Page 27

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

S aint…

I touched her all over, holding her close in the dark. The birds were beginning to chirp outside the window, and pretty soon, dawn would be pressing at the glass and the curtains. She was sleeping soundly in my arms. Still, I just couldn’t stop touching her – stroking her soft skin, massaging her scalp through her thick, luxurious hair while her warm breath coated my chest at even intervals.

God, she felt phenomenal, and I still wondered how I’d gotten so completely entangled with her. I honestly couldn’t say if it was any one thing. She had a will of iron, a heart of gold, and those green eyes of hers might as well have been silvered glass, although it was a mirror made of some kind of magic.

I didn’t see myself reflected in them as I was now. I saw something more – the man she needed, the man I always wanted to be, but the world just wouldn’t fuckin’ seem to let me.

She gave me warmth and a glimpse of the life we were all fighting for right now.

Reflected in her eyes when I looked at her was a sort of peace that I’d been desperate for, and laying in my arms like this? One I’d never known… until now.

It was something big and overwhelming, which made the heart race and the mind silent, and the breath still into something deep and even in a silent whisper.

Fuck.

She was poetry in a way that I couldn’t grasp intellectually, but on a spiritual level, it moved me. Incredibly. Irrevocably.

I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but with her against me, draped over me, I found it hard to concentrate on anything but the feel of her.

Still, I managed to drift, and yet even with her in my arms, I still only dreamed of her.

I woke to sunlight streaming through the crack between the curtains, which put it at late morning, maybe early afternoon. I grunted and turned my head to get the beam out of my eyes and realized pretty quickly, I was in bed alone, but that the house was far from empty.

A clatter of dishes came from out in the house and I sat up, frowning. The smells hit me next. She was cooking, I think – or at least what passed for it.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!” she whisper-shouted, and I rounded the corner to a kitchen rapidly filling with smoke just as the fucking smoke alarms went the fuck off.

“Just what in the hell are you doing?” I asked, but I couldn’t stop myself from laughing as she waved oven mitts in front of the oven and looked up like she’d been caught.

“Trying to cook your breakfast, but it’s been a while! Okay?” she cried. I went in, rescuing the pot holders from her hands and fishing the broiler pan with some more-than-crisp bacon out of the oven.

“Who the fuck cooks bacon in the oven anyway?” I asked, setting it down on the cutting board before going for the detector in the dining room and pulling it down from over the archway leading to the kitchen. I pulled the batteries, and it stopped its screeching.

I tossed both the detector and the batteries onto the table and turned around to look at Velina, who was hugging herself in nothing but my tee shirt in the smoky kitchen, her butt leaned against the kitchen’s farm sink, her arms crossed under her breasts.

Fuck, she was sexy without even trying.

“I appreciate the gesture, but why don’t you let me take over?” I said with a grin. She threw up her hands and gesticulated wildly around her at the trainwreck that was my kitchen.

“Have at,” she said, and she took a seat at the kitchen’s island. Properly, unlike Hex. Pulling out one of the stools tucked under its edge and hopping up on it.

“Thanks,” I said, and I set about attempting to figure out what she’d been trying to accomplish so that I could do it correctly.

“Pancakes and bacon?” I asked.

“I mean, that’s what I was going for,” she said, and she was smiling, but high spots of color that could only be embarrassment rode on her cheeks.

“I got you,” I said.

“ My hero .” She rolled her eyes and I laughed. I couldn’t help it. She had that dry, sarcastic humor that I liked.

“If you were hungry, you could have just woke me up,” I said, and she put her chin in her hand.

“That would sort of defeat the whole purpose of trying to do something nice for you,” she complained.

“Now why you feel the need to go and do something like that?” I asked, and I was only half-joking. It was sweet, and I knew she wasn’t in the habit of being sweet.

“You’ve been nice to me,” she said softly and fixed me with those green eyes of hers.

“I like you,” I said. Winking, I added, “Probably against my better judgment.”

She cracked a smile and laughed a bit herself, bowing her head and shaking it. She said, “Yeah, well, that makes two of us.”

“You doing better?” I asked, after a long silent pause during which I cleaned up some of her mess and tried to carry on with achieving her goal of fixing us some pancakes. Her batter looked sound and was from scratch. I didn’t have any mix or anything around here so…

“I’m okay,” she said, and I gave her a look that said, you can’t bullshit a bullshitter.

“I wasn’t okay last night,” she said defensively. “But I’m okay now . Thanks.”

“You got us some valuable information, baby. For that, we thank you, but I don’t know if it’s a good idea you continue.”

She perked up. “What do you mean? I’m not done yet. I can’t be done. I’ve hardly even started!”

I stared at her until she settled back down into her seat, her hands smoothing back and forth over the stone counter. She looked chagrinned.

“You scared the shit out of me last night, and Ruth? Knowing Ruthless is in play is a big deal. He’s a different animal. If he found out you were feeding us information, shit .” I shook my head. “He and his boys would do things to you that would make you wish for death.”

“Speaking from experience?” she accused, and her passion, which was one of the things I liked about her, was about to get the better of her.

I sniffed, set down the bowl and whisk from pouring batter into the pan, and leaned on the edge of the counter, staring her down unequivocally.

“Yes,” I told her simply.

She stared back for several heartbeats, doing the calculations, and then asked, “Like what?”

I shook my head, and she raised her eyebrows at me.

“I’m a big girl and capable of mathing out my own risks,” she said.

“Strap you to a pool table and take turns on you until you literally fuckin’ died, maybe,” I told her. “You don’t die fast enough. They might start using things to get you to bleed and get the job done faster.”

“Jesus,” she said. “I’ve survived the whole gang rape thing before, but that last part is a whole new horror show.”

I froze at her frank confession. She’d made it to me once before, but that was before… you know? Now, things were different.

“I’m not going to ask,” I said quietly. “But if you ever want something done about that…”

She waved me off.

“I didn’t even bother to report it. There was no point. The system isn’t built for women like me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I cocked my head.

“Poor,” she said with a shrug. “It was back in high school – a bunch of rich white boys.”

“You’re white,” I said.

“I’m not rich,” she countered.

“Touché,” I conceded and she nodded.

“I let it go,” she said. “I was just trying to get the point across that I’m tougher than you think.”

I considered her and glanced down at the bubbling pancakes, but not quite there yet for flipping.

“Baby, I know you’re plenty tough. I just don’t want or need you taking any more damage than absolutely necessary.”

“You know I like it when you call me baby?” she asked, and she was staring at her hands.

“Yeah?” I asked softly.

“Yeah, anyone else, and I would probably hate it, but you… I don’t know. Sort of warms me from the inside out.”

I flipped the pancakes in the pan and nodded absently.

“I don’t want you to get hurt any more than you’ve already been,” I repeated.

“I’m a big girl,” she said.

“I know,” I answered, but that still didn’t stop me from wanting to protect her.

We were silent. I dished up some of the food and salvaged the mostly unburnt pieces of bacon, grateful we hadn’t had a fire, just a shit ton of smoke, and I slid a plate across to her, going around the island to take up the seat beside her.

“Next time, you should bite it off,” I grated, and she snorted.

“Believe me, I thought about it,” she said. “I mean, I want to say he’s not a bad guy – but we both know that’s kind of bullshit.” She sighed. “In another life, he might have been the kind of guy that I did go for, but I’d like to think I’m not that dumb.” She eyed me then, and I chuckled.

“We may both ride motorcycles and do some fucked-up shit by society’s standards, but the Voodoo Bastards aren’t anything like the Bayou Brethren, babe.”

“Aren’t you, though?” she asked softly.

“In some ways, maybe too alike – but people change, and we’ve been trying like hell to change.”

“Why?” she asked softly. “I mean, I get the whole getting older, yadda, yadda, yadda – but what really made you guys hit the pause button?” she asked.

“I’m pretty sure I’ve told you this already,” I said. “But for real, it was the club out in Florida when they came around these parts on some business several years back. Those of us not entirely blinded by Ruth’s bullshit looked at them and saw something we wanted. The more that time went on, the more we figured out – Ruth’s way was not the way . That it would never pay off in the dividends we were hoping to achieve.”

“And what would those be?” she asked softly.

“Work with the purpose of working for ourselves, earning enough wealth that we could ride more than work, attract and keep quality women,” I eyed her. “Such as yourself. We want to build our little self-made empires with…” I trailed off, thought about it, and simplified it. “Just a life that no one could take from us, and that was our own.”

“That sounds like the American Dream,” she said with a slight shrug, taking a bite of her food.

“Yeah, well, we all know the American Dream is more like a nightmare for us fuckin’ peasants on the ground.”

“I know that’s right,” she said softly, rolling her eyes before dropping them to her plate.

“We’re almost there,” I said. “Or, we were .”

“No,” she said. “We are .”

“We?” I asked, arching an eyebrow. She reached over with her free hand and laced her fingers through mine.

“We,” she said. “I’m in this to win this, just the same as you. I have no reason to disbelieve what any of you have said. Everything has matched up with what Louie told me of you all, to a tee. You’ve only ever been kind to me with actions, even if we do rag on each other with words.”

She smiled at that. I had to smile, too.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” I said.

“Me either,” she told me, and I raised the back of her hand to my lips and kissed it.

“We’ve got this,” she assured me, and I nodded.

“I believe you’re right,” I said, even if I was a little lacking on feeling it at the moment.