by Nicole Snow
Soon as her legs stopped shaking, wrapped around mine, I eased out and flipped her over. This time, I watched her sweet ass bouncing as I took her, pounding my balls against her clit while I fucked harder and faster than before.
My grandma's ring glittered while her hand tensed, clutching the sheets. A slow, feminine growl poured from her lips while we fucked. Each time I quickened my strokes, she matched me, moving her ass back to meet my thrusts.
My hands moved like demons. One snatched at her hair, giving it a pull, turning her gasps into grunts of ecstasy. My other hand straightened, came down on her ass several times, making her fuck me back faster.
I wanted to demolish her tonight, and build her up as mine. More beautiful, more sexy, more sweet than ever before. But my body wouldn't let me do it in one go. When her cunt clenched my dick again, I lost it.
“Fuck, darlin', I'm coming!” My cock ballooned while I snarled the words.
My balls slapped her one more time while I drove in, held it, and let the wave pour out of me, into my bride's womb. Hot, thick fire erupted in steady, wild jerks.
I came like a motherfucker deep inside my wife for the first time, and kept on doing it long after my seed slipped out the space between us, spilled onto the sheets, and carried us deeper into bliss. We fucked for a small eternity, grunting our pleasure, grinding our flesh, whispering each other's names through clenched teeth.
When it was finally done and I pulled out half-hard, I wondered if a man could get so hot he'd fuck right through his woman's birth control. If it happened...we'd figure it out.
I took her in my arms, stroking her brow, wiping away the sweat and breathing in the scent of sex. “You're gonna kill me in this bed one of these days, darlin'. Least I'll die happy.”
“Sorry, no room for death anytime soon,” she said, squeezing my hand, resting her head against my chest. “There's just you and me tonight, Dusty. No reapers allowed.”
“Deal. No fuckin' reapers. I'm a helluva lot more interested in making a life for us than taking anybody else's.”
She cooed her agreement into my muscle. I stroked her hair softly, imagining my old man standing in the corner, shaking his head in sick disapproval at what I'd just said.
He'd raised me to be a badass, a killer, his successor in Dixie's meanest MC. I'd lived half my life doing it, but I'd always let the good outweigh the blood.
Now, that went double. For the first time in forever, his ghost didn't haunt me. I never gave it a second thought by the time she turned her face to me, begging to be kissed.
Three Weeks Later
The mansion was just a distant memory. We didn't have the crew to guard it twenty-four seven, run all our biz, and keep tracking the Sicilians, so Hannah moved in with me. My house meant a smaller space to cover, and less chance anybody unexpected tracked her down without making their presence known in town first, asking for intel.
If sharing the same bed every night seemed like paradise, then having her there in my own place was nirvana.
We took things slowly at first. She worked hard on her machine when I wasn't around, always protected by a couple prospects. I showed up around the clubhouse again, taking club business by the horns. I made sure we kept our coin rolling in, despite the distractions.
Ma? She screamed when I finally introduced them, and explained what we'd done. Left out the part about the savage, relentless bastards we had to deal with. I told her we'd eloped, gone off and done our own thing, while we figured out how to break the news to the club and everybody else in our lives.
Ma gave me plenty of shit about that. Thankfully, it didn't last long. By the end of the evening, I saw the two favorite women in my life chattering away over chai tea lattes. Ma stopped to wipe tears from her old eyes when she thought nobody was looking.
The unthinkable had happened. Her son was married. Such a surprising, surreal, and beautiful happening it nearly brought a tear to my eyes, too.
As for the club...not so fuckin' easy.
I waited for all my boys to come home, get back to work for several days, before I decided to do church. We were three weeks in since we'd moved the wife none of them knew I had to my place.
Firefly took more time away with Cora's baby coming. When I gaveled the briefing open that day, I should've seen his blows coming, before they hit me in the face. A new baby puts stress on the strongest man, pressure I hoped I'd know personally one fine day, so he had good reason to be extra wound up.
“Boys, there's been a few developments while you were off having fun. I handled it myself 'til now because I wasn't gonna shit on anyone's honeymoon.” I paused, searching their reactions, taking a long pull from the fresh tobacco in my pipe.
“Tell me it ain't the Deads.” Joker's gaze shifted over. Having his revenge and gaining a family drained a lot of his venom, but something still lingered, a lifelong urge to destroy anybody wearing the Deadhands MC patch.
“Nah. Our friends down yonder in Georgia can barely even find what's left of 'em since we took down Hatch and his crew. This is something different.”
Yeah, different. Good candidate for understatement of the year.
“Fuck it. There's no way to say it that's gonna please everybody, so I'm just laying it out,” I growled, choosing my next words very carefully. “Hannah's in trouble.”
Firefly nearly hit the fuckin' ceiling. He stood up, his big hands gripping the edge of the table. If there was ever a time to slam the gavel, calling for order, it was now.
Skin, Lion, Crawl, and Tin jumped up behind him, took him by the arms. I wondered if four burly men would be enough to stop him from turning the room upside down.
“She took a loan from the Sicilian Brotherhood.” I said it coldly, listening to men shake their heads and hiss between their teeth. “It was an honest mistake. Something she did when she was young and dumb, before she made all her money, and now it's caught up with her. Me and the prospects were protecting her house when we took down two vicious motherfuckers there to kill her. We got them first, and dumped their bodies off in the usual places. Brothers, it's a clusterfuck, no bones about it. But she's asking for a favor, and I'm willing to answer. She needs our help, and she's going to get it.”
“You two-faced weasel sonofabitch! First you fuck her, then you hide this?” Firefly roared, his spittle flying several feet through the air. He strained in the brothers' arms, trying to break away like a bull charging through a crowd.
“Shit, Firefly! Easy!” Skin growled, taking a rough elbow to the gut when my big Enforcer got some leverage.
“Fuck everybody, and fuck you, Prez! You wanna do her a goddamned favor, you can stay the fuck outta her life. She's too good for this, damn it. Too fuckin' good.”
“This is turning into a shit show,” Joker said, leaning toward me, maintaining his icy calm. I looked at him and nodded.
Fuck's sake, I had to tread lightly. I'd narrowly saved my patch a couple months ago, after that dust up with the Deads. More horrific infighting in this club would do me in for good. Brothers at each others throats were easy targets for any outsiders looking to pick us off.
“I'll give you boys the rest of the details as soon as I can hear myself think.” I waited, eyeballing Firefly, feeding the rage boiling over in his eyes.
His face was red. Every few seconds, his temples bulged, grinding his teeth like he wanted to chew me up and spit me out. If he ever regretted the swing vote that kept me at the head of the table, it was now.
“They roped her into a money laundering scheme through that matchmaker app of hers. She's torn up their infrastructure, cut them off, and thrown out their shit since we killed the two assholes. This file, here, contains everything we know about the capo after her, a man named Dom Barone.” I pushed the manilla envelope in front of me toward Joker.
My Veep flipped through the flimsy pages, ignoring the chaos around us, giving me a quizzical look before passing it to Sixty next. “Hardly anything there.”
“Yeah, that's
our biggest problem at the moment,” I said, drawing more smoke into my lungs, before I let it out in a good, long puff. “We need more intel. Need it fuckin' bad. I moved Hannah into my place because we're spread too thin to watch her mansion around the clock.”
Firefly twisted in his brothers' arms, his eyes becoming pure death, fixed on me. Almost like he knew what was coming next before I even said it.
“She's living with me. It's no secret –“
“Motherfucker!” Firefly lost it, struggling with all his might, elbowing poor Skinny boy in the guts again. This time, Skin lost it, winded. Crawl took his place, grunting as he tried to hold the giant back. Took the rest of the boys in the room jumping up to hold him against the wall, howling like a maniac the whole damned time.
I stood up, putting out my pipe. “Brothers, I ain't the enemy, and neither is Firefly. We've got our disagreements, and I'm hoping one day, we'll put it all behind us. It's no secret me and her have had a thing for a long time. Half this club knew. So did the brother who's pinned down, trying to tear my head off.”
Moving between my men, I stopped about three feet from Firefly, close enough for the fuming hulk to spit in my face if he wanted. He looked up, opening his lips. “You're a two-faced, cradle robbin' sack of shit, Dusty. You put a bigger fuckin' mark on her head than the Sicilians ever will.”
Several men jeered. Others whispered among themselves. The brothers were getting pissed with his antics, and we'd have a full blown fight on our hands real soon if I didn't play lion tamer fast.
“Firefly, we've rode together, fought together, bled together, even fuckin' wept together. I can live with you wanting to reach down my throat and pull my balls out through my teeth,” I said coldly, coming closer, 'til we were face-to-face. “One thing I ain't tolerating is you letting your anger spill over, fuckin' up the rest of this club when Hannah needs our support. She'll always be your little sis, yeah, everybody knows it. We get it. But she's more than that now. She's my old lady, brother. She's my wife. And I'll take a hundred kinds of death before I let your bullshit cause hers, or anybody else's wearing this patch.”
“Wife?! The fuck?” Half a dozen identical cries went off, almost at once.
Firefly's eyes bugged out his head, and then pinched shut. For a second, I feared he was having a goddamned stroke. Several brothers probably wondered the same thing, holding him down, looking back over their shoulders at me for instruction.
“Leave him be,” I said quietly, watching as the big man finally overloaded himself, and slumped. Overwhelmed or giving up, who the fuck knew, but he'd lost his will to fight. “You all heard me the first time. Hannah and I got hitched about three weeks ago in a quick little ceremony in her library. Just a couple days after Skinny boy and Joker tied the knot. I couldn't wait a day longer, knowing the danger, and the fact she'd be facing this world like a defenseless fuckin' lamb if I didn't protect her with everything we had.”
“She had that anyway, Prez,” Skin said, the scar on his cheek rippling as he twisted his lips. “The girl's always been family, before you came along.”
“Yeah, but she wasn't mine, and that had to change. I love her.”
Nobody argued. Firefly opened his eyes. The lightning hot rage scorching through his body faded, but a deader hatred simmered on his face, focused on me.
“This club's doubled down on Hannah's life, brothers. Skin's right about us owing her a helping hand from day one, thanks to her blood, same as our very pissed off Enforcer here. Now, she's wrapped up in this patch even deeper, part of our hearts and souls.” I thumped the skull with its smoking pistols on the back of Joker's cut, just above his bottom rocker. “I know this shit's getting real old. Seems like every month, we're chasing down some jackals, trying to keep them from eating us alive. This ain't no different from what we've done before. We're going after the Sicilians for love, for peace, for vengeance, for money, or maybe just because they're demon fucks who deserve to die.”
Half the boys in the room nodded. Lion looked at me, taking one hand off Firefly to scratch his scruffy beard. His closest brother, Tinman, stood behind him, still trying to wrap his head around why this club oughta have more heart than a man needed to sink his dick into new whores begging for the patch. Crawl held onto Firefly's arm, his dark features making him look even more determined in the dull light.
“We've taken pure hell this last year,” I said. “So much shit. We've survived beatings, bullets, knives, rogue pimps, and two of the meanest fuckin' clubs who ever set up shop in Dixie. I'm asking ya'll to step up and stand strong one more time.”
“Prez, you can stop right there,” Joker said, a little bit of his trademark crazy returning to his hazel eyes. “We're with you. Whatever mistakes were made before with the Deads, they're ancient fuckin' history. We ain't leaving anybody's old lady to suffer alone, especially not yours.”
“Old lady, wife, over my goddamned dead body...” Firefly snorted harshly under his breath, shaking his head.
“I couldn't ask for better friends and brothers. All of you,” I said, bowing my head gratefully. “We'll hash out the details as soon as we know more. Skinny, I want you on the financials in that folder full time. See if you can use your sense for numbers to find out where the fuck those shell accounts go.”
“You got it,” he said, a slow smile pulling at his scarred face.
“I'm trusting every man in this room to do me the biggest solid of my life. I'm counting on you. Even the ones who want me dead right now...well, here's hoping we can put that shit aside, and make sure Hannah lives out her days in one piece. We can settle what else that means with fists or words later.”
I looked Firefly square in the face. He stared at me while I walked back to my seat, never saying a word.
“About half you boys got women and kids to worry about. Believe me, I'm starting to share your frustrations with the river of blood we're always trying to cross without drowning in this biz.” Skin and Joker nodded.
“Everybody else, you're still deciding who you are. Maybe you'll be content to fuck bitches, make money, and ride with the wind for the rest of your days. That's your right, and there ain't nothing wrong with it.” Sixty looked at me and grinned, his goatee twitching in a way that said he'd never give up the partying.
“We're all different, every man wearing this patch, but we took an oath to each other. If we don't live by it, and die by it if need be, we don't have shit. When I slam this gavel down, bringing church to a close, I want three brothers bringing Firefly to the bar. Give him as much as he needs to calm the fuck down.” I paused, locking eyes with my big pissed off brother again, hating that he had the same baby blues as my Hannah. “Firefly, when you sober up, we'll sit down and talk. Whenever and wherever you want. Let's talk this out like men, unarmed, and make ourselves a deal we can both live with.”
“I ain't making shit with you, Cap'n. You're a backstabbing son of a fuck who stuck your dick in the wrong fuckin' place. Fuck you. Fuck –“
Skinny boy cut him off with a quick, blunt punch to the gut. We'd all had enough.
“I'm closing this out for the day, boys. We'll all sit down and talk, soon as I've found us something worth talkin' about.”
I slammed the gavel down so hard the handle nearly snapped. Sitting back in my chair, I watched my brothers haul Firefly away, still spitting and cussing me out.
It'd take a lot of whiskey to soak his ass happy. And even then, some poor bastard might wind up with his fists in their face, taking punches I deserved.
Joker nodded, the last one leaving the room, giving me a brotherly slap on the shoulder. I lingered behind for a few minutes, staring at the relics lining the wall. Old photos, flags, and patches hung in frames like museum pieces, capturing a hundred good times, bad times, and dirty fuckin' times under my old man's rule.
I'd finish what I started, turning this club around. I fuckin' had to.
It wasn't all about Hannha, even if she'd taken centerstage. Every man who had my
back deserved a happy ending. I'd put my ass on the line a hundred times over if I could bring it. I'd even see the day when Firefly got over his shit, hugged his sis, and sat next to me with a beer while we watched our kids playing at our feet.
11
Fading (Hannah)
Seven Weeks Later
Three weeks after I started living in his modest house, it grew on me. I hadn't appreciated small spaces growing up. Probably because the mobile home Huck and me were raised in was dirty, desperate, and surrounded by crazies.
But this cozy little rambler on the other side of town...this was nice. I sat on his deck every evening, my laptop sprawled out around me, listening to the birds coming down from the Smokies to say hello.
It was already November, with Thanksgiving coming up fast. Soon it'd be too cold to sit out here, even in a jacket. I normally did the holidays with Huck, whenever I wasn't off traveling. This year should've been extra special with Cora and the baby.
Too bad my brother hadn't called me in weeks. Cora sent texts every so often, cautiously trying to make peace, but I could tell she was afraid to get in the middle of it. I wouldn't press her either, especially with her baby due anytime.
Limbo made the long, sad season even more melancholy. I pressed him all the time about the Sicilians, and he mostly cut me off after a point. Every time I heard don't fuckin' worry, darlin', or club business, my fears pitched into overdrive.
They hadn't found a solid lead. Even stranger, Dom and his men hadn't tried to hit us yet.
I expected it every night, laying wide awake sometimes. Just waiting for a window to cave in, sending broken glass flying everywhere, about a second before evil men with guns were at the foot of our bed.
I wasn't the only one who was restless. Dusty slept fitfully, mumbling in his sleep. Sometimes, I'd catch him sitting up, staring into the darkness, one hand on his nightstand, just inches from the nine millimeter he kept for protection.
