Out of the room she perked, still naked. Len and Tasha still hadn’t moved.
“You let her call you Natasha Jean? You don’t let anybody call you that.”
“You might have noticed—Nadia doesn’t really ask for permission.”
“She’s a handful, I can tell.” His cock finally soft, Len flexed and let himself fall out of her. He liked it, though, when she whimpered a little, as if she were sad to lose it. “Tasha. Is something going on here, you think?”
Her body tensed, just subtly, and he regretted the question. But he was too old to dance around shit. He hadn’t wanted this kind of connection, but he’d never feared it or actively avoided it. Now, he was feeling something, and for somebody close to him. What was the fucking point of pretending he didn’t feel it? Especially since she was reading like she felt something, too.
“What do you mean?”
Except when he’d pulled out, they still hadn’t moved, were still wrapped up together, kneeling on her bed, her hands over his, as he held her intimately. But now he let her go. He sat down on the bed and looked up at her. “Don’t play, Doc. I’m sayin’ what’s been happening here feels like more than a fuck to me. I know you said it is what it is. So…what is it? I’m a big boy. You don’t need to play games.”
She sat down on her heels. “You want that? An hour ago we said we didn’t.”
“A lot happened in that hour.”
“Moo shu pork, General chicken, fried rice, and egg rolls good?” Nadia was shouting from the other room.
“Szechuan beef, too,” Len called back.
“On it!”
Tasha laughed. “This is a weird way to have this conversation. What do you want, Len?”
He thought about that. Knowing Tasha’s history, and his own, he wanted to tread lightly. Slowly. Which already they weren’t doing. It was hard to see how two people who’d known each other so well for so long could start anything slowly—though it had become thoroughly apparent this night that there was a lot about Tasha he didn’t know.
“How about this: I want to eat Chinese, and play around with you and your friend some more. Then I want your friend to go home, and I want to sleep here with you. In the morning, when we’re alone and rested, we’ll talk. See what we see. Take our time.”
“If your burner doesn’t go off.”
He grinned. “Yeah. If my burner doesn’t go off.”
~oOo~
When the food was delivered, they all three sat at the tall, steel table. Tasha wore her blue silk robe again, and had her beautiful hair caught back in a messy ponytail. Len had on only his jeans. Nadia, of course, wore nothing. That chick was a nudist or an exhibitionist, or something. She sat on the chair around the corner from Len’s, with her legs folded under her—which had the effect of putting her little pussy right out for show. Shaved. And her clit was pierced. That was a new one for Len. He’d heard of it but never seen it. He had to admit, he was curious about what that would feel like.
As they’d sat down, Nadia pulled a black elastic band from her wrist and bound her long, nearly black hair up. She had thick gauges—about an inch—in her lobes, and an industrial piercing in her left ear.
Springfield was not a big city. It was a big town, surrounded by country. And it was smack dab in the Bible belt. People who looked like Nadia, and like him, didn’t get along so well, not unless they had something else going for them. Len had his willingness to pulp a guy, and the physical presence that made that clear. Nadia was little and skinny and, without all the metal and ink, probably looked about sixteen. He wasn’t sure how she made her way. But he thought she was pretty damn brave.
Ink for Len was akin to journaling. Every piece on his body meant something. Every piece commemorated something, or said something about him. Something he wanted to remember or re-experience about himself. Something he’d learned about himself. He never told anybody what anything meant, and no one bothered even asking anymore. He knew it looked like random words and images to absolutely everyone else, but every piece, from the smallest to the largest, had a particular significance to him.
He looked over at Nadia’s little illustrated body and felt like she’d probably understand. Her work, though it had a different aesthetic than his—he tended toward old-style ink, and she clearly liked a more modern style—had the same sense of random intention he saw in his own. But he was a good twenty years older than she was, at least, and she was nearly as covered as he was. He wanted to tell her to slow down, that she needed to leave some skin for the rest of her story.
Tasha came over from the fridge, carrying three bottles of fancy, imported beer. He smirked at her when she set his down, and she flipped him off with her eyes.
With her mouth full of moo shu, which she was eating with chopsticks, Nadia looked at Len and said, “So, tell me about this biker thing. Is it like on that TV show, about the bikers in LA, the ones with the bike shop? ‘Cuz I gotta tell you, that show was a real boner killer for me. I have this whole biker, like, slave fantasy, and it went straight to shit. All those pretty boys did was sit around with chicks on their laps, calling each other ‘brother’ and, like, practically helping old ladies across the street and shit. Like Boy Scouts with bimbos.”
Len almost did a spit take. She was talking about the Scorpions LA. He set his beer down and struggled to swallow. That fucking reality show. Despite the Scorpions’ outrageous hypocrisy, coming down on the Horde for the publicity the movie had generated while at the same time negotiating their own Hollywood deal, the reality show had been genius, in a way, reorienting people’s perceptions of MCs, and giving the Scorpions a lot of room for the kind of activities that would apparently give Nadia a chick boner. Room they’d used to help the Perros start up a cross-country weed business to augment their cross-country heroin and coke businesses. But it had been shit entertainment, cancelled after a season, and a few MCs had had to reassert their status in their own communities. Not always gently. The Horde hadn’t had that problem. Signal Bend knew them for what they were, the dark and the light.
“‘Boy Scouts with bimbos’? You wound me, chicklet.”
Her eyes sparkled, and she grinned big. “So, fill out my fantasy, then. Do you, like, have bodies buried out back? And, like, a room full of torture tools? Maybe chains for the women?”
Len looked over at Tasha. Nadia was coming a little too close. He knew how to answer her, but it was still odd. Yeah, they had bodies buried. Yeah, they had a room full of torture tools. They didn’t have chains for their women, but they had chains, and sometimes they’d had women in them.
“You got a lively imagination, girl. Reality is never like you imagine it—and you should be glad of that. You best keep your fantasy world right where it is. In your sick head. You wouldn’t like any of that to be real.”
“That’s not a no!”
Tasha pulled a carton of fried rice over and dumped some on her plate. “It’s a no, Nad. Lots of no.”
Nadia made a dramatic show of a pout and dug back into her moo shu. From the limited information he had, Len thought the relationship between Tasha and Nadia was fascinating. Tasha was about fifteen years older, and sometimes, like now, there was almost a parent-child vibe between them. But Nadia had a bulletproof personality, showy and demanding and apparently impervious to subtlety. She seemed to control whatever situation she was in.
“How’d you two meet?”
Tasha answered him. “Nadia does hair. She does my hair.”
Nadia gave Tasha a pointed look and then waved that answer off. “That’s just what I do to make money. What I really do is poetry. Not much of a market for that here. Or anywhere, really. Not many places here to even perform. So I do hair. By the way—why the shaved head? Goin’ bald?”
He grinned. “No. Went grey.”
“Gotcha, Gramps. Well, it works for you. You’ve got a good head. Smooth. Not all knobby and lumpy like some guys. Or that neck roll thing. I want to grab the big guys who shave their heads a
nd show that stupid neck roll and just slap ‘em silly. They all look like Jabba the Hut.”
Smiling at the image of this little pixie climbing up a big, bald, bouncer type so she could slap him, he asked her, “There anything you don’t got an opinion on?”
“Of course not. If you don’t have an opinion, you’re not paying attention. When you don’t pay attention—that’s when the bastards ream you right up the ass.”
Well, he completely agreed with that. “Fair enough.”
At some point, Tasha, who’d been surprisingly quiet throughout their meal, had gotten up and brought back another round of beer. Len picked up his full bottle and drained about half of it. That Szechuan had been extra spicy.
Nadia picked up her bottle and mirrored him. She met and held his gaze. When they set their bottles down, she said, “I saw you looking a couple of times. You want to touch it? Feel what it does to me?”
He didn’t understand right off, but then she shifted in her seat and put her hand between her legs, pulling gently on the ring through her clit. There was a little crystal dangling from it. When he looked up at her face again, he saw that the pupils in her blue eyes had gone wide.
Christ, this kid was something else. He looked over at Tasha. Something dark flashed through her eyes—was she jealous, too?—but then she smiled and cocked her head. An invitation.
With that, Nadia hopped down off her chair and climbed onto his lap, wrapping her naked body around him and laying her lips right on his, pushing her little, pointed, pierced tongue into his mouth. She took one of his hands and brought it between them, guiding his fingers to that ring. She was wet.
Apparently, it was time for dessert. Or, as Nadia called it, ‘candy.’
CHAPTER SIX
Tasha let consciousness come on her slowly, keeping her eyes closed, luxuriating in the snug atmosphere of the closed draperies around her bed. She stretched and opened her eyes. The light of the morning made the crème-colored velvet glow. She felt rested and sated and in general quite content for a woman with no job and no prospects and a lot of expenses.
Len was lying at her side, on his back, one arm thrown over his eyes. Tasha rose up on her elbow and studied him. There was something intimate and sensual about watching a lover sleep. Especially a man like Len, who was always so alert and aware. Only in sleep, she thought, was he completely relaxed. Maybe when he was really, really drunk, too. Though she didn’t think that happened very often. Not that she’d know. It had been years since she’d spent any real time in Signal Bend.
Just now, she’d thought of Len as a lover. After last night, and early this morning, she supposed it was true. But she wasn’t sure what that meant—what it would mean, could mean. He wanted to talk this morning and figure that out. Anticipating that talk made Tasha feel unsettled.
What had happened between them in the past twelve hours was nothing like what had happened between them twenty years ago, even though both happenings had begun in strongly similar ways. She wasn’t sure why it was different this time. Maybe it was that before it had been a reaction to a heartbreak, and Tasha’s heart had already been engaged. Devastated, but engaged nonetheless. A rebound, in the most traditional sense. This time, she was open.
Was she open? To an attachment with Len? What kind of attachment? And God, was he? Was he really? With his own unconventional sexual tastes? And after all these years as the Horde’s lone wolf?
It wasn’t just a lack of interest in romantic attachment that she saw in Len. He simply didn’t attach at all. Not to people. Not deeply. Not anymore. He loved, but he didn’t attach. He kept his distance.
She’d always seen Len as bound more to the club than to any of his brothers. He was loyal as any of them—more, even. She knew he would die for any brother, and for their families, and he would do it without a thought. But he was like her father had been. He did what the club needed him to do, even if that put him at odds with a brother, even if it put him at odds with himself. He put no one brother over the club itself. He had no especially tight bond to any particular one of them. It was the Horde he loved, the Horde he had committed to. He loved his brothers because they were club.
Maybe that had changed in the years since she’d really been in the nest of the club, but she didn’t think so. She could look at him, look into his eyes, and know that, while the years had changed him, in that regard he was the same. He was pure club. Like her father. Maybe it was a peculiar trait of the Sergeant at Arms. Men who were good in that role, with the protection of the club as their main responsibility, stood back a step from the friendship and instead embraced the brotherhood.
She admired that. Yes, it reminded her of her father, but it was more than that. She admired the purity of his bond, the way it didn’t get clouded by pettiness and bias. He saw clearly, and his motives were stable. It was easy to trust a man like that.
Yes. She was open. If he was. To…something. Not sure what.
Len sighed in his sleep, his chest rising heavily. He was a magnificent specimen of pure masculinity. His torso was broad, chiseled, and hairless. The new scars on his belly had marred some ink, leaving bare pink skin through the eagle there—through its head and chest and through one wing. She reached out and traced a finger over the new flesh.
At her touch, the covers over his legs began to rise. Smiling, she scooted down, uncovering his big, beautiful, swelling cock. He had a pentagram, centered in a sun, tattooed below his navel. It seemed to her a particularly Len kind of tattoo, and she bent down and kissed it as she wrapped a hand around the thick weight of his shaft.
He sighed again, his body tensing, and she felt his hand on the back of her head.
“Hey, Doc.”
She looked up and found him watching her, his brown eyes hooded with waning sleep. “Morning.”
“We still alone?”
“We are. And the door’s locked.” She’d gotten up a couple of hours before dawn and made sure of that.
Having Nadia in bed with them had been intensely erotic, both times. God, being pressed between her and Len, with their bodies all over her, had been incredible. Nadia had been right—it had been a badass fuck. And later, when they’d focused on Len—that had been glorious as well.
He’d penetrated only Tasha. Nadia had made a production about wanting him to rend her in two with his “big, biker boner”—she was so classy—but he’d deflected her and had given her what was apparently life-altering head instead. The sight of him with Nadia’s clitoral piercing between his teeth had been really damn hot.
But she’d been surprised at how glad she was that he hadn’t fucked Nadia, and how irritated she’d gotten when Nadia had pressed the point. As erotic and wonderful as their play had been, she’d had several moments of jealousy—fleeting, but present nonetheless. From before they’d even returned to bed. She hadn’t liked seeing Nadia wrapped around Len, while they were still at the table, the leavings of their meal strewn before them.
Maybe it was just a consequence of sex with a friend, when that friendship had not been predicated on a physical connection. Someone she loved and knew well. She felt territorial because the relationship dynamic was off somehow. As if Nadia was out of place between them.
She had a few partners, but her sexual relationships were stable. She didn’t sleep around or indiscriminately. In reality, her little group of friends mingled with each other sexually as well as socially, and currently none of them was attached exclusively to anyone. They got together with each other, as the impulse called them, and in whatever configuration or context worked at the time. Sometimes dinner parties culminated in board games. Sometimes they culminated in different games.
When Nadia had finally left, long after midnight, Tasha and Len had fucked again. He was out of condoms, so she’d pulled hers out of her nightstand. Carter, the man she’d been sleeping with lately, was a very different kind of man from Len. The condoms she had reflected that—they were multicolored. The look Len had given her, when he’d pul
led a green condom in a clear cellophane packet out of the box, had been one of abject horror. “Green?” he’d said. “Really?” But he’d worn it.
And then he’d fucked the hell out of her.
“You know what I’d like right now?”
His voice brought her back from her memories of the hours before, and she rubbed her thumb over the head of his cock. It was wet, and she smiled. “What?”
“I’d like to watch that pretty mouth of yours take me in.” He lifted his hips.
His voice was naturally deep and gruff, roughened over the years by habits of smoke and drink; recent sleep had deepened the gravel even more. It sent a low-voltage jolt down low inside her. She bent her head, pulling her hair to one side so it wouldn’t obstruct his view, and gave him what he wanted.
Yes. She was open. To something.
~oOo~
Later, he made her breakfast. Pancakes. She sat on the counter and watched him as he moved around her kitchen, again wearing only his jeans, finding the things he needed. She’d had no idea he could cook.
As he flipped a cake perfectly onto the griddle, she said, “You know, I thought you were bullshitting. I expected this to be a disaster. But you really know what you’re doing.”
He looked over his shoulder at her. “I don’t lie, doll. You know that. Not if I don’t have to.”
“Yeah. Sorry. This is great.” The coffee was finished brewing, so she hopped down and poured them each a cup. “Still take it black?”
“’Course. Still turn yours into tan milk?”
“It’s called café au lait.”
“I don’t care what it’s called. What it is is ruined.”
She set his black coffee on the counter next to the range. “Good thing you’re not drinking it, then.”
“Yep.”
They ate their pancakes—fluffy and golden—in companionable silence. Len ate quickly, then went and poured himself another cup of coffee. He returned to his seat and watched her eat.
Show the Fire (Signal Bend Series) Page 6
