“So, basically, everything about your life will remain a secret.”
“We all got secrets, Chelle. All of us. Even you. But club business remains club business, it’s nobody else’s business. That’s one of the fuckin’ rules and I ain’t breakin’ any rules ‘cause I don’t want my colors stripped.”
His colors stripped? She dug deep into her newly-found, but still limited, MC knowledge. “I read on a website about a brother having his colors stripped.”
Shade groaned and scraped a hand over the black wiry hairs of his beard.
He said he’d answer what he could, so... “You lose everything when that happens.”
“Yeah.”
“And depending on why they’re stripped that could be... deadly.” Or bad enough to the point where the offender wished he was dead.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t want you to lose everything, so I won’t push if you can’t answer.”
He twisted his head to look at her. Relief. That was what was in his face.
“All I’m askin’, beautiful.” He grabbed her hand and lifted it. His gaze remained locked with hers as he pressed it to his lips.
His mouth parted and he tucked one of her fingers inside and sucked it while his tongue swirled around it. He could distract her from a topic he didn’t want to discuss way too easily, damn it.
Her lips parted and she released a ragged breath. It didn’t take much for him to make her wet and wanting. A look, a word, a touch and she melted.
They hadn’t had intercourse for the last week. They’d done other things but not that. She had wanted to make sure he was on the road to recovery before they did. When Jemma stopped by earlier, her opinion was that he was.
That meant it was time to take things back to where they were. Maybe not completely yet, but close.
She’d gone for years without sex. Since she started having it with Shade she struggled if it was only a few days. That was how good he was.
He always made her want more. More of him, more of what he could do to her, more of... everything.
And here he was in her bed right now. At least for another week. No reason to go to sleep wanting a man who wanted her and who conveniently slept by her side. Especially when his almost black eyes told her clearly what he wanted.
More than her mouth on him, like this morning. More than his fingers inside her, like last night. More than his lips on her breasts.
So much more.
His voice was thick when he asked, “Girls here?”
“Yes, they’re watching a movie downstairs with some friends.” When she left them, the five girls were cuddled up on the couch together under blankets, passing around large bowls of popcorn and containers of Ben & Jerry’s, engrossed in the latest Jason Momoa movie.
He pressed her hand to his boxer briefs and slid her palm along his erection. It pulsed beneath her fingers, causing everything on her to pulse, as well.
When she sank her teeth into her bottom lip, he pulled her lip free and brushed his thumb across it. “How quiet can you be?”
That question sent a shiver of anticipation through her. “Are you okay for that?”
“Jemma said not to put weight on my leg yet. That’s it.”
She curled her fingers around his hard-on, gave it a stroke downward and cupped his balls. They were hot and soft and this morning she had her mouth all over them while his fingers dug into her hair, encouraging her.
Her, “Well, pressing your knee into the bed can’t be good for that,” came out a bit breathless.
He pursed his lips and only stared at her.
“Oooh.” She smiled slyly. “You want me to do the work.”
“My tongue’s gonna do the work when you sit on my face. Then my dick’s gonna do the work when you sit on it after you come all over my beard.”
She raised a wait-a-minute finger as she slipped from the bed. “I’m going to lock the door.”
“That’d be good.”
On her way back to the bed, she tugged her panties off from under the vintage-style nightgown she bought just to wear for him. The baby doll design was antique white with eyelet lace around the edges and made her breasts look like they were twenty years younger. The nightgown covered the important bits but still made her feel sexy as hell and Shade loved it.
The first time she came out of the master bathroom wearing it, he’d instantly gotten hard. Unfortunately, it had only been the second night after his “being jumped at a bar,” so they couldn’t do anything about it since he was still dealing with the effects of a concussion at the time.
But right now, his brain wasn’t rattled and his cock was hard, so she didn’t bother going back to her side of the bed, she climbed on and right onto his lap instead. His cotton-covered cock flexed against her bare pussy.
He needed to get rid of those boxer briefs. Like now.
“You got wraps?” he growled, his fingers digging into her hips.
She didn’t. They hadn’t needed them until now. Though, even now they really didn’t need them, did they?
She rolled her lips under and tried her best to feign innocence. “Did I forget to mention I got my tubes tied after Josie?”
He tipped his head up from studying her cleavage to look her directly in the eye. “Yeah, you kinda forgot to mention that.”
“Welllll, after having Josie, I didn’t want to raise a third baby by myself while Brendan was serving overseas, so we decided to stop at two.” They had wanted to wait until after his time served to start a family, but that plan got shot to hell. Every time Brendan came home, they spent so much time having sex, they sometimes forgot to use a condom. The only regret she had when it came to those two unplanned pregnancies was the girls never getting to know their father before he got killed in action.
Shade’s, “For fuck’s sake, Chelle, all this time...” drew her back to the bed.
“Pregnancy isn’t the only reason to use condoms,” she reminded him.
“No shit. But been dyin’ to fuck you without one.”
He was? “You were?”
He shot her a look.
“Haven’t you always used one, though?” Please say yes.
“Yeah, beautiful, always used a wrap.”
“Well, then... What are we waiting for?”
Chapter Twenty-One
Julian stared at the cracked sugar cone on the hot blacktop surrounded by a muddy-looking puddle of what used to be chocolate and vanilla swirled ice cream. His heart thundered in his chest because he knew what came next, and worse, he could do nothing about it.
Every time he ended up standing in that parking lot, the same event happened over and over. He knew how it ended but he couldn’t change it, no matter how hard he tried.
They’d end up in that big room in a big house in a crowd of strange men. The men Julian couldn’t stop from touching and poking at his mommy as she stood naked on a raised platform at the front of the room.
Like livestock.
No matter how much he fought it, he couldn’t stop himself from turning around and seeing his mommy standing behind their minivan encouraging him to hurry up.
He couldn’t stop himself from crying over losing his ice cream. That ice cream cone he bugged her to buy him. When he glanced over his shoulder, the ice cream was gone, the pavement bare. Like it never existed.