CHAINED: A Motorcycle Club Romance (6 page)

Cain seemed distracted, and Jenna still thought that he was annoyed with her. But she remembered vaguely what to do in situations like this. When a man was annoyed or angry or upset, it was always her fault, and she had to make him feel better. And maybe Cain wouldn't hit her, wouldn't make her hurt like some of the others had done.

She reached out, putting her hands on his lap, rubbing them back and forth. Cain started up in surprise, but she found the hard rod beneath the rough fabric of his pants, and she wrapped her fingers around it, stroking back and forth. It stiffened at her touch, as it always did, and she slid one hand up to find the button that would take his pants off, so that she could put him into her mouth.

But before she could undo that button, Cain's hands came around and seized hers, holding them firmly by the wrists and pulling them away. "What the hell are you doing?" he burst out, staring at her.

Jenna looked back up at him, her eyes going wide once again. Was he going to hit her for doing something wrong? "You are angry," she tried to explain herself. "And when a man is angry, I must make him feel good-"

"No!" The cry came out as a roar, and Jenna shrank back from Cain. Couldn't he see that he was angry, now, that she had to make him feel better before he lost control and hit her?

Even as she shrank back, however, Cain forced himself to stop, to take a deep breath and let go of her hands. He stared down at his crotch, taking several more deep breaths. When he finally lifted his eyes back up to gaze at her, the anger that had flared up in them before was gone.

"Jenna, I don't know what you had to do before, but you don't have to do it now," he said, not pulling his eyes away from hers. "And as long as you're in my house, under my roof, you don't need to sleep with anyone, man or woman, or do anything with them that you don't want to. Do you understand?"

Jenna stared back at him, not understanding. "But you wanted it," she tried. "I could feel you; you were hard, needing it. You wanted me to touch you, to make you feel good."

"Did you want to?"

She shook her head, still feeling confused. "What does that matter?"

For just a second, Cain stared at her with his mouth hanging slightly open. And then, to her complete surprise, he swept her up into his arms, pulling her into a fierce hug.

"It makes all the difference into the world," he whispered into her ear as he hugged her, comforting her. "It matters more than anything else."

Chapter nine

When he released her, Cain peered closely at Jenna's eyes, wondering if he'd managed to make himself clear to the girl, if she understood. As well, he tried to imagine what she might have been through, what had been done to her to teach her that she had to satisfy any man who was angry around her. Such degradation seemed almost unthinkable, even to him. Who could break down a woman, little more than a girl, so thoroughly?

Shifting a little, he did feel his erection, pushing against his pants. It was true that he'd reacted at her touch, but for heaven's sake, any woman grabbing for his cock would have caused the same effect!

He shifted a little, trying to find a comfortable way to sit where his bulge between his legs wouldn't be obvious. "Listen, Jenna," he tried. "It doesn't matter what anyone else wants. If they try and tell you to do something because they want it, well, you give them your biggest middle finger and you tell them to go to hell, understand?"

Even through her shame and downcast eyes, he thought he saw a brief little glimpse of a smile at that comment.

"All that matters is what you want," Cain continued, feeling emboldened. "If you want to sleep with them, and they want to sleep with you, well, great! But each person is able to choose what he or she does with her body. Even here, with us."

Now the girl was looking up. "What do you mean, here with us?" she asked.

Another tough question. Cain reached up and scratched the back of his head, trying to buy time for an answer. "Some of the women who live here, in the house," he began slowly, "will sleep with some of the bikers who hang around, in exchange for money, or for other favors."

"But that's okay?"

"Yes, that's okay. Because they still choose to do it. It's still the woman's choice, and she can always turn a man down, send him away if she doesn't want to fuck him. She owns her body, and she has the final say."

Jenna nodded slowly, looking thoughtful. "So I own my body?" she asked.

"Yes."

The girl suddenly stared up at him, her eyes boring into his. She had brilliant greenish-blue eyes, Cain suddenly noticed. They contrasted sharply against her hair, now full of shades of red and yellow since it had been cleaned. She stared at Cain, and to his amazement, the older biker felt himself tempted to blink, caught off guard by the intensity of that gaze.

"So if I choose, I could give my body to you," she said, still watching him closely.

Cain's mouth opened, but he scrambled for a minute for words. "Well, yes," he hedged. "But you don't need to do that!"

"Why? Don't you find me attractive?"

Again, Cain found himself at a loss for words.

Somehow, he knew that the answer to that question was a definitive yes. Even though he knew how wrong it would be to take advantage of this situation, of this poor used and abused girl, he wanted her, felt his body yearning for her.

Angrily, he forced that feeling down, pushing it aside. This was not the time! he shouted mentally to himself. He could choose from any other whore in the house to fulfill his needs. Jenna was damaged, fragile. She was off limits.

"I do find you attractive, yes," he said slowly, realizing that the girl was still waiting for an answer, "but I know that you're not ready. You've been hurt, and even if you might not know it, you need time to recover. And until you're fully healthy, nothing will - nothing can happen between us."

He waited, watching Jenna, hoping desperately that she wouldn't ask him to explain further.

For several seconds, the girl was quiet, just staring back at him. Cain tried to match that gaze, but he sensed disquieting intelligence hiding behind those blazing, powerful eyes. This girl might be still healing from whatever trauma had befallen her before she'd found her way here, but Cain sensed great strength still lurking within her, bruised and beaten but not yet broken.

Finally, she nodded, breaking the eye contact, and Cain breathed a little more easily. "Okay," she said quietly, looking down at her hands. "I understand. I am not yet ready to offer my body to you."

For just a moment, Cain hesitated. That still didn't sound quite right to his ears. But he didn't want to dive deeper into that sinkhole, and he sensed that he was not equipped with the right skills to work through this difficult, thorny problem.

Instead, casting about, he found something else to distract Jenna from such thoughts of her body and sex.

"Well, it sounds like you'll be staying here a while," he said, trying to sound happy, as though the previous topic was totally forgotten. "I suppose I ought to find you a room of your own, huh?"

The girl didn't reply, but Cain caught a pleading, concerned look in her eye.

"Here, follow me," he said, standing up from the bed. "There's a couple open places right near my bedroom."

Before he turned away, Cain caught the brief but powerful glimpse of gratitude on Jenna's face.

He led the girl up through the house, back over to the wing where his own bedroom resided, up on the second floor. Although Cain didn't mind lending out other rooms to his guests, and to other Iron Skulls, he made sure to reserve the master bedroom for himself. He opened the door to it as they passed, nodding inside.

"This is my room," he told Jenna. "Just letting you know, that is."

Jenna peered around the open door, her eyes wide. Cain kept his room very simple, with one single exception. The walls were a plain white, and although he'd picked out a massive king-size bed, the sheets were plainly colored, without any pattern. Aside from a couple of small paintings showing nature scenes, the walls were largely bare, and the relative lack of furniture made the room feel even bigger and emptier.

Whenever a visitor was lucky enough to get a glimpse past his bedroom door, however, they always gasped in amazement and stared up at his ceiling.

Cain felt proud of relatively few things, but even he considered his ceiling one of the best painting jobs he'd ever managed. Along the edges of the room, the walls shifted from white to blue, at first a pale, light blue, but gradually darkening to the robin's egg blue of a cloudless sky. The color of the ceiling continued to shift further in towards the center of the room, running through all the oranges and reds of a brilliant sunset before darkening to a deep, pure black. In the middle, where the ceiling was black as a moonless night, Cain had carefully dotted the smooth surface with hundreds of tiny white dots to represent the stars.

Gazing up at the ceiling, either from the entrance or from the massive bed, it was easy to imagine that he was truly outside, beneath the night sky.

Cain glanced over at Jenna, and felt a moment of unaccustomed pride and happiness to see her mouth hanging open as she took in his masterpiece. "You did this?" she gasped, taking a wondering half-step into the bedroom.

"I did." Normally, Cain felt very self-conscious about any sort of bragging, but Jenna's clear wonderment couldn't help but bring a matching smile to his own face. "You like it?"

The girl nodded like a puppet, and as she stepped into the room, all her fear and anxiety seemed to melt away, at least for the moment. Jenna kept on staring up at the ceiling, turning around in slow circles, but Cain instead found his eyes drawn to the young woman.

With all of that fear and anxiety that had seemed an ever-present part of the woman now absent, Jenna stood taller, her smile brighter. Even in the slightly too large clothes that Cheery had given her from Brandy's room, she seemed filled with life, lighting up his bedroom as she spun around.

Another couple of steps brought her to Cain's bed, where she flopped back, kicking her legs up into the air as she kept on staring up at the ceiling. "Wow," she said aloud, once again, as though she stood before a work of art.

This was followed by a long moment of silence - Jenna staring up at the ceiling, and Cain watching her, marveling at her transformation.

Chapter ten

After a long minute of silence, Cain cleared his throat gruffly. "Anyway, I suppose I should show you to your room," he said, feeling as though these words were too abrupt, too rough to break this soft, fragile moment.

But although Jenna rolled off the bed with a little sigh, her eyes were still bright, sparkling almost as if an echo of the painted stars had transferred themselves behind her pupils. "Is my room painted?" she asked, as she stood back up.

Cain shook his head. "None of the other rooms are painted," he said. "Just mine. But," he suddenly added, "there's plenty of paint left over in a closet, if you want to try your hand at it."

Even as he spoke these words, Cain wondered where that suggestion had come from. He almost never even spoke about his own painting, much less offered anyone else the chance to do so! It definitely did not match with how he saw himself. Bikers, especially not senior officers in a one percenter motorcycle club, did not indulge themselves in fancy, artsy hobbies like painting.

But Jenna clapped her hands together, looking vibrant and excited once again. "I'd love to try!" she exclaimed, smiling so widely it almost looked like the top of her head was about to fall off - the illusion compounded by how she nodded so energetically.

"Okay. Well," Cain said, stepping past her and out across the hall, "I figure that you can stay in this room. At least for now," he added quickly.

The bedroom across the hall from Cain's was not nearly as large, and it only had one window to provide some illumination. But it did have a bed and dresser, abandoned by previous inhabitants, and Jenna still looked amazed at the biker's generosity.

She stepped forward into the room, turning around and examining the empty, blank walls and ceiling, and then turned back to Cain. "Can I paint it right now?" she asked, bouncing up and down on her toes.

At first, Cain began to shake his head, his lips already forming the first syllable of "no." But then,with the words halfway out of his mouth, he relented. What harm would it do? And if nothing else, it would get this mysterious girl out of his hair for a little while.

"Sure," he said instead. "Let me show you where the paint and supplies are."

Never one to throw things away if they still had some use left in them, Cain had stored most of the paint, as well as some brushes and rough canvas cloths to put down on the floor beneath his work in progress, down in the barn. At first, Jenna looked apprehensive about leaving the safety of the house, once again shrinking back slightly on herself and flicking her eyes back and forth, as if she expected James Archon or one of his cronies to be lurking right outside Cain's door.

After a minute, however, she evidently decided that the coast was clear, and followed after Cain into the barn next door.

Cain handed Jenna the brushes and cloths, and pulled out a stepstool so that she could reach some of the paint on higher shelves. "Now, try not to make a mess," he cautioned. "And I'd avoid getting paint on Brandy's clothes, too. That girl's got a temper, and she screams when something upsets her."