Thirty-Six
FANG
“Can we go look at the horses?” Molly shovels in another mouthful of crunchy cereal and waits for my answer.
“What horses?”
“The ones outside.” She glances toward the window that overlooks the area behind the house.
I push my seat out from the table and wander over to take a look. Sure enough, workhorses drag felled trees out from the stand that covers half the property. The issue is the man in control of the pair. Andy. Or rather, who his sister is.
My Rumspringa fuck-up.
“Please?” Molly appears at my side, bopping on her toes to see them better.
Guess we’ve all got to atone for our sins somehow. “I s’pose.”
“Yay!” She whips her empty bowl off the table and sprints into the kitchen with it. I wince at the clatter it makes when she hastily dumps it in the sink. “I’ll go tell Anna and Jenna.”
“What?” I spin on my heel. Tell who? “Why?”
“Anna might like horses too,” Molly explains with a gentle pout.
“But you said Jenna, as well.”
Her little eyebrows rise. “So?”
Yeah, old man. So? What the hell do I say to that? How do I explain to my six-year-old that Daddy feels too sensitive when he’s around the woman, so to maintain his sense of masculinity, he avoids her like the plague.
“Fine,” I cede. “Go and get her.”
Molly’s footsteps recede through the parlor and up the stairs.
I brace both hands on the back of the nearest chair and draw a deep breath. I can’t go on pussying out every time that Freckles and I make progress. Every time she gets closer, I pull further away.
“She seems excited.”
I pull a deep breath and straighten to find Darla standing in the archway to the parlor. “That would be because she is.”
“I’ve got a question for you.” Her words are light and friendly, but the stern dip to her brow says otherwise.
“Shoot.”
Darko enters the kitchen with his dirty dishes.
Darla studies him a moment and then seemingly decides to forge ahead. “How long have you known that Jenna killed Mary-Beth?”
Darko’s eyes go wide. He conceals his shit-stirring grin by placing his back to Darla, then quickly escapes via the kitchen door. Pussy.
“I don’t think it matters, does it?”
She huffs. “If you’ve known the whole time that the sheriff has investigated the culprit, then yeah, I think it does matter.”
“How long have you known?” I counter, lifting an eyebrow.
Her eyes crinkle the teensiest amount. “Does it matter?”
Smartass. “About as much as who told you that information does,” I say. “Which is a lot.”
“What if nobody told me?” she says. “What if I figured it out for myself?”
“Then I’d ask why you haven’t told the sheriff yet, either.” I take a step closer and relish the way she stiffens. “Unless you’ve only just learned about it.”
“Anna deserves to know.”
“And she will,” I grit. “When the time is right.”
Darla raises an eyebrow and humphs. “Did she tell you why she did it?”
“She did.” I fold my arms. “Did she tell you?” I narrow my gaze. “Gonna guess you’ve confronted Jenna about this, and that’s why you’re here, looking for the answers she didn’t give you.”
I itch to search Freckles out, but find small comfort in the knowledge Molly does just that.
If it’s true—Darla really did grind Jenna about Mary-Beth—then it’s likely sent the girl into another meltdown.
Another mental snap that she’ll default to dealing with the way she appears to have her entire life: alone.
She doesn’t deserve to be isolated with this.
“According to Jenna,” Darla explains, “Mary-Beth wanted to use Jenna’s association with the club to get out of that hell hole.”
“She did.” I lean a little closer. “She also wanted to score a hit to soothe her addiction. Did Jenna tell you that? Did Jenna also tell you that if Mary-Beth had traded knowledge for drugs, Jenna would likely be dead for what she’d done to get there?
Why she’d allowed herself to get caught up in the situation? ”
I catch the moment that doubt enters Darla’s mind. Her lips purse ever so slightly, eyes relaxing a little.
“I guess she didn’t tell you that then,” I taunt. “Or did you not let her?”
The woman says nothing further, even as I push her out of the way with my shoulder when I walk by, hell-bent on one thing and one thing only.
Finding Jenna.
“Molly!” I get no answer when I yell her name up the stairs.
Kathy sits on the porch, seemingly in a semi-trance-like state again. Great. So she knows too. And fucking Darla didn’t stop to think how that would undo Circus’s work regulating the woman so far.
I backtrack into the house and holler up the stairs again. “Big man!”
It takes a few beats, but Circus opens the bathroom door, towel around his waist, black ink covering nearly every inch of his torso.
“Your woman needs you.” I thumb to the porch behind me.
Darla stands idle just the other side of the parlor entry, our eyes locking as I turn for the yard again. “Any idea where she went when you jumped to conclusions?”
Her mouth twitches. “The trees.”
I don’t fuck around.
Stones crunch beneath my boots, mud pushing into the tread as I cross the yard to the path through the woods. The air still has bite, dimpling my exposed arms. Fuck knows what Jenna has on or if she’s warm enough. She better not get sick from this.
“Freckles?” I pass the cabin, turning my head side-to-side to scour the shaded stand of pine. “Where you at, girl?”
Silence greets me. Silence and a fucking noisy bird to my left.
I follow the squawking. The damn thing sounds panicked, and if she’s near its safe space, then that’ll be why.
“Jenna!”
A small section of fallen brown pine needles lies smooshed into the soft ground, pushed to one side as though something, or someone, cornered hard.
I scour the ground for another footprint and find one leading right.
The marks grow closer where she presumably slowed down, my heart hammering harder the nearer I get to both the bird and Jenna.
“Freckles.” I squint a little at the stubby bushes that grow amongst the older trees. “Make this easier for me, huh?”
“No.”
Gotchya. I veer left and move a couple of yards across from where I’d been. And there she is—in all her desperate glory, kneeling on the damp ground, hair a fucking nest against her shoulders, hands pressed against her knees.
“Let me guess,” she sasses. “Your coffee is cold now?”
Goddamn it, but I can’t help but smile. “No coffee today.”
“Pity.” She sniffles. “I could use another one. Or a cigarette if you have one handy?”
“Quit smoking.” I close the gap between us and offer her my hand. “They don’t fix anything.”
“Says you.” She sets her palm in mine and pushes to her feet. “Who narked on me? Kathy?”
I wipe the remnants of her tears from her cheeks with my thumbs, one side at a time. “Darla.”
She makes a humph in her throat and turns the other way, searching the ground. “I got a little emotional.” Jenna bends to retrieve something out of the debris. I look away to stop myself from staring at the appetizing swell of her butt. “Sorry.”
She presents me with the burner phone—at least, what’s left of it—dumping the pieces into my waiting hands.
I stare at the scraps on my palms. My lips twitch.
Jenna lifts her head to meet my eye.
Her mouth trembles.
And we laugh. Hands wrapped around the broken phone, I fucking laugh with her at the absurdity of the moment.
“I’m probably going to prison for murder,” she says through her giggles, “and here I am worried about a thirty-dollar fucking phone.”
My humor swiftly dies. “You’re not going to prison, Freckles.”
“Yes, I am, Fang.” She smiles sadly. “People know what I did, and rightfully, they’re angry. I’m not innocent.”
“I’m not letting it happen.” I toss the broken phone to the ground and wrap a palm around the side of her neck. “You hear me?”
She stares up at me with confusion twisting her brow. “What are you doing?”
“What I’ve been trying to do ever since you fucking got here,” I admit.
“Even though I didn’t know why.” I tug her forward and set a chaste kiss to her lips.
“I’m making a promise—right here, right now—that nothing else bad will ever happen to you, Jenna.
You’re done being used and abused. You’re my fucking problem now. ”
Her palms tentatively rest against my chest. “I’m a pretty big problem, Nibbles.”
“And I’ve got a pretty big solution for that.”
She snorts, pulling back. “Did you honestly just reference your dick?”
I smirk. “Thought we were done lying to each other.”
Her gaze grows hooded. “Then I guess I’ll let you in on a secret.”
“Do tell?” My words graze her upturned face.
Her palm finds the swelling bulge in my jeans. “I need a really good distraction from all this mess, Fang.”
“Consider your problem solved.”
She gasps when I wrap an arm around her waist and heft her off her feet. “I’m fucking done being worried about you,” I admit as I walk us toward the nearest tree. “We’re gonna sort this shit out, and you ain’t leaving my sight again. Understood?”
Jenna’s palms flex on my shoulders, breath whooshing from her lungs as her back hits the trunk. “I don’t like being held against my will, Nibbles.”
“You won’t be.” I use my nose to brush her hair aside and sate the desire to smell her skin, right at the sensitive part of her neck. Roses. “You’ll be the one begging to stay after I’m done with you.”
“Big talk for a little man.”
“Little?” I jerk my head back. “Thought we just established I’m not little.”
A spark enters her eyes, and I make a promise there and then to fuel it more often. “I’m yet to see the evidence.”
Game on. Yes, she came here in a moment of weakness, of need.
Yes, she’s been through hell. But if difficult times like this aren’t the very fucking reason we need to give in to our baser desires, then when is?
I can’t fix her—not straight away. But I can sure make her feel better, if only for a while.
“Good things come to those who wait, Freckles.” I grip her chin in the crook of my hand and devour her smart little mouth.
She groans into me, hitching her legs higher around my waist and shimmying up the tree a little to align our hips.
I grind, moaning into the kiss from the fucking perfect feel of her center rubbing against my thick cock. I’ve pushed against this feeling long enough. Made excuses and lied to myself about what this complicated little woman makes me feel.
I let her push me away, and then I did the same, starting our game of turnabout.
No more. I’m done.
“Fuck, Nibbles.” Jenna rolls her head back against the rough bark, exposing her neck—her fluttering pulse. “You have no idea how wet I am right now.”
“Jesus Christ, woman.” I taste the underside of her chin, lick a path beside her jugular. “You want me to come first?”
She laughs and damn, if it’s not the most perfect sound I’ve ever found in these woods.
Using my hips to hold her against the tree, I lean back and tug the tight waistband of her leggings away from her body. She inhales sharply, breath held in her lungs, and watches as I twist my hand to push it down the front. Fuck. The woman has no panties on.
I pause, draw a deep breath, and quell my growing need to fuck her hard. Mark her. Stake my claim. Not yet.
Her dark eyes shimmer with the dappled light that breaks through the canopy, gaze fixed on mine as I use two fingers to spread her lips and push a third inside her very warm, very slick cunt. Her breath seesaws in short bursts, mouth a perfect oval as she fights for control.
I pump the digit a few times and then, with a smile, withdraw to taste the evidence. Holy, sweetness. My eyes slide closed, and I let loose an involuntary groan. Good things sure do come to those who wait.
I barely have time to register the change of pressure at my side before cool steel touches my temple. “Freckles…”
“What do you want from me this time?” Her words shake, as does my gun against my head.
“What do you mean?” Why the fuck do I still have a raging hard-on?
“Exactly what I said, Fang. Every time you’ve done this to me, there’s been an ulterior motive for you. What is it this time?”
“Nothing.”
She shoves the weapon into my skin, pushing my head to the side. “Bullshit.”
I guess if I’m going to die young, then at the hands of a beautiful woman while she’s wrapped around my hips isn’t too bad a way to go. “I meant every word I said, Jenna.”
“Really?” The skepticism is thick in her words.
“Really.” I take a swift step backward, letting her fall to the forest floor, and snatch my gun from her grip on her way past.
The air leaves her lungs with a sharp huff when she hits the ground, Jenna staring up at me with shock pinching her brow.
“Gotta know who you’re fucking with, baby.” I flip the safety on and holster the weapon, removing the other to do the same.
She rises to her feet, dusting leaf debris from her clothes. “Why do you keep them live in their holsters?”
I thumb my bottom lip with a slight grimace. “Because the time it saves me not having to flick the switch could be the difference between living and dying.”
“It’s that serious?”
“It has been that serious. Yeah.”
“Daddy?”
My gaze fixes on Jenna’s, the woman staring straight back at me with equal surprise.
Fuck. “Yeah?”
“Are we looking at the horses now?” Molly stands a few yards away, attention flicking between Jenna and me.
“Sure, baby. Gimme a minute.” I lean in close, lips brushing Jenna’s ear. “This isn’t over.”
She pushes against my chest and slips free with a mumbled, “It should never have started.”