Since their talk on the beach, they’d mostly passed the time in companionable quiet. Rainy had changed into one of her long dresses, like the white one she’d been wearing the first time he’d gone to her house. She called them ‘caftans.’ This was a deep green that made her already fantastic eyes seem supernatural. The white one had been form-fitting, flaring away from her legs. This one was snug in the front and loose and flowing in the back.
Still such a hippie chick, his Rainy.
She seemed less passionate about changing the world these days, though. Her circle of interest seemed to have narrowed to her own family and friends.
They’d been sitting quietly, watching the night tide through the trees, Ronin’s arm over Rainy’s shoulders, when she tipped her goblet up and finished her wine. “You want a refill?”
He finished his scotch and handed her the glass. “Sure. Thanks.”
She smiled and glided through the French doors to the room service cart inside.
After she came back and handed him his full glass, she stood before him, sipping her refreshed wine.
He took a drink and smiled up at her. “What?”
“I love you, Roe.”
“I love you, too.”
With her knee, she pushed his legs more widely apart and stood between them. Taking another long sip of her wine, she leaned forward, so that her wonderful freckled cleavage was almost close enough to kiss. He took a long, deep breath, filling his head with her scent, the scent that had always been her—some kind of flower he’d once known the name of. She set her glass on the table at his side.
Then she knelt between his legs.
Lily of the valley. That was the flower that smelled of her.
“Rainy,” he breathed. What she was about to do, she hadn’t done for him in twenty-five years.
“Shhh. It seems like you haven’t spent much of your life feeling good, Roe.” She put her hands on his chest and began unbuttoning his shirt.
He didn’t answer. He’d made a life, the only one he could have made. And what did that mean, ‘good’? Wasn’t ‘good’ relative?
No. No, it wasn’t. Good was what was happening with her. And no, he hadn’t spent any of the last quarter century feeling this.
She opened his shirt and then smoothed her soft hands, their long, manicured fingers with their pretty, funky rings, over his skin, scratching through the light coverage of hair. Her nails grazed his nipples, and he jumped. Taking a deep breath, he relaxed and gave himself over to her.
She came up and ran her tongue over the long, thick scar under his ribs. Then she kissed and licked each one of his scars, big and small, as her hands grasped his belt buckle and worked it open.
When his belt was open and she’d unbuttoned his fly, Ronin shifted in his seat, reclining back, and set his glass next to hers. Gathering her hair into one hand, he closed his fist as she pulled him free of his clothes.
“I love your cock,” she whispered as her hands closed around him.
He sat there, entranced by the sight of her, the red silk of her hair in his fist, her freckled eyelids closed, her graceful fingers, tipped in dark red, circled in silver, wrapped around him, her lips sliding over his tip. Then he felt her tongue, hot and slick, and he had to fight the urge to throw his head back. He didn’t want to lose sight of her. He never wanted to lose sight of her again.
As she worked him, Ronin was struck by a powerful realization: this felt overwhelmingly familiar, overwhelmingly right. His memory of her touch this way was still so vivid that it laid over the present moment like déjà vu. His eyes itched and burned. When they blurred, he blinked impatiently, unwilling to lose a second behind closed eyes.
Her hands and mouth worked together, sliding, twisting, grasping, sucking, licking, and Ronin could feel the eddy of need swirling deep and low in his gut, making his balls tighten against his body. But it wasn’t enough. He wanted to fill her and be full of her. He wanted her slight weight on him. He wanted his face against her neck, her scent spinning in his head. He wanted his arms full of her, his hands tangled in her hair. He wanted to feel her breath on his face. Not wanted—needed.
“Rainy, I need you.” His voice sounded like a growl even to his own ears.
She stopped and pulled back, her hands still firm around him. Their eyes met, and then she pressed a soft, lingering kiss to his tip, licking what had wept from him, and she stood up.
Lifting her long dress, with a sultry shimmy, she worked her wisp of silky underwear off and dropped it to the veranda floor. Then she picked up the hem of her dress again and knelt on the settee, straddling him. He held himself steady as she slid down, taking him in.
What a vision she made as he filled her. Her mouth opened, her eyes rolled up, and she breathed out an earthy, visceral moan. He wanted to think that she looked that way only for him.
He pulled her close, burying his face against her neck, drowning in her hair. Tasting the sweet of her skin, he muttered, “Move, Rainy. Move for me.”
She hooked her hands around his shoulders and did as he asked.
~oOo~
The water sloshed over the side of the tub as Ronin rolled, putting Rainy under him and taking control.
“God, Roe!” she cried as he thrust into her, so deep he could feel her limit pressing against the tip of his cock.
“The feel of you…” he muttered and claimed her mouth, plunging his tongue deep, echoing the movement of his cock inside her. Water splashed against the tile floor like the tide against the shore.
She tore her mouth from his. “I love it when you talk.”
He buried his face in the crook of her shoulder, sucking her skin between his teeth, and hooked an arm under her leg, bringing it up high. She gasped at the shift. “Now, Roe, now! Don’t stop. Don’t stop!”
He had no intention of stopping.
Just then, faint under the sounds of them and of the sloshing, splashing water, Ronin’s phone rang. His burner. He froze, and Rainy made a strangled sound of desperation.
“Roe?” she gasped. It rang again, and this time, she heard it, too. “Roe, let it go.”
It was the burner. He couldn’t let it go. He lifted his head and turned toward the sound.
Under him, Rainy flexed her hips, making his gut spasm with need, and he groaned. She cupped his face in her hands and turned his head until they were eye to eye. “Let it go. Be with me.”
She didn’t know about the club, didn’t understand that he couldn’t ignore the burner. Maybe it would be nothing, just a call to check in, give him some information, tell him about a job. Or maybe it meant trouble. In the state the club was in now, it could well be trouble. A patch didn’t ignore his burner, because he never knew when he might be desperately needed.
He did not want to answer the fucking burner. He wanted to stay right where he was, deep inside the woman he loved, in a bathtub like a swimming pool, making a mess on the imported tile.
Rainy flexed again. His sudden turmoil had not softened his cock, and he groaned again, his need becoming real pain. Then he tucked his face against her neck and picked up his rhythm again.
By the time he groaned with his finish, a second call had rung through, and then alerted a voice mail.
It was trouble.
~oOo~
The call ended, Ronin stared at the phone in his hand. He was dripping into a puddle at his feet, standing naked in the middle of the suite’s bedroom. The morning sun slanted over his legs.
Rainy came up to him, a thick hotel towel wrapped prettily around her chest, holding out to him another towel just like it. “Everything okay?”
“No. I need to get back.”
“Who was that?”
“My VP—the club Vice-President. I need to get back.”
“I don’t understand.”
He knew, and he didn’t want her to understand. He wanted to keep her innocent of the things he did, wanted her and her life, their son, to become his sanctuary, his calm in the eye of the sto
rm that was the club. If he didn’t tell her about the club, and didn’t tell the club about her, then she would be safe. No one who might harm her to hurt him knew of their connection.
Now more than ever, he needed her safe.
Dora Vega, La Zorra, the cartel queen with whom they’d worked for almost five years, and for whom they’d ridden deep into the dark, was dead.
Assassinated.
What that meant for the Horde—well, he had to get home, to the Keep, so they could try to figure out what circle of hell they’d just fallen into.
He took the towel from Rainy and rubbed it over his head and face. When he opened his eyes again, she was standing exactly as she had been, her eyes worried and searching. He had to tell her something.
“This phone is for club business. When it rings, it’s important. There’s trouble, and I have to get back.”
“What kind of trouble? Dangerous trouble? Roe, I’m not an idiot. I know what the Night Horde is. I know what you do.”
He wrapped the towel around his waist and grabbed her arms, pulling her to him. “Rainy, I won’t talk about that stuff. It’s not for you. I want my life with you to be something different.”
“You can’t live two lives, Ronin.”
He could try. “I have to get back, and we’re not close. Will you please let me take you home?”
After another long, contemplative moment, she nodded, and he kissed her.
~oOo~
The men at the table sat quietly, taking in what Hoosier had just said. Big Nate, wearing a patch he’d had less than forty-eight hours, stared at his hands.
“I thought her kids were in Europe,” Trick said, his voice low and hesitant.
“They were,” Hoosier answered. “She had them squirreled away in Brussels. They got them, anyway. The Águilas cartel is broken, and they took everybody with any personal connection to Dora down. All at once, by the look of it.”
‘They’ was Emilio Zapata and the people working for him. There was no doubt about that; the assassins had signed their work.
“How old were her kids?” Demon asked.
Sherlock answered him. “Youngest was eleven. Oldest seventeen. Both boys. There was a girl between them. She was thirteen. Dismembered and left in a row across the street in front of their safe house. Just like their mother, on the other side of the planet.”
Muse sat forward. “We’re next. We’ve been leading her charge all this time, gutting his soldiers. Zapata will come for us next. We gotta get our women and kids out of town,” he said, his voice sharp with anger and anxiety. “Right the fuck now. Buttoned up at Bart’s isn’t good enough—they’ll know to look there.”
Ronin sent some quiet gratitude into the ether that he hadn’t allowed Rainy to be known in this life. She and his son were safe. He looked around the table. Hoosier, Bart, Sherlock, J.R., Muse, Demon, Trick, Connor—they all had old ladies, and most had young children, too. Sherlock’s boy was only about three months old; so was Demon’s youngest son. Trick’s youngest daughter was about six or seven months old. Muse’s son was little more than a year. Yeah, they were vulnerable.
Bart nodded. “We’re already on it, Muse. We’re gonna send them to Laughlin first thing tomorrow. The Bulls have a safe house.”
“Laughlin—that’s two hundred and fifty miles. Will they be safe on the road that long?”
“We’ve already contracted for a bus—reinforced, blacked-out windows. Trick, Big Nate, Stuff, and Terry—they’ll all ride along.” Hoosier turned to Trick. “You good with that, brother? The work here’ll be dark. Figured you’d be better on protection.”
Trick was staying clean and had been since he’d done time being tortured in a black site prison. In answer to Hoosier’s questions, he nodded. “I’m good with it, yeah.”
“Good. Now we got to figure out where we’re most vulnerable, because Muse is right. They’re gonna come for us, and we need to be ready.”
Ronin didn’t like the idea of protection of all of their dearest treasures, their women and children, being left to only one real soldier. Trick was an excellent choice. But Big Nate, just patched? And the Prospects? It didn’t seem like enough.
“I’ll ride with the bus, too,” he volunteered. “Put some more experience on guard.”
Everybody did their usual double take because he’d spoken up at the table, and then they all turned to Hoosier, who considered and said, “Yeah. We’ll leave Terry back with us, then. The bus is armored, and the driver is a former merc, so four guards is enough, and we need the manpower here. We don’t know what we’ll be facing.”
“Jesus fuck,” Connor muttered and slammed his fist on the table. “Dad, enough. I am done. Say it all, right here, or I will.”
“Son…”
Connor cut his father off with an impatient flick of his hand. “No fucking way. No need to keep a lid on now—the work died with her. Now we’re up to our balls in trouble because she had a fucking God complex and we knelt down before her. So everything gets laid out on this table, by you or by me, right the fuck now.”
Father and son stared at each other, and then Hoosier nodded. Sighing heavily, he scanned the whole table. “I think you’ve all heard me say some time or another that people who gain great power all eventually start to believe their own legends. I thought Dora was different, and I guess she was. She wasn’t motivated by greed, or even self-interest. But she still forgot she was a human being, and I think that’s what got us here.”
He paused, as if collecting himself, and the table waited. Ronin, having sensed for a long time that something had been withheld from the club membership, honed his attention to a point, and breathed deeply and regularly, maintaining a calm he could see his brothers around him losing.
“Not everyone personally connected to Dora is dead. I got word about the killings from the last person alive in her family. Her husband. David Vega.”
A ripple moved slowly over the table, as the men—those who hadn’t already known, and those who would recognize the name—reconciled that name with what they knew of the man. He had been Julio Santaveria’s closest advisor, and he had been deep undercover for the Department of Homeland Security—the same department that had taken Trick and held him secretly for almost two months. In his capacity as an agent under deep cover, he had brutally killed one of the Missouri Horde. Ronin couldn’t remember the man’s name, but he had been Bart’s best friend, he remembered that.
Also in his capacity as an undercover agent, as part of some deal he’d worked with the Missouri Horde, Vega had given them access to kill Santaveria, the head of the Perro Blanco cartel. The nasty business of the Perros had destroyed the club Ronin had first patched into. From those ashes had risen the SoCal charter of the Night Horde.
And somehow, here again, David Vega was involved in trouble with the Horde.
Ronin could tell that all of the officers had known about Vega. He wondered for how long that had been the case, and why it had been decided that the rest of the club couldn’t know.
Connor cut in. “Vega is still a Fed. He’s leading some shadow agency, so deep it’s not on the books anywhere, and neither is he. Their sole purpose is to kill the drug trade. By any means necessary.”
“What do you mean, ‘kill’ it?” J.R. asked.
“I mean end it. Destroy it.”
J.R. gaped. He wasn’t the only one. “That’s insane.”
With a nod, Connor went on. “Yeah, it is. Dora was working with Vega all along, from what we can tell, with the goal to tear drugs down. Once she had her monopoly, she started glutting the market to bring the prices way down, and she’s been raping the fields on two continents so they won’t be fit to produce for a long time. All the heat we’ve been taking the past year is her surviving enemies thinking she was fucking up and trying to exploit a weakness.” He turned a bitter look on his father, then turned to Sherlock. “I got that right?”
“Yeah,” Sherlock sighed. “That’s about it.”
“How long have you known we were working for Vega? He’s fucking DHS. They’re the ones that fucking took me—Dora was in on that after all? Was the whole thing some fucking game they were playing?” Trick directed his questions to Connor. His hands were fists, shaking on the table.
“No! He’s not DHS anymore, and whatever he’s running, he seems to be working against DHS now, or at least despite them. It’s because of Vega you got out, T. This is fucked up, no question. We should have said what was going on as soon as we knew. But we’re not working with the people who hurt you. I swear it.”
Calm & Storm (The Night Horde SoCal Book 6) Page 15
