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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

S aint…

I lay with her in the dark, her body snug and warm against mine, and I couldn’t stop myself from caressing her smooth skin. Up and down her back, her arm, over her hip, the round globe of her ass… she was perfection. Her body tight from work and regular exercising, but not a gym rat. She didn’t strike me as a gym rat. More a hiker, a nature buff. I liked that about her.

I liked a lot of things about her – her feisty attitude, her loyalty, her steadfast conviction. She was perfect, but whether she was perfect for me or not was irrelevant. I wondered if I was perfect for her.

It was a weird thought. I didn’t think like that about anyone. I didn’t fuckin’ care . Until now… I guess that meant something.

Not sure what – okay, that was a lie. I knew exactly what it meant. It meant she was the one.

I knew it down to my fuckin’ bones. The Bayou Baroness knew it and had all but said as much. The ride I was on with Velina was the wildest I’d ever taken, and I couldn’t help but think or feel like it was also the ride with the highest fuckin’ stakes that I’d ever taken in my fuckin’ life.

I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t. My thoughts were wide-ranging and fuckin’ wild, and I didn’t know what to do with them except think them through and wait for my lady to stir.

She was down for the count. Well-fucked, and I held a silent pride in the fact that I’d been the one to satisfy her so completely.

The sun was up, and it was creeping in toward late morning when her breathing lost its steady cadence, and she sucked in a sharp breath. She grew taut beside me, stretching like a cat and shuddering with her muscle tension in this adorable way that had me fuckin’ smitten all over again.

“Morning, kitten,” I murmured, and she made a face.

“Bleh, coffee first, then pet names.”

I rumbled a laugh and gave her a little squeeze, and she cuddled back up to me. I absently kissed the top of her head, and she melted into me.

Perfect.

“So, what’s on your agenda today?” she asked.

“I slept like shit last night,” I told her honestly. “Probably go back to my place, get a shower, fix something to eat, and try to get some real shut-eye. What about you?”

“No plans,” she said quietly.

“Come with me,” I said spur of the moment. “I’m only a few blocks away from your hotel.”

“Yeah?” she asked. “I thought it was farther – took you forever to get to the café.”

I chuckled. “I was being an asshole.”

“Figures,” she said with a sigh and without surprise. “Yeah, I’m down,” she said, finally pushing off me. “Let me grab a shower and get dressed.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

One of the things I loved about her was that she didn’t keep me waiting. She took a five-to-ten-minute what I liked to call a tactical shower . Washing up the necessities with speed without lingering. She dried off just as efficiently, dressed and pulled her hair up into a clip without bothering to dry it.

I wasn’t even dressed all the way before the shower shut off, and I wasn’t even halfway through my first cigarette of the morning when she came back into the borrowed room we’d landed in at Cy’s borrowed pad.

“You ready?” she asked me.

“Whenever you are,” I said, straightening up.

I had some shit back at my place that I thought she might like. Photos and shit like that. I figured she could look through ‘em all while I fixed us something to eat.

I went out to my bike first, scanning the street and over the bayou, looking for trouble. We were technically in Bayou Brethren territory, and it never hurt to check. Seeing nothing and no one, I called out to her to come on out. We rode back over to my place, and I pulled us into the garage, the door trundling closed behind us and closing us in.

“Never pictured you for living in a small house in fucking suburbia ,” she said with her special brand of sarcasm, dismounting the bike.

“It was my mom’s house before it was mine,” I said. “Same house I grew up in.”

“It’s in really good shape,” she said, impressed.

“Yeah, well, you saw LaCroix’s place – the one out on the barge. He built that shit mostly by himself, and Hex did build his place and Bennie’s. We got some talented guys.”

“Never said otherwise,” she said with a smile. It was a genuine and kind thing, full of a soft pride.

“Louie was getting good at helping out,” I said. “Really took a shine to learning all sorts of things. Got good with his hands. Was always eager to help.”

“He seemed like a good soul,” she said, and she looked tired, sad.

“Yeah, well, it’s part of why I wanted to bring you here,” I said, heaving myself off my bike’s seat. “C’mon.”

I led her into the kitchen off the garage and told her to sit at the kitchen counter. She did as I asked beautifully, and I wondered at that. She was so obedient with me when it was just us like this. She was definitely the same vein of deviant in the bedroom that I was. Seemed to delight in ceding control as much as I delighted in taking it.

She hopped up on one of the stools at the kitchen island, and I went into my small den, hanging my cut off the back of the chair in there and sliding a box off the top of one of the bookshelves. I plucked a couple of thick albums off the shelf below it and headed back into the kitchen with both.

“I never really liked digital photos. I take ‘em, sure – who doesn’t? But I found this app that allows you to get something like eighty-five free prints per month and all you have to do is pay like ten bucks or less for shipping. The photos are actually decent quality, and they print the coordinates and shit right on the back of where and when and what time the picture was taken – all that shit. So, I started using it and keeping these.”

I set the box in front of her and the album beside it.

“These are newer,” I said, flipping off the lid of the box. “These are older,” I said, tapping the albums. “Knock yourself out.”

“Is Louie in here?” she asked.

“All through ‘em, I’m sure. Lots of his story in there. You want to know, just ask. I’m going to fix us something to eat.”

She stared at the photo on the top of the box and looked up at me.

“Thanks,” she barely breathed as if it was hard for her to draw breath around the emotion swelling in her breast to get the word out.

I leaned down and kissed her, a hard smack of lips.

“Don’t mention it,” I told her.

She started sorting through the pictures, carefully lifting each one out of the box and studying it before laying it face down beside it.

“Where was this?” she asked, holding up a picture of me standing with Marlin and Cutter of the Kraken out there in sunny Ft. Royal, Florida.

“Those are some buddies of ours out there in Florida on the Gulf side. They came on out this way to handle some business and we struck up a friendship a few years back. They did things the right way.”

I told her about how the Kraken had called up to let us know they were gonna be in our territory. How they’d put some respect on our name and how we’d been more than willing to extend our hospitality. That was how shit was supposed to work. Respect. Respect was everything in this life. The only currency worth a damn and in the absence of respect, fear would fuckin’ do.

“They had a problem that just so happened to coincide with a problem we were havin’ – well, not a problem per se, but it was still a sort of enemy of my enemy kind of a thing,” I said as I ran a knife through a bundle of fresh basil from the fridge.

Velina rolled her eyes. “Gee, where have I heard that one before?”

I chuckled and set to work smashing and peeling some garlic.

The recipe wasn’t anything super fancy, just your basic pasta sauce loaded with garlic and fresh basil – all of it from scratch. Easy peasy for an Italian boy like me.

“Oh, wow.” She lingered on a photograph and smiled reverently at it. I peeked over the top at one of Louie’s smiling face, standing with a beer in one hand, his other lifted in a bicep curl.

“That’s a good one,” I said.

“It really is,” she agreed.

“Set it aside. You should keep it.”

“Really?” she asked.

“Yeah. We’ll get you an album and some frames just for Louie.”

“I’d hit the thrift store for that project,” she said.

I smiled and mixed and stirred, waiting patiently for things to start to bubble and simmer on the stove.

“I don’t recognize these guys. They must be from before.”

She slid a photo across to me, and I tapped the chunky one in the middle.

“That’s Ruthless. He mostly liked to be called Baby Ruth,” I said.

“Like the candy bar?” I asked.

I chuckled darkly. “Like he used to take a Louisville Slugger to some kneecaps, and he thought it was funny to be known as the Babe Ruth of bikers.”

“Eee.” She made a face. “He really was ruthless.”

“He never let a motherfucker forget it, either,” I said quietly.

I’d been one of the guys to dispatch him out there in the swamp. Four of us had shot him all to hell and gone and left him for the gators. Body was never found – which is how we liked it. Wasn’t unusual around these parts. Oeople disappeared into the swamps all the time.

She studied his picture and went through several more in the box.

“What’s wrong with his eye?” she asked.

“He was blind in it.”

“Really?” she asked. “I thought you couldn’t ride if you were blind in one eye.”

“You’re not supposed to, but it’s possible. He was legally blind in it, but he could sort of see out of it – enough that he kept riding. He compensated for it. You can.”

“I didn’t know that,” she said. “I thought the government just wouldn’t give you the endorsement or whatever.”

I laughed. “Darlin’, who the fuck cares what the government has to say? Ye haw, fuck the law,” I reminded her.

She laughed then and shook her head.

“Irreverent much?” she asked.

I shrugged, and she continued to go through photos, studying them and asking about brothers past who were gone. Either died or, in one or two cases, left the club. It was rare, but it did happen.

Some were put out, out bad , and that was a whole other rabbit hole or warren of conversation.

We looked through photos, ate the decadent pasta lunch I’d fixed, and eventually found ourselves back in the bedroom – which I didn’t mind. I rather liked having Velina in my bed.

I slept, she watched some television, and eventually, when I woke late that night, she was gone – a note left on the nightstand on the side of the bed she’d occupied.

Didn’t want to wake you. Carver’s picking me up on the early side on Friday morning – which is my Sunday. I have to catch up on laundry and other shit on my Saturday. I’m walking back to the hotel.

Miss you already.

Yeah, okay, that was weird to say. Sappy and weird. Sorry.

Later,

V

I dug the sappy and weird, because honestly?

Same.