He kept going, “So promise me, right now, my dick still inside you, you naked on top of me in my bed, us sharing what we just shared, us having a taste of what it’s like apart and knowin’ we’re better together, you won’t leave me. You won’t go in your head and take off no matter what. You stick with me until there’s nothing to stick to, if that ever happens.”
I could promise that.
“Okay, darlin’. I promise,” I said quietly. His eyes closed slowly then they opened, his hand sifted into my hair and pulled my mouth to his.
He gave me a soft kiss then his fingers squeezed my head gently.
I got the message, pulled slightly away and he whispered, “Hate losin’ you but you gotta shift off me, honey. Need to get rid of this condom then we can talk about shit I don’t wanna talk about with you sittin’ on my dick.”
My lips twitched, I whispered, “Okay,” then I shifted off him, slowly, taking my time, not liking the feel of losing him but really liking the way his eyes got lazy as I slid him out of me.
Once I’d lost him, he rolled me to my back, bent and kissed my chest, then kissed the underside of my jaw and rolled off the bed.
I watched him hike up his jeans as he walked away, appreciating his ass as he did so. Then my eyes shifted to the Chaos tattoo that spanned his back, and I appreciated that too. All of this I appreciated while appreciating the loose-limbed way his lanky body moved before he disappeared though a door.
I moved my eyes to the ceiling and smiled.
He had the same thoughts I had, exactly. He knew we needed to talk and he knew what we needed to talk about. He was going to give me that.
I rolled toward the edge of the bed, reached out a hand, and nabbed my panties, and since Shy’s tee was close, I nabbed that as well. I shimmied my panties on while lying on my back, sat up, pulled his tee over my head, and my smile came back.
His shirt smelled of him.
Another piece of paradise.
Arranging myself cross-legged on the bed, I looked around and surprise hit me, tamping down (but not forcing out, nothing could do that except, perhaps, the end of the world) my happy mojo.
Shy lived in an apartment that was just that little bit older and more worn than mine. The carpet wasn’t great. The walls needed a new coat of paint, and they needed that coat about seven years ago. There were boxes all around and no personal touches at all. It was like he hadn’t actually moved in yet.
I’d never been to his place, and I knew he spent a lot of time at the Compound, but I also knew that he’d had his own place for a long time.
Maybe he’d recently moved, though if this was a step up, I wondered where he used to live.
I was in the living room and, weirdly, so was his bed. It was at the wall to the back of the room, but there were two doors on the side of the living room and I figured at least one must be a bedroom. There was a couch shoved up against the side wall, but it was covered in boxes. There was also an old TV on a stand about two feet from the foot of the bed. There was one nightstand with a lamp on it, a bunch of change, packets of condoms, and that was it. No other furniture. No dressers. No bookshelves.
Nothing.
It was somewhat tidy considering any space filled with boxes wasn’t exactly tidy. It was also surprisingly clean. What it wasn’t was a home. Not even close to it. Not even a bachelor pad.
It looked like it was just a place to crash on occasion and store stuff.
This made me feel uneasy.
What didn’t make me feel uneasy was when Shy walked back into the room with his biker grace, his chest on display.
The instant I saw him, I pushed to my knees and moved to the edge of the bed.
Shy, his eyes on me, his face soft, did exactly what I wanted him to. He moved right to me.
I slid my arms around him and pressed my lips to his chest.
He curved a hand around one side of my neck, the other hand he glided up into my hair to curl around the back of my head.
There it was again, that feeling.
Loved.
Right.
I took my lips from his skin and put my chin there, seeing the “Love dies” tattoo.
I’d seen the two tats he had on the insides of his forearms and I’d suspected, like all the brothers, he had the Chaos emblem on his back. These three tats all the brothers had, the two Shy had inked into his forearms the brothers put wherever they wanted. The emblem on his back, all the guys had on their backs. They got the back tat the minute the Club voted them into full membership.
Having never seen his chest, I’d never seen the only tattoo he seemed to have outside the Chaos ones.
“Love dies?” I asked quietly, my gaze lifting to his.
His hand twisted gently in my hair even as his fingers at my neck dug in slightly, and he broke my heart when he replied quietly back, “Had a mom and dad I loved, they died. Had an uncle I loved who didn’t shield us from that bitch and that love died too. One night, I was seventeen, listenin’ to them fight, her bitchin’ yet a-fuckin’-gain about how they had two more mouths to feed, two more bodies to clothe so they couldn’t go to Hawaii or whatever the fuck, and I knew the next day her mood was gonna fuck up my week because she always took that shit out on him first, then on us. He didn’t take our backs during the fight, and I knew he wouldn’t take our backs the next day. That night, my love died for him. I was holdin’ on but it slipped away. I had a fake ID to buy booze so I snuck out the window and went to an all-night tattoo place.” He lifted a hand to indicate the tattoo. “Had this inked on me.”
My eyes moved to the tattoo but went back to Shy, and I leaned away a bit when he bent slightly.
His face got close and he continued, “I was young, pissed, and stupid, sugar. I don’t believe that shit anymore. But ink is ink, it doesn’t fade away. Unfortunately, it reminds me of a shitty time in my life every time I see it.” He grinned. “It also reminds me not to do anything permanently stupid because I’m pissed.”
I grinned back. “Good lesson to learn.”
His grin faded and he muttered, “Not sure I learned it.”
I knew what he was saying so I whispered, “Shy, don’t. We both fucked up and, obviously, it wasn’t permanent.”
He touched his forehead to mine and sighed before he ordered, “Shift, Tabby. I’m climbin’ in.”
I shifted. Shy climbed in then he claimed me. Resting with his head on the pillows, he tugged me over his body and turned so he was on his side, his body curled at the waist and knees and my hips were cradled in his lap, thighs over his hip, my back to the bed, head to the pillow. Shy came up on an elbow, head in hand and aimed his eyes at me.
“Rosalie,” he muttered.
Oh crap.
I braced and his gaze moved over my face even as his hand hit my belly and slid across, pulling me in and tucking me closer to his body.
He kept talking, “Until about an hour ago, we were seein’ each other. Now we are not.”
“Shy—” I started and his hand at the side of my waist gave me a squeeze.
“Let me finish, baby.” When I shut my mouth, he went on, “It was unpleasant, for her it came outta the blue and she was not pissed. She was hurt. Pissed I can deal with, hurt’s a lot harder. It sucked. It’s over. She’s sweet, nice, pretty, she’ll find someone else.”
“Um…” I began hesitantly, “being honest, although it’s good to know you had that conversation with her before we, uh… officially started things, I have to admit I’m not real sure you being equipped to scrape her off at the drop of a hat fills me with joy.”
“I get that, Tab. What you don’t get is, she isn’t you,” he returned, and I blinked, then my belly warmed.
When I said nothing, he gave me another squeeze and went on.
“By the end of our conversation, she admitted she’d wondered about you and me. The time I spent with you. When I’d walk away from her to take calls from you. How you disappeared for a month and I was in a shitty mood that whole
month. None of this I hid from her. I knew where my head was at about you but I had no clue your head would ever go there. Seein’ as I knew how I felt about you, bottom line, I dicked her over. It was uncool. I gotta live with that. You in my tee in my bed, I think will help.”
“That’s kinda cold, Shy.”
“It’s cold but it’s real, and it’s better that shit is done for her, for me, and for you so we can all move on, rather than me draggin’ it out in a pointless effort to cushion the blow for her that, in the end, would only make shit even shittier.”
“Yes, but you and I are moving on to something that’s good and, obviously, since it lasted a while for you two, when she started it with you, she thought she was moving onto something good too,” I pointed out.
“I saw you,” he replied, and my head tipped on the pillow as I felt my brows inch together.
“Pardon?”
“With that guy outside DCPA. You were wearin’ a red dress.”
My heart squeezed, I felt my eyes get big and I stared at him.
I remembered that night. That was the night Jason took me to see Les Mis.
“You saw me?” I asked.
“You were alone, looked beautiful but lost. You saw him, he got to you, you leaned into him, kissed him, made him laugh and then he kissed you. I saw it. All of it.”
Wow, he really did see this, and he remembered it better than I did until he just reminded me.
I didn’t know what to make of this or the reminder of Jason when I hadn’t thought of him once. Not once. Not once since Shy stormed into my apartment.
Before I could make anything of it, Shy kept talking.
“Didn’t like it,” he stated.
Not keeping up, I asked, “Didn’t like what?”
“Seein’ you with another guy. Didn’t like it.”
My hand slid up his arm at my waist and I whispered, “Shy, honey, I don’t—”
“I had the taste of you in my mouth, so sweet, for four years. Your grudge and you hatin’ me made that taste as bitter as it was sweet. Didn’t get it, what I was feelin’, not until I heard you were gettin’ hitched. Then I knew I was gone for you. Don’t know how it happened, just know it did. Seein’ you with another guy cut deep. Then you lost him, and I felt that for you. Even removed, I felt it. And when you called me, I realized if I didn’t get my shit together it would be empty pussy and parties for the rest of my life, and I’d never have a woman who was lost without me.” His hand moved from my waist to frame the side of my face, and his voice got quiet when he said, “Just to be clear, the point of findin’ that is not makin’ a woman be lost without me like Rosalie will be for a while until she moves on. The point of findin’ that is to have that feeling, be able to give that gift, to work at keepin’ it good so my woman never feels lost because she knows she’ll never be without me.”
I closed my eyes and my fingers curved spasmodically around his forearm.
That was beautiful, amazing, right, and the best part about it was, if I wasn’t mistaken, he wanted to give that to me.
I opened my eyes again when he kept talking.
“I’m sorry I had to bring him up but you gotta know that’s where I’m at. That’s why I stepped away from the empty pussy and parties and looked for somethin’ that meant somethin’. The problem was, I found you a month before Rosalie and I had the somethin’ that meant somethin’. I just didn’t think you wanted me that way and I liked spendin’ time with you enough, I was willin’ to take what you could give me.” His eyes warmed. “Now you’re willin’ to give me more and I’m gonna take that too.”
Suffice it to say, I was willing to give more to Shy, but he knew that and I had to go over some of the more important things he said.
So I commenced in doing that.
“You were gone for me?” I asked softly and got a grin in return as his face dipped closer.
“You and me may not have been tight since the day we first saw each other, but am I the kind of guy who hangs around listenin’ to bitches moan about work while ruining a dinner I gotta eat?” he asked.
No, he was absolutely not that kind of guy.
My belly got warmer and I whispered, “No.”
His eyes moved over my face again before they caught mine and he whispered back, “Gone for you.”
I closed my eyes and pulled in breath.
Yes, this was right.
“Sugar, look at me,” Shy ordered gently, and I opened my eyes. “Let’s go over it all. You are not Rosalie. That shit that went down with her will not go down with you. On that, baby, you got my word. When it goes around that we’re an us, we’re gonna face shit from the Club. How that’s gonna come, I don’t know, but I suspect it’ll come from your dad, even Cherry, and we gotta stand strong and prove to them this is what it is. And last and most important, to stand strong and prove it to them and ourselves, we gotta get our shit together and get outta this pattern where you go into your head and freeze me out and I get pissed and say shit that’s outta line. That means you gotta suck it up when I call you on your shit, and you gotta be willin’ to call me on mine. Are you with me on all this?”
I nodded.
After I nodded I found my mouth forming the word Why?
His head jerked slightly and his brows drew together before he repeated, “Why?”
It came out, I had to go with it.
“Yeah, Shy, why? Why me? Why us? You seem pretty sure, and I—”
I stopped talking when a big, beautiful white smile spread on his handsome face right before he burst out laughing.
He was good-looking always, better when he was laughing, but it kinda peeved me he was laughing when I wasn’t being funny.
“Shy,” I snapped into his laughter. He sobered, kind of, and focused on me. Then he started speaking.
“Baby, I got a piece of tail, I fuck,” he announced, and that didn’t make me any less peeved. I figured he noted that because he carried on, “I fuck and I do it hard. I take what I want and if the bitch gets off, golden. If she doesn’t let go enough to let me take her there, that’s not my problem.”
Again, this didn’t make me feel much better.
“I’m not sure why you’re sharing this with me, Shy,” I told him. “I’m equally unsure I feel real good about what you’re sharing.”
His hand shifted minutely so his thumb could move over my cheek and my lips before his eyes got intense and he explained, “I have never, not once, not in my life, made love to any woman. Not once. Not until what I just did with you.”
Oh.
Wow.
That was a good response.
“I had you up against the headboard, baby, but that was not fucking and it came natural. It’s what we have. I didn’t know that’s what I’d get but I’m pleased as fuck you gave it to me. That alone answers your why when it comes to the us part. As for why it’s you, I don’t know, I don’t care. It just is. It could be ’cause you’re gorgeous. It could be ’cause you’re funny. It could be ’cause I like the way you handled Pete when he lost his daughter. It could be ’cause you and me got Chaos in common, it’s us, it’s in our blood and this was meant to be. It could be ’cause I like the way you are with your family. It could be ’cause you get off on bein’ on the back of my bike almost as much as I get off straddling it. I figure it’s all that and more. I am not gonna analyze it. I’m gonna feel it ’cause I like it and that’s all there is to it.”
That response was even better.
“Do you wanna know why it’s you?” I asked quietly, my hand gliding up his arm to his chest.
“Don’t wanna piss you off, Tab, but I don’t give a fuck. I’m happy just rejoicin’ that it is.”
Another good answer.
“Now,” he continued, “you get that I’m pretty fuckin’ sure and my guess is, you’re here in my bed, my tee, and my arms, you’re pretty fuckin’ sure. So are we good?”
“Mostly,” I answered and his head tipped to the side.
“Mos
tly?” he prompted when I didn’t explain.
“Well, I didn’t get the work thing entirely sorted. I have a feeling they’ll let me renege on the contract since I told them I had a family emergency, but if I renege that means I don’t have a job.”
“Can you get your old one back?” he asked.
I shook my head. “They weren’t happy to see me go and they told me when I got back from Cape Cod, if I wanted to come back and they had an opening, they’d see what they could do, but I don’t wanna go back there, Shy. Since you and me, uh… had our thing, Dr. Dickhead got worse and began to target me. He used to spread his dickheadedness wide, but when I became his focus, I decided I couldn’t deal.”
“You talk to the administrators?”
“No, Shy and, darlin’ ”—I kept going quickly, because I knew by the change in his expression and the muscle that ticked in his jaw what he was going to say—“you don’t get how it works in that world, but doctors are king. I could get embroiled in a big drama but in the end it would be a lot of headache, time, and stress, and either I’d have to suck it up and carry on or I’d have to get out and move on. It’s just the way it is.”
“Lucky for you I don’t live in that world,” Shy replied and my belly lurched.
Uh-oh. I knew what that meant, and what that meant was that it was damage control time.
“Shy, you don’t and I don’t but I do have to exist in it for eight-hour shifts, five days a week.”
He leaned a bit away from me and declared casually, “No blowback.”
Great.
The guys said that word all the time and then things would happen, like a few years ago when Tyra got kidnapped and stabbed, like, a gazillion times. Granted, that huge drama wasn’t Dad’s fault. It happened because Tyra’s best friend Lanie’s messed-up fiancé was, well… totally freaking messed up. So messed up, he got both Tyra and Lanie dragged into it. Still, Dad also got in the mix, and no one had given me the full briefing but however it went down pissed my big brother Rush off so much he refused to approach the Club to become a recruit. This gave me the sense that Dad’s involvement upped Tyra’s vulnerability. She survived and she was a fighter, so she didn’t let what happened drag her down, not even a little bit.