Knife & Flesh (The Night Horde SoCal Book 4)

by Susan Fanetti

  God, she was going to cry.

  Her climax opened up inside her, unfurling a heartbreaking ecstasy that reached everywhere. Needing to touch him, too, as her body arched stiffly in its release, she stretched her arms back and grabbed his head, her hands fists in his hair. His laboring breath strafed her ear; his beard scuffed her neck. His hands clutched at her, digging into her breast, her hip.

  “Trick, please!” Her climax was ebbing; she didn’t know what she was begging him for. But yes, she was crying.

  He folded forward, driving her chest down to the counter. The pace of his thrusts increased and finally became the rough assault she’d first expected. Still reeling from her own finish, she felt raw and exposed as he stabbed his body into hers. Then an anguished roar ripped from his throat and he slammed once more into her and went still.

  It seemed an eternity that they remained like that, heaving harsh breaths, Juliana’s head and chest on the tile counter, Trick’s damp chest pressing down on her back, his nipple ring imprinting into her skin. There was something oddly comfortable in it, and she was in no rush to move.

  She felt his cock shift inside her as it softened, and then he stood up and eased himself gently out of her. She stood, too, and turned around.

  He wouldn’t meet her eyes, so she grabbed his beard and lifted his head. “I don’t understand what’s wrong, Trick. Please tell me that much, at least. Why are you pulling away?”

  She was naked, and he was still in his jeans and boots, but when his eyes met hers, he was the one who was vulnerable.

  “I can’t.”

  “Can’t what? Can’t talk? Can’t be with me? What?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Do you love me?”

  He nodded.

  She picked up his t-shirt from the floor and pulled it over her head. “Okay. Then you can. Whatever it is, you can.” She took his hand and led him out of his kitchen, to his living room. He followed without resistance, and he let her push him to sit on his futon. Sitting next to him, one foot tucked under her ass, she faced him. “I know you can tell me something. Like what happened today. Tell me that, at least.”

  He was quiet so long, staring at his hands in his lap, that she didn’t think he was going to tell her, after all. But then his eyes came up. They were beautiful eyes, that gold-edged blue, and Juliana could read so much of him in them. So much struggle.

  “Who was that woman, Trick?”

  He sighed. “A threat.”

  “What? What do you mean? To us? Were you involved with her?”

  He laughed darkly. “No. Never. She’s powerful, though, and not very happy with me.”

  “The way she looked at you, I thought…I thought she was an ex. Or not totally ex yet, maybe.”

  “No. Not that. I can’t tell you more, Jules, I mean it. I just can’t.”

  Her curiosity was not nearly as important as his increasing anguish. Every day lately, he seemed more on edge. “You need somebody to talk to.”

  “Maybe. But I can’t.”

  “Not maybe. Definitely. You’re…you’re crumbling. I can see it. Why can’t you talk to me?”

  “Because there’s risk to you if you know what’s in here.” He tapped his head. “And to me, and the club.”

  “You don’t trust me with your secrets.”

  He looked up and studied her face, his eyes scanning back and forth as if he were literally reading her. “Tell me this: if somebody made you choose between keeping your daughter or keeping my secrets, would it be much of a choice?”

  No, it wouldn’t. A painful choice, but not a difficult one. “Who would make me make a choice like that?”

  “Any number of people. Law, enemies of the club. And it shouldn’t be a choice. You should serve me up on a plate to keep Lucie safe, no question. So I can’t talk to you, not about this. I shouldn’t be in your life at all.”

  “Stop saying that. It’s too late for that.”

  “Are you sure? You want all this? You want Lucie near all of this?”

  Now Juliana was angry, and she stood up. “Dammit, Trick! Every time you ask about Lucie, it’s like you think I’ve forgotten about her. I haven’t, trust me. If you don’t want me—us—then say so. But I have thought about it. I’ve thought about what’s best for my little girl and what’s best for me. What’s best for us. You act like everybody but you and your club are living some kind of perfect life, like because you’re an ‘outlaw’ you live in a different world. That’s a huge mountain of crap. You live in this world, same place I do, and this world sucks.”

  Pacing his living room, she felt outrage fill her veins and knot her throat. “I spend all day working on cases of people whose families are being torn apart by stupid, inhuman, inhumane laws that treat the US like an exclusive golf club. People who’ve worked hard for decades, who’ve paid taxes and built stable lives and been good neighbors. People who’ve fled horrible circumstances, or who just wanted something more, something good for their children. The government doesn’t give a damn about them. The government raided my graduation party and took my parents away in handcuffs. Because they didn’t have the right piece of paper. And it’s not just ICE. It’s everywhere. The world only works for people with power. Lucie’s father beat me into a hospital and nothing happened to him. His friends got him out of it. He volunteered to take an anger management class, and the judge acted like it was the most magnanimous gesture anyone had ever made. Nobody cares about the victims because the victims don’t have power. So you think your ‘world’ is so dangerous? You think there’s only threat there? That’s bullshit. There’s threat anywhere there’s power, to anyone who doesn’t have it.”

  She took a breath and turned again to face him. He sat there, staring, looking surprised to the point of shock. “Jules—”

  “No! I’m not done. You once gave me this beautiful speech about how you’re an outlaw and not a criminal because the reason you do what you do is moral. Because you’re trying to live a truer life. Okay. Good. I admire that. I trust it. What I want for Lucie is a family she can depend on. That’s security, knowing that there are people who will be stalwart and stand with you, through the bad or the good. I had a vision of something else, like a postcard in my head, but it never really filled in because it wasn’t real.”

  Sitting down at his side again, she picked up his hands. “What I’ve seen since I’ve been with you is real. I want it. I want you. I want you for Lucie, too. I’m not being reckless. I’m making a choice. I want a true life. I think we can have that with you. If you want us, I at least want to try.”

  She bent down and kissed his hand where it was linked with hers in his lap. “What do you want, Trick?”

  He freed his hands from hers and picked up her head, lifting her to meet his eyes. “I want to deserve you.”

  “I’m telling you that you do. Trust me.”

  Finally, sighing heavily, he nodded. Then he leaned close. Before he kissed her, he whispered, “I love you.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Trick woke to the chattering chaos of a flock of finches that had settled in the tree outside his bedroom window. Though it was August, the night had been cool, and they’d turned off the air conditioning and opened the windows.

  Even before he opened his eyes, he realized that the room was bright with daylight. That was unusual; with sleep so often his enemy, he was an early riser. When he did open his eyes, he saw the blinds lifting and dropping in the breeze. They rattled lightly, but that sound couldn’t compete with the sweetly-pitched fuss of the birds outside. The tree shook with the commotion; it seemed to be as full of finches as of leaves.

  Juliana was here. Even after the near-disaster of the day before, she was still with him. Though he remained unconvinced that he was good for her, he knew for a certainty that she was good for him. If she could ride out his psychosis, as she had, then he didn’t know who could be better for him.

  God, he’d been a fucking mess. So much that now the whole prev
ious afternoon, from the time he’d seen Dora pull up at the park until he and Juliana had come to bed, was obscured by a fog. He’d been drunk, definitely—too drunk to ride, though he’d managed—but the fog was deeper than the kind that made drunk escapades seem unreal. This was more like his brain was trying to erase them—or record over them, leaving nothing but old noise and static.

  That had happened before, a couple of times, but not for years. It happened when he’d made a spectacle of himself. When he’d exposed his weakness too widely—like running from a final exam in gasping tears, for instance. Or collapsing to the ground at his best friend’s wedding.

  He still had the day, even through the static. He had a choice now to let the memories fragment and fade out like a bad dream, or focus on them and make them clearer, more permanent. Usually, he’d let them fade. But lying in bed in his sunny room, listening to noisy, happy birds, feeling quiet in his mind and body, he focused instead. Maybe letting memories like that fade lost him an opportunity to understand what was happening in them. Maybe in his endeavors to weaken the power PTSD had over him, he had in fact been strengthening it.

  Even as he sharpened his memory of the day before, Trick felt good. He’d slept well and long, and not alone. Smiling, he rolled over.

  He was alone. He sat up and listened, but heard nothing in the apartment. Fuck, had she left? Tossing back the sheet, he got up—and quickly relaxed when he saw Juliana’s tall black boots on the floor by his bureau. His jeans were in a nearby pile—nope, her jeans—he scanned the floor and found his own, then stepped into them and went down the hall while buttoning his fly.

  He found her curled prettily on his futon, reading, her dark hair knotted on top of her head, and her bright blue glasses perched on her nose. She wore only his t-shirt from last night, the v-neck alluringly deep on her smaller body, and her panties. He could just see the pink edge peeking from under the hem of his t-shirt.

  “Morning.”

  She looked up with a sunshiny smile and set the book down. “Hey. You got some good sleep, didn’t you?”

  “I did.” As he came to her and leaned down for a kiss, she took off her glasses.

  They lingered over the kiss just to the point that it would become more, and then, with a last suck of her bottom lip, Trick let her go and sat at her side. He picked the book—one of his—up from her lap, sliding his finger in to keep her place.

  The Corrections—she was almost a hundred pages in already. “What do you think?”

  She looked at the cover, a light crease through her brow. “I don’t know. I’m trying to give it a chance—I mean, it’s supposed to be A Great American Novel. But I guess I’m missing something. You mind if I borrow it and keep trying?”

  “Of course not. I hate it, for what it’s worth. I do not care about how hard it is to be affluent, which is what the thing is about, as far as I can tell. Updike does stuff like this much better. But that’s a minority opinion, obviously. Maybe I just don’t get it, either.”

  “Maybe that’s it, though—why I can’t get into it. Their problems seem so insignificant. They’re all…whiny, and they’re jerks to each other, and I don’t understand where it’s coming from. I can’t figure out how to care. But I’ll trudge on. I feel like there must be something here that’s fantastic somewhere.” She took the book from him and set it and her glasses on the floor; he didn’t have a coffee table. “I’m more interested in this. When did these happen?”

  From the floor, she’d picked up a framed photo that he kept on a shelf in one of his bookcases. The frame was two simple, thick pieces of glass, and a four-by-six-inch snapshot slid between them. The photo showed him and Connor, smiling broadly, standing arm in arm in their kuttes, Trick holding a pool cue, and Connor raising a bottle of beer. There was a pinprick in the photo at top center. It had been taken at the clubhouse at some random party. Nothing special, but it had landed on the photo board in the Hall, and Trick had seen it, liked it, swiped it off the board, brought it home and displayed it on a shelf.

  He took the heavy frame from her and grinned. The photo had been taken a few years ago, not long, as he recalled, before their return to their outlaw ways—which, for Trick, was the true beginning of his outlaw ways, at least while he was wearing a patch. “By ‘these’ you mean…” He knew what she meant.

  “Your hair. The dreadlocks.”

  Still grinning, he handed the frame back to her. “I had them for a long time. Until last year, I hadn’t cut my hair since I left the service.”

  “They’re hot. Really hot. Why’d you cut them off?”

  Now his grin faded away. “Had to. Not something I can talk about.”

  That provoked a frown from her, and Trick dropped his eyes from hers and let his attention fall on the spot above her lip. He prepared for her to push the point, but she didn’t. Instead, she raised her hand and pushed her fingers into his hair, and he lifted his eyes back to hers.

  “You have great hair. Wonderful hair. I love it like this, with so much to get hold of. If you cut them off last year, you haven’t cut it since. You’re growing it again, aren’t you? For dreads?”

  He shrugged. Not intentionally, he guessed. He hadn’t cut it again since he’d shaved it and his beard all off so that he wouldn’t stand out in the L.A. financial district, where he’d shot and killed Allen Cartwright. Now his hair, naturally wavy, was a thick, shaggy mess that brushed his shoulders. He could easily do dreads again if he wanted—it had been about this length the first time he’d started, and they’d grown to mostly cover his back. But they didn’t mean the same thing anymore. Now he wasn’t making a statement; he just wasn’t paying that much attention.

  He tipped his head to lean against the hand still in his hair. “I’m glad you like it. Probably not doing dreads again.”

  “I’m trying to imagine you without hair. Do you have pictures of that?”

  “Don’t think so. Maybe on the board in the Hall. I look…odd without hair or a beard. Young and skinny.”

  With her free hand, she pulled on his beard. She did that often, and he liked it. It felt like she was claiming him in some way. Bibi pulled on Hoosier’s beard in a similar way, and he’d always thought of the gesture as intimate.

  “I like your beard, too. I like the way if feels on my skin. I like the way all of you feels everywhere.” Her voice had grown husky as she’d spoken, and when she shifted on the futon, leaning nearer, he took her arms and pulled her to straddle his lap. Reaching up, he fed his fingers into her hair and loosened the knot that she’d made to hold it up.

  She was light, her body firm and warm, and Trick pushed his hands under the t-shirt she wore, savoring the silky texture of her skin. He covered her breasts, and they tautened against his palms. Her breath quickened; they were close enough that he could feel it rush across his face and move the strands of his beard. He plucked at her nipples and closed his eyes when he felt her body clench and shiver.

  Her hands twisted in his hair, and she dragged his head backward and lunged at him, sucking hard at his neck, licking a line up to his ear, nibbling at his beard. Her body ground on his, and he dropped his hands from her breasts and grabbed her hips instead.

  “Jules,” her name came from his throat like it had been carved in granite. “Fuck, I need you.” It was so much more than physical need. Every part of him needed her: heart and soul, body and mind.

  She sat back, panting, her skin glowing. He could see her pulse making a staccato beat at her throat. He cradled her face and brought her close again. Her hair fell around them both like a dark curtain.

  When their lips met, he wanted to devour her, to hold her as tightly as he could and ravish her, but he’d been too rough the night before, so he mastered that needful impulse and instead let his beard, lips, and tongue tease lightly at her mouth, over her chin, down her throat.