sheet that was covering him.
The sheet came all the way up to his chest, tucked tightly to him and held in place by one lone muscular arm. His other arm was thrown up over his head, tucked slightly behind his head where it rested on the pillow.
The only bit of skin I could see on his entire body was his arm, neck, face, and one foot that was poking out at the bottom of the sheet.
His hand was resting on his taut abdomen, splayed out, fingers spread wide on his belly.
And his face was tilted away from the moonlight that was streaming in through the window.
His breathing was even, and his chest rose and fell at a steady rate, drawing my attention.
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