Chapter 2
TWO
AXL
It was a testament to his self-control that kept him from tossing her over his shoulder and spanking her until she couldn't walk. And then fucking her until the same could be said.
He smiled thinking of her on her knees in bed and him buried balls deep, leaving finger bruises in her tanned flesh.
Yeah. He knew where she was tanned.
Maile wasn't ashamed of her body.
She didn't flaunt it, but she wore bikini suits under her clothes when she worked in the yard, and she liked to help Kawehi in her yard.
And he?
Well, he liked to watch.
Picking up Maile hadn't seemed like a problem until he got there and saw her cozying up to some hot Hawaiian guy that looked too much like a young Jason Momoa for his peace of mind.
Not that he'd seen anything Momoa had been in when he was young, but you know. Didn't everyone know what he looked like?
Still, Mister Hot Guy with the highlights in his hair wasn't fooling him.
He was after Maile.
Getting all handsy.
Putting his arms around her.
Well, he needed to keep his grubby, suntanned hands off of her.
Maile was Kawehi's cousin. The two were almost inseparable.
And while part of what Maile had said was right, it wasn't the full story.
Pallas was being trained as the leader of their Raider group so he could take over when Wolf stepped down. So... in a way, Pallas was his boss.
Not that he'd make it easy for him.
The best kind of leader was one who learned through adversity.
Wolf liked putting posters up on the wall of their training room. The one that he liked the best but wasn't about to tell any damn person about it, was a quote from Nelson Mandela. He'd been through some serious shit.
The quote on the poster seemed simple, but the message got under his skin.
“Do not judge me by my success. Judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again."
The one from Walt Disney was cool, too.
But he didn't want to take advice from a man who put pants on a mouse and made money off of making him look like he was dancing around.
Axl shuddered at the idea.
Dancing mice.
What the fuck was that about?
He stopped walking and let go of the suitcase handle to get his keys from his hip pocket, but whoever made the parking lot had done a shit job of leveling and the bag that he'd let go started to roll away and into the path of a car.
Axl took a step to the side and grabbed the handle of the suitcase before it ended up under the bumper of the car.
The curse he let loose echoed off of the concrete posts and walls.
For a second, he froze waiting to see if there were people around who would complain.
He didn't care about swearing normally, but his truck had a sticker that identified it as having base access to KBAY and he didn't want to be reported.
His unit was one of the two most important things in his life.
The other, his sister Cora.
The laugh that reached his ears a moment later made him clench his teeth together.
He felt Maile push on his back as her laughter grew in volume.
"I don't think I've ever heard that particular curse," she laughed more. "That's one I'm going to have to remember."
He bit the inside of his cheek and shook his head slightly to clear it. "What's so special about it?"
He hadn't meant to snarl the words, but whenever he was around Maile, growling was something as easy as breathing.
"Do you have to growl at me like a guard dog all the time?"
She sounded exasperated.
And that was a good thing.
The more she didn't like him, the better.
If she gave him any indication at all that she could tolerate him, or even like him, he might do something drastic.
Like kiss the shit out of her.
He bit down on the inside of his cheek, and his hands gripped the handles of her suitcases so hard that he thought he heard the hard plastic cracking in his hands.
Yeah, they might not like each other, but that's why he wanted to stay the fuck away from her physically.
They way he felt about her and the way she felt about him, they'd be fucking dynamite together.
If they both came out of it alive.
But know how much Pallas worshiped the ground that Kawehi walked on, if he managed to get his dick inside of her cousin, Pallas would likely cut his dick off.
Or worse, let Kawehi do it.
That would be fucking embarrassing.
"Here," Maile huffed, "if you're going to just stand there, I'll get your keys."
He felt her step up behind him, heard the soft echo of movement off of the concrete.
He started to let go of the suitcases and reach for the keys himself, but he stopped moving a moment later.
He stopped breathing, too.
Maile's hands were on him, against his abs. Flattened against him.
"Oops," she laughed, "too high."
Too high?
His brain wasn't functioning.
Thoughts weren't coming together.
He needed to get some air in his lungs and remind himself to let go of the bags so he could push her hands away.
But his lungs didn't seem to be helping.
"I can't help it that you're so big around the middle that I can't reach."
Big around the middle?
Fuck that!
He let go of the bags and reached for her hands to knock them away.
"Wait-"
Suddenly, before he could stop her hands, one grabbed the waistband of his jeans and the other...
Her other hand moved along his waistband.
He felt something catch on a belt loop and then with his lungs starved for air he felt her fingers slip into his pocket.
"There they are!"
Her fingers closed around his keys, but her fingertips...
Well they were dangerously close to unmanning him.
Psychologically.
He felt her fingertips trace down the side of his shaft and almost swallowed his tongue.
Just as soon as he felt her fingers against him, they were gone.
And he felt all the air still trapped in his lungs was suddenly gone.
The headlights on his truck blinked bright in the dark interior of the parking lot and the horn blared, setting his nerves even more on edge.
"Ohhh... this is a nice truck."
He heard her laugh and could only manage to swallow the knot in his throat.
"Holy shit, this car is-"
The rest of her words were lost and he turned to look.
That was his next mistake.
The passenger door of his truck was open, and Maile must have been reaching inside.
All he could see was one foot on the runner of his truck, the line of her leg, and...
The tight curve of her ass.
Fuck.
He'd gone hard in a heartbeat just a few seconds before with her hand in his pocket and now, staring at her in the dark leggings she was wearing, he was tempted to find a dark street somewhere and pull those leggings off.
With his teeth.
Shit.
Sitting behind the wheel of his truck and driving was going to be a pain when he was so hard.
She turned and put her ass on the seat.
It was only a momentary relief as she closed the door. She leaned on the open window and looked at him. "You need me to help lift the bags into the trunk?"
"Trunk?" He scoffed at that and opened the passenger door again. She leaned away from him, her eyes widening and wondered if it was just the sudden swing of the door that shocked her or if it was his hand reaching toward her.
Her eyes widened and he managed to keep his expression to a vague smile as he opened the latch for the back door on the extended cab.
With a sharp indrawn breath through his nose, he lifted one suitcase and set it behind her seat.
When he stepped back, he saw how her eyes followed him.
He closed the back door and the passenger side door before walking around the front of the truck toward the driver's side. He made quick work of putting her suitcase behind his chair and closed the back door with a resounding thud and pulled himself up into the cab.
He'd taken his mind off of his immediate physical condition until it became a problem.
Folding himself behind the wheel, he felt the pain of his erection twisting the way it shouldn't in his jeans.
Trying to hide his groan in the movements he made to settle into the seat, going so far as too lift the position of the steering wheel to give himself more room.
He made the mistake of looking over at Maile in the passenger seat.
The long sleeved top she'd been wearing when he saw her was lifting.
She pulled it up and over her head.
What she was wearing under it left him speechless.
It was entirely possible that all of the blood had rushed out of his head and into his dick.
"Oh, thank god," she groaned as she folded her top and set it across her lap. "This top was fine in the plane, but ugh... the heat after I got off the plane? Yuck."
He felt that way almost every day. Hawaii was a world away from Alaska when it came to the weather.
He started the truck and put it into drive before looking down both directions in the parking lot.
Axl didn't try to look at Maile, but it couldn't be avoided if he wanted to drive safely.
He did see enough to know that the top she had on was more of a sports bra. It was more than enough to be decent, but the cleavage he saw above the neckline did more for his erection than he'd care to think about.
He'd seen her wear it to the gym and she'd worn it under her cut off t-shirts in the yard, but somehow, seeing her wearing it, sitting beside him in his truck, put all kinds of thoughts in his head.
"Hey," she turned to look at him, "did you forget something?"
He looked back at her. 'Yeah, how to breathe.'
Smiling as if she heard the words in his head. "We should get moving. I want to see my cousin."
He would have said something witty, he was sure, but at that moment, her stomach gurgled and they both ended up laughing.
"Damn it... Don't they feed you on the plane?"
She rolled her yes and sat back, folding her arms across her chest.
A movement that made her tits look even heavier.
He was going to end up with his head empty of blood completely if she kept this up.
"What do you want to eat?"
Maile looked at him as if she was surprised that he'd asked the question.
Well, fuck!
He was surprised that he'd asked it.