Her scowl had smoothed away as he’d spoken, and now she was staring at him with wide eyes, her mouth open. He waited.
“That was quite a speech,” she finally said.
“I ain’t shy about speakin’ my mind.”
“I see that.”
“So you want to tell me about your ex or not?”
“Okay. Okay.” She put her hands on the table as if she meant to stand. “But I need a fresh beer first. You want one?”
Like he would sit there and let her hobble up into the kitchen to serve him. “Sit.” He stood. “I’ll get ‘em.” He expected yet another fight from her, but she gave him a hesitant smile and relaxed in her seat.
He could already see that any road they traveled together would have its share of bumps. And yet that thought didn’t worry him like it should. Instead, it quickened his pulse.
As he pulled the beers from the fridge, he glanced over its contents. She kept a full stock: eggs and skim milk, a bottle of some kind of red juice, deli meats and cheese in a drawer, about every condiment he could think of, a tub of margarine, some cartons of yogurt, a few plastic containers that seemed to hold leftovers, three bottles of white wine, the rest of the twelve-pack of Rolling Rock. No produce, but she had that in a couple of bowls on the counter, and in a hanging gizmo with three wire baskets.
A fancy-looking coffeemaker stood on the counter next to the range. He wondered if Willa made good coffee.
Holding the bottles in one hand, he closed the fridge and took a peek in her freezer. A full bin under the ice maker, a carton of butter pecan ice cream, and some supermarket packages of raw meat.
At this moment, in his fridge at home, he had a week-old half-carton of shrimp fried rice, an elderly jar of brown mustard, two twelve-packs of Coors, half a package of bacon, and four eggs. The freezer held a few empty ice trays.
Like he’d told her—he ate most of his meals out of a sack. Her place felt a lot more like a home than his place did.
Of course, he’d had a home once. Dahlia still lived in it, and he still paid its fucking mortgage.
As he came down the steps onto her patio, Ollie was sitting beside their chairs, getting love from his mom.
“Can he have scraps?”
“Not from the table. Later, I’ll pull a little chicken off the bone and mix it in with his kibble.” She gave Ollie a last scratch under his chin and said, “Lie down, boy.”
He lay down at her feet with a jowl-flapping sigh.
Rad chuckled as he sat back down.
Willa lifted a wry eyebrow at him. “Did you get a good look?”
He twisted the cap off one of the bottles and handed her a beer. “What d’you mean?”
“You were in there a while. You were snooping.” She could barely get a sip of her beer for the smirk on her face.
“I looked around a little, yeah. You must do a lot of cookin’.”
She shrugged. “When I can. I like it.”
Rad eyed his plate of half-eaten food and decided he wasn’t interested in more. Willa seemed to have had her fill as well. The conversation wasn’t conducive to eating while they talked, and the conversation was more important.
“So about your ex.”
“It’s either a long, drawn-out story or not much of a story at all. I’m not sure how to tell it.”
“From the beginnin’. I got nowhere else to be tonight. What’s his name?”
“Jesse.”
“Jesse what?”
“What, are you going to look him up?”
“Might do. Depends on your story. Come on, darlin’, get it out here.”
Fixing her attention on closing up the bucket and the side containers, Willa took another second or two before she began to talk. Rad worked on his patience and gave her time to sort her thoughts. He knew he was being a pushy son of a bitch about this, but if she had some guy lurking in her shadows who had her scared enough to hermetically seal herself in her house whenever she was home, day or night, then he needed to know what to be on the lookout for. And if he could solve the problem for her, he would.
She put the Styrofoam cartons back in the rumpled sack and rolled it closed. “His name is Jesse Smithers. He’s from my hometown in West Texas—Duchy, it’s called. Just a little dip in the road near Odessa. Anyway, we started up in middle school, stayed together all through high school. Then I went to college at UT. Got a full scholarship. He didn’t like me being away, and that was when things started to get weird between us. He was always possessive and jealous, but I didn’t know better. All my friends thought it was romantic, how he was, and most of the guys around Duchy weren’t much different. People around there have very specific ideas about men and women. My dad’s a pretty hard-edged guy, too. He was roughneck on a drilling crew when he was younger. But he’s never treated my mom like…”
She stopped and swallowed. “Anyway, Jesse stayed home on his folks’ farm after high school, and he hated me being in Austin. He started getting demanding, insisting I come home every weekend, wanting me to call every night from my dorm room, losing his shit if I didn’t call on time, stuff like that. I was uncomfortable with it, but too young and dumb to stand up for myself. One weekend, right before finals, I told him I couldn’t come home because I had to study. My scholarship meant I had to keep my grades high, and this chem class I was taking was killing me. We fought and he hung up on me, and I stayed and studied. Before dawn on Saturday morning, he was down at the front desk of my dorm, losing his shit because the attendant wouldn’t let him up to my room. He beat the poor guy up and spent the rest of the weekend in lockup.”
“Christ.” Rad had a vivid picture of this guy in his head now, and he was ashamed to see he didn’t look that different himself. He understood those impulses. He’d never acted out quite like that—but he hadn’t been in love when he was a kid. Maybe he would have been like this Jesse at that age, before he’d gained some experience and self-control.
“Jesse was banned from the dorm, but the desk attendant didn’t press charges. I went to get him out of lockup, and he apologized, told me he loved me, and went home. After that, things seemed more or less okay.”
She shivered. Night had fallen, and the warmth of the young spring day had faded to a cool that remembered a winter not long past. “Can we go inside and finish this?”
“Sure.” Rad stood and picked up the bucket, the bag, and the three empty beer bottles. Willa stacked the plates and silverware on the placemats and napkins and picked up her half-full beer. He followed her into the house, and Ollie followed him.
In the kitchen, Rad put the bottles on the counter and the bucket and sack in the refrigerator while she rinsed the dishes. Grabbing another beer before he closed the fridge, he turned and watched her at the sink. The back of her neckline scooped down a little, showing her neck and the top of her back. With her short hair, and her posture at the sink, he thought he saw a hint of ink peeking out from her dress.
He didn’t even try to resist the urge that came on him. Crossing to stand just behind her, he set his beer on the counter and drew a finger down her neck, over the beads of her spine, until he hooked her dress and pulled, just enough to see a bluebird between her shoulder blades.
She gasped at his touch and went still. The water ran from the faucet into the drain.
Rad had a lot of ink. In his world, everybody had ink, but even there, he had more than most. Tattoos had always been a way to mark himself out as different and to chronicle his life. But in the past few years, civilians were starting to wear it, too. Not everybody, still mainly people who stood on the edges a bit, but he was seeing more ink on ‘regular’ people, like Willa.
This was no drunken indiscretion, no Tweety Bird flash on the ass that had been regretted with a hangover the next morning. It was a delicate, artfully done piece.
He meant to speak, to comment on the tattoo, but his mouth had gone dry, and he could see her pulse throbbing at the side of her throat. He licked his lips and put his mo
uth on her neck, at the point where it joined her shoulders. He felt the rise of her body as she took in a deep breath, and the fall as she let it out.
Needing to taste her, he slid his tongue out and ran it over her skin. Cool from the night air, and sweet.
“Rad,” she whispered, and he answered with a groan and put his body around hers, framing her legs and arms with his. He kissed her again, this time at her shoulder, up the side of her neck, her ear. He took her chin and turned her head so that he could reach her mouth.
His other hand slid up the left side of her body, lifting her dress, skimming over the soft, firm skin of her thigh until his fingers slid under the elastic band of her underwear.
Willa moaned into his mouth and began to turn toward him—
The move was awkward, and her moan became a grunt, and Rad remembered that she was hurt. With a pang made of disappointment and guilt, he took a step back. He’d been close to fucking her right there. His body cramped with thwarted desire.
She seemed dazed and as disappointed as he was, but she shook it off with a little laugh. “Jesus.”
“Yeah. We should go sit and talk.”
“That’s what you want to do?”
“No. I want to fuck you till your eyes cross. You think your leg can take that?”
She stared down at her leg, and Rad could sense her seriously considering the question. He grinned at that. He, too, had been trying to think of a way to fuck her without hurting her—but he’d come up empty.
“Probably not.”
“Didn’t think so. Let’s talk. I need a distraction.”
With a wistful sigh, she picked up her beer, took his hand, and limped toward the front of the house.
He pulled back and turned off her faucet, which she’d left running.
CHAPTER SIX
Willa limped to the living room, Rad following just behind her, and Ollie bringing up the rear, his tags jingling.
Still reeling from that kiss, her legs shook, making her limp even more pronounced, and she felt like Frankenstein’s monster lurching across the moors.
God, that kiss. The way his hand had skimmed up her thigh, hot and rough. The harsh rumble of his groan. The lightning charge of his words. I want to fuck you till your eyes cross.
Her belly ached hotly with need. The last thing she wanted to do now was talk about Jesse. She wanted to turn and head down the hallway to her bedroom.
But her leg really did hurt. After she’d gotten back from Rad’s station, she’d spent most of the day on the sofa, with her knee propped up and an ice bag wrapped in the elastic bandage, and she’d floated through the afternoon on the cloud of a couple of Percocets, but she’d woken stiff, and she’d been using it too much since then. It actually hurt more now than it had the night before.
So no eye-crossing sex was going to happen tonight. That sucked.
At the sofa, she set her beer on the coffee table then eased herself onto the cushions. Before she could shove a pillow under her knee, Rad was there, sitting just next to her and lifting her legs gently, laying them over his lap. The gesture was sweet and possessive, but it made Willa feel vulnerable, with her dress hiked up and her legs, bare except for the bandage, over his legs, under his hands.
Then he asked, “This okay?” and it was.
Getting her nod, he took a long drink of his beer, then set the bottle next to hers on the table. “What happened after he went home from your dorm?”
Willa hated this. With the exception of cops and lawyers, she’d never spoken in great detail about all that had happened with Jesse. Her family back home had known it in real time. She’d never had to roll the whole thing out to someone whose opinion of her she cared about.
The Willa in this story wasn’t strong or smart. She was stupid and weak. The Willa sitting on the sofa with Rad, in the house she loved and had made her own, hated that girl.
But he was regarding her with a kind of fixed confidence, and it seemed to pulse out of him and pull her in. As much as she hated to tell this story, it didn’t occur to her, this time, to refuse.
She wanted him to know.
She reached over and picked up her bottle. With a big swallow of beer for fortitude, she began again. “Like I said, it was more or less okay after the scene with the desk attendant. I figured out that if I gave him enough notice about when I wouldn’t be home, because I had to study, or, later, because I had practicum hours at the hospital, and if I made sure to call him when I said I would, he’d cope well enough. And I sent a card or letter home to him every day. I must have spent a thousand dollars at the campus bookstore on dumb ‘miss you’ and ‘love you’ cards. But he didn’t make any more scenes. When I was home, I spent just about every free second with him. He could be sweet and loving, he usually was, but he was controlling as hell. He was never super violent to me, like some guys were to their women, but he could still be scary. If I did what he wanted, everything was calm and he was sweet, so I did what he wanted. It got so I could barely stand to be home, and I practically burned rubber whenever it was time to go back to school.
“My senior year, he started talking about getting married. He wanted to do it as soon as I graduated. But I’d been away from home long enough to be able to start to see a different way to be. I didn’t have to marry a Duchy boy and live in a trailer while he worked his daddy’s farm and I worked in the doctor’s office, taking kids’ temperatures. I didn’t have to keep my head down and be what a man expected me to be. If I could get out of Duchy, I’d be free.”
Feeling like she’d been talking for hours and getting nowhere, bored by the sound of her own voice, Willa stopped. “You sure you want to hear the long, drawn-out version?”
Rad brought his head down and then back up. It wasn’t until he was looking at her again that she realized that had been a very slow nod. “That’s what I said. Keep goin’. I’m with you. Can I ask a question?”
“Yeah.”
“Didn’t your folks see how he was? Or your friends?”
“Like I said, on the top of things, he didn’t seem much different from any other guy in Duchy. Better than most, even. I’m the only one in my senior class or the one before it who went away to college. A couple people from high school took some classes at the junior college in Odessa, but that was it. High school was the end of school for most everybody, if they got even that far. Couples got married right after graduation, had their first kid within a year. Guys worked family farms, or hired on as hands on somebody else’s, or worked the oilfields. Or did the kind of work that doesn’t come with a W-2. Girls went to ring up groceries at the market, or just got pregnant and stayed home. At church, we all heard about husbands having dominion over their families, and wives being their helpmeets. It’s still the Fifties in Duchy, Texas. It’ll always be the Fifties in Duchy. All anybody thought about Jesse was that I was lucky to have a man so in love with me. He’s good looking, and all the girls were jealous. When it ended, everybody was mad at me, or disappointed in me. Even my folks. It wasn’t until—”
Willa broke off. What she’d been about to say was jumping ahead—and she needed more time to work up to that part.
She took a big breath. “I didn’t want to get married, not to him or anybody, but I was afraid what he’d do if I said no, so whenever he brought it up, I kept trying to be vague about it. I don’t know what I thought I was accomplishing—just being chicken shit, I guess. Then he gave me a ring for Christmas, made a big production out of proposing in front of our families, and I still tried to be vague. I said I needed time to think. He broke up with me while he was still on one knee. We haven’t been a couple since that day. I was so fucking relieved. I went back to school for my last semester, and I thought I was free.”
“But you weren’t.” Rad’s hands were moving up and down her legs, caressing her with tender firmness. The touch was intimate but not sexual. Willa could feel a shift of tension in his hands, as if he sensed that her story was about to become more interesting. And
it was.
“No. He showed up in Austin about three weeks into the semester. I came back to my room after class, and he was sitting on my bed. My roommate wasn’t there. I found out later that he forced his way in and she ran, but the RA wasn’t around to ask for help, so she just left Jesse in there.”
“RA?”
“Resident Assistant. Like the grownup in charge of the dorm.”
A grimace twitched on Rad’s face, up and gone. “I thought he was banned. Nobody helped you?”
Nobody had, and she hadn’t gone looking. She shook her head. “At the time, I was scared, but I didn’t think I needed help. I was more worried about another scene. He was crying. He begged me to get back together, to take the ring. In Austin, I was braver. I told him I didn’t want to live that life. I wanted to be a nurse in a hospital, and I couldn’t do that in Duchy. He said he’d go wherever I wanted. I knew that wasn’t true—and anyway, it wasn’t about that. I didn’t love him. I don’t think I ever really did. I thought I did at the beginning, but it was the crazy high-school kind of love, the kind that feels like it runs all through you but’s really only on the surface. I guess that’s the kind of love all our friends were getting married in, though. I just saw it differently after being away. I told him there wasn’t any way we weren’t over.”
Crash (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 1) Page 7
