Devil May Care: Boxed Set (82 page)

By the time my lower half was bare, he’d gotten his belt and fly undone, his hand reaching into his pants to pull out his already hard, throbbing member. I licked my lips at the sight of it and gave him a look that silently asked if he wanted me to suck or fuck.

“Not tonight, baby,” he murmured to the small space between us. He closed that distance so that he could get a hold of my leg, jerking it up high, letting the knee bend over his arm so that my nether region was opened wide for him.

He wasn’t patient that night, but I hadn’t expected him to be. His cock was poised at my entrance in a second, and before I even had time to register it, he’d shoved it inside me all the way, my walls stretching to accommodate his large size.

I cried out again, arching my back as he wasted no time in beginning to thrust. He was right; this wouldn’t be gentle.

His hands were all over me. Sometimes they’d hold my arms above my head so that he could have his way with my body without interference, sliding his length inside until I was so full of him that I thought he might be an extension of myself. Other times, his hands would find my hips and grip so tightly that I knew there would be bruises later, purple and blue and yellow handprints where he’d used the indentation of my hip bones like handles so that he could find a new angle or dive into me even deeper than before.

He never let me back from the wall. He needed the leverage and the power to thrust into me with abandon, the sounds our bodies making as they came together a mix of sensual and violent.

Finally, his hands found my breasts, reaching up beneath my tight shirt until I heard a seam tear across the bottom. He fondled them, pinching and pulling and massaging. He pressed his face into the side of my neck, nibbling and kissing and worrying at it. He thrust into me again, bottoming out, and grunted against my skin. His hot breath whispered, “Fuck. You’re soft, you’re sweet, and I have to do it, baby. I have to fuck you like this.”

It was the only explanation I would get tonight, but that was okay. I understood what this was about just like I understood that it didn’t mean he loved me any less than before.

He plunged himself inside of me, burying his length so deep that our hips pressed together and my body felt like all there could ever be was him. My skin was flushed with heat, sticky with sweat and a rosy red color that made me look like I’d been left too close to the fire. Johnny wasn’t much better. Sweat dotted his forehead and passion burned in his eyes along with something else, something darker. His lips pressed fire into my skin and his hands trailed it along my body. My lingering shirt did nothing to protect me from the inferno that was threatening to engulf me at any minute.

“Oh, Johnny!”

I cried out his name and begged,
begged
to find the end of this fire, wherever that might be. I didn’t care if I came, but I needed him to. I needed him to find some sort of relief in the depths of my body so that I could have him back, because whatever uncertainty I was feeling, there was no doubting that I needed him.

He let out a loud, low groan that told me he was close. His thrusts became quicker, more urgent as he built up higher towards that final explosion. The slick sounds of our embrace became more and more intense, until finally he used his whole body to hold me tightly against the wall and pressed his long cock inside me until there was no room left.

He bit me on the neck, hard, when he finally came. I felt him pulse inside me, throbbing and aching for long moments until he was finally spent. When he was done, he didn’t release me right away, but allowed for both of our bodies to slide down the wall to the floor. I straddled his lap as his cock grew soft within me and eventually slipped out.

I held him, because I wanted him to feel this softness for a little while longer. I stroked my fingers through his hair. He didn’t move, didn’t say anything for a long time, and I wondered why we couldn’t have moments like this without the darkness that had pushed him to need it.

Why couldn’t we exist like this outside of the fear that came with this life?

I didn’t know, but I knew that there were a thousand more nights like this one waiting for me. For us. There would always be someone else coming for Johnny, some new enemy. There would always be some night that drove Johnny to do devastating, haunting things like tonight had.

I hated it, but that was how it would always be so long as we were here, like this.

Eventually, Johnny pulled himself from his stupor and helped me up off the floor. He murmured sweet things to me that were sort of apologies, but not really. He wasn’t sorry for the things he enjoyed doing to me any more than I was, but he never wanted it to reach past that to real pain. It didn’t, but I appreciated his worry over it anyway.

We undressed the rest of the way and rinsed off quickly, washing the sweat and stickiness from our bodies, before crawling in to sleep off what was left of the night. As I lay there in bed beside him, I couldn’t help but wonder what a life without fear was. I tried to picture it, but as much as I tried, I just couldn’t.

Johnny

It took me a moment longer than it should have to realize what was going on. I was drowsy still, heavy with sleep and sated after the pleasure I’d taken from Charlotte. She was still lying beside me, but like me, had jerked awake at the sound.

It had been loud, like a car backfiring or a small cherry bomb blowing up a mailbox, but that wasn’t it. I knew because I’d heard the sound before a time or two. Occupational hazard of leading a biker club, even if we were mostly legitimate.

“Shit,” I muttered as I realized what that sound was, and the potential for what it meant.

I reached for the bedside table and jerked open the door, pulling out the piece that I always kept there, just in case. Even as I threw back the covers and leapt out of bed, I checked to see that the gun was loaded. It was. Safety off. I made a quick run for the window, it was the only one in the room and faced the front lawn, which was where I thought the shot had come from.

A gunshot. Someone had been shooting in my fucking front yard.

“Johnny, what’s going on?”

It was Charlotte, her voice small and worried. She was tough when she had to be, but so much of that was an act. When she could, she relied on me to be the tough one, and I couldn’t let her see that I was scared, too.

“Get on the floor and stay away from the window and door!” I told her in a fast, hushed tone.

I didn’t look to see if she obeyed, but heard the ruffling of clothing, the padding of feet, and knees hitting the floor. Focusing on the shot, I went to the side of the window and carefully looked around the frame, pushing back the curtains just enough to see outside.

It was late still, dark outside. The streetlights were on, but three in the area were broken and unlikely to be fixed anytime soon. The neighbors’ lights were out and I knew they’d remain that way. It wasn’t that they hadn’t heard the shots. It was that they didn’t want to get caught up in what those shots meant.

I searched the street for the shooter, and prayed that whoever it was wasn’t too close to
here
, though it seemed the most likely scenario.

Quickly, my eyes fell to a dark shadow in the night. His arms were up, his bulky frame lined perfectly to fire away from the house and down the street. There was the faintest gleam of light reflecting off his smooth, shaved head, and after I made that connection, the rest fell in place quickly.

“Specter.”

“What?” Charlotte asked. She was on the other side of the bed on the floor, but had come up just enough so that she could look over the bed at me. “What about Specter?”

“Stay here. He’s downstairs. I’m going to meet him and ask him what the hell is going on.”

“Johnny!”

I didn’t listen or pause. I headed out the door of the bedroom and headed down the stairs immediately to meet Specter. I still had my piece and it brought me some comfort. I couldn’t say why I was nervous, this was Specter, one of mine, but there was something off about tonight. A lot of things had been off lately.

The front door opened and there he stood, a dark silhouette in the doorframe. I gripped my piece tighter, then flipped on the damn light. He squinted against the sudden brightness.

“Fuck,” he growled.

“That’s my line,” I told him, gripping the handle of my gun tighter, but keeping it lowered at my side. “What the hell is going on?”

He gestured back out towards the night. “I caught some fucking guy creeping around your house,” he told me, his voice dark and serious. “He had a fucking knife, man.”

A tendril of cold ran through me. A knife? All things considered, it wasn’t the most deadly weapon in a lot of respects. A gun would have maybe been more intimidating, but if that guy wasn’t interested in intimidation, if he was interested in just
taking care of business
, then there was a lot of reason to choose a knife.

A knife was quick. A knife was quiet. A knife was hard to fight off and it was hard to fix without medical attention.

And it meant you had to be up close and personal. Whoever this guy was, he meant business.

“Who the fuck was it?” I demanded of Specter, anger and fear mixing in my belly to come up with something similar to adrenaline, but more like fire and whiskey. “Did you see him?”

Specter shrugged his shoulders. “It was dark, but we grappled. I got a few good hits in, I think, but it’s hard to say. The chickenshit ran off, but when I saw him, he was standing on the front lawn and he was staring up. He was staring up at the window, Johnny.”

The window. As in, the bedroom window. It was the only one on that side of the building on the second floor. The house just wasn’t that big.

“Did he say anything?”

Specter shook his head. “No, but he was on a motorcycle and it looked like he was a club member.”

I frowned. “Not an Unholy.”

Quickly, Specter corrected me, “No. Not one of ours. One of
theirs
.”

“The Berserkers.”

I thought of that night, of their
gift
. I thought of that manic look in Stitches’ eyes and the way he seemed to be enjoying it all so much. Too much. It made something sick swirl through my guts and I wasn’t sure if I was going to keep from puking.

What had I gotten us into?

“I can’t be sure,” Specter said, but I could see something in his eyes that told me he had already decided who it was out there, or at least who they belonged to. “But it wasn’t one of ours, that much I
am
sure of.”

I sat heavily on the bottom stair, putting my piece down next to me. My hands went to my hair, running through them uneasily. What the hell was I doing anymore? The Reverend had made this shit look easy, but I had learned pretty quickly that it wasn’t. More than that, it was dangerous. That was pretty obvious.

What had happened tonight? What if that guy had gotten into the house and made it up the stairs before anyone had heard him? What if Specter hadn’t been there? What if he made it to the bedroom and gotten to Charlotte before…

I couldn’t finish the thought. It made me sick to think of something happening to Charlotte. It was more than I could handle and I finally realized it: I wasn’t cut out for this crap anymore. Somewhere along the way, things had changed for me, too. I thought of Charlotte and how she wasn’t happy, how she seemed scared all the time. I couldn’t protect her twenty-four seven, no matter how I wanted to or how I tried, but I could change the type of lifestyle that meant she
had
to be protected all the time.

I could make her safe, I just couldn’t do it like this.

“I think this is it,” I told Specter. He gave me a confused look, not following the thoughts in my head. “This is my last big deal. Things have gotta change, man.”

I heard a sound behind me, footsteps on the stairs, and almost sensed more than heard Charlotte standing at the top landing. I felt as though I could hear her breathing and feel the pounding of her heart. Things were like that sometimes. Like we were so connected that there was this sixth sense about her. I always wanted to ask her if she felt it, too, but could never man up enough to do it.

“What the fuck?” Specter demanded in a low, angry whisper. He looked like he might argue or say something else, but snapped his mouth shut instead, his eyes moving from my face. He’d seen Charlotte, his gaze going to a spot behind me, and the glare there was more than a little intense.

Things weren’t great between the two of them, not that I could blame Charlotte for that, but I could see what Specter thought was going on.

He thought she was a distraction, and maybe she was. Maybe she was the worst and best kind of distraction, but that wasn’t Specter’s call. He didn’t have the right to say one way or the other what kind of leader I was, because everyone had a pretty good idea what kind
he
would be. Reckless. Dangerous. A loose cannon. If people left the club to him, everyone would be thrown in the slammer by the time the year was up.

But that wasn’t the real reason he didn’t like Charlotte. It was part of it and the only legitimate thing he could say against her, because no one questioned the validity of the Reverend’s daughter, least of all to me. The other part of it was less pretty and less fair, though maybe made more sense.

He was in love with her.

Or at least, he wanted to fuck her pretty badly. He wasn’t the only member of the Unholys who’d eyed Charlotte like she was a piece of meat or some French model they could bend into all kinds of naughty, dirty positions. But he was the only one who’d made a pass at her.

It had been years ago and it was water under the bridge—at least it was for me, more by force of will than any real inclination—but no one had forgotten that it’d happened. Not Charlotte. Not me. It was hard when you had as much history as we did.

Ten years ago, I’d saved Charlotte. Maybe I didn’t look at it that way, but Charlotte did. We were just a couple of kids in high school. She was only fifteen and I was coming up fast on seventeen. Even then her father had been leader of the Unholys. She acted a lot tougher than she was back then, and that along with her father’s reputation was usually enough to keep her out of trouble.

But not that day.

I’d never forget it, though my memories were red around the edges and fuzzy in the middle. It was raining. Charlotte was walking home. I never did find out why, but it was the last time she did it. I was on the other side of the street trying to bum a cigarette off a guy who wouldn’t believe that I was eighteen—which I wasn’t.

I saw the guy start following her, but didn’t think much of it. A lot of people walked that way; no big deal. But then she got a little farther and he got a little closer. She finally stopped, leaning against the wall like she was waiting for someone. But she wasn’t.

The guy looked like he might just keep going, but when he didn’t I knew that things were about to get bad.

I forgot the guy and the smoke, turning to cross the street just as the guy reached for her. He grabbed her by the arm and she struggled to shake him off, but he was too strong for her. A car nearly ran me over, making me stop before I could reach her, and by the time it passed that guy was dragging her into an alley between a smoke shop and the Mexican food place right next to it. I heard a scream.

I ran. When I got to that alley, she was pressed against the wall, the guy holding her down as she kicked at him, struggling to break free. But his hold was tight and his free hand was already wandering. He had one knee between her legs, forcing them apart, and his hand was starting up her skirt. She screamed. He smacked his hand over her mouth. She bit him. And that was when he hit her across the face, making her fall to the alley floor, her mouth bleeding.

I saw red. Fury flared through me, so hot that I might have burst into flames right then and there. I ran for her as the man started to undo his pants. I heard his sneering voice as he told her, “Scream again, bitch, and I’ll fucking kill you.”

The rest, I didn’t really remember. I knew I got there before he reached her. I knew that I punched him until his face was broken and bleeding and my hands weren’t doing much better. I knew that when I finally came back to myself, Charlotte was wrapped in my arms, my bloodied hands stroking her dark hair as I whispered to her that she was okay, I’d protect her.

As far as I knew, the man survived. Barely. His face would never quite be the same though. I wasn’t charged only because Charlotte was the Reverend’s daughter and he had an in with the police department.

After that, I always walked her home. We started making out in little hallway nooks when no one was looking. By the end of the year, my hands were constantly down her pants, making her cry out in pleasure. And on her seventeenth birthday, she took off all of her clothes and told me that she wanted me to be her first. I was. I’d had other girls before and made sure it was good for her. After that first time, we couldn’t be separated.