Chapter 13
Wraith
I got carried away. I wanted to know my new wife for more than a day before I lost control.
Leena walks Abby, the leash tucked into her hand, a look of stupefied wonder on her face.
She loves this. She loves my dog. She loves walking her.
She finds joy in just watching Abby get around in her little cart, just like any other dog.
I think Leena senses Abby’s will to live, the strength of her spirit and her absolute determination.
She senses a kindred spirit, or whatever they call it, a soul that matches her own, just like I did when I first met Abby.
And damn if that doesn’t make her that much hotter.
Like she needs to be. She doesn’t. I’m already frayed to beyond what I can bear.
She’d tempt even a saint into sin with that body, a body made for luring men to their destruction.
She seems blissfully unaware of her own power, which is charming in itself.
Her sweet shyness is part of the allure.
She acts like she’s not beautiful, like when she looks in the mirror, she doesn’t see the gorgeous features staring back at her.
Fuck if she doesn’t have the sweetest pussy that I’ve ever tasted.
I trail behind her and Abby, a few feet between us so that I can breathe in the fresh air without it being scented like her.
Like flowers and the sharper tang of her musk and the sweet salt of her skin.
My brain feels thick and useless in my head.
It’s not the only thing that is thick and useless.
My cock begged for some attention after what I did in the kitchen, but I didn’t want to pull it out and demand that she suck me off or let me fuck her.
Only a bastard would do that, and a bastard I am, but I’m trying to be better.
For her. And not just because we’ve both had a hell of a past twenty-four hours.
Leena turns at an intersection, waiting for me to catch up.
I nearly groan when I stride up beside her and the first thing that assaults me is her sweet, floral scent.
She doesn’t just smell good. She smells amazing, and with the taste of her still ripe on my tongue, I have to grind down hard on my cheek to keep from throwing her down right there on the sidewalk, ripping off her clothing, and mounting her like an animal.
Her eyes narrow and darken, like she knows what I’m thinking, but she gives her head a shake and crosses the street. I keep pace with her, and I’m not surprised that she turns back to me again when her feet hit the sidewalk.
“Do you think you could take me over to Stephanie’s new house? I want to talk to her. I told her that I’d be coming later.”
I nod and try to prepare myself for her arms wrapped around my waist, her lush curves slammed up against my back. I don’t think my cock has ever been so tortured in my life.
“Is it far? Where Wing lives?”
“No. Not really. About a ten minute ride. Helena isn’t that big. It’s only about ten thousand people.”
“That’s big enough. Although, I guess Jacksonville is huge.” Leena turns her head to study me. She keeps walking though, thankfully, and I get busy pretending to be interested in the surroundings.
The day is disgustingly hot, the humidity frying me in my leather vest, my blood still boiling, cooking me from the inside out.
I would never consider stripping it off.
It’s like my second skin. I’ve never worn anything with such pride, not even when I was Prez of my old club.
I treated my patch like shit, dishonored it in so many ways, but then again, I was a piece of shit who dishonored myself in just about every way there was.
Leena swallows so loudly that my eyes are drawn immediately to the pale column of her neck. I imagine sinking my teeth in there, into that tender flesh, and my entire body shudders.
“I- I like your bike. I mean, I didn’t think I would.” A splash of red stains her high cheekbones. She might be flushed from the heat, but I already know her better than that. “I didn’t think I’d like any of this. You, least of all.”
“I have my charms,” and because I seriously am a bastard, I sweep my tongue over my bottom lip. I take my time and stare at her pointedly.
The pink on her cheeks turns into a full on scarlet stain the color of red wine. “I- er- uh…”
Seeing her so flustered is absolutely adorable.
She looks good like that, her eyes heated and dark, her full lips parted, her face flushed.
I’d like to see what she looks like after she takes my cock in her mouth and swallows my cum down her throat.
I’d like to watch her struggle to take all of me, to please me.
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. Seriously. Thinking shit like that is not helping.
A sheen of sweat forms on my brow and trickles down my temples. I’m already soaked beneath my jacket, but if possible, that fire raging in my chest banks even higher. I’m fucking lucky I don’t incinerate right there on the sidewalk.
“Tell me about you,” Leena says softly, switching tactics. She lets Abby tug ahead, so that we’re forced to keep pace.
“Me? There isn’t much to say.”
“Yesterday you told me you were shot three times,” she states dryly, staring straight ahead. “I think there’s definitely something to say.”
“I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time after a series of very wrong decisions. Isn’t that how all of life goes?”
Her lips purse in a sort of pout. It makes me want to throw her over my shoulder and beat a hard path straight back to the house so I can fuck her up against the wall and watch that pout turn into screams of pleasure.
“I don’t know. I- my whole life has been a series of decisions made for me by other people.
My mother was… well, she was addicted to my father, I guess.
He was a notorious womanizer. He used her and discarded her like the rest, but toyed with her.
Their relationship was on and off. I don’t know if he actually loved her, in his horrible way, or if he’s just a sick bastard.
The rest, he didn’t want anything to do with them after.
The only reason he talks to Steph and Ami’s moms is because of Steph and Ami. He has nine kids. Did you know that?”
No. No I fucking didn’t. “Nine?”
“Yeah. Nine. Six boys, three girls. I’m the youngest. I don’t know if my father finally figured out how to use fucking contraceptives or maybe that shit just dried up or women got wise and figured out that popping out a kid wasn’t going to make him stick around.
I have no idea. I just know from what my mom said, that he had hundreds of women. ”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t see the attraction.”
Leena bites into her bottom lip to keep from laughing, but I see her lips turn up at the corners anyway. “I don’t either,” she admits.
“So your mother-”
“She couldn’t take dealing with my father anymore.
He broke every good thing about her. She was never kind to me.
She never wanted to be a mother. She had me because she thought my father would stick around if she did.
She never said that, but I know it. She liked to pretend I didn’t exist. I mean, she kept me alive and everything.
Did the basic things for me, and I’m thankful for that, because other people have it way worse, but she was never like a mother mother.
Not the way some people’s moms are. They actually love their kids and it’s obvious. ”
“You’re right. There is worse.” I hope she doesn’t ask me about words I didn’t mean to put out there, and thankfully, she doesn’t.
“Anyway, she dumped me with my dad when I was twelve. I’ve lived there since, at his house.
Steph and Ami were raised by their moms. He might have wished I never existed, but he was really strict and never let me do anything.
He provided for me like my mother, but he never really wanted me or loved me.
That’s basically my life up until this point.
” Her eyes flick to my face. “I want to know about you.”
What can I possibly say about the horrors of my childhood?
If she suspects anything from what she saw on my back, she’s obviously too polite to come out and say it.
To ask me if I was abused. To ask me what kind of fucking parents I had.
To ask why I went so damn wrong with my club, drugs, getting shot.
All that bullshit. Up until the last two years, my life has been nothing but a pile of steaming assfuckery and I’d rather spare her the details.
I compose my face into a blank mask, so she can’t see the turmoil that lies below the surface.
I hate thinking about my childhood. I spent years trying to build a family and snort enough shit to erase it.
It wasn’t until Steel sent me to rehab and I actually talked about the things that were done to me that I learned that healing won’t ever be found in the bottom of a bottle or up my nose.
At the end of that high, you just go back to being your regular shit self.
The Riders saved my life in more ways than one.
Still. I don’t want to talk about that shit, to put it between us like a thick cloud of black poison.
Leena turns back to me while Abby pauses to sniff at a particularly well-groomed lawn of a cute little white house with a wrap-around porch and flower gardens extending along the driveway and sidewalk.
“You’re beautiful when you frown.” Her easy words catch me off-guard. She blushes after, like she didn’t really mean to let them out. “You have really nice eyes too,” she adds, like she doesn’t exactly mind digging herself a little deeper since she’s standing in the hole already.
“They’re just brown. Pretty ordinary.”