Chapter Twenty-Three #2
Mel loved on her for a good long while, worshipping every part of her, finding and attending to every spot that pleased her, that excited her, that drove her to sighs and whimpers, to pleas and moans.
She was so fucking soft . He couldn’t get enough.
He slipped his fingers into her, back and forth, around and around her clit, until she rocked and bucked and begged beneath him, her cries muffled by the pillows.
When he lifted her hips, brought her up to her knees, she was putty in his hands, already rocking back and forth before he had hold of himself and sank into her.
“Ah, fuck, you feel good,” he muttered as her hot slick enveloped him, as her muscles clenched around him, as he drew backward and pushed in, as far as he could.
“Oh my, oh my, oh Mel!” she gasped, pressing her ass to him, almost grinding against him.
He sat up on his knees and set a hand on the small of her back.
“Move the way you want,” he said.
She’d been moving almost constantly, but now she stopped. Over her shoulder she said, “How should I? I’ve never done it this way.”
Mel wasn’t giving up control here; he wanted her to find the rhythm she liked. He wanted to know it so he could replicate it. Trial and error worked, sure, but nothing worked like watching.
“Move the way you want,” he repeated. “Figure it out.”
She’d been moving steadily, instinctually, and driving him nuts with it—like grabbing his cock with her ass? Not a beginner move!—but now that he’d instructed her to explore, she was hesitant. So he got her started, shifting on his knees to move himself inside her.
With a soft, almost feral sound of pleasure, Abigail’s instincts kicked back in, and she began to move.
After maybe a minute, just as Mel’s need was breaking its chains, Abigail’s need caught fire and her movements shifted from exploratory and curious to driven and demanding.
She slammed her ass against him, a little harder each time.
When she suddenly dropped her head into the pillows and began to grunt like an animal, when Mel was starting to see sparks and swirls in his vision from holding his breath so fucking hard, he grabbed her hips in both hands, leaned over her, and fucked her hard and deep.
Just as he was about to lose the last thread of his control, he felt her come, fully screaming now into the pillow, and spasming like a fist clenching around him.
When he came, roaring, his entire body tightening from his toes to his damn ears, a spasm blasted through his middle, and Mel thought briefly that his belly might split open. He didn’t care if it did.
After they both fell into stunned, gasping silence, he pulled out, checked his—unsplit—belly, and dropped, spent and sated, to his side of the bed.
Abigail flopped a hand onto his chest and flipped her head to the other side, to face him again. He smiled and brushed a wet, spiraling curl from her eyes.
“Hey, beautiful. You good?”
“I am perfect,” she sighed with a goofy grin. “I am complete.”
He picked up her hand from his chest and pressed her palm to his lips. “So am I.”
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~oOo~
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“W elcome back to the Keep, Mel,” Badger said as he gaveled the meeting open. A round of applause and some friendly slaps to the back ensued.
“You look good!” Double a said. “Skinny, but good.”
Mel grinned. He hadn’t had much extra weight before, but he’d lost fifteen pounds in the four-ish weeks since the Harvest Festival. His cheekbones were sharper than usual for sure. “I don’t recommend getting gut shot as a diet plan, but I can’t deny it’s effective.”
“Tomorrow’s gonna suck for you, isn’t it?” Nolan asked. “Can you eat any Thanksgiving food?”
“I gotta watch it, and I’ll have to skip the mac-n-cheese, but me and Abs have been figuring out what I can have.”
At the other end of the table, Showdown smiled. “You two got real cozy together. She’s a good woman.”
“Yeah, she is.” About to burst with the news, he sat up tall and looked around the table. “I put a ring on her finger last night.”
This time, the Keep erupted with shock and cheer. Everybody jumped up and came to him to offer a hand, or a hug, or a amiably snarky comment.
Dom and Thumper both wore happily smug expressions; he’d told them before he’d bought the ring.
In fact, Dom had suggested the jeweler with the witchy aesthetic—though Dom had called her wares ‘funky.’ He’d asked them to keep their lips zipped, but he hadn’t really expected them to.
News like his was too good not to share in this nest of gossips.
From the manifest surprise among the rest of the club, however, it was clear they’d honored his request.
There was a reason they were his favorite brothers and best friends.
“Okay, okay, asses down,” Badger called after a few minutes, and everybody returned to their seats.
“Fuck, man!” Tommy said. He was the only one who hadn’t gone to Mel, but Tommy was still working on reclaiming full mobility.
Now that the Keep had settled down, he sent a lopsided grin down the table to Mel and said, “Mel Lind ... gettin’ h-hitched.
I can’t ... re-member you even havin’ a . .. girlfriend.”
Mel shrugged. “Ain’t had one since before I left KC. Thought I liked bein’ on my own. But I like bein’ with Abigail better.”
At his side, Thumper reached over and clasped Mel’s shoulder.
Badger rapped his knuckles on the table to reclaim everyone’s attention. “It’s good news, and we’ll make sure to make a deal about it at dinner tomorrow, but we gotta get focused now. I called a meeting the day before Thanksgiving because Rhett reached out. And it’s a problem.”
The last threads of friendly murmuring among the patches abruptly stopped, and Badger had the room completely. The silence deepened as everyone waited for him to say more.
“They didn’t do what we expected they’d do with Kellen. He’s still alive. They’re patching him in.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Isaac snarled and shoved his—thankfully empty—coffee cup to the middle of the table.
“That is very, very bad, Badge,” Bart said softly.
“You think I don’t know it?” Badger snapped. “Yeah, it’s bad, and so far I don’t have the first idea what to do about it.”
“Wait,” Thumper cut in, leaning toward the head of the table. “Why’s it so bad? We didn’t want him, so he’s gone. If Montana wants him—”
“Them wanting him is the bad part, Thump,” Dom said gently.
“Think, Thumper,” Badger said, letting an edge of impatience show that pissed Mel off a little.
Badger had been president for a long time.
He’d been handed the gavel when he was too young to bear its weight, and he’d known that, so in those early days he’d been collaborative with everyone, and deferential to the older, more experienced patches, especially Isaac and Showdown.
He still gave those old men more grace than anyone else, but each year at the head of the table had hardened him a little more, until now he was pretty much a slab of granite.
“I’m thinking,” Thumper said, without defensiveness.
He was the first to say he wasn’t very bright, so he took on Badger’s sniping like something he deserved.
Mel thought it was bullshit. Thumper was no scholar, but he was no slack-jawed yokel, either.
He just wasn’t wired to see trouble right off the bat.
He tended to take the brightest view of any situation, until somebody shot out the lights. “I don’t see the problem.”
Badger sighed rhetorically, and Mel’s back went up a little higher. “Remember at the hospital, in the chapel, we talked about how Rhett and Gravy threw all kindsa shade at us for not taking dark work? The disrespect was knee deep—more than disrespect, it was contempt .”
“We think they’re planning something,” Double A added.
“Planning what, exactly?” Zaxx asked, and something in his tone suggested he had an idea or two himself. In fact, after a beat, he threw one out. “Shit, you think they’re planning a coup?”
Badger answered by staring fixedly at Zaxx until the younger man fell back in his chair and said, “Fuck.”
Double A leaned in. “One thing in particular Gravy said was they were embarrassed to have a mother charter doing town fairs and building shopping malls. That kicked the shit out of my radar right then. Mel, you were in that meeting. Do you remember?”
“Yeah. ‘Throwing cheeseball town fairs while the other charters do real work,’ is what he said.”
Thumper’s jaw went slack. “You think—holy shit. Kellen was our secretary and treasurer. He knows shit.”
Badger clapped sarcastically. “And Thumper catches up.”
That swipe, Thumper felt. He seemed to shrink in his chair.
“Chill the fuck out, Badge,” Mel warned. “You’re bein’ a real dick. Even more than usual.”
Their president glared at Mel. Mel glared right back.
Badge blinked first. “Yeah, okay. I think it’s clear as day that Montana is planning to break with us. The question is are they planning to break away from the Horde or try to kick us out of it.”
“We’re the mother charter,” Darwin pointed out. “The Night Horde MC started right here. Isaac’s old man founded the club! Who the fuck are these cocksuckers to disrespect our patch?”
They all knew all of that, obviously, and they were all thinking the same thing anyway.
“We don’t know, yet, if that’s what they’re doing,” Showdown pointed out.
“Why else keep Kell alive?” Isaac asked. “And patch him in? He killed Maniac—a founding member of their charter. That’s a capital offense. So he must have given them something real good to turn his fortunes around like that.”
Slamming both fists suddenly into the table, Badger roared, “FUCK!”
Double A took over again. “I don’t see how it can be anything but real bad, but Show’s right—we don’t know enough. So we need to do some work and figure it out, and then figure out what we do about it.”
“We cannot have another goddamn war in this town.” Isaac, his fists clenched on the table before him, infused each syllable with as much emphasis as it could hold.
Mel thought at once about Abigail. She’d been safe from the Horde’s previous town-based horrors, tucked up in the hills, but now, with him, she was in and around town much more often.
The idea that she could be less safe with him tried to dig in, but he grabbed it and snapped its neck. He’d never let her be hurt.
“And we won’t,” Len assured Isaac. “I will personally kill each one of those fuckers in their beds if I have to, but they are not coming anywhere near this town again.”
Damn straight. Mel would join Len in the bed-killing if it meant peace for Signal Bend and the people who called it home.
“They’re still a charter,” Bart said. “And we’re still guessing, with no evidence but some words said in anger and a choice we don’t understand. Dub’s right. We need to keep sharp but hold our shit together while we gather more intel.”
Badger considered for a few moments, then nodded.
“Yeah, okay. Not one fucking word of this leaves this room—and I mean our women, too. They can’t know anything more than they know right now about Montana.
Bart, Dom, Len—you’re all three on intel.
Get something we can act on, or find something that says we don’t have to.
Get it fast. Otherwise, we act normal. Thanksgiving tomorrow at my place, the grand opening on Friday, and”—he made a flaccid twist of his hand, “all the holiday shit, like normal.” He shook his head, and added in a mutter like he was talking to himself, “Cheeseball town fairs. Fuck that fucker in the facehole.”