Their Ex's Redrock Dawn (Texas Alpha Biker) (7 page)

“I just wanted to show you this,” Coco said, as she reached them a little breathless. Well, okay, he might be thinking that Carly was kind of cute girly, but Coco took the prize on high maintenance.

“That’s Coco. That’s Carly,” he said between them, and he liked Carly reaching forward.

“Nice to meet you, Coco.”

Coco’s smile came big as she took Carly’s hand. That was quite a transformation, and his eyes widened as he saw Carly’s widen too.

“So good to meet you, Carly,” Coco said with sincerity and enthusiasm. “I just don’t know anyone here, and your Zeb was very kind to me.”

Carly glanced over her shoulder at him, and he moved to hug her back at her smile. “I’m glad he helped you,” Carly said, while looking up at him, then she turned to look at Coco, who still held her hand.

“I can see you two are going out, but could you take a quick look at this picture. Maybe you’ve seen him.” Coco lifted her other hand to show them a picture of a slightly balding man, but probably Coco’s age, in a suit standing in front of a building that had a sign, “Maxwell Accounting Firm.” “That’s my husband, Gordon,” Coco whispered. Then she added, “He’s missing.”

Carly squeezed Coco’s hand. “Is it serious?” she asked, looking closely at the man. “I mean the missing part? Do you really think anything has happened to him?” Zeb’s hand cupped her waist from behind, and she really liked him offering solid and close support at her back. Carly could clearly see why Zeb offered to help Coco, who seemed nice, but a bit lost.

“Um—” Coco bit her bottom lip. “Not the police yet. I’m sure he’s in this town, and when I find him, he’ll explain it all.”

Zeb cleared his throat. “Not seen him, Coco. But I’ll keep a lookout, while you should go and get a better room at Redrock Casino’s hotel. It has more security and better customers.”

Carly let Coco’s hand go. “I can get you a discount at Redrock, my boss runs it, and I haven’t seen your husband either. Sorry.”

Coco’s pretty eyes got bright, and Carly thought she might be on the verge of tears, but she was holding it back. “Thank you so much for looking,” she exclaimed. “And caring. I’ll think about that room. Now you two go on and have a wonderful day in this sunshine.”

Coco whirled around with her perfume swishing them in scent, then she clicked her heels back toward her room, and her free hand, not holding the picture, rose with a backhanded wave. “Loved meeting you too. Bye bye, sugars.”

“Sugars,” Carly whispered, as Zeb growled the endearment, then louder he said, “Redrock, Coco, I’m telling you.”

Coco didn’t look back, but kept waving, as Zeb started to mutter, “Going to have to watch out for her ... just know it.”

Carly hugged him, turning away from watching Coco enter her room next to Zeb’s. She squeezed him tight. “Zeb Andersen, badass biker, military man, who also saves suburban women from—”

He squeezed her back, pushing the air out of her lungs before she could finish as he growled, “Badass, is it?”

She leaned against him, nodding with her lips very close to his mouth. “Badass
hot
,” she rumbled in her best Zeb growl.

His lips chuckled over hers as they kissed, and she forgot to worry that Finn, the owner of Rowdie’s, might see her. That’s what astounding sex and a new smoking hot affair did to a person—it blew their mind right out of them.

And she’d loved it.

––––––––

Z
eb stood by the breakfast bar in Carly’s two-story house, looking through the mail piled there, while Carly packed some bags in the other room. He looked at each envelope with part of his attention as he spoke.

“So he’s a rodeo clown?” Zeb asked with a voice loud enough Carly could hear.

He set an insurance envelope to one side, then a bank statement with only Carly’s name on top of it. Her dickwad was seriously uncool leaving the house with so many undone repairs. Just walking in Zeb had seen the garage door was not closed to the bottom and whacked off its tracks, a broken rail, broken doorbell, and a busted outside light. Not to mention the torn screen door, and then inside he’d quit adding them up after he saw the dishwasher half pulled out like a forgotten project.

“It’s one of the things he does. Only I thought he wasn’t doing it anymore. But maybe with the rodeo in town they asked him to fill in.” Her voice floated out of the bedroom. “He’s a jack of all trades, always trying a new scheme. I think the latest is warehouse rolling doors. There’s some new kind that will revolutionize the docking door system.”

“Yeah, right,” Zeb muttered under his breath.

It looked like he and Carly were the same on one thing: neither of them had been a very good judge of character about the depths of their spouses’ psyches. Zeb had thought Tula was one kind of person, but after they married that had all changed, like she’d been gaming him or something.

Just a glimpse of Carly’s life and he could see that was happening to her also. He wondered if she saw it or ignored it or didn’t have a clue. Then there was the other issue: he’d heard her saying on the phone that she was going to judge the beauty pageant and he’d yet to tell her Tula was likely in it. That was not going to go over very well with Carly—

“Bastard!” Carly screeched from the other room. “Lowlife, two-timing slug!”

Zeb grabbed the mail he’d set aside, shoving it into his back pocket, and he headed to the bedroom. He glanced into the room, and Carly whirled on him with a skimpy yellow bra held up, which if he was any judge would no way fit her stellar chest.

“This is
not
my bra,” she exclaimed, with bruises of hurt in her eyes, but also anger. Her other hand lifted while shaking, and he saw a necklace with a silver stallion charm on it.

Damn it.

He knew whose necklace that was.

“This is not mine either!” She tossed both down on the bed. “He had them right there in his coat thrown on the floor. In
our
bedroom!”

Carly was married—Zeb knew it. The necklace was Tula’s, and he should be pissed about that, but when his eyes turned and caught sight of her marriage bed, it made him simmer with feelings he’d never felt before. Being maddened with possessiveness was at the top of those sudden emotions.

He grabbed Carly and pulled her from the evidence of a bed she’d slept in with another man, and he knew he was being unreasonable, but he couldn’t seem to help it. It just rolled over him.

“You’re
never
sleeping with that bastard again,” he snarled, with the raw edges of command.

Carly was blinking at him wide-eyed as he grabbed the back of her head and hauled her mouth to his. No way was he nice or easy, but hard and driven. Driven to brand her and wipe the images of her ever in that bed with another man. He latched her back, pulling her up on him, and she took his intensity with a passionate moan, then gave him back as much heat and urgency.

Carly gasped as Zeb thrust inside her, while pulling her to the edge of the kitchen table so he could do it so amazingly hard. Her legs were wrapped around his hips and her jean skirt was bunched between their bodies. Her panties were in his fist on the table beside her.

“Tell me
never
again.” His light blue eyes seared into her. He withdrew and slammed home again.

“Never. Never,” she whimpered, and his lip pulled up in a sneer as he pumped faster, rocking the kitchen table.

“Rub your clit,” he ordered as he rocked her harder.

She panted little screeches, digging for her clit, while he plunged into her.

“Zeb!”

She looked down at him entering her so fast it made slapping sounds as she rubbed her clit. Her legs rose higher on his sides and she squealed in her throat as the blast of a sweet freaking gut-curling climax blazed through her core.

She heard Zeb grunting, and she latched his neck with her nails digging in. “
Come
on, baby,” she gasped. “Give me that hot cock. Oh! Oh!”

He groaned, shook his head, and rammed into her. His gaze pierced her as if it was his thick shaft. Then he held with a heavy shudder going through him.

Ohmygod, they’d just had sex on her kitchen table.

Stunning.

Zeb’s mouth came down over hers and they kissed passionately for long moments. It had not escaped her that Zeb had become intensely possessive being in her house. A place where she used to sleep with her husband. The second Zeb had seen her bed he’d gotten all growly and dominant. It actually wiped away the pain from the evidence of her husband’s unfaithfulness.

She discovered hot, urgent, and rough sex could blow pretty much anything out of her mind but Zeb. In fact, she decided it was a perfect way to deal with it all. She would continue having consuming, intense, and hot sex with Zeb. She’d never known she was a “hot” sex kind of person. Whether it was her age or she’d been an unknown slut all this time, she was diving into it with a passion like she’d never felt before.

“Man, I don’t know what’s going on with me,” Zeb muttered as he pulled away from her. “I keep meaning to go slower but—hell.” He grumbled to a stop.

Carly closed her legs. She knew they were going really fast but she wasn’t sure she cared. Zeb turned further away from her and she saw her panties left beside her on the table. She reached her hand to the back of his neck and squeezed his tense muscles.

“If I walked into your house and I’d seen the bed you and your skanky wife slept in, I’d have you on the floor in a second. Me
on
top.”

Zeb’s gaze turned to her with his light blue eyes glittering. “On top?”

“Hard,” she told him, then she got serious. “I know it’s fast, honey. But I feel this thing between us I’ve never ever felt before.”

He took her hand from his neck and brought his lips to her palm. He kissed it then uttered, “Yeah.”

He felt it too.

Now her eyes glittered.

“I’m selling this junk pile of a house,” she declared. His slow smile would have melted her panties if she’d had them on.

“We’ll see,” he said, leaning in and kissing her mouth slowly.

Ten minutes later, she had her panties back on and her suitcases outside as she complained, saying, “I better take my car, because he insisted and he might wonder if I don’t.”

“I’ll follow you, sweetness, and we can drop off the truck you borrowed.”

She wanted to kiss him, but maybe she shouldn’t in front of the neighbors. He seemed to telepathically get that, or maybe he just thought that too, as he gave her a long, slow, body-crawling look, then he tossed her suitcases in the back of her four-door sedan.

“Follow me to the casino; we’ll be going around back like last night,” she told him.

Carly made sure Zeb was following her, because she was taking the back way to get to the casino. She kept part of her concentration on Zeb, but she knew he’d be good at following her, and with the other part, she thought about how basically she wasn’t going back home again. At least not as long as Rick was there.

The house was technically hers because she’d owned it before they married, but she didn’t care about the house, since she’d really bought it as an investment. To live in for a while, then rent out. The house she really cared about ... her house was out by the lake.

Part of her property at the lake was used as a safe house for WTSF girls getting out of bad situations when they needed to hide off the radar and let things cool down. The other part was her big lake house, but it was further out from town and not very practical for trying to come into do her volunteer work at WTSF. Rick didn’t even know about the lake house.

She wondered why she’d never told him. Was it some sixth sense that knew he was rotten even as he was trying to con her into believing he wasn’t?

“
Why
did he come back to me?” she exclaimed, while angrily flipping back her hair.

She stopped her car at the stop sign on top of Mustang Hill; looking in her rearview she saw Zeb right behind her. She waved at him and her anger melted. How amazing was it to find a man like Zeb, and right at this particularly screwed-up time in her life?

Her mind wandered to all things Zeb as she drove and thought about the prospects of getting to know him better, until she put her foot on the brake to slow her speed on the hill. But the brake pedal went to the floor. A second later she screamed in panic, realizing she had
no
brakes.

“Slow down, sweetness,” Zeb growled under his breath as he checked the speed, then he got more irritated mixed with concern.

He honked his horn twice. Was she a speed demon? It was dangerous, even out on the back-country road. Suddenly, he watched Carly’s speeding car veer over into the oncoming lane, then back, then veer again.

“Damn it, something’s wrong,” he muttered.

Her hand waved out the window, and it wasn’t a nice wave, but frantic. Was it her steering? There was no one else on the road, and at the bottom of the hill it looked like there was a stop sign.

Zeb sped up the truck he was driving, to get beside her. They were running out of time. One glance over at Carly’s panicked features told him something was wrong as she swerved toward him and he shot past their imminent collision.

Brakes? Steering?

“What the
hell
is it,” he expelled, and with only seconds left he hit the intersection and checked it both ways. “Clear!”

It was the bottom of the hill, and the road flattened and straightened for as far as he could see.

Carly’s car whizzed past him. She had to be doing seventy. Zeb gunned his engine and worked to get past her, then he whipped in front of her and he did a controlled slowing, until her bumper tapped his. It jolted him, but their speeds finally started slowing.

Just before a hairy curve in the rode, he got her stopped. Zeb threw the truck into park and pulled up the emergency brake before he flung out of the truck. Carly was sobbing with her face in the steering wheel as he slammed open her car door.

“Brakes!” she wailed, and he crouched and caught her as she pitched into his arms.

“No brakes,” he expelled, just making certain he’d got it right. She nodded as she bawled against his neck. “Fuck,” he cursed, dragging her tighter, feeling the adrenalin pump through him.