She’d surprised him, and he laughed wholeheartedly, a fuller laugh than she’d yet heard from him. His body shook hers with its force. “Oh, I like you, little outlaw. I really do.”
She lifted her head, and he met her halfway for a kiss they both wanted. Sadie began thinking of how she wanted to spend the rest of this day. She wanted to lie in bed and talk. She wanted to take a shower with him. She wanted to order pizza or something and have it delivered and eat it in bed. She wanted to sleep with him. She’d never slept with anybody before. Not once in her whole life had she woken up with somebody who’d held her through the night. She wanted all of that with Sherlock. Right now.
At the very moment that she opened her mouth to take the risk to tell him so, his phone rang in his jeans pocket.
“Fuck,” he muttered and reached down for his jeans. He was still inside her; he hadn’t moved off of her. “Yeah,” he barked into the phone.
She lay very still, waiting, pushing back the freakout that already wanted to invade her head, simply because he’d answered his phone.
He listened to the caller for maybe a minute, then said, “Yeah, okay…Yeah…I’m in Riverside. Gimme about thirty. Less if I can.” He ended the call and dropped his phone on top of his jeans.
He was leaving.
At least he had the good grace to look guilty. “Sorry, sweetheart. I have to go.”
No, that was bullshit. He was still inside her! The freakout blossomed into fullness and her blood turned to foam faster than she thought it ever had before. “You can’t! You’re still inside me! You can’t just pull out and leave!” She hit his shoulder with the heel of her hand. “Asshole!”
“Sadie!” His voice was sharp, corrective. “Calm down. I have to go. I don’t want to go. Believe me, I am not ready to leave. But I have to. That was the club. I’m needed.”
“Right now?” The fight in her deflated, but not the fizz.
“Right now, sweetheart. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” He kissed her forehead. “Can I come back when I’m done? Pick you up and take you back to my place, where there is a queen-size bed?”
A little hopeful, she said, “This has a trundle that hooks on. I can make it a king-size bed. I just never have reason to. And your house is gross. How often do you change your sheets?”
His smile made her feel a little better. “Then I can come back?”
She nodded. Maybe she could still have all the things she wanted. “Okay.”
“Okay.” He kissed her, just a light press of his lips to hers, and then eased slowly out of her. Even as he softened, the feel of him moving inside her made her whimper and him groan.
He stood and pulled the condom off. When he looked around for a place to put it, she pointed at the bathroom door. He turned toward the door, and she saw that he had the word HORDE tattooed across his shoulders.
When he’d disposed of the condom, he came back and started to dress. Sadie still hadn’t moved. She lay there and watched him. He pulled his jeans on, fastened his belt, sat in a chair and put his socks and boots on. When he went to his pile of shirts, he picked up the beater and tossed it to her. “I’m gonna leave that here, if it’s okay.”
It was just a cheap beater, the kind that came two to a pack, but it made her feel better that he was leaving it. And it smelled of him. As he buttoned his shirt, she sat up, put the beater to her face and breathed deep. When she looked back at him, he was watching her, his eyes serious.
After he was dressed, he picked up his kutte and then came and sat at the end of the daybed. She had to move her feet to make room for him. “I’m going to be back as soon as I can. In the meantime, if you need anything, you have my number. And I have yours. I’ll call if something comes up, okay?”
“Wait—how do you have my number?”
He grinned. “I told you. It’s my job to know things.”
“Still creepy.”
He put his hands on either side of her legs and leaned close. “You sorry I knew your address?”
No, she was not. She smirked and dropped her head.
“That’s what I thought.” He kissed the top of her head, then stood and slipped his kutte over his shoulders. “Okay. I’ll see you later.”
She needed to know something, something that might settle her blood. As he walked to her door, she said, “Sherlock, wait.”
He stopped and faced her, and he waited.
“Why are you coming back? What’s happening here?”
He smiled, and his eyes sparkled. “Because I like you, Sadie Ballard. I like you a lot. What’s happening here? I guess we’ll have to see.”
He knew her last name. Of course he did. It would have been right there with her address. “What’s your last name? Or do I need to hack you to find out?”
“I wager I’m tougher to hack than you are, but my name is right out in the open, just like yours. My last name is Holmes.”
She laughed. “Your name is Sherlock Holmes? And it’s your job to know things? For real?”
He opened her door. “For real. Be a good girl while I’m gone, Sadie B.”
And then he was gone.
And she was alone. Fizzing.
CHAPTER NINE
“Okay, here’s what I got.” Sherlock projected the screen of his tablet onto the back wall of the Keep. A photo appeared, showing a Latino man in his thirties. Crew cut, heavy build, gold aviator sunglass. “Gael Leandro. He’s the youngest grandson of a former major cartel player, Pablo Leandro. The Leandro crew went down a long time ago, when Gael was just a little kid.”
Hoosier grunted. “I know ‘em.”
“The Leandros hurt my mom,” Connor added, his voice low.
Fuck. Sherlock should have put that together. Nobody ever talked about it, and it wasn’t widely known, but as the guy with his hands around all the club knowledge, Sherlock knew that Hoosier had changed club affiliations more than once, and he knew the first time had been because Bibi had been badly hurt by club shit. If he’d dug a little deeper putting this shit together, he’d have found that link and presented this intel differently. But he’d been in a hurry—and he was distracted, having trouble pulling his attention away from Sadie.
Jesus, fucking her had blown his sockets. She’d been perfect, giving him what he wanted, following his lead, and so totally into it, like everything he’d done had been an epiphany for her. When the burner had gone off just as they were finished, while he was still hard inside her, he’d actually considered not answering. And after he had answered and known he was needed, he’d still had to fight off the temptation to blow the call off.
Especially the way she’d been looking up at him, shocked and upset that he was leaving. Even after he promised to be back, that wary doubt dulled her eyes. He was a little worried, truth be told. She obviously wasn’t the most stable woman he’d ever met.
A recovering addict with other ‘reckless behavior’ issues probably had no business getting involved with a guy like him. As the club’s intel officer, he spent more time at the rear than at the front, but it wasn’t like he had an actual desk job. He’d been shot, he’d killed, he’d buried, he’d done all the dark his brothers had. And more often than not, he’d been the one planning it.
Not to mention the age difference, which was substantial.
But he liked her. And he liked that she seemed to need him—or if not him specifically, then somebody, and why not him. It felt good to be needed, and he liked taking care of her.
He liked a lot about her. He liked the way she felt. He liked the way she talked—the sound of her voice as well as the things she said. He liked her beautiful, too-big mouth and her violet eyes, her little pink tits and her bony ass that he could hold completely in his hands. He liked the way she looked surprised when she came.
He’d come into the clubhouse still smelling her everywhere on him. He’d had to go into the bathroom and wash his beard so he could master his fuckin
g hard-on.
Yeah, he was distracted. He pulled his attention back to the room and responded to Connor’s statement. “Sorry. Hadn’t made the connection. Do you think that’s a factor now?”
Hoosier leaned forward, and his hands curled into fists on the table. “Don’t know. What happened back then was the beginning of the end for those bastards, but I wasn’t a player after I got Beebs back, and I wasn’t a major player before that. Wasn’t wearing Horde colors then, in any event. Don’t know if a family…v-v-vendetta would carry to me, but I guess all the other players are dead and gone, so…maybe.”
It was just the three of them in the room. Bart and Lakota were in Vegas, working on PR details for the upcoming national charity run. The Horde was pretty thin at home this week, actually, with Demon, Muse, and Keanu on the run they were talking about, and Bart and Lakota in Vegas, and J.R., Fargo, and Ronin on a southwestern run.
They were meeting because their first run on the new route Sherlock had plotted out a week and a half ago had been ambushed. There’d been a firefight in broad daylight out in the wilds of Idaho. And the protection crew running it, a combination of SoCal Horde and NorCal Brazen Bulls, had nearly lost about three million dollars’ worth of La Zorra’s product. Two Bulls had been hit, and the Horde’s own Keanu. All three were going to be fine, and the shipment had moved on, delayed by a day while the able-bodied on the crew disposed of the ambushers’ bodies.
Muse had sent photos back of faces and ink. He was a shitty photographer, but the images were decent enough. The ink was new, and hadn’t made any database Sherlock could find—which meant it hadn’t made any database, period. Most of the faces were nobodies. Gael Leandro had been the only dead face of note.
Sherlock went on. “I didn’t find any noise about these guys. From what I can tell, this is their very first move as a crew. All the bodies have fresh ink: a pitchfork—or a trident, I guess—with a Latin cross for a handle. Looks like they’re calling themselves Los Pecadores Inmortales. The Immortal Sinners.” Which sounded like a lame guild name in his MMO, but then, a lot of outlaw crew names sounded like raiding guilds to him. Including the Night Horde.
“Idaho seems pretty fucking far north for an upstart Mexican crew to make their first stand,” Connor observed, staring at the photo of the dead Leandro.
“Could be that Leandro was the only Mexican national in the ambush crew. I don’t have facial rec or ink hits on the others. Not yet, anyway. If this is a new crew with Mexican roots already seeding a presence in the US, that far north? Then I can only think of one thing they’re really after.”
“They’re making a play for La Zorra’s Mexi-Canadian…pipeline,” Hoosier finished.
“Yeah.”
“Fuck.” Connor leaned back and linked his hands behind his head. “How’d she miss this coming up?”
“I don’t know,” his father answered.
Sherlock had an idea how La Zorra’s team could have missed it. “Something starts small enough, it’s easy to miss, no matter how close you’re looking. And the bigger she gets, the harder it is to look close. This might be a sign that she’s getting bigger than she can manage.”
Hoosier nodded, pulling on his beard. “Well, it’s on our…turf now, and that puts us on the front lines. We’ll need to stomp it out.” He turned to Sherlock. “If Leandro”—he cut off abruptly. “Fuck, I hate even saying that…goddamn name. If he was on an…ambush in the middle of Fuck-all Idaho, then I don’t see him as the shaker of…this new crew. The Immortal Assholes or whatever they call themselves. Keep digging, brother. Bring me all you can find. Fast.”
“I’m on it, Prez.” As Hoosier and Connor got up and left the Keep, Sherlock checked his tablet. Shit, it had already been hours since he’d left Sadie. Pulling his personal out of his jeans, he texted her: Will be a while yet. Still want to come back to you.
Then he put his phone away, gathered up his tech, and went back to his office. He hoped finding intel on his new crew wouldn’t take as long as he feared it would.
~oOo~
After midnight, Sherlock finally stood outside Sadie’s door, waiting for her to answer his knock. She hadn’t responded to his text after the Keep, or to his text telling her was done and on his way. At this point, he didn’t know whether she was blowing him off or in some kind of trouble. That look in her eyes as he’d left had him on edge now.
He knocked again. He knew what kind of car she drove—an ancient, ’92 BMW convertible—because that had been among the nuggets of info he’d picked up in his cursory search. It wasn’t out front, but the residents didn’t seem to park on the street, so he didn’t know if she was around or not. “Sadie,” he called, his face near the door. “You in there, sweetheart?”
Finally, the lock turned and Sadie opened the door.
She’d showered; her hair was soft and gleaming, the ends curling sweetly around her chin. She wore a pair of men’s—or, more likely, boys’—pajama bottoms. And his beater, loose enough on her small frame that there was serious side-boob happening. His fingers itched to touch.
She stayed at the door, holding it, barring him entry. “Hey.”
“Hey, little outlaw. I come in?”
“Why.” The word was too flat to sound like a question.
“Same reason I said earlier. I really like you. I didn’t want to leave in the first place.”
“But you did.”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“Will you always do that? Drop everything and run off when your phone rings?”
“When that phone rings, yes. I have to. When that phone rings, it means my club needs me.”
“What if I need you more?”
He’d known while he was fucking her that something deeper was going on between them, and he didn’t shy away from it. He’d liked that feeling. He still liked that feeling. But if she was asking him to tell her, mere hours from the first time they’d been intimate, that he would choose her over the club, well, that was a bit much.
Seeing that it was not the time to be so blunt, though, he sought a diplomatic answer. “I guess that’s a decision I’ll have to make at the time.”
“I don’t like that.” She put a hand to her mouth and chewed on her thumbnail.
She still hadn’t opened the door much more than the width of her body. He was tired; it had been a long day of deep thinking. It seemed a lot to ask to stand in her doorway and have a discussion about a relationship that hadn’t really started yet. He sighed. “Do you want me to go, Sadie?”
In lieu of an answer, she stepped back and pushed the door open wide.
Sherlock went in. Her place was tidy and dim, only a light over her kitchen counter and the glow of her television illuminating the space. The screen was paused; she’d been playing the same shooter he’d been playing with Dylan the last night he was at Taryn’s house.
The lavender scent was even stronger now than earlier. And her daybed was made, tidied from how they’d left it. “You didn’t make up your bed into this magical king-size you advertised.”
She shrugged. “Not sure I needed to.”
He went to her. Standing before her, he curled a finger under her chin and tipped her head up. “I told you I’d be back. Have I given you a reason not to believe me?”
“You left.”
“Sadie,” he sighed. God, he felt tired. And protective, and guilty, and responsible for her.
She jerked her head off his finger. “I hate it when you say my name like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m a kid who’s just disappointed you.”
In all honesty, at least to himself, that was more or less how he was feeling. Again, he sought a way to be honest without hurting her obviously fragile feelings. “I am disappointed. I’ve been thinking about you all day. It got in the way of my work, I’ve been thinking about you so much. And now I feel like I’m getting a bum rap.”
Well, he’d said it right, he could tell that immediately. Everything ab
out her expression and posture changed—only slightly, but the effect was dramatic. She went from icy reserve to warm welcome with a blink. “You were thinking about me?” As she spoke, a smile grew until it filled her face. “Really?”
“Really. Can you put your spikes down again?” He brushed his fingertips along her dazzling bottom lip.
“Sorry. I just…I’m still figuring out how to live like this, and this is new to me.”
“Too many demonstratives in that sentence, sweetheart. Live like what? What’s new to you?”
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