He’d meant it as a joke, but it struck too close to home, and he went quiet.
She was quiet, too, for a few seconds, and then she rose up onto her elbow. “You know…serotonin can be a natural pain reliever. And it can help you sleep.”
“What’s serotonin?”
“Our bodies release it naturally when we come—it’s what makes that little cloud of calm after an orgasm.”
The light on the chest of drawers was still on, so Rad could see the wry gleam in Willa’s eyes, and he chuckled. “Baby, you know I’d fuck you morning, noon, and night, every day from now until the grave if I could, but I don’t think I’m up to it just now.”
“I’m not asking you to fuck me. I’m just saying you should relax and let me take care of you.”
She scooted down under the covers, and he watched as the lump that was her head moved over his hips. She picked up his soft cock in her hand.
His mind couldn’t make this left turn. “Wills…”
“Shhh. Let me make you feel better.”
He felt her breath skim over his tip, and then her mouth was there, and he filled out inside that wet warmth. “Fuck,” he grunted.
Needing to see her, he flipped the covers away, and they slid off the bed, onto Ollie, who sat up and gave him a dirty look, then went over to his bed and dropped into it with a grouchy huff.
Rad paid him no mind. Of much greater interest and importance was Willa bobbing on his cock, her full lips stretched around him, her eyes closed. She lifted away and came back to run her tongue over him, circling his tip, licking a long line up his shaft, all the way from the base. Then she blew lightly over him, cooling the warmth her mouth had made, and he shivered. She wrapped her hand firmly around him and sucked him straight down, taking him in all the way to her fist, and his back arched.
Somewhere far away, there was a pain that should have been sharp, but already his shoulder was forgotten. Now the ache in his gut, rolling out through his cock, had his full attention. “Ride me, Wills. I need to be inside you.”
She pulled back and looked up at him. Her lips glistened, and it was all he could do not to sit forward and grab her. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You won’t. I need it.”
“I don’t want you to pull sutures. You have to relax and let me do everything. No grabbing, no thrusting. Just be still and feel.”
“Okay. Just get the fuck on me.”
With her eyes locked on his, searching, he knew, for the slightest sign of discomfort, she straddled him, took hold of his cock, and sat down on it. He hissed and reared his head back as he was sheathed in her and her wonderful tight muscles contracted around him—he was fucking close to blowing his wad already.
“Rad, relax.”
He coughed out a laugh. “If you knew how you felt…” When she shifted slightly to the side, as if to get off of him, he quickly added, “Okay, okay.” He made a show of taking a deep breath—and ignored the catch he felt in his shoulder. When he let the air out, he smiled, meaning it to say Satisfied?
She must have been, because her hips began to rock, and to sway, and to twist. Her eyes stayed fixed on his, and she moved slowly, sensually, and with tender care. Sweet Jesus.
He saw it when her own pleasure entered the equation; her focus on him blurred just a bit as her blinks became longer. Then her hands moved up from her thighs, brushing over her own skin, over her belly, to her breasts.
Rad groaned when she caught her nipples between her fingers, and he couldn’t help but reach out to cover her hands with his own.
And fuck—his shoulder. He grunted and tensed; he couldn’t help that, either. Willa stilled on him and gave him her disapproving nurse’s glare, the power of which was diminished somewhat by her own panting breaths.
He dropped his hands. “I’m sorry. Don’t stop. I won’t move.”
“You’d better not, or I’ll get off you and make you watch while I finish myself off.”
“That’s cold, baby.”
“That’s tough love.” She resumed her perfect rhythm, and Rad behaved himself and was still, reveling in the feel of her clutching, twisting, pulsing, silky-hot pussy on him, in the sight of her hands on herself, in the sound of their mingled breath, growing louder, faster.
Without breaking her tempo, she moaned loudly and dropped her hands down, between her legs. Rad felt the fingers of one hand slide around him, and he saw the fingers of the other rubbing herself, and it was more than he could withstand. All that bleak introspection—his dark worry about his worthiness, his ambivalence about what he’d done mere hours before, his fear that he could hurt her—it all crashed onto the rocks of a single truth: he loved her and she loved him. She made him worthy. She made him good. They took care of each other, and they gave each other what they needed.
Out of fire and ash, they had made this, and it was the world.
That was the thought that carried him over into an orgasm so strong it erased every other thought in his head. Dimly, with ears deafened by the beat of his own heart, he heard her cry out and felt her body close tightly around him.
He slept well that night, with Willa snuggled at his side, unbothered by pains in his body or mind.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Don’t look that different from the town I grew up in,” Rad mused, ducking his head to look around as he drove down Duchy Avenue.
Ollie had his nose pressed up to the glass of the passenger window, take big snuffles from the two-inch crack Willa had made at the top. It was too hot to drive with the windows open, and Willa was hemmed in on both sides by males who couldn’t stand to be cooped up inside a ‘cage,’ as Rad called cars and trucks.
She ducked her head and looked in Rad’s direction. Across the top of a faded yellow building was a long, whitewashed board sign that read DUCHY HARDWARE & DRY GOODS in dingy red letters. But for the new ATM for West Texas Bank just outside the door, one might imagine horses tied up at a hitching post.
“It’s probably not. Little country towns like this are all the same, I think. Only thing that’s different is the landscape.”
She couldn’t see it from the center of town, but even so many years later, the clear memory of the low, barely rolling fields and plains of the Permian Basin rolled out before her. She could smell the cotton fields and hear the oil pumping units, even as they drove down Duchy with the windows mostly up and the AC blasting.
“You’re right. I ride through towns like this all the time. They got a look about ‘em, don’t they?”
They passed the Cornerstone Baptist Church. Its sign noted that Sunday Service was held at nine a.m. and Sunday School/Bible Study was at ten-thirty—that hadn’t changed in all of Willa’s life. The inspirational message was IF GOD IS YOUR COPILOT YOU’RE IN THE WRONG SEAT ~PASTOR ED.
That was new—both the pastor and the amusing take on the message. Willa smiled; if they had a minister now who styled himself an entertainer, the old folks would be up in arms.
“You okay, Wills?” Rad asked, giving her thigh a squeeze. “You been quiet since we got close.”
They weren’t all that close yet. Another twenty minutes before her folks’ place. But they’d been on the road for nearly nine hours, counting their lunch break, so twenty minutes was nothing. Willa’s stomach felt sour, and not because of the baby. This felt like…stage fright. Or that feeling when you get to the head of the line at the Texas Giant at Six Flags.
“I’m okay. I just haven’t been back here for more than ten years. Almost nothing’s changed. Even the cars seem the same.”
“That’s why these old towns all look alike. They settle in. Even the people stay the same—nobody ever moves in, nobody ever moves out, so it’s just new generations of the same faces.”
She thought of the saying ‘you can’t go home again.’ She’d read the book of that title, by Thomas Wolfe, and remembered the line in it that explained that you couldn’t go ‘back home to the old forms and systems of things which once see
med everlasting but which are changing all the time.’ She thought it meant that you never could see your past the way you lived it, and that what you’d lived could never be relived. Nothing ever stayed the same, not even in memory. Everything always changed. Even Duchy Dry Goods and Cornerstone Baptist Church, the two oldest buildings in town.
Even the people.
Even her family.
“I moved out. I left home.”
As the rolled out into the country beyond the edge of the town proper, Rad turned and studied her for a second before returning his attention to the road. “Yeah, you did. So’d I. But you got somethin’ to come back for.”
She set her hand on his and tried to prepare herself for home being something she didn’t know.
~oOo~
Her family’s land was nothing special—not quite a hundred acres on which they farmed cotton rotated with sorghum, an ordinary one-story house, a big garage, a couple of barns, a couple of sheds, and a motley assortment of farm animals: goats that served as lawn maintenance, a flock of chickens for eggs, usually some ducks on the pond, horses for everybody, and a pack of lazy dogs and mouse-fat cats. It hadn’t been a glamorous life, and there hadn’t been a lot of extra anything, but it had been a good life. It still was, Willa supposed, for the people who’d stayed.
When Rad pulled up and parked his truck, Willa sat back and stared out the window. It looked exactly like home. She could have been pulling up in Jesse’s truck after school.
“You need a minute?” Rad asked, brushing his fingers through her hair.
A big, black dog Willa didn’t know stood in the middle of the yard. It barked the kind of hailing bark dogs had, several syllables, then stopped and trotted toward the back of the house. Ollie sat in perfect alertness, his body vibrating with wary curiosity. Willa snapped his lead on his collar. She’d have to hold him until he got the lay of this land.
“No, I’m okay. They know we’re here now, anyway.”
It was Saturday evening. Willa hadn’t told anyone they were coming, because she wanted the opportunity to turn around at the last minute. After so many years of being mortally afraid of being seen in Duchy, it was hard to shake that fear, despite the threat being gone. But she missed home. She’d missed it all this time, and the ache had grown more acute with each passing day after Jesse’s death.
She knew that her family—her whole family—had dinner together on Saturday. So she knew she could surprise everybody at once showing up like this. Considering the number of vehicles parked near the garage, that hadn’t changed, though they were all grown up now. In the summer, they’d be eating outside, under the big oak tree.
Willa hadn’t been out of touch in all this time. Her people knew she was with Rad, and they knew she was pregnant. They knew that Jesse was dead—not the way he died but that he had. They’d heard it the same way everybody else had heard it: when Jesse’s mother had been informed.
Now, three weeks after Rad had been shot, with things quiet again in Tulsa and their life finding, for the first time, a place that seemed normal, Willa felt like she could go home. Maybe not again, but anew.
The black dog came back around, this time with Willa’s father in tow.
She turned and kissed Rad’s cheek. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”
Rad got out, and Willa came out after him on the driver’s side, so that she could bring Ollie down last. He was a perfectly-behaved good boy, but if he got it in his head to break away, there was no way Willa could hold him, so she wanted to be in firm control when he came down among all these news things, new animals.
The black dog barked more ferociously upon seeing Ollie, who moved directly in front of Willa and took his protective stance, the fur rising up across his neck and shoulders like spikes.
“Easy, Ollie, easy.”
Willa’s father had stopped in the middle of the yard as soon as she’d come out of the truck. He stood there, his head cocked, his hands limp at his sides as if he couldn’t understand what he was seeing.
She handed Ollie’s lead to Rad and went to him.
“Willy?”
“Hi, Papa.”
“You’re home. You came home. It’s okay now.”
“Yeah, it is.”
She’d seen him in Houston a few months earlier, but when he wrapped her up in his arms, Willa felt like it was the first time in years.
~oOo~
Willa had been right—the whole family was in the yard for supper. She was welcomed like a conquering hero, and Rad got hugs from everybody. Her parents, her brother Ken, his wife Harmony—who was also pregnant—her brother Tad, her little sister Kelly, they all brought Rad into the circle as if he’d always been there. No judgments, no reservations, just joy for the completion of their family.
And Rad slid in like he’d known them all their lives, too. It wasn’t even fifteen minutes before he was immersed in a lively discussion about Harley mods with her father and brothers.
Ollie had taken a bit longer to relax among so many animals, but after a couple of hours, he could be seen tussling over a big stick with Bowser, the black dog who’d announced their arrival. Rocky, a little mutt of a hound, stayed under the picnic table, not sure what to make of the new dog or the new people.
Watching these people she loved, she understood that nothing had changed. Nothing at all but the surface. The love, the bond—that was eternal. Willa felt a pang for all those years isolating herself from this feeling, this fulfillment. She’d had this. Her family had always been there, had always loved her, had been as close as she could keep them. Jesse had kept her away from this. Or, more true, her fear of Jesse had kept her away.
Now she had her place in two families. This one that was hers, and the Bulls. One to ground her, and one to surround her. Both to keep her safe and loved. She set her hand on her belly. To keep them safe and loved.
~oOo~
“I keep trying to decide which of your parents you favor most, but I can’t figure it out. You’re both of them. And they’re nothin’ alike, are they?”
Willa and Rad sat on a rock at the edge of the pond late the next morning. Tall trees circled the water and made cool shade. There wasn’t a lot of that on the Randall farm. A family of ducks swam around at the far side. Ollie was flopping around in the shallow water on this side, avoiding the ducks.
For their part, the drake had swum to about the middle of the pond and yelled at Ollie for a second, then swum back and forth as if to say This is our side, buddy. Cross this line at your peril.
Ollie was happy to give them their space. He’d had a traumatizing incident with a goose when he was a puppy and had a healthy respect for birds since. As protective and obedient as he was, Willa thought if a goose ever came after her, she’d be on her own.
The night before, after a good dinner and a lot of great talk, augmented for everyone but Harmony and Willa by a lot of good booze, her brothers had gone to their homes, and everyone else had gone to bed. Willa and Rad had slept in her girlhood bedroom, with Ollie on the floor at their side.
The next morning, after an early breakfast, they’d all gone to church. The Baptist kind, not the biker kind. Neither Willa nor Rad was a churchgoer, but they’d both been brought up Southern Baptist, so they’d shared the same kind of awkwardness about sitting in that service—the discomfort of being somewhere that you knew really well but had been avoiding for a long time. Like tea with an elderly aunt at a nursing home, or sitting in church for the first time in ten years. Like everybody around you knows that you don’t do this nearly enough, and they’re all judging.
As she’d expected, Pastor Ed was young and gave his sermon with a wry flair that Willa enjoyed, but she could see that not everyone was yet sold on the new kid who’d taken over for the retired Pastor James.
Willa had caused a minor commotion after the service, showing up in town after so long. Everybody knew that Jesse was dead, and everyone wanted to make sure that Willa had heard about it, too, and wanted to see her face
when she heard.
If they’d been expecting shock and drama, they’d all been disappointed. But she was sure they’d spice it up in the retelling.
Back at home, while her mom and sister started lunch, and Willa was feeling a little queasy, she begged off helping and lured Rad outside for a walk. They’d ended up here, at the pond, a cool little oasis in the middle of the hot Texas farmland.
“No,” she answered his question. “They’re definitely attracted opposites. And I think we’re all a mixed-up bag of both of them.”
Crash (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 1) Page 32
