Unattainable (15 page)

I cried out again, more so in
frustration than from my immediate second release. I cried out
because Cage wasn’t just fucking me,
he was fucking
me
.

Because I’d just had an orgasm just by
kissing
. And then another just because the motherfucker had
told me to.

“
Fuck you,” I said, half
moaning into his mouth as I ground my backside into his groin.
“Fuck…you.”

Cursing, Cage pulled quickly out of me
and wet warmth shot up over my back as he groaned through his own
release. Breathing hard, he rolled onto his back, bringing me with
him, settling me on my side into the crook of his arm. I slid my
arm over his rippled stomach and curled my left leg over top of
his, then laid my cheek down upon his tattooed chest.

“
Fuck you, too,” he rasped
and kissed the top of my head. “You mouthy little shit.”

I snorted, my lips curving into a
smile, and I found myself holding Cage tighter.

“
You’re stayin’ all
weekend, right?” he asked as he reached to his right, fumbling
around with the contents of his nightstand.

My smile fell away as reality began to
permeate my lust-addled brain. Why the fuck was he asking me
that?

“
Teacup?” I heard the
flick of a lighter followed by the scent of freshly lit
green.

“
What?” I whispered,
refusing to look at him.

“
I asked how long you’re
stayin’, babe.”

“
I’m not sure.” Which was
a lie. I was due to leave on Monday, but I could stay longer if I
wanted. I had vacation time at work and if I…

FUCK.

No. No way was I going down this road
again, no way was I going to get trapped inside feelings that could
never amount to anything but more self-loathing. So I kept my eyes
shut and tried to remember every female I’d ever seen Cage slutting
it up with. Groping them, kissing them. I forced myself to relive
that awful night so many years ago at the clubhouse.

I had to get out of here. Away from
Cage. And then I had to get very drunk, very, very drunk and forget
this ever happened, because if I didn’t, if I allowed what just
happened to sink too deep within me…

Teacup. I would be Teacup
again.

So I told myself that, in no uncertain
terms, Cage West was a whore, that this was what he did, and that
if he hadn’t changed his MO not once in his entire lifetime, he
never would.

“’
Cause I’m thinkin’,” he
wheezed, blowing out a mouthful of smoke, “that if you’re stayin’
for the whole weekend, we could keep this shit goin’ ’til you head
out.”

Sex. That’s all he was about. It’s all
he would ever be about. If I spent the entire weekend with him
having sex, more sex meant more feelings were going to slip out,
and more feelings meant I’d end up doing something really fucking
stupid.

Like telling him I loved
him…again.

Which would mean I had indeed turned
into my mother even after all the promises I’d made myself to never
be some dirty biker’s second choice. Or third. Or his
whore.

Suddenly I wasn’t just mad at myself, I
was mad at him and my mother and my father and my grandparents and
Jase and the whole lot of stupid bikers that had set this all in
motion, all over again. And then I wasn’t just mad, I was fucking
livid and suddenly wanted to cry and scream and rip my hair out for
being such a stupid girl! Again!

“
Tegen?”

“
Hmm?”

“
Fuckin’ really, woman?
I’ve only been askin’ how long you’re fuckin’ stayin’ for the last
ten minutes.”

“
I’m tired,” I lied,
rolling away from him as I faked a yawn. Grabbing the blankets, I
pulled them up over my shoulder. “Let’s talk in the
morning.”

Muttering nonsense about women and
decision-making, Cage rolled over, reached under the blankets, and
gathered me in his arms. His large hands slid over my bare body,
one stopping on my breast and the other between my legs.

“
I had fun tonight,” he
whispered as his lips found my neck. A shiver tore through me even
as I grimaced.

He had fun.

Was I supposed to take that as a
compliment? When didn’t Cage have fun? Fun was one of his two
middle names, the other being “slut.”

“
Lips,” he growled,
nipping his way across my face. Unwittingly, I turned my head and
met him, countering every stroke of his perfect tongue with one of
my own. We kissed for a while, touched, but Cage was spent and even
though I’d never admit to it out loud, I was too, not to mention a
little sore.

Eventually exhausted, we fell away from
each other.

It took all of fifteen minutes before
Cage was sound asleep. Then I was up, dressed, and calling my
mother from his cell phone.

• • •

The next afternoon, upon arriving at
the clubhouse, Cage headed straight for his father’s office holding
the small envelope of photos he’d taken from Eva’s room in New
York. Things had gotten so out of control so quickly last night,
he’d forgotten to pass them along. Finding the office door already
partially open, Cage walked in and found Deuce seated behind his
desk, looking over a pile of printed pages that looked to him like
laundry lists. As in the dirty money the club laundered through
their legitimately owned businesses.

“
Tell me you didn’t fuck
the hippie,” Deuce said, not bothering to look up.

Cage grimaced.

Yeah, he’d fucked the hippie. And then
the hippie had taken off and never came back.

So she hadn’t wanted to spend the
weekend with him. She hadn’t even wanted to spend the night with
him. Which was fine. Whatever. So what if he’d never had a bitch
just up and leave in the middle of the night before, not even a
club whore. But hey, there was a first time for everything. Which
was…fine.

He’d hit her up later today for a
re-run.

“
You fucked her, didn’t
you?” Deuce growled, finally looking at him. “Even after I told you
to leave her the fuck alone?”

They stared at each other and Cage felt
like he was looking in a mirror thirty years in the future. A
cranky, pissed off, judgmental bastard of a mirror.

Cage opened his mouth and Deuce’s hand
lifted, then crashed back down on the desk.

“
You got any idea how
fucked-up D is? She barely sees her daughter as it is and what do
you do? YOU GO AND FUCK HER!

“
It was real fuckin’
simple,” he continued. “I told you to leave the girl alone, but
stickin’ your shit in anything that’s walkin’ by you is more
important than followin’ orders, isn’t it?”

Cage didn’t respond. He’d heard this
speech enough times that he knew it by heart. He also knew that
interrupting his father would only make the man angrier.

“
You’re pushin’ thirty
fuckin’ years old and still ain’t listenin’,” he continued, looking
at Cage with unmasked disgust. “You’re never goin’ to amount to
jack-fuckin’-shit, are you?”

It wasn’t a question. It was an answer.
He knew it, his old man knew it, and Blue, who was in the front
room asleep at the bar, knew it too.

“
Here,” Cage muttered,
pulling the pictures from his cut as he walked toward his father.
He tossed the envelope on the desk.

Deuce’s gaze dropped. “What the fuck is
that?”

Cage shrugged. “Found it at the Demons
MC, in Eva’s old room.”

Deuce glanced down and picked up the
envelope. As he looked over the first photo in the stack, Eva
seated next to Blue at the bar, Cage watched his father’s
expression shift from indifferent to downright sappy.

“
Where the fuck did you
find these?”

“
Hidden,” Cage said,
knowing better than to bring up anything to do with Frankie, or
Frankie with Eva, to his father. Shit might be happy-go-lucky
between them now, but it wasn’t always that way and Frankie had
been the reason.

“
Behind a photo,” he
finished.

“
Fuck,” Deuce muttered,
slowly going through the stack, his eyes growing more and more
unfocused with every picture. “Look at her…just fuckin’…look at
her.”

“
She still looks pretty
damn good,” Cage said and Deuce’s eyes shot to him and
narrowed.

“
That’s not what I was
talkin’ about,” he growled. “I was talkin’ about how fuckin’ stupid
I was. I had that.” Deuce held up the photo he was looking
at.

Eva, grinning, wearing a baggy cropped
tee and saggy jeans, sandwiched in between Kami and Dorothy, was
giving Dorothy rabbit ears while her other hand made the sign of
the devil over Kami’s shoulder.

“
I had that,” Deuce
repeated. “And I fucked it all up.”

Cage didn’t say anything, unable to
believe his father was done fucking up, and Deuce went back to
looking through the pictures.

Jumping to his feet, his father glared
at him. “Did you look at all these?”

Father and son stared at each
other.

“
Little fuckin’ asshole,”
Deuce growled. “Get the fuck out.”

“
I’ll be around if you
need me,” he said tonelessly, already turning on his boot
heel.

“
Don’t hold your breath,”
he heard Deuce mutter.

He wasn’t going to.

When it came to his old man, he’d
stopped holding his breath a long fucking time ago.

“
Stupid,” I muttered as I
yanked a frying pan out from underneath a stack of pots and pans,
wincing as the following loud clatter echoed throughout the
kitchen. My mom didn’t get a lot of sleep; when she did sleep she
dreamt of the memories she couldn’t quite access and usually woke
up in a cold sweat, shaking and crying. Between that and
Christopher, she needed her rest.

After placing the pan on top of the
stove, I headed for the refrigerator.

“
Stupid, stupid, stupid,”
I said under my breath as I surveyed the chilled contents. A carton
of eggs, a package of cheese, a loaf of bread, and a tub of butter
later I was sitting down with a cheese omelet and a side of toast,
not eating.

I felt too sick to eat.

I was a first-class fucking idiot. And
not just because I’d fucked Cage. Again. I mean, yeah, that was
seriously idiotic, but worse, I’d fucked him not once, but three
times, and not once did we use a condom. Not once did I even
remember to use a condom. Why oh why did I always lose my head
around that man?

Goddammit, I probably had AIDS now or
at the least some sort of wonky biker venereal disease. Or even
worse, I was going to end up like motherfucking Danny and pregnant
with a little biker baby that, knowing my luck, would be a boy
who’d look just like his father, become a biker just like his
father, and break a million hearts…just like his father.

It was official. I was my mother’s
daughter. I could bed the man but never wed him. I could suck his
cock, make him dinner, do his laundry, and have his children, but I
could never actually have him.

Jesus, I’d actually prefer to have
explosive diarrhea while wearing a miniskirt, performing a jig
onstage in front of half a million people.

My one saving grace was that I had
absolutely no reason to see Cage for the rest of the weekend. I
closed my eyes and let out an irritated sigh. Why did I absolutely
hate the sound of that?

My eyes flew open and I stared down at
my omelet. “FUCK!” I yelled. “You look really yummy and I don’t
even want to eat you!”

“
Tegen?”

Glancing up from my breakfast, I found
my mother hovering near the kitchen entrance, dressed in only a
knee-length black robe and fuzzy slippers.

“
Shit,” I said,
immediately pushing my chair back and getting to my feet. “I’m
sorry, Mom.”

She gave me a small smile. “Is it okay
to come in? Or am I going to get an omelet to the face?”

My shoulders sagged. My mother had
never been a shy woman and she’d never skirted around sensitive
subjects. Unless it had something to do with her relationship with
Jase, she’d never had a problem speaking her mind. I took after her
in that way, although I was infinitely more vulgar than she would
ever be.

Other than that, we were polar
opposites. Our hair wasn’t even the same shade of red.

Even at forty-one she was still
beautiful; at forty I was pretty sure I was going to look like skin
sagging off a stick. But not my mother. She was several inches
shorter than I was, petite but not without curves, her breasts were
full and her stomach flat.

Her deep red hair hung halfway down her
back in soft waves, her pretty green eyes still sparkled with a
youthful vitality, and her skin, although freckled, was a
shimmering sort of pale, not the sickly sort. Like me.

“
I’m sorry I woke you,” I
said quietly.

“
No, baby, I was already
up and about to get in the shower when I heard you yell. Everything
okay?”