Doin' a Dime

by Vale, Lani Lynn

  I had a feeling they’d probably love the time lapse of her painting.

  Even if she couldn’t paint.

  “I can help,” I found myself saying. “I aced art in high school.”

  “You aced art because you banged the professor,” she disagreed.

  I gasped and turned to her, wielding a paintbrush. “I did not! That was you!”

  She was shaking her head. “It was not me! I didn’t bang him!”

  I frowned as I slowly started to trail the soft bristles of the paintbrush against my cheek.

  “When he got fired, I always thought it was you,” I said.

  “It wasn’t me. I always thought it was you,” she objected. “What are you doing?”

  “It’s so soft,” I breathed, then turned the paint brush to rub the bristles on her cheeks. “See?”

  She leaned into the touch. “Oh, you’re right. It is soft. Do it on my nose.”

  • • •

  HUNT

  “You think that she has a hit out on her?” Zach asked, placing his half-filled drink onto the counter behind him.

  “I don’t think,” I said as I pulled up what I was talking about. “I know. This right here is an order. Upon completion of the hit, the first person to show proof will have money deposited into their account.”

  I turned the computer around to show them the order.

  “Shit,” Sin said. “That’s fucking wild. How do you even find shit like this?”

  “The dark web,” I answered. “I’ve already deleted the order, but I’m sure that someone’s already seen it. They don’t need the order up any longer to follow through. They have the contact information, and that’s enough. I’m busy running anything I can find, but someone on the other side of this has a computer person exactly like me. They can do the same shit that I can, and with a lot less guilt than I would have.”

  “What do you think we should do?” Trick asked. “You could stay with one of us for the time being.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “As much as I appreciate the offer, I don’t think it’s a good idea to be bringing any other people into this. I wouldn’t have brought her here, but she’s best friends with Six. They would’ve already known her friends. Neither Six nor Wyett hides their friendship with the other.”

  “I’ll make a few calls,” Lynn said. “In the meantime, I don’t think it’s a good idea for her to go to work. Maybe you can call, say that she hurt herself while on vacation, and won’t be in for a couple of weeks. Give us a bit of time to work through what we need to work through.”

  “Agreed,” I pinchedthe bridge of my nose. “For the million-dollar bounty, it’s enough to make the really shitty assholes who don’t know what they’re doing, as well as the professionals that do, consider it.”

  “She won’t get caught unaware, Hunt,” Trouper promised. “Between all of us now being aware of the hit, plus the way your place is wired, and your skills at a computer, they won’t even get close to her. You can go right now and look at who all got the ad, who responded that they would try. And from what I can see, you literally got to it within eight hours. How many people could really see it in that small of a time frame?”

  The answer was forty-two.

  Forty-two people saw it. Eighteen responded and accepted the contract.

  Meaning, I had eighteen people that I needed to find.

  And now.

  So that was what I did for two hours.

  I found each and every person that’d taken up the contract.

  And then Lynn helped me call their information in to authorities.

  Fifteen of them were apprehended within an hour.

  One was at large. One was on a plane and would be apprehended once he landed.

  That left me with, most likely, only one person that was going to try to kill my wife.

  “Luckily there’s a time frame,” Zach said as he placed his phone down on the counter behind him. “If he doesn’t accomplish it, the contract expires and is no longer valid. Would he really try past that point without any money to show for it when he’s ‘done?’”

  I sure the fuck hoped not.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose and started to count backward from ten when I heard the most hilarious singing coming from the other room.

  “Is that your wife?” Trouper asked Lynn.

  Lynn shook his head. “Nope. There are a lot of noises that come out of that woman’s mouth, but that one isn’t one of them. Has to be Wyett.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from getting up and going to check on her.

  I’d done it multiple times over the last couple of hours, but each time I’d checked on her, she’d been doing some sort of paint thing with Six.

  And drinking.

  There was a lot of drinking.

  I guess learning that you had a hit on you was a reason for her to break her ‘no getting drunk’ rule. A rule that I’d always wondered about, but hadn’t quite thought enough about until now to ask.

  Together, the six men in the room, not including me, followed the loudness of Wyett’s subpar singing.

  When we arrived, it was to find Six and Wyett with their backs to us. They were both painting something, and both of them were singing to a tune only the two of them could hear from the phone that was on the table between them.

  “It’s gonna be May!”

  “Me, loser. Me. It’s not May,” Wyett corrected. “You know that.”

  “I know what he says, and I know what he thinks he says. There’s a difference,” Six said as she placed her paintbrush in her cup. “I don’t think that mine matches the picture.”

  Six stood up and moved slightly, revealing a pretty sad looking lighthouse.

  I moved closer as did the rest of us, and that’s when I heard NSYNC playing softly from the phone. As well as saw my wife’s painting.

  “Mine sure doesn’t look like it.” Wyett scratched her face with the paintbrush, causing a streak of red to cover her face.

  “Dangit!” Six said. “I was really trying. Let me see yours.”

  Wyett moved, finally revealing her painting to not only Six, but the rest of the men at my back.

  That’s when everyone burst out laughing.

  “Oh my God.” Six gasped. “I can’t put a time lapse video on my social media pages when you drew a fucking dick on it!”

  Wyett squinted her eyes so cutely that I couldn’t help the small smile that lit my face.

  “It’s not a dick,” she disagreed. “It’s a lighthouse.”

  “Wyett.” Six was already shaking her head. “That’s a dick. It may be painted blue, but that’s a dick if I ever saw one. I mean, it even has veins.”

  “Those are cracks!” Wyett yelled.

  “Those are veins.” Six shook her head. “And that’s a dickhead. That right there is the frenulum.”

  “You’re fucking insane.” Wyett shook her head. “I was drawing that lighthouse right there.”

  The lighthouse was white, not blue. And the sky was bright blue with a sun.

  “And that?” I teased. “Are those supposed to be balls, or double suns?”

  Wyett whirled around and glared. “They’re the sun and the sun’s shadow.”

  “I don’t even know what to say,” Trouper drawled. “But that’s the most realistic dick I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  “It’s a lighthouse!” she cried. “I swear to God.”

  “Babe,” Lynn drawled. “That’s a dick.”

  And it was.

  There was no other way for it not to be a dick.

  “We were talking about Hunt’s dick… maybe you got distracted and forgot what you were drawing,” Six teased.

  “Painting.” Wyett sighed. “And I was thinking about my husband’s dick. I was thinking about how it was curved to the left… or so he says. But if anything, this one curves to the right.”

  “It’s a matter of perspective,” Six said. “It curves to his left, but your right. When you’re down on your kne
es in front of him, you’re looking at his right. Not his left. Or whatever. This is why you’re not allowed to get drunk.”

  That reminded me.

  “Why aren’t you allowed to get drunk?” I found myself asking the woman that was beginning to mean a whole freakin’ lot to me.

  A woman that I was fairly sure, after my reaction to the thought of her having a hit on her, I was in love with so irrevocably that I wasn’t quite sane when it came to her.

  “Because she’s argumentative,” Six said as my wife came to me, paint streaking her face, as she pressed her body into me like a needy cat. “She likes to argue until she’s blue in the face, and the damn woman has no clue how to be appropriate. Like drawing dicks instead of lighthouses. We decided it was in our best interest to not allow her to get drunk so she could not get fired from her job.”

  That made sense.

  But…

  Wyett once again started to move, her fingers doing the exploring this time.

  “Just take her phone away from her,” I suggested. “She can still get drunk.”

  “There’s another reason,” Six said, looking at me with a small smirk forming on her face.

  “What?” I asked, catching Wyett’s hand before she could do anything inappropriate like touching my dick in front of the men.

  Six wiggled her brows suggestively. “You’re still in the dark?”

  I opened my mouth to tell her that yes, I was still very much in the dark, when Wyett moved like a ninja.

  One second she was next to me with my hand holding one of hers, the next she was crouching down to her knees and reaching for my zipper with her free hand.

  It took her all of three seconds to get the zipper down, and she had her hand buried in the spread of my fly before I could even put two coherent thoughts together.

  “How about now?” Six asked.

  I stepped back and Wyett’s arm came with me.

  “Though, I have to say, Wyett is being quite a bit more forward than usual.” Six watched on with amusement. “I think that’s likely because you’re her husband. When she groped me back in the day, it was only a boob here and there.”

  “She groped you?” Sin asked with amusement lacing his tone.

  I gently disentangled Wyett’s hand from the fly of my jeans and zipped back up.

  Though, this time my cock was much bigger and it was harder to zip up than when it’d been to let down.

  The idea of taking a drunk Wyett was making me harder than a rock.

  The only thing stopping me was the fact that the room was full of people that we had to see a lot, and I knew that sober Wyett wouldn’t find this anywhere near as amusing.

  “Hunt!” Wyett cried when I helped her to her feet. “Why don’t you ever let me do bad things to you?”

  Amusement lilted my voice as I replied. “Because you make me lose control. And a man like me needs control. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  Prison had done bad things to me.

  I’d always leaned toward a little bit more of non-vanilla kind of sex.

  But since I’d gotten out, I’d seen no reason to hide those urges when it came to sex.

  Only, I didn’t want to scare Wyett off. So, I had to go slow with her as to make her think she had control.

  Make her have a sense of security before I started to do things to her that she wouldn’t know how to react to at first.

  Like public sex.

  When we were in that campground, and I was fucking her in the showers with Sin and Zach in there, as well as that weirdo who didn’t want to admit how much he liked hearing us have sex, it’d been downright erotic.

  I always craved more, though.

  More skin.

  More roughness.

  More people to know how much I enjoyed fucking my wife.

  Hell, if she’d let me fuck her in the middle of the room, I just might because I wanted everyone to know she was mine.

  You could look all you wanted, but you couldn’t touch.

  Touching meant possessing it in some way. But, here’s the thing, Wyett was mine to possess. She would be mine for the rest of her life.

  And the cute as fuck way she was staring at me with a pout on her face? That only made me want to fuck her more.

  “Six has a ton of bedrooms upstairs,” Wyett declared. “Let’s go use one.”

  “Hey.” Six snapped her fingers. “I think that you need to think about other things than that man’s penis. Let’s think about the fact that you have a hit on you. There’s no time for sex.”

  “If I have to die, I want to do it remembering the way my man’s cock…”

  I placed my hand over her mouth and said, “We should probably go home.”

  “No.” Wyett shook her head. “I’m staying the night with Six. Six said I could. She has a basement. Did you know they have a basement? Most people in Texas don’t have basements because of some reason. I think that’s a stupid reason. Even though I don’t know what that reason is. I think everyone should have basements. That way we can have dungeons. Or moats. Six, you should look into a moat. This place would rock a moat.”

  “The frost line in Texas is much shallower than it is up north.” Zach sounded amused. “Moat’s doable, though. Lynn, you should look into that.”

  “That actually would be a great idea,” Six admitted. “We could put attack goldfish in it. Unless you think we could make it saltwater, and then we could do sharks.”

  “I think that a moat would likely take a lot of upkeep.” Lynn shook his head. “And you can use the room on the second floor. The dogs are fine, too. Tomorrow, we can look into getting you back home.”

  Tomorrow would be soon enough, sure.

  “On that note, I’m heading out,” Trouper clapped. “Beckham’s been alone with our sick son for the last couple of hours, and I’m fairly sure she’s going to be mad as hell if I stay gone for much longer with a puking kid at home.”

  “Ew,” Trick grumbled as he shoved his hand into his pocket and withdrew his keys. “I have to go, too. The bar won’t run itself.”

  He stopped in front of me and held out his hand. “Let me know if I can help. I’m there.”

  After a quick handshake, he was gone, as was Trouper.

  “I’ll run by your place on the way home. Make sure that everything is on the up and up,” Sin said as he pulled his own keys out. “Want me to stop in for a change of clothes? Food for the dogs?”

  I shook my head and once again caught my girl’s wandering hand. “No. We have a shitload of clothes from our trip to the beach along with dog food. It’ll hold us over until we get to go home.”

  “Sounds good.” Sin left without another word, leaving Bruno, Laric, Zach, Lynn, and Six, as well as Wyett and me.

  “We should drink some more,” Wyett declared. “Then we can watch television. There’s a How To Get Away With Murder episode I wouldn’t mind watching.”

  “What do you need to know about getting away with murder?” Bruno asked, taking a seat on the bar that separated the kitchen from the living room.

  He was so far away from the living room that he might as well not be in it.

  I knew that Wyett wasn’t comfortable around him, and I knew that he picked that up, because he purposefully stayed away.

  And a lot of that had to do with Six, and how she was purposefully ignoring him. Wyett was totally and completely loyal to Six. And Six, at one point, had been good friends with Bruno when he’d left her and stayed away.

  That wasn’t something Wyett would forgive until Six did.

  Wyett looked at Six, who rolled her eyes before she answered.

  “I know how to save a life. And I like to be a well-rounded person. So I need to know how to take one, too. Not to mention how to get rid of a body when I’m done.” Wyett narrowed her eyes at Bruno, and it wasn’t lost upon us, her warning.

  Bruno’s lips twitched. “What would be the easiest is to just rent a helicopter, fly the body out to the ocean, and drop it down
to the bottom in the middle of nowhere. Make sure it sinks. Never to be found again. The ocean is too vast of a place.”

  “There aren’t any oceans here.” Wyett shook her head. “Not to mention I don’t have a helicopter.”

  “Lynn does,” Six declared. “Lynn, honey, if we ever murder anyone, can we borrow your helicopter?”

  “Anytime, sweetheart.” Lynn rolled his eyes. “Maybe you should learn how to fly one, though. I’m not sure Trouper will be willing to fly you out there on murder missions.”

  Six scoffed. “I’ll learn. Just you watch.”

  “God help us.” Lynn shook his head. “There are other ways to do this. If you don’t have the skills, the easiest way is…”

  For the next thirty minutes I sat on the couch with my wife in my lap, and the entire time she surreptitiously rubbed her backside against my dick.

  I was only half listening to their explanations, but by the time ten o’clock rolled around, I was more than ready to get my woman to bed.

  I’d have preferred my own place, but I would take what I could get at this point.

  “Time for bed, darlin’,” I said, standing up mid-murder investigation conversation.

  “But Laric was telling me the best way to kill someone from his perspective!” Wyett denied.

  I picked her up and tossed her bodily over my shoulder.

  She squeaked and froze, her face going so close to my ass that I couldn’t help but smile.

  “If you so much as think of farting, I will shove my fist up your ass,” she warned loudly.

  Six giggled as we passed her.

  “Last room on the right,” she said. “That’s the only one that I think might have sheets on it. I’m not very good at being a host.”

  “That’s okay,” my wife whisper-yelled. “He’s a hot sleeper. All I’ll need is his body to keep me warm.”

  Six snorted. “Whatever. Lynn keeps it on subzero in here. I’ll bet you need something besides him tonight. I’ll let the dogs out one more time, don’t worry about them, Hunt.”

  Wyett grabbed both globes of my ass. “Nope. Don’t think I will need anything but him.”

  Chuckling, I led her into our temporary room and shut the door.