And then her tongue slipped over the reaper.
After it did, it traced the word “Black.”
His eyes opened and he stared at the ceiling, feeling her touch on him now burn like acid.
She could worship him, fuck yeah, he’d let her do it for hours.
But she sure as fuck couldn’t worship her old man using him.
Except for the fact that she did, she was doing it right then, and she had been for months.
That was what this was.
He let her move to the “Red” and trace that and the scale before he took his fingers out of her hair and put both of his hands under her arms.
He hauled her up his body then slid her off to his side, turning her so her back was to his chest.
“Shep—”
He wasn’t Shep.
He hadn’t been Shep since his girl called him that in high school.
He was Hound.
Chaos’s dog on a leash.
And he was fucking proud of it.
“Quiet,” he ordered.
He reached behind him to switch off the light. Then he pressed into her to reach to the light on her side and he switched that off.
Finally, he yanked the covers over them and tucked her in the curve of his body.
“Are we done?” she asked quietly.
They were done before they started.
How she could not know they were totally done now, he couldn’t fucking guess.
What he did know was that this was about Black. This was about using Hound to get her wild on. This was about going back to the glory days and getting fucked so hard she was breathless, made to come so hard she thought the world was ending.
It didn’t matter who it was, as long as it was Chaos, as long as she had that link to her old man, as long as the cum that jetted up inside her was the seed of the brotherhood.
It was just that Hound, for years, had been giving her the opening.
And she finally needed it enough, she’d walked right through.
“Shep—”
“Go to sleep,” he grunted.
“I was—”
He squeezed her belly, pressed his body hard into her and growled, “Keely, go to fucking sleep.”
Her frame was strung tight, and it felt like she forced it to relax before she replied, “Okay. We’ll talk in the morning.”
They wouldn’t.
They’d talk tomorrow night, somewhere private, quiet, not there, not at the house that Black bought her, not anywhere a brother could see, not anywhere an old lady might catch them, not anywhere anyone in the biker world might witness the end of something that hadn’t begun.
She linked her fingers in his at her belly and held on tight.
He let her, not because he liked the feel, just because he couldn’t deal with the shit.
He waited until she fell asleep.
It took a long time.
But finally her body loosened, as did her grip.
Only then did he slide his fingers from hers.
But he didn’t let her go.
He had one more night.
A few more hours.
A few more hours of make believe.
He was going to fucking take it.
Then it would be over.
Defeat
Hound was awake before the alarm sounded.
Keely started in his arms and lifted her head.
“Fuck,” she muttered.
He slid his arm from around her waist, muttering back, “You best git.”
It was dark but he still saw the shadow of her head turn his way.
“Shep, baby—”
“You got work, I gotta get some more shuteye before I see to Jean then I got shit to do for the Club.”
And he fucking did.
It was time to knock some teeth down some throats and do it hoping he was bulletproof.
“I think something happened last night,” she said softly.
She thought?
“Keely, you need to get moving,” he reminded her.
“You told me we’d talk in the morning,” she reminded him. “It’s morning.”
“And we’re talkin’ but we don’t got a lot of time because, like I said, you got work and I got shit to do.”
“Hound—”
“Woman, shake a fuckin’ leg. We’ll talk tonight.”
She studied him through the dark before she asked, “You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
And he was sure.
They were absolutely going to talk that night.
More studying but he didn’t take it. He rolled the other way and turned on his light.
Then it was him that got out of bed, murmuring, “Before you go in there, I’m gonna hit the pisser.”
He did that and she came in wearing her underwear while he was washing his hands.
Her eyes were steady but searching on him in his mirror.
He didn’t touch her as he walked out.
He didn’t know what to do then.
Get in bed, which meant watching her put on clothes and get ready to leave his place, her not knowing it was for the last time, him feeling a hole in his soul because he did.
Or get in bed and turn his back to her like a sulking kid.
Uncomfortable and feeling like a fucking moron in his own goddamned house.
He should have kicked her ass out the night before.
In the end, Hound did neither.
He yanked up his jeans commando and strolled down the hall to his kitchen.
He didn’t have a coffeemaker, something Keely gave him shit for, told him last weekend that was her next addition, but he didn’t need one. If he wanted coffee, he went over to visit Jean.
So he had no reason to be in his kitchen either.
He still stayed there, leaning into a hand on the counter of the bar that faced his living room and scowling at the furniture she picked for him, wondering if it’d fit through his windows so he could just shove it out.
She walked into the room, and he stopped scowling at his furniture to turn a blank face to her.
Keely didn’t miss it.
But she powered through it.
“You want me to come earlier? I can make dinner for Jean before we talk,” she offered, like nothing had happened.
Like she hadn’t touched her tongue to her husband’s name on his fucking body with Hound’s cum up her cunt.
“That might be good,” he lied. “I’ll ask Jean and text you.”
She seemed to relax at that.
“Okay,” she said quiet, then came to him, put her hand on his stomach and tipped her head back.
He went through the motions, putting his lips to hers, even setting his hand on her waist.
When he lifted away, she looked confused and worried again.
“Are you gonna walk me to my car?” she asked.
Fuck.
He was so deep in his own head, he forgot.
“Right, yeah. Be back,” he grunted, walked around her, down the hall, tore on a tee, jammed his feet into his boots and then walked back.
He nabbed his keys off the kitchen counter and he was the first out.
She followed him.
He went down the stairs first too.
She followed him again.
At her car, so he didn’t have to tell more lies, eat more shit, he took her mouth in a kiss that was a fuckuva good-bye.
She just had no idea that was what it was.
But it worked. Her pretty eyes were hazy, her face soft, her body plastered to his when he finished it.
“Get home, babe. I’ll see you tonight,” he murmured.
“Okay, honey.”
She rolled up on her toes to give him one last lip touch.
Her good-bye.
And she didn’t know that either.
Then he waited until she folded in her car, closed her door for her and he was sure to stand on the sidewalk and watch her drive away.
When he went
up to his place, he didn’t find his knife and slash the furniture to shit like he wanted to do. He didn’t yank the lamps out of their sockets and smash them against the walls like he wanted to do. He didn’t drag the stools and end tables out into the hall and send them crashing down the stairs like he wanted to do.
All that shit would have woken up Jean.
Instead, he got his phone, got his ear buds, walked to his bed, laid on his back and listened to “Use Me.”
Withers could write and sing a song.
But the motherfucker was fucked up if he thought that shit was all right.
The end of the end started thirty-eight minutes later.
It happened after he’d brushed his teeth. Taken off his shirt and splashed water on his face and in his pits. Toweled off, put his shirt back on and went over to Jean’s.
It happened after he let himself in.
It happened after he walked down the hall.
It happened after he knocked on her door and called, “Jean bug?”
That was when it happened.
Because she didn’t answer.
He pushed open the door and saw her lying on her side, her back to him, in her bed.
“Jean,” he called.
She didn’t answer.
She also didn’t move.
Dread and fear filled him. Dread that felt like a hand closing around his throat. Fear that built to terror that felt like a set of claws had sunk into his gut and was tearing up, splitting him open on a trajectory to his heart as he put one boot in front of the other on the way to her bed.
He had a moment when he made it to the side and he saw the covers up, her head on the pillow, her soft, wispy white hair framing her face, her eyes closed. A moment he thought she was just still asleep, like when he’d walked in on her napping in front of the TV.
“Jean,” he whispered, bending to her, reaching to her, his fingers out and searching.
They closed around her ice-cold hand.
He stared at his big hand around her little one, his knuckles scarred from fights, the veins standing out at the back, his calluses catching at her soft skin.
He didn’t need to look for her pulse.
He did it anyway.
But he got what he thought he’d get.
Nothing.
He moved his hand back to hold hers.
And then Shepherd “Hound” Ironside stood beside the bed of the old Jewish lady who owned his heart and he held her hand.
“I hope,” his voice came rough, raspy, tortured, “you knew even a little how much I fucking loved you.”
She lay there . . . sleeping.
Hound let her go.
He could only manage one step back before he fell right to his ass beside Jean’s bed.
He stared at her beautiful, peaceful face right there before his.
Then he cocked his knees, drew his wrists up to rest on them.
And he dropped his head in defeat.
Ride Free
Keely
Just over two months earlier . . .
I sat in my car at the cemetery, staring at Bev’s text on my phone.
It was an address.
Hound didn’t live in a very good part of town.
I dropped the phone to my lap and looked out the windshield not seeing anything.
I’d seen it all before.
I’d been there a lot.
But Hound wasn’t bringing my checks anymore.
So today’s visit was going to be different.
I drew in breath and closed my eyes.
Things flashed in that dark.
Memories.
The first time I saw Black, over a barrel of fire, the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.
The time he had me against the wall, his cock buried deep, his fingers digging into the webbing of mine, cutting the ring he’d just put on me into my flesh, pressing it against the wall, promising me, “We’re gonna ride wild and burn bright, baby. We’re gonna tear this life up.”
The look on my husband’s face when I told him I was having his baby.
The look on his face when I told him I was giving him another one.
The look on his face on the slab in the morgue when, Tack at my side, Hop, Dog, Brick and Hound at my back, I identified him.
Hound at my back.
I opened my eyes but the visions didn’t stop coming.
Hound walking up the stairs from my basement carrying Jagger’s little mini-bike on Christmas Eve.
Hound sitting on my front steps with Dutch, not touching him except the side of his leg was pressed to Dutch’s and his shoulder was dipped, his neck bent, his head turned to Dutch, his lips moving, after Dutch’s first girlfriend dumped him.
Hound on his back under my kitchen sink with a wrench after those assholes installed my kitchen and didn’t put the pipes in right.
The look Hound gave me when I told him no woman loved him.
I’d been pissed.
But I had a bad habit of lashing out when I got pissed, always did, and it didn’t get better after Graham died.
The worst part of me doing that was that most the shit out of my mouth, I didn’t mean. I just meant it to hurt, like me hurting someone could take away the pain in me.
Would I ever learn?
Hound was not bringing my checks anymore.
I had to learn.
The cemetery came in focus, like a sharp, savage blow, telling me to get with the fucking program.
Yeah.
I had a lot of lessons to learn.
I got out of my car. Walked to his grave. It was a wonder there was any snow or turf under my heels I’d walked that path so often.
It was cold. The December chill biting through my jacket.
I should have worn the sheepskin but I really didn’t feel the cold.
The only thing on my mind was what I had to say, how much I needed to say it, and how hard it was going to be.
I sat on my ass in the snow and I didn’t feel that either. It’d get wet through when it melted about two seconds after I sat in my car, but I didn’t care.
I stared at the black marble gravestone with the Chaos insignia etched at the top.
In a fit of rage at life, but mostly at his family, sticking it particularly to his sister, an uppity bitch who I’d detested before but did that more when she thought she had a say about the gravestone of a brother she hadn’t seen in years, I didn’t allow his full name to be put on the stone.
So under the insignia, it just read “Black” and gave the dates he’d been put on this earth and then left it.
Under that, it said, “Ride free, baby.”
That last was mine.
“I know you’re so totally pissed at me,” I whispered.
We’re gonna ride wild and burn bright, baby. We’re gonna tear this life up.
“I can feel it through the dirt,” I said. “Just how pissed at me you are.”
Burn bright, baby.
“I just loved you so much.”
We’re gonna tear this life up.
“I couldn’t find it in me to burn bright without you. You were gone, I was so empty. I gave everything I had to our boys and it felt like there was nothing left.”
We’re . . . gonna . . . tear this life up.
“I gotta burn bright, honey,” I said softly. “I gotta start tearing this life up.”
The black stone just stood there.
It might be there forever.
It might fall through the sky when the earth fell out of it.
“I love him.”
It was choked, my admission, choked with the betrayal I had to get over so I could get the fuck on with it.
“I love him and he loves me. I know that last. He doesn’t know the first. Not yet. I didn’t mean for it to happen. Not with Hound. Not with a brother. Not with Chaos. But you’ve seen,” I leaned toward the stone, “you’ve seen. He’s been everything. Everything I needed. Everything you would have been to our boys. He’s been
everything, baby. Every-fucking-thing. And I fell in love with him. I tried to blank my heart. I tried to hold it back. But when I hurt him, I knew. When I said that shit to him, I knew. When I found out the Club was in the thick of it again and all I could think was that Hound would be the deepest in that shit, I knew.”
Ride wild.
I pushed up to my knees, leaning forward, reaching out a hand, putting it to the base of the cold marble.
“You love him like I do. If you were breathing, you’d never want this. You’d break the brotherhood to claim me. But you left me, Black. A brother stepped up. And shit happens. You’re not breathing. I gave you years and then I gave you more and I can’t do this anymore. He’s given so much, baby. He’s been there through it all. He sent the man who took you from me straight to hell, maybe earning his ticket there when he did it. He did that for you. You need to do this for him. You need to let him have me. And you need to forgive us both.”
I sat back, wet ass to heels and stared at cold stone.
“We’ll work it out in the afterlife, honey,” I whispered. “Somehow, we’ll make it work. And we’ll all burn bright, tear it up and ride free. I know we will. You wanna know how I know?”
There wasn’t a sound.
Not even a rustling.
“Because that’s how much you both love me.”
My man lay still in the earth, his beacon of black marble gleaming dull in a gray sky.
“You know I’ll come back. Maybe not every week like you’re used to, but I’ll be back. And I’ll see how he feels about it, but if he’s up for it, I’ll bring your brother.” I tipped my head to the side. “And don’t get pissed. You know you wanna see him. You dig down deep, you know where you stand with this. You know, it was you wearing the other boots, Hound would want this for you. You know I told you your future before it happened, then what he’d hand over to me, to us, you’d give this to me. So now you gotta get your shit together, baby. You gotta take my back like your brother’s been doing. And you gotta shine your badass biker light down on us because this is not gonna be easy.”
It didn’t happen right then. Shit like that doesn’t. It isn’t like the movies.
It happened later.
Wild Like the Wind Page 18
