Tattered & Torn

by A. J. Downey

“Okay Princess. I’ll shelve the discussion for now,” I conceded. She bit her lips together and nodded.

  “Okay,” she murmured. I jostled her a little in my arms.

  “You’re okay,” I told her, “You’re always okay with me. I will never force you to do anything. I’ll just craft convincing arguments until you give in,” I smiled at her and bounced my eyebrows and her expression was like the sun coming out from behind dark clouds. She laughed and it was high and bright and perfect and the mood in the room lightened considerably.

  “Caveman,” she accused.

  “I won’t disagree, now come on. I need you in my bed.”

  We went out into the common room where some of the guys were playing poker, some were watching the game and slipped out front after Shelly retrieved her purse from the kitchen. I opened the door to the truck and waited while she stood tapping a text into her phone. She sent it and looked up at me.

  “Reaver,” she said by way of explanation. I nodded and she got up into the cab. I shut the door and rounded the front end. The drive out to my place was silent. She stared out the window but I don’t think she was worried or thinking too hard. It gave me a thrill that she held my hand on the expanse of seat between us.

  I pulled down the long lane, my house and garage was set back from the road. I had enough property here that if I’d wanted I could probably keep a horse or two but wasn’t really interested. With work and the MC keeping me busy I didn’t even have a dog right now which I’d always had a dog growing up around my parent’s farm. I kind of missed having one.

  “Dog or cat person?” I asked Shelly suddenly as I rolled up to a stop by the house’s back porch.

  “Dog,” she answered but her eyes were all for the light blue clapboard house with white trim set in the deepening twilight. It was a single story rambler and I liked it. Plenty of room to add on with no real need to.

  “What do you think?”

  “Awfully big for just one person,” she murmured.

  I smiled, “Guess when I bought it I was still holding out for that happily ever after.” Shelly snorted, a jaded and derisive noise.

  “Shit like that is only in fairy tales Ghost. Not the really real world,” It hurt my heart to hear her say it like that. We had a long road ahead of us but I’d committed, and part of that commitment meant changing her mind about certain things. I added this one to the list.

  “Can’t have a real appreciation for the good things in life if there weren’t a few bad to compare to,” I said and got out of the truck, she was still staring at where I’d been when I opened her door. She let me help her down without thinking about it. Whatever barrier had been in her mind about me touching her, it was gone now and I loved it.

  “You can explore tomorrow as much as you’d like,” I said letting us into the house. “Right now, I’m beat, I want to make love to you one more time and I want to fall asleep with you in my arms,” Shelly laughed at me.

  “That is such a chick thing to say,” she accused.

  “Yeah and you tell any of the guys I’ll fucking deny it. Besides, I thought chicks dug a dude in touch with his feminine side.” I steered her down the hall by her belt loops and into the master bedroom, my bedroom. She was laughing and turned in my arms.

  “Condoms?” she asked and I swore.

  “Fuck I don’t keep them around the house.” She pulled the lot from the club out of her back pocket.

  “Good thing one of us thinks with their big head.”

  I pulled her up tight against me with a surprised yip and crushed my mouth over hers. She kissed me back but it was restrained. I told myself to slow down with her. I was just so fucking elated to finally have her here with me. To be able to call her mine and know it was true to the very marrow of my bones. I kissed her until it was her hands that gathered my shirt beneath my jacket and cut. I slid the leather off from my shoulders and tossed it across the foot of my King sized bed.

  After sleeping on narrow cots and worse over in bum fuck Egypt, it was the first thing I’d done when I came home from my first tour, gone out and bought the biggest most comfortable damned bed I could find. Of course that bed I’d left with my cheating ex. This one I bought after I’d moved out here. I’d taken everything else but left her the bed. I wanted no part of that. Shelly was the first woman I’d brought to it and I swore that I would do everything in my power to make her the last.

  I let her pull my shirt over my head and drop it to the floor. Her hands were cool against my warmer skin and it felt amazing. She explored my planes and angles gently, smoothing her silken hands over my heated flesh which did absolutely nothing to quell the fire burning in my blood, if anything her cool hands stoked it higher. I wanted her more than any woman I had ever met before. It was like something in her blood called to mine. I wasn’t into a bunch of mystical crap but the attraction I had for Shelly, I was almost willing to bet that soul mate was a real thing and that she was mine.

  I broke my mouth from hers and kissed along her jaw, pulling her in tight against me. I buried my face in the crook of her neck and breathed her in deep. She smelled like fucking candy. Sweet and fruity and I was pretty sure it was the shampoo she used but I didn’t care. She just smelled good enough to eat and I couldn’t get enough of her. I kissed, licked and sucked the side of her neck and found some place special because she went weak in the knees.

  “Oh God, Ghost!” she cried and I went from hard to harder. My hands skated under her fitted girl tee and I let my hands smooth over her perfect skin, along her stomach, curving over her ribs above her hip. She had no idea how hard it’d been to hold out on her before. None at all.

  “Ghost please,” she gasped and it was music to my fucking ears. I pushed the cardigan off her shoulders and helped her untangle from it. She worked at my belt and made a slightly frustrated noise when I took her arms and hands away from it by lifting her shirt over her head. I let her get back to it, toeing out of my running shoes which I hadn’t laced back up when I’d redressed at the club. She pushed the denim of my jeans down over my hips mirroring my actions, toeing out of her Chucks while I unsnapped and unzipped her tight, figure hugging jeans.

  I stepped out of my pants and went to my knees to peel her out of hers, looking up the long lean length of her torso. I pressed a kiss below her navel and her hands burrowed into my hair. She threw back her head and let out a shuddering sigh and it was the most perfect fucking thing I’d ever seen in my life. She was so damned beautiful and so damned mine. I skimmed her panties to the floor and pressed her back, turning her so her thighs hit the bed. She sat down obediently and I picked up a foot and pulled her sock off. I pressed a kiss to her knee where I was crouched at her feet and repeated the process on the other side, quickly skimming off my own.

  She unhooked her bra and pulled the straps from her narrow shoulders and tossed it to the floor. I wanted her so damn bad but there was still something I hadn’t gotten to do. I pushed her knees apart, my eyes locked with hers and lowered my mouth to her pussy. She watched me and didn’t make a single sound or protest, desire filling her eyes making them glow like jewels with flames behind them. She tasted fucking phenomenal. Musky and sweet, like Ambrosia, the food of the fucking Gods.

  Her arms, which she’d been propping herself up with to watch me, gave out and she flopped back into the midnight blue comforter with the most succulent groan and I knew I had her right where I wanted her. I slid my middle finger up inside her and caressed the roof of her walls with languorous strokes while I lapped at her lips and clit, sucking the little kernel of nerves into my mouth. She cried out and her hips bucked off the bed involuntarily. I felt her convulse around my finger and my cock twitched out of the opening in my boxers.

  God I wanted to be inside of her. I snatched one of the condoms off the bed by her hip and withdrew my fingers from her sweet fucking pussy. She made a sound of protest, which I ignored, and I kept working her with my mouth, rolling the damned condom on by feel. I pushed the boxers off
most of the way then stopped caring, climbing her body.

  “God you’re so fucking awesome,” I ground out. I wrapped my arms around her thighs and pulled her towards me to get a better angle. She cried out, fear flashing in her eyes which quickly dissipated and I managed to make a mental note to A) slow down and B) never do that again, or at least work up to it.

  I knelt up straighter and guided myself to her entrance and she was so wet and ready for me I slipped right in. She was so smooth; satin and perfect around me. Her body tightened and I bowed my head, my eyes closed and I lost myself for a minute in the sensation of her milking my cock. She whimpered and I drew back and thrust forward sharply. She was a fever that had taken ahold of every one of my senses. Driving me wild in just about every way.

  I held her hips, caressing the hollows left by her pelvic bones with my thumbs as I set a rhythm of sure even strokes. I wanted to pound that pussy into next week but I knew just by looking at her she was nowhere near ready for the rough stuff. Still, this position was so god damned tempting to do just that…

  “Wrap your legs around me Honey,” I told her and she complied. She was skin and bones, way too thin that I was able to do this so easily. I bowed over her and slid my arms behind her back, bracing her. She cried out when I stood up with her still wrapped around me, me in her. I sat down on the edge of the bed and her hands braced on my knees to keep herself from going over backwards, but I had her.

  “I got ‘cha Princess,” I held her to me and looked up into those luminous blue eyes of hers and she gasped. Trusting that I held her fast she took her hands from my knees and twined her arms around my shoulders. She kissed me, and held tightly to me and it felt amazing to have her wrapped around me in just about every way possible. She rolled her hips and I made an appreciative and encouraging sound into her mouth.

  It wasn’t a position that was going to get either of us up and over that edge but I needed to slow my friggin’ roll. I didn’t want to scare her or do any damage. I wanted to do just the opposite. She writhed in my lap and it felt amazing but even she grew quickly frustrated. She broke our kiss and my name, my real name, spilled from her lips, her voice strained.

  “Derek…” It was all I needed. I stood us up and walked us up onto the bed better. She clung to me and made a frustrated noise when I slipped from her but it couldn’t be helped. I laid her down into the softness of the center of my bed and with as much self-control as I could muster, I eased my way back into her.

  Her hands flew to my face and she forced my head up to look at her. I’d been watching where our bodies joined, watching myself slide in and out of her moist, wet heat but she didn’t want that. Her eyes were passion filled and at the same time raw, and vulnerable. I searched her face as I made love to her and smiled when I realized that she felt it too. That she was giving me as good as she got.

  So. Fucking. Flawless. I don’t know how long we were like that. I didn’t care. All I cared about was that it was me and my girl in my bed and that there was finally nothing between us but perfect love and perfect trust. Shelly was fucking amazing.

  Chapter 17

  Shelly…

  It was dark, long past sundown, and creeping towards deepest night. We hadn’t either of us moved from his bed. Ghost dozed fitfully beneath me. I lay, my ear pressed to the center of his chest, listening to the ticking echo of his heartbeat. I felt languid and at peace, completely relaxed and drunk off his love and yet I couldn’t for the life of me tell you why I couldn’t sleep. I traced idle patterns on his skin with my fingertip while I tried to puzzle it out, but as soon as a thought flitted into my head it slid right out again. I couldn’t focus like this. I was too warm and comfortable. With a laborious sigh I sat up. Ghost slept on and I smiled wanly. He was so gorgeous to me. That all-American Midwest boy with the panty dropping smile.

  I slipped out of bed and looked around. I didn’t feel like getting dressed in anything we’d been wearing. I slipped back into my panties and pulled them up my legs and with a wolfish grin plucked his jacket and cut off the foot of the bed. The leather was a heavy, solid weight on my shoulders and big enough that it covered me, leaving just a narrow strip of my flesh visible down between my breasts. Really all I cared about was that it was something of his and that it smelled like him, that comforting mix of outdoors, woods and man.

  I took him at his word that I would have plenty of time to explore the house after he and I made love and I took that time to be now since I had nothing else to do. The first room, out and to the right of his master bedroom was empty. Just four stark walls and a couple of random boxes. The next, the one on the left was an ever loving treasure trove! It was an office. Likely for his towing business and I was happier than a pig in shit! It was a total freaking disaster area. Filing cabinet drawers open and over flowing with tow slips. The computer monitor on the desk was black and wreathed in yellow sticky notes with hastily scrawled numbers on them. If there was a keyboard, it was buried underneath a drift of gas receipts.

  I moved a banker’s box of tax papers off the office chair and sat down. I looked back at the open doorway and with a devilish grin decided, fuck it, what was he going to do? Be pissed I fixed it for him? I marveled at the train wreck around me. Ghost was a neat freak judging by his bedroom both here and at the club. His beds were made with military precision to this day. Even his tow truck was organized and clean. So I had to wonder to myself. How did this happen!?

  I found the mouse and moved it back and forth and the fans on the desktop’s tower started to whirr. The screen flickered to life and I made a face at the password protected screen. I hit enter but nope, it demanded a password. I tried ‘password’ but no dice. Then, just to be flippant I tried ‘Shelly’ and my jaw almost hit the floor when it worked.

  “Holy shit,” I muttered. The place may be an organizational train wreck but he looked like he at least kept the book keeping software up to date. It looked like he came in, entered shit and then just cast the paper aside. All though some of the receipts on the desk still hadn’t been done. Still, I started to see a pattern to the utter chaos after just a few minutes. I rooted around the office and figured out what was supposed to go where after a minute or two and before you could say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious I’d set myself to it.

  I fell down the rabbit hole of numbers for Ghost’s business pretty hard, adding this; subtracting that, busting out a percentage here or there for this tax or that… It wasn’t until I heard the camera function on his cellphone make the shutter noise that I realized he was in the doorway and it had to have been hours after I’d started. I was pretty well into it when he found me. Still the noise scared the shit out of me. I jumped and let out this startled little girl shout and that more than anything made me throw the legal pad I was working on at him. He batted the yellow paper out of the air before it could hit him laughing.

  “You scared the shit out of me!” I shouted. That was me, mistress of the obvious, but Ghost was rapt thumbing through menus on his phone’s screen. “What are you doing!?” I demanded.

  “Princess that is the hottest fucking thing I ever could have imagined. I’m saving it,” he said.

  I blinked. “What?”

  “You, sitting there in nothing but your panties and my coat taking care of my books.”

  Truthfully he was one to talk, leaning nonchalantly in the doorway, hair sleep mussed, bare feet crossed in just his jeans, the top button not even done and hanging dangerously low on his hips. His hip flexors drawing the eye right fucking there. Ghost was sex on a stick and it hit me right between the eyes, right then, right there like a bolt from the blue, that he was mine. All mine and the reason I couldn’t sleep finally came to me. I was scared as shit that I was going to wake up and find that this was all a dream.

  “What’s that look for Baby?” he asked solemnly. I shook my head so he smiled and changed tact. “What’re you doing up?”

  “Did I wake you?” I tried.

  “Don’t answer a
question with a question, and no… I woke up and you weren’t in my bed where I wanted you to be. Why not?” he cocked his head to the side, rich hazel eyes regarding me.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” which was true.

  “How come?” Shit, he would ask that. I sighed. Of course it was the next logical evolution…

  “I didn’t want to wake up and find it wasn’t real. It still doesn’t seem real,” I looked around and gave him a skeptical look, “What happened in here?” I asked. He laughed.

  “I hate this book keeping shit,” he shrugged a shoulder.

  “Good thing you have me to bail your ass out. You’re about to be in trouble with the tax man. I think I can fix it but you’re going to need to file an extension,” I shifted some papers on the desk and Ghost pushed off the doorframe.

  “Come here,” he ordered but his voice was soft, his tone gentle. I got to my feet slowly and couldn’t help but smile a little on the inside at the raw appreciative lust in his expression which was swirled with a healthy dose of protective possessiveness and I suddenly had another epiphany. I went to him and molded my front to his, my arms going around his neck. His arm slid beneath his jacket and wound around my naked body and the feeling made me shiver.

  “I got you Babe,” he said softly in my ear and I believed him. He really did have me, my best interests, at heart. We held each other in the door way to his office for a long time and finally I blurted it out.

  “You’re scaring the shit out of me with this whole moving in thing,” I swallowed hard.

  “Okay, fair enough but let’s cut the bullshit, shall we?” he leaned back and gave me a grave look, “I told you, straight up, that if you came to my bed that there was no one and done, that this was it, the end of the line and you came to me, willingly, and gave yourself to me. That makes you mine Sweetheart, and I’m not saying that you’re a fucking object or that you have to do what I say or that it makes you a slave or any of that garbage.