7. Lila
Chapter Seven
LILA
“No, Lila. Absolutely not,” Taryn says, arms crossed in the doorway to my bedroom. “You are not wearing your work flats to the Saloon.”
Rosie left an hour ago for her first-ever sleepover, two doors down at Maria's house, escorted by Waffles and carrying a backpack she re-packed four times. Maria’s mom’s husband Shadow is in the Outlaws MC and Striker is positioned outside the house.
Waffles insists on staying. He's on Maria's porch right now, and Maria's mom has already texted me a photo of both girls reading to him.
Which is how Taryn caught me at a loose end, and why I'm now in my sexiest red dress. It’s the one with the sweetheart neckline I made the winter I decided I was done dressing to disappear. Red lipstick to match. Heels I haven't worn for at least a year.
“There she is,” Taryn says softly, over my shoulder in the mirror.
The Outlaw Saloon glows at the edge of town, all string lights and rows of motorcycles parked outside.
Inside it's louder than the diner has ever been in its whole existence.
Taryn tows me through it by the hand, and as Hawk's girl, she basically owns the floor.
Bethany finds us at the bar, blonde-haired and quick-eyed, Striker's ring catching the light.
“Hey Lila.” She hands me something with bubbles in it. “Welcome to paradise.”
“Thank you.”
“I hear you’re the one who turned Wrench into a talker. I’ll believe that when I see it.”
I laugh, shaking my head. “I think he must just be in a good mood.”
I get maybe ten minutes of feeling like the new kid at a good school, the teasing warm, the women chattering to me about my dress, before a big guy with a beard braid and meaty hands decides the night needs improving.
He takes my hand off the bar rail, engulfing it, already tugging toward the little dance floor.
“C'mon, little darlin', one dance, I promise I don't bite…”
He's harmless; I've spent years studying the difference. I'm already assembling my polite no when the tug on my hand just... stops.
Wrench is there. I don't understand how a man that size crosses a room like a ghost, but the guy’s suddenly three feet away, and my hand is free.
Nobody has raised a voice or spilled a drop of beer.
Wrench doesn't even look at him. He looks at me, bends to my ear, and under all that noise I get the words meant for me alone.
“Nobody touches you but me. Nobody.”
It should raise my hackles. I have opinions about men who talk like they own women. But then he straightens, and this impossible, silent mountain of a man turns his hand over between us, palm up. Asking, not ordering.
“Dance with me, dulzura?”
“You dance?” It comes out breathless.
He smiles. “Put your hand in mine and find out.”
I do.
I don’t even know what’s playing, something uptempo, I’m so surprised. Because this mountain can dance.
His hand frames my shoulder blade and the first pressure of his palm tells me everything, lead sure as a compass, and my body answers before my brain.
He takes me through a turn, catches me on the exact beat, and the grin that breaks through the black beard is one I've never seen on him: young, carefree and a little wicked.
“You've been holding out on me.” I grin up at him, spinning.
“Says the woman doing triple steps in heels.”
Around us, the Saloon seems to have lost its mind.
Taryn's up on a chair, whooping and clapping. Bethany's filming on her phone. Savage appears to be mock-weeping into Lucky's shoulder. Then there’s just his hands and the sweet geometry of moving with a partner who will never let you fall. We dance until my curls come loose and my sides hurt from laughing. When the song ends he dips me back low and the room roars. Upside down and breathless, I’m happier than I’ve been in a long, long time.
Later, we take our drinks out to the porch, the night air cool on my flushed skin, the party thumping happily along inside without us.
“Where does a biker learn to dance like that?”
“Mamá's kitchen.” He looks out at the dark line of the mountains.
“There were six of us. In a house that loud, the quiet kid disappears. I worked something out early on: you talk, somebody bigger talks over you. You fix the truck, people remember who fixed it.” He turns the bottle in his hands.
“So I fixed things. Bikes, radios, the roof.
Danced at every party, because dancing you don't need words for. Been the useful one my whole life.” A shrug.
My heart beats faster. All those months of Wrench talking to my daughter and his dog, then going silent for me. I thought it was indifference, but it wasn’t.
“You know what I did before all this?” I say.
“Before Rosie, before... everything. I danced. Competitive rock and roll, if you can believe it. Regionals two years running. My mom had a whole cabinet of my trophies. Probably still does.” His eyes come to me and stay.
“I haven’t been able to contact her in case Shawn targets her.
And I quit dancing when my life stopped being mine. Tonight's the first time.”
He's quiet a moment. Then: “Will you show me? Teach me?”
“What, here? Not in front of everyone… I can’t hear myself speak.”
“Your kitchen's got a floor, doesn't it?”
We leave with the party still going. I ride back on the back of his bike, the thrum of the big engine hot between my thighs, leaning close against his broad back.
In my kitchen I kick off the heels, pour us water, and put on my playlist. It’s the uptempo stuff, the songs I've been dancing to in my head behind the counter at the diner for months without letting my feet do more than hint at it. And then I teach him how to rock and roll.
“It's a six count. Your salsa brain will fight it.”
He laughs. “My salsa brain is open-minded.”
He's a shameless quick study, huge but light on his feet in my little kitchen. This time I lead, and he lets me, following my hands with complete attention. There’s something about that, this enormous man letting me steer, that undoes me faster than any dip.
We're laughing through a botched turn when the laugh runs out of both of us at once and the song keeps playing to an empty count, because I'm up against his chest.
“Lila.” His voice is deep as he kisses me, walking me backward down the hall with his hands spread over me, and between kisses he keeps telling me how beautiful I am, low and rough against my skin.
About all the months of watching me. Describing my every curve, in two languages, until my knees quit and he simply picks me up with no effort in it at all, and carries me into my bedroom.
He sets me on my feet by the bed and finds the zipper at my back, and draws it down slowly, knuckles tracing my spine the whole while.
“You sew this?”
“Every stitch.”
“You did a good job.” His mouth grazes my bare shoulder. “But I want to see what’s underneath.”
The dress pools at my feet, and I stand there in my slip and an old instinct fires, arms rising to cover myself, to apologize, to make myself smaller. He catches both my wrists, gentle as anything, and turns me toward the mirror, his cock hard against the middle of my back.
“No,” he says. “Not with me. Not ever.” He looks me over slowly, his expression a mixture of hunger and awe.
He bends to kiss my neck, his hands cupping my breasts, my nipples hard peaks under the silky slip.
“Mírate. Look at you. I've been imagining this from memory for months and I didn't do you justice.”
I turn to pull his cut off his shoulders and he lets me, patient under my hands while I map him: the tattoos winding up both forearms, an engine, a compass rose, a name in gothic script. Muscle everywhere, and those big scarred hands exploring my body.
Then the waiting ends. He pulls down the straps of the slip and groans at the sight of my breasts. Holding them, he tongues one nipple and then the next, then licks and sucks until I’m arching off the bed.
He strips me out of the slip and lays me back, kneeling down at the edge of the bed like a man with nowhere else to be in this life, big hands wrapping my thighs and easing them apart.
“Wrench…”
“I told you I was patient.” He kisses the inside of one knee, then higher, unhurried, his beard dragging soft fire up my skin while I twist the sheet in both fists. “Let me show you what it's for.”
Then his mouth is on me and the whole world goes bright.
He's slow about it, thorough, ruthless, learning what makes me gasp and then doing exactly that until I'm arching off the bed again with my fingers buried in his hair, saying his name in a desperate voice I've never heard coming from myself.
He hums against me, pleased, one heavy arm pinning my hips still, and takes me up and over the edge until I come so hard the room whites out, and even then he doesn't stop, works me through it, murmuring in Spanish against my skin.
“Now,” I finally beg, pulling at his shoulders. “Please, I need you, come here.”
He stands and strips off the rest of his clothes, and my mouth goes dry, because all of him is built to that same unreasonable scale, his cock huge and hard. He retrieves his jeans off the floor for his wallet with an unhurried economy that makes me want to throw a pillow at him.
“You keep that in your wallet?”
He rolls the condom on, eyes on me the whole time. “I was hoping I might get lucky with you, gorgeous. Told you. Patient, but not a saint.”
Then he's over me, braced on his forearms, all that size and heat caging me in, and he nudges against me and stops, and his hand comes up to turn my face to his.
“Look at me, hermosa.”
He pushes inside me slowly, so slow, watching every flicker on my face while my body stretches around him. When he's deep inside we both go quiet, breathing each other in.
“Tell me you belong to me.”
“I’m yours. All yours.” No hesitation left anywhere in me.
He moves, and it’s the same sure lead as the dance floor, and my body follows him the same helpless willing as before, hips finding his rhythm, and he groans something that sounds filthy in Spanish.
The thrusting builds and builds, his pace never rushing, hitting some place inside me that unravels me entirely, until I'm clawing his back and whimpering.
Then he rolls, taking me with him without slipping free, and I'm astride him, his hands spanning my hips, his grin wicked in the dark.
“Your turn to lead.”
So I slide up and down on top of him, that massive cock spreading me apart. Slow at first, his hands a steady frame on my waist. This huge man lets me steer him exactly as I please. His thumb finds my clit and circles and the wave of my orgasm gathers under me.
“Come for me,” he says, his voice rough as he thrusts up into me, my breasts bouncing with each thrust. “Let me feel you.”
I shatter. And out of me, at the top of it, at full volume, comes the first honest-to-goodness curse word to leave my mouth in years.
Underneath me, wrecked, Wrench starts to laugh, and then the laugh breaks apart because he's coming too, gripping my hips hard, groaning my name into my throat as I collapse onto his chest.
His hand strokes down my spine. “I’m shocked. Where did you learn to curse like that?”
I giggle. “I stopped when she was learning to speak in case she imitated me.”
“Sweet merciful heavens,” he says solemnly, in a terrible imitation of me, and I bite his shoulder. He laughs again, and the sound of it, big and unguarded, might be my favorite thing I've ever heard.
I lie wrapped in his arms in the quiet of the night, his heartbeat thudding in my ear, one huge hand tracing lazy circles on my body.
“Who’s this?” My hand rests on the tattoo on his upper arm. “Do I need to be jealous of… Rosa?”
His laugh rumbles out. “It’s my Mamá’s name.”
“Oh. Good. And what about you? Or do I just call you Wrench forever?”
“If you like… my name is Rafael. My family call me Rafa.”
“Like the angel? It’s a wonderful name.”
“I’m no angel, gorgeous…” he kisses me again.
This is temporary, says the old scared voice inside me. Just until it's safe. Don't get used to it, Lila.
His lips press to my hair. His arm tightens, sure even in half-sleep, and for the first time in years, that old voice sounds exactly like what it is.
A liar.