CHAPTER THIRTEEN #2
She took it. She got one hand around the base of my cock and worked it in time with my hand in her hair, and she never tried to set it herself. “Nobody’s ever taken me the way you do,” I said.
She took it until my grip was the only thing holding her upright, and then I pulled my cock out of her mouth wet before that got away from me, and she went after it, and I put my thumb under her chin and stopped her.
“Not like that.”
On her back. I took her ankles, one in each hand, and put myself in her, and the sound she made went through the floor and into whatever Luca was hitting down there.
Her pussy was so tight around my cock that the first stroke nearly finished it. I stopped, all the way in, and made myself breathe, and she said please into the pillow, and I gave it to her.
“Ankles up. Higher.”
“Like that? Adrian, like that, don’t you dare stop —”
She put them where I wanted them and I put my cock in her to the root and kept it there on every stroke, and she came apart around it with her hands over her own face until I took them down off it.
Then I turned her over.
Fist in her hair. One palm flat between her shoulder blades, pinning her down into the mattress, and I took her from behind with her knees pushed wide and every inch of my cock going into her, and the washers still loose on the sheet under her elbow, ringing every time she moved.
That was where my voice left. It came down out of anything a man makes, into a growl with the whole wolf in it, and what came out with it was not English and was not kind, and she pushed back into it.
She had her hand braced on the headboard. She had her mouth open on nothing. Her cunt was clamped down around my cock so hard I could feel every stroke twice.
I got my hand under her and two fingers onto her clit and made her do it again like that, with her face in the sheet and my cock all the way in her.
Then I stopped moving.
Buried in her all the way, both hands locked around her hipbones, my arms shaking with the work of holding absolutely still, because the next thing I had in me was not going to be careful, and she is five feet three and I am not.
“Adrian.”
Nothing out of me but breathing.
“Let go. I want you to —”
“Not yet.”
Her hand came back off the headboard and found my wrist and stayed on it.
“I want you to. Say it back to me and let go.”
Something savage came all the way up my throat and my cock jerked inside her with it. There is a thing under my ribs that does not take instruction from me and it had my hands already.
I let go.
I came in her with both hands locked on her hipbones hard enough to leave marks that would still be there tomorrow, my cock as deep in her cunt as it goes, my mouth open on the back of her neck and my teeth resting on the skin over her spine. “You did that,” I said into her neck. “All of it. You.”
I did not close them. I want that written somewhere. I had her under me with my cock still going off inside her and every part of me that has never been a man saying finish it, and I did not close my teeth.
Afterward neither of us said anything.
I got a cloth wet in the sink and cleaned her up while she lay there and let me, gentle across her swollen pussy and the insides of her thighs, and she flinched once and I slowed down and did it softer. I brought her water and held the glass until she had it. I pulled the sheet up over her hips.
Then I swept the washers off the sheet into my palm and poured them into her hand and closed her fingers on them.
She counted them. All the way through, under her breath, slower and slower, her face turned into my ribs and her breath going warm through the hair on my chest.
Her scent had gotten into everything in that room. My bed, my shirt on the floor, the air over the whole pack’s heads downstairs. By noon nobody in the Forge was going to have to be told.
Seventeen men under this roof, and every one of them would read her off the air before she woke up. There is a word for what she is to me. I had finally given her the word. I had not yet earned what she would make of it.
She was most of the way gone when she said it.
“Some books are doors and some are locks, and don’t ever be the hand that turns one.”
She said it flat, the way people say a thing they have heard said to them a hundred times.
I went still all the way down.
“Say that again.”
She was already asleep. I did not wake her up, and I did not ask her one question about it. Not that morning. Not with her that heavy against me.
She shifted once, coming up out of it and going back down. I gave her my hand.
She counted the fingers of it — one, two, three — and got to the end, and went under.
?
I got dressed with the light coming across her back and my knuckles opened up again, wet in my palm where I had made a fist of them.
I unlocked the door and Bex was in the hallway with a crate of limes on her hip and her eyebrows all the way up.
“Morning,” she said. “Don’t mind me. I’m a crate of limes. I see nothing, I hear nothing, I’m barely even a person before noon.”
“Bex.”
“Yeah, I know, I know. I’m going.” She did not go. “For what it’s worth, boss, there’s sixteen of the pack downstairs and about four of them can count, so you’ve got maybe an hour before somebody says something stupid where I can hear it.”
“Nobody’s going to say anything.”
“Sure. That’s why I’m still standing here holding limes.”
She got a noise out of me that I had not authorized.
I did not shut the door behind me. She could see the bed. She could see whose it was and who was in it.
“Anybody asks whose room you came out of, you use my name. All of it.”
I said it to Victoria, in the open doorway, at a volume that carried, with Bex standing right there taking every word of it in.
Victoria lifted her head off my pillow just far enough to hear me say it.
“Copy that, boss,” Bex said, and carried her limes off down the hall, and that was the claim made and witnessed and never going to be unmade.
Down the back stairs. Past my Dyna in the yard with the throttle grip gone shiny under the haze, and into the office with the door shut behind me.
I got out the number I have carried since the spring and never dialed. A Frederick exchange. Eleven digits I know by heart and have kept behind my teeth.
It rang four times, and then my sister said, “Vance,” like the name belonged to somebody she hadn’t decided to forgive.
“Mara. I need a place for a woman to go that isn’t mine.”
“You finally run out of fences?”
“Yes.”
That bought me a silence. Mara had been a medic before she left the club’s emergencies behind for a clinic in Frederick. We had not spoken properly since our father died.
“Does the woman get to decide whether she comes?”
“Yes.”
“Then give her my number. Not one of your men. Her.”
I wrote it on a clean card. For the first time that morning, I had something to hand Victoria that wasn’t an order.