She didn’t even need him inside; she could have come just staring at him, spread out beneath her, hers to do with what she wanted. But where was the fun in that?
She wanted to punish him, at least a little. She raked her nails up his chest, rewarded with shallow red scratches across his golden skin. His muscles leapt beneath her hands; the low-lidded, dark glittering points of his eyes told her he liked it.
She leaned low, her hair falling off her shoulders, around her face; soft rustling sounds as it pooled across his chest. Ava fitted her teeth to the marks inked into his pectoral. I can’t trust you, she’d said, but he’d had her bite him here on purpose, right over his heart. In maybe the only way an inelegant quarter-Frenchman biker could express himself, he’d told her that he’d needed her, too. That her love had affected him deeply. She’d put her teeth in his heart, long ago, and he’d left the print there, evidence that he wanted her love. That he returned it.
She pulled back a fraction, lifted her head so she could see his face: the strain of keeping still, the leashed power.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Me, too, sweetheart.”
She sat up, caressed slowly down his stomach, traced the grooves between his abs, the harsh lines at his hip bones. When she curled her hand around his cock, it felt like he was the one touching her, the damp heat building between her legs, her pulse struggling to match his. When she slowly lowered, and took him inside, she murmured a curse. She was still sore from yesterday’s vigorous round in the office, but it was a good pain. A sharp counterpoint to the pleasure of pulling him deep into her body.
Mercy said something in French she didn’t understand and his hands came up to cover her breasts.
She leaned into his touch and rose up on her knees, lowered back down, sheathing him again. Her hands fluttered against his stomach, useless movements she couldn’t seem to coordinate. She wanted to touch him everywhere, to take her time, to tease him; she wanted him to do the same to her, too, but she wanted to rush headlong at the same time, too fractious and overwhelmed to plan any of it out. It was the idea of doing more, taking it further, that drove her hips into a grinding rhythm.
When he came, he lifted up into her, the deep penetration igniting her own release.
After, she hardly had the strength to dismount, managed to slump down beside him on the bed, bleary-eyed and dizzy. She didn’t know if that was the effect of the orgasm, or the Scotch.
Mercy put the bottle back into her hand and she took a grateful sip. He’d been right; the taste wasn’t so bad now.
In the moonlight-slatted dark of their bed, Maggie told her husband about Jackie’s strange mood that afternoon. Maybe that was betrayal to her sister in arms, but her husband’s wellbeing mattered more to her than any friendship.
“I don’t know why she brought it up,” she murmured, curling her fingers through his chest hair as she studied the blue bars of light at the window.
She felt his shoulders shrug. “Women like to gossip.”
“Thanks for that vote of confidence for the gender,” she said with a snort. “But I meant, it was out of character for her. And there we were going in to talk to Ramona, and she blurts that out. It was random. It was…I dunno.”
His finger thumping at her arm was silent encouragement.
“It was like she was trying to distract me. Or mention it to me while I was distracted. It was just weird.”
Another shrug. “Maybe Collier’s running his mouth at home. He’s not right in the head since Andre bit the big one.”
“Probably,” she said, not convinced. Then: “But while we’re talking about it…what about Aidan? Is he upset?”
Ghost sighed. “Aidan’s too busy chasing tail to know who’s in which chair. When he gets his head out of his ass, then we’ll talk officer spots. Until then, he can fall in line.”
Maggie bit back what she wanted to say: Maybe, if you did more encouraging and less dismissing, he’d be better suited to follow in your footsteps.
He cupped her hip in his hand and dragged her up higher against his shoulder. “Why are we talking about him? You’re supposed to be distracting me from how pissed I am.”
“Right.” She smiled and kissed his jaw.
“How was school?”
She grinned; she was drunk at this point. Just a little; not puking drunk, but happy drunk. “Amazing. Just…I mean, can you imagine that they’re letting me study writing? How is that possible? Why haven’t the fun police showed up yet?”
She was still lying down – the room was giving a slow twirl – but Mercy was sitting; he’d pulled her feet into his lap and was massaging the arches with a touch too light to have possibly come from his big hands. God bless the French, she thought, for their sensitivity in all things.
He snorted. “I’m pretty sure writing papers counts as torture for most people.”
“Most people aren’t me,” she declared, and then laughed.
Oh, yeah, she was drunk.
“Good point.”
“I have this one prof – Pitts – who teaches Themes in Contemporary Literature, who is obsessed with that whole postmodern downfall of mankind thing.”
“Uh-huh,” Mercy said.
“And that class is going to be a pain, because I don’t like writing that kind of crap, but he, get this, loves crime novels told from the criminal perspective.” She laughed again. “So I should have plenty of material for that class.”
She lifted her head and propped her elbows up behind her. “Hey, maybe I can take you for show and tell.”
His brows lifted in mild amusement. He raised her left foot, tapped the top of it with his thumb. “Speaking of show and tell, what’s this?”
Her tattoo. “That’s my gator.” She wiggled her toes. “I got it right after I lost the…” All the breath went out of her as she went staggering back into Memoryland. “Well, I got it a while back.”
“Five years back?” he guessed, his expression softening, saddening.
“Yeah.”
He lowered back down to the bed, stretched out beside her, laid his hand over her belly, down low, where the baby would have been. He was a little bit drunk, too, she saw, as she turned her head to meet his gaze; his eyes were too-wide, too-dark, not sharp like they should have been.
“You have to know I never wanted that to happen,” he said, earnestly. “If I’d known, I would have wanted it. I would have done anything–”
She laid her finger against his lips. “I know, baby,” she whispered. She hadn’t ever called him that before; they took a moment to let it settle over them, this idea of her being the one to comfort him, the grown woman inside her coming out, taking its rightful place beside him.
It was a good night for firsts.
“I love you,” he said against her finger. “You know that, don’t you? I always did, fillette. It just…changed.”
“It didn’t change,” she said. “That’s just the lie we tell ourselves to make it sound better.”
Because she would always be the ten-year-old girl in his faded wallet photo, and he the lanky kid who bought her sodas and spoke to her like she wasn’t a child. That love, the closeness it had bred, the way they’d grown to want one another, that was a progression, not a change.
He kissed her, and they traded the taste of Scotch back and forth.
“Get some sleep,” he instructed when he pulled back, tucking her head beneath his chin.
Her eyes closed and she was gone.
Ava didn’t know where she was, but she was warm, and sleepy, and sore in a good way, exhausted in every muscle, loose in every tendon. It was dark, and the scents that pressed around her were familiar, comforting: Mercy.
She lay on her stomach, and a hand passed down her back, lingering in the tender hollow of her waist, traveling downward, stroking her bottom until she ground her hips into the mattress. The hand moved down, between her legs, long fingers giving her something to grind against.
She wa
s a little drunk, and very tired, but she was swamped with a sense of safety, security, like she was loved and watched over. She felt lips beside her ear, warm breath inside it. Mercy spoke entirely in French, his voice low and rich, the words reaching for something inside her that had her leaning into his hand. The room was dark; he’d turned out the lamp and that heightened the sensations, his touch the central point of her world.
She felt him move. Hands on her hips, lifting her onto all fours. His chest at her back; his cock at her wet entrance.
“Mon amour,” he said as he entered her.
She’d taken Spanish in high school. “It’ll be more useful,” he’d told her, and so she’d taken it. And so she only knew a handful of French phrases, the ones he used all the time. She knew “mon amour” was my love, and a shudder passed through her, the words tightening the pleasure, elevating her pulse.
Never before had he said such long strings of sentences in French before, like he did now. In the sheltering dark, his thrusts were slow, deep, sure, his hands digging bruises into her hips, the French rolling in thick purrs off his tongue; she had the impression it was sexual, whatever he said, the way the words caressed and encouraged her.
One of his hands left her hip, went down between her legs, to her slippery sex, her clit. He stroked her with expert flicks of his thumb; pulled her backward into each thrust, bringing her ass in tight to his hips as he pushed inside her again and again.
She bit the pillow when she came.
He didn’t stop; rode her through the rippling shockwaves and into another climax, joined her on the second one, his body a great spring-loaded machine behind her as the spasms tackled him.
She collapsed, knees giving out, hands reaching blindly through the dark for something to hold onto. She was sobbing when he lay down beside her, bawling into the mattress, overcome in every sense of the word.
Mercy brushed her hair to the side and kissed her neck. “Poor little thing,” he whispered, an echo of five years ago. But then she heard the raw emotion in his voice. “Let me make it up to you. All of it. Give me a chance to do that.”
Sleep claimed her again, while the tears were still wet on her face.
At six, they had microwaved pasta on the couch in front of the morning news, coffee steaming on the table, in sweats and warm socks. One of those mornings they never got to have anymore: irreverent, careless, unhurried. A morning like they used to have before they were married, up early, before Aidan was awake, Maggie in one of his shirts and a nuked breakfast shared between them. They needed to make time for this, she decided, twirling fettuccini noodles onto her fork. Life was nothing but work, and she missed her husband; missed him badly, she realized, as he handed her coffee over unasked for out of habit.
Her heart melted around the edges, just a little, like warm caramel. He was a sweet man, deep down, really he was, even if he forgot to show it most of the time.
“Hey.” She set her plate down on the coffee table, leaned into him and raked her fingers through his tousled hair. “What are you going to say to Ava this morning?”
His eyes cut over, blue with the reflection of the TV, one corner of his mouth curling. “I dunno. What am I supposed to say?”
“I’m right, you know,” she said with a soft smile.
“I get real sick of that being the case.”
“Don’t let her safety be another worry on top of the pile,” she urged. “Let him look out for her.”
He sat back with a deflating sigh. “God, raising a girl’s a pain in the ass.”
“So’s being married to one,” Maggie added, cheerfully, and he grinned.
A cellphone trilled, somewhere in the house.
“Mine,” Ghost said, standing.
As he left the room, the news caught Maggie’s attention.
“…breaking story coming to us live from Walter Brantwell in the field.” The camera cut to an image of leaping flames against the black, predawn sky. Not a campfire, no. It was a building that burned like a torch.
Another cut, this time to the reporter in his light wool jacket, serious face, mike in hand, gloved fingers pressed to the piece in his ear as he struggled to hear the crew back at the studio.
“Walter, what can you tell us?” the desk anchor said.
Walter nodded. “I’m standing in front of Milford Mattress…”
Ghost reappeared, expression grim, and Maggie knew their morning was over. “Get dressed and I’ll follow you in.” Kenny her husband was gone, replaced by Ghost the MC president. “Shit just blew up. Literally.”
**
“If it gets infected, it’s your fault.”
“Hmph.”
At six-fifteen, the first brush of gold had passed along the tops of the trees. The incoming light had paled to a deep gray in the high window above the bed. The lamps were back on, and by their glow, Ava cleaned and repacked Mercy’s wound. His hair was tied back in a neat queue, out of her way; she missed passing her fingers through it already.
“And then what are you going to tell the doctor when you’re finally forced to go to the ER? ‘Ya see, doc, first I got shot, then I refused to have the wound cleaned because I was too busy trying to get it all night.’ ”
“Trying?” he asked with a chuckle.
“Getting it,” she amended. “To excess.” The last edge of tape went down. “There. All done.” She set the gauze and tape roll on the desk, and was pulled off her feet, into Mercy’s lap, the breath knocking out of her when she landed.
“Oh no,” she said with a mock groan. “Even you can’t go again. Not possible.”
He pulled an affronted face. “I want my girl to sit with me, and suddenly I’m asking for something? Am I really that disgusting?”
She opened her mouth to respond –
And someone knocked on the door.
Thirty-Five
“Who in the hell in this place is awake before seven?” Ava asked. She bolted off Mercy’s lap, hands going to the long hem of his t-shirt that she wore and tugging it down on impulse.
The look he threw toward the door was hateful. His voice was easy when he told her, “The door’s locked, remember? Just calm down.” He made a waving motion toward the bathroom. “Stand over there.” He stood, like an adult unfolding himself from a tiny child’s chair. She would have grinned if her heart hadn’t been knocking at the base of her throat.
In nothing but his jeans, he opened the door a crack, put on a fierce scowl, and said, “What the fuck?” to whoever waited on the other side. “It’s six in the goddamn morning.”
Ava pressed her knuckles to her mouth when she recognized her brother’s voice. “There was a fire during the night,” Aidan said. “Sorry the carnage couldn’t wait till you’d grabbed a few more hours’ sleep.”
She watched Mercy stiffen, his frame tightening. He didn’t get frightened in these sorts of situations, but excited. Kid-on-Christmas excited. “A fire here?”
“Nah. It’s worse than that.” There was a sound like his knuckles rapping against the doorframe. “Dad’s on his way in. He wants us all at table by seven.”
Mercy nodded, sighed. “Yeah.”
“Oh,” Aidan said, voice rising. “Ava, did you think nobody would recognize your truck?”
She bit the backs of her fingers and felt her face go scarlet. It was an easy thing to say she didn’t care in the dark, behind a locked door, with Mercy’s hands on her. But at dawn, in front of an all-too-knowing audience of his brothers – one of which was her own brother – she didn’t know how to assert herself. She didn’t have a leg to stand on in the daylight.
“What’re you talking about?” Mercy asked him.
“Dude, if I didn’t think I’d walk in on my sister naked, I’d come in there and kick your ass.”
Mercy lunged through the door and Ava heard Aidan’s boots retreating, going down the hall too fast to catch. When Mercy stepped back in, locking the door again, she shook her head. “That’d be my cue to leave.”
&n
bsp; Mercy sighed. “Ava.”
She grabbed her bag off the desk. “I’m taking a shower.”
“Ava–”
“I’ll be fast.”
And she would be, because their moment, their night, was over, and reality had a bitter taste before sunrise.
She showered in record time, with Mercy’s harsh Irish Spring soap, too rushed to be amused by the fact that he had a bottle of women’s Herbal Essences on the shelf; she washed her hair with it, and kept hurrying.
The clothes she’d packed the night before were a long-sleeved black t-shirt, cutoffs, sweatshirt, and the knee-high boots from the night before. She dressed, brushed her teeth, tied her wet hair back in a knot, and managed to smear a layer of gloss across her lips.
Mercy was waiting, propped against the wall as she stepped out of the bathroom. His expression was unfathomable, determined, if she had to describe it, the eyes soft for her, the jaw set in a hard line. He’d pulled on a shirt and socks. “I’ll walk you out.”
She breathed a laugh as she walked around him to the desk, grabbed her jacket and stowed it in her bag. “Yeah. Right.”
“Can you even drive? You had too much to drink.”
She tossed him an accusatory look: that’s your fault. “I’m fine. I’ll stop for coffee.”
“Still walking you out.”
“Why? Why, when Dad’s on his way in, and the world’s on fire, would you insist on that now?”
“Because things are different now.”
“Really?” As the dark faded, her sanity returned, Scotch-soaked and painful. “How?”
“They just are.”
“And I’m the coerced, seduced child in this situation,” she muttered under her breath. “Sure.”
“What was that?”
“I said it’s your funeral.” She lifted her bag – and he took it away from her, slinging the strap over his own shoulder with a look that dared her to argue. “You want to carry my purse, too?”
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