Page 16
Gunner
I ’ve never needed much sleep, and compliments of a lifetime of working night hours, awake and cautious, I find it hard to start now. I spent years working as a bodyguard and having Diletta snuggled next to me in this bed is pretty much a guarantee that there won’t be any sleep happening tonight. We’re in the middle of nowhere. Not many people know about this place, and probably none of them, aside from the club’s lawyer who finalized the land sale, are outside of the Satan’s Angels family, but I’m not leaving anything to chance.
There are great locks on the doors and the windows are bulletproof glass. Tyrant and Raiden weren’t messing around with the club’s safety. The men who have old ladies and kids planned on bringing them here. The ring of trees hides this place, but that could work both for and against safety. The place is also monitored by Wizard, but it’s a damn long hike from Hart all the way up here should anything go wrong.
I only thought about Wizard after I was in the shower with Diletta. I know he would have killed the cameras the second we pulled up, giving us our privacy. I’m ninety-nine percent sure of that. The one percent makes me want to go into full blown psychopathic mode and perform some kind of brain surgery that would eliminate his memory.
Diletta was so happy this afternoon as she challenged herself to make something edible out of what she found in the fridge and cabinets. The renovations on the interior were just finished, but officially, Ella and Raiden opened it up last month. They brought a bunch of nonperishable food items. I guess it was my fault for not stopping en route for things like vegetables, fruits, and milk. The freezer might be full, but most of it is meat.
Diletta still did something with potatoes and the steaks she thawed out that had me just about groaning as I sat down with her to eat.
I could almost imagine we were a regular couple.
Her, on the back of my bike. My old lady. Out here, enjoying a few days that are solely ours, away from our stresses and worries. It didn’t feel carefree—I’m too firmly rooted in reality for that—but it felt like the end of something and the start of something new.
I’m no longer just the secret creep in the shadows.
I’m no longer a man who doesn’t have a clue what it feels like to be wanted.
I’m not just the biker or a human wall of ice that people are afraid to get close to, better left alone.
Tonight, I was the lucky prick who got all of Diletta’s smiles, laughter, and easy conversation. There was nothing guarded or black or stormy about our time together. I was the man who made her come in the shower, then showed her all around the cabin and explained all of the modern and not so modern crap that Tyrant and Mason took so long to decide on and assemble. Even I helped out with the building of this place and then the heavy labor of lugging in fridges, stoves, and furniture. Diletta was so keen to hear everything I had to say.
When I talk to Diletta, she listens. She sees me. Maybe too much of me. I wanted so very badly to be a part of her life. I craved her. She was more than an addiction, she was life itself. I never thought this would be a reality.
“Christ on a cracker, I don’t know what’s louder. Your thoughts or the thunder outside.”
My lips flick up in amusement. It’s so easy to do that with her. Smile. Laugh. Want to be someone better than I currently am and believe that this could be our time, that would be a match.
She shifts to look up at me, tilting her face from the crook of my arm. She keeps her hand on my chest, caressing my abs and my scars. “You can’t sleep?”
“It’s not so much of a can’t situation.”
“Ahh.”
“During the day. A lot of guys at the club keep the same hours. Night is when most of the shit goes down. If we do a run during the day or have business, I generally haven’t slept the night before, or the one before that. I’m not like other people. You get trained into wakefulness and then it becomes something you don’t even think about.”
The cabin’s main bedroom with the king bed, the red and black plaid flannel sheets and patchwork quilt, and the massive sliding door that opens up to a deck and a hot tub, is cozy and warm. It faces part of the grassy clearing that Tyrant has plans to landscape this summer, and beyond that, the woods.
The total blackness of the wilderness is offset by flashes of lightning cutting through the downpour. When it rains out here, it’s different than it is in the city. This close to the mountains, the weather is probably much more unpredictable, the storms fresher and cleaner. Maybe I’m making that up.
In here, the dark is pierced by the most absurd lava lamp. It’s the only one in the room, overlooking the large space from its home on the antique secretary desk across from the bed.
Diletta traces my line of sight. “Are you watching that lamp?”
“No.”
“You are! The pink and purple blobs are so awesome. Who picked that out anyway?”
“Tyrant’s old lady, I think. She has a thing for antiques and far from telling her no, I think he does too. He picked most of the furniture.”
Diletta giggles. “When I was little, I used to see lava lamps in movies. I always kind of wanted one, but I never asked for anything. I was always an experiences versus things person, even as a kid. I know my father was rich and could have given me anything, but I never wanted crap. I just wanted my parents.”
I hate the way her face crumples with sadness. She blinks so hard, a little warrior, but a silvery tear tracks from her eyes and dribbles over her nose. Her mom is dead, and she hasn’t seen her father in years.
She grasps my face, scooting up so that we’re nose to nose, sharing the pillow. “Don’t do that.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
A flash of lightning illuminates the whole room for the briefest instant. Thunder cracks almost immediately. We’ve been in the heart of the storm for a good twenty minutes. It’s not moving anywhere, just hovering right overtop this place.
“You feel guilty. Don’t. Anything we need to figure out, we do it together. This is about going forward, not back. You’ve been there to protect me for the past five years of my life.” She moves her hand up and sets it right above my heart. “You’ll always be here. You’ll always come after me. And now? We’re a team, Ronan. It goes both ways. You try and leave, I’ll hunt you down and haunt your ass. You don’t have to punish yourself for the past. That wasn’t your doing. It stops now.”
I grin at her until her feistiness softens. Fuck, I love seeing her both ways. She’s hot as hell when she’s mad and no less so when she’s sweet.
My cellphone is on the nightstand beside the bed. I palm it one handed and check the weather app like an old man. This place didn’t have any reception before, but Wizard took care of that, installing a piece up on the roof that gets insanely high-speed internet.
“It’s supposed to be clear tomorrow. Nice weather for riding. I never thought about what I’d do if it was raining, and I couldn’t get you back in time for Monday morning. It’s difficult to ride a motorcycle through these roads in the rain. I would never do that with you on the back, but this is Washington. It can rain for days or even weeks. I should have checked before we left.”
She shoves up on her elbow and silences me with two fingers.
“We’d get it figured out.”
It sounds very much like she’s talking about all the shit that’s been wrenching me in half. It’s true. I was in pain. I was lying here, trying to fight it. Normally, I can just turn it off, but I can’t do that now. I want Diletta to be happy, but how can you have happily when there can’t be an ever after?
I make a strangled sound beneath her fingers.
“Okay,” she says decisively. “If you can’t shut it down, let’s go to the kitchen. I obviously didn’t feed you enough for dinner. There’s no way between the eating and all that sex that even you should be able to hold out on sleep.”
“I’m not hungry. You don’t have to do that.”
“Cooking is my love language.”
We both freeze at that word. She punches me lightly in the shoulder. “It’s just an expression.” Her eyes aren’t light and teasing like her tone. They’re soft and warm and serious.
Diletta reaches for my t-shirt, slipping into it. It’s so hot seeing her in my clothes that I barely get my boxers on before my cock is doing its best tent pole impression. I have to adjust myself before I follow her. She’s intent on cooking, not getting her brains screwed out again, though if she wants that after, I’d be happy to oblige.
I find her in the square kitchen, rummaging through the cupboards.
“I think that your club’s version of fully stocked might be different than mine.” She didn’t say anything at dinner, but she jokes about it now.
She finds a plastic container of popcorn kernels, and a few minutes later, produces a strange old popcorn maker that has to be operated by turning a crank with heat from the stove and tossing the pot back and forth over the heat so that the kernels don’t burn. She cuts a few pieces of butter into the contraption while I lean back against the wall, watching her the way I used to, except in this scenario, I’m warm and dry, on the inside.
I didn’t think that Diletta could be sexier or more beautiful, but she proves me wrong. As in, there’s probably something wrong with me that my dick is leaking all over the inside of my boxers at the sight of her swallowed by my t-shirt, smelling like me, shimmying her lithe form at the gas stove, working wonders with a pot that belongs to some other century.
I make a mental note to find her popcorn maker back at her house and throw in the garbage and do the same to anything she might try and buy as a replacement. The only way to make popcorn is like this. In the eighteen hundreds maker.
I know it’s not really that old. Whatever.
“Will you let me take care of you, Ronan?”
The question comes out of nowhere, barreling into me rudely.
I cross my arms and do my best tough guy routine. “Christ no. I should be the one taking care of you.”
She flips the pot, shimmies her hips and arms, gives a flick of her wrists, and turns the dial thing on the top to move the kernels around. A distinctive first pop echoes through the quiet kitchen. The silence is suddenly so charged that I can hear the hiss of the propane flames on the stove.
“Because you’re the man? In a relationship, you take care of each other. You help each other and treasure each other. You’d do anything for the other person. I’d let you look after me, if you wanted to. I meant… will you let me feed you? Hold you? Help keep you safe? One day, will you let me love you?”
I’m so glad the wall is at my back. There’s that word again. Love. I have no idea what that means. At best, I could only ever hope to give Diletta the most brutal form of that emotion, and even then, it would be dark and twisted, not pure and unselfish. It would be so fucking selfish. It would be the burn down the world protective shit that makes a man crazy.
As if it’s not already, dumbass.
“It doesn’t matter if I want that. It only matters what’s real.”
The first pop is finally followed by at least six more and after that, it’s like the whole pot is going to explode. Diletta works it hard, paying an intense amount of attention to it to make sure nothing burns.
“You miss your family. You belong with them. You know that I can never go back there. Chances are slim for you, but they’re none for me. Can you give up Italy forever?”
“I’m alive and free because of you. That’s what I care about. I miss my family, but I don’t think that they’re mutually exclusive. I don’t have to go back. My father and anyone from my extended family who wants to come here, could. We’d always protect your identity.”
“You father saw my face.”
She moves the pot off the burner and shuts the flame off. “Trust me to protect you.” She’s the one who finds a giant bowl from one of the lower cabinets. She rinses it in the kitchen sink and dries it with the tea towel. She opens up the steaming pot. The scent of that rich, salty, buttery popcorn hits me like an assault. “Trust me to care for you.” The kernels fall into the bowl like harnessed clouds. “Let me help put you back together.”
She puts the popcorn maker in the sink and gathers the bowl in both hands. She walks over, an angel in my oversized shirt. I want her in that shirt always. Wearing nothing else. Smelling like me, freshly fucked and glowing.
She picks up one perfect kernel and brings it to my lips. She’s not going to be happy until she feeds me, but just the thought of doing it makes my limbs feel like they’ve lost all their power.
I eat it from her hands, grazing her fingertips with my teeth, licking the salt and butter from her skin. Her lashes flutter closed, and she lets out a long, shaky exhale. I know that if I put my hand between her legs, she’d be wet.
“You’re a good man in this lifetime right now.” She slips a second piece past my lips, her eyelids heavy as I chew. “You were a good man in every other lifetime. The things you did and didn’t do don’t define you. I want all the buried parts of you. All your truths. I know you have your wounds. Even if no one else can see them because you hide them so well, they’re deep and they’re real. Let me help you find peace.”
I reach into the bowl and dig out a handful of popcorn. I feed her the pieces, one by one, returning the favor, dying to claim her mouth and feast on her lips, but holding myself back.
“You’ve had to look after yourself your whole life,” she whispers between bites. “There was never anyone who you could trust. Let that end now. Trust your club. Trust me.” Her fingers shoot to my lips, pressing there, with no popcorn. She swings the bowl over the counter. “You’re my ride or die.”
I cage her up against the countertop, pinning her in place with my massive frame. “I think that’s supposed to be my line, Dil.”
She crowds right back at me, reaching up and locking her fingers around my neck. She stands on her tiptoes. If my t-shirt wasn’t down to her knees, it would ride up dangerously, exposing her ass and sweet, sweet pussy.
“I think I can say it too, Ro. You don’t have the market cornered on being a badass.”
She’s got that right. She’s wild and kickass herself. So much energy, goodness, inspiration, the whole damn sun bottled up inside her small body.
Like she needs to prove a point, she edges away from me and slips out at the side. She whips my t-shirt off, races to the other sliding door at the kitchen, unlocks it, and wrenches it open.
“What are you doing? It’s pouring rain out there!” Not warm rain either. It’s spring and it probably is fresh off the mountains. She was complaining about having to bathe in a stream earlier, before she knew about the shower. This isn’t a better option.
I charge after her, eating up the distance with my massive strides. There’s no way I’m letting her go out there in a lightning storm.
She doesn’t give a shit about what I’m going to allow or not allow.
She races out into the darkness, the light from the kitchen only spilling out a few feet past the door. I trail her dancing shadow, chasing her wild whoops and screams of joy out into the icy rain.
This is the second time I’m going to catch my death outside, but at least this time, I’m not shot to shit and sick already.
“You’re so slow, Ronan! Come on! If you’re not going to dance with me out here in the rain, then you better catch me, take me back inside, and punish the shit out of me for being so careless!”
Her tantalizing words stir the primal animal I have shackled under my skin. I know instinctively that she can handle the beast. She wants me to unleash myself on her. She’s seen every bit of me already and hasn’t shied away. She’s never looked at me with reproach, disgust, or fear.
You’re my ride or die.
Fuck if she hasn’t been mine for a lifetime already.