Craving Redemption

by Nicole Jacquelyn

  “We just rode right up. No one was fuckin’ there. Crime scene tape on the doorways, blood all over the floors, but not one fuckin’ cop. Idiots.”

  “I’m guessing Jimenez has more pull than we’d originally thought. Houses are usually full of cops for at least twenty-four hours after a murder, taking prints and staging shit.” He looked deep in thought, and I didn’t ask how he knew police procedure so well. He was remembering something, and his past wasn’t any of my business.

  “I’m gonna get back to Callie. She’s probably climbing the walls.”

  “Yeah, I’ll be in there in a bit. Let the boys know to get their shit off the bikes and outta the Yukon. Gonna need bedding—we’re staying here for the night. Something’s not sitting right.”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I was glad they weren’t headed to a hotel. I sure as fuck wasn’t leaving Callie and Rose and I was glad Poet had the same idea. Unfortunately, Rose’s trailer wasn’t very big and it was going to be a tight fit, even with the boys sleeping on the floor. I knew Poet was gonna take the couch, which left me with the tiny-ass loveseat.

  When I got back in the trailer, Callie was sitting at the edge of the couch with her knees pulled up to her chest. The boys had made themselves comfortable around the table playing cards with Rose, so I let them know to get their shit and then I headed toward my girl. She was wearing a long-ass nightgown and I couldn’t help but smile at how innocent she looked. It was a big difference from the tiny-ass shorts she’d been wearing when I met her.

  She scooted into my side when I sat down beside her, and tension I hadn’t noticed seeped from my shoulders. Yeah, the girl had completely fucked me.

  “Gram gave me a nightgown,” she muttered into my armpit as I wrapped an arm around her.

  “I see that. It looks… cozy,” I told her with a smile, glad she was talking without crying.

  “Shut up,” she huffed. “I look like I belong on fucking Little House on the Prairie.”

  Her words were like a punch to the chest and I chuckled, wheezing like I couldn’t catch my breath.

  I’d seen her relieved, and I’d seen her embarrassed, and I’d seen her confused and scared. But I’d never seen her confident or sarcastic. Up until that point, I’d wanted her. I’d wanted to take care of her, pamper her, and make her feel safe. But her dry tone of voice had an entirely different effect. It made me want to bend her over the damn couch we were sitting on and fuck her. Hard. Holy shit. I readjusted my suddenly tight jeans and settled more comfortably in the couch before saying anything else. That was all I fucking needed—for Rose or one of the boys to see me tenting my jeans like an asshole.

  A couple hours later, Callie fell asleep and I carried her into Rose’s bed for the night. The boys were setting up the sleeping arrangements and I didn’t want them to wake her up. The girl looked tired as hell even when she was actually sleeping. Once I had her settled, I grabbed a blanket from Rose and got situated on my tiny-ass bed for the night. My back was going to kill me in the morning.

  It wasn’t too long after the house had fallen asleep that I woke up to someone moving around in the living room. When I opened my eyes, I saw Callie quietly making her way through the guys on the floor. She was stepping around them when she could, and over them when she had to, walking on her toes as if that was going to help. I could see that most of them had woken up—men didn’t get far in this life if they let their guard down, and they would have felt the shift as soon as she came out of Rose’s room—but none of them moved or made a sound.

  As she was stepping over Hammer’s chest, one of the brothers that came down with Poet, I saw his eyes open and his head move slightly as if to look up her nightgown. Fucking prick. I didn’t want to startle her by saying anything, but when his hand moved as if to grab her, I’d had enough.

  “Touch her and I’ll fuckin’ gut you, brother or not,” I growled, my voice raspy from sleep.

  Callie squeaked and jumped, almost falling into the men sleeping on the floor. She barely caught herself and ran to me, stepping in any open space she could find between the bodies. When she got to me, she dove, landing sprawled on my chest and almost clipping my nose with her chin. I grunted as her knee came really close to my balls, and quickly moved her legs so one was between me and the back of the loveseat and the other pulled high on my waist. Fuck, even with her landing on me like a ton of bricks, my dick still sprang to attention.

  “I thought you left,” she murmured quietly in my ear. She’d straightened out one of her arms so it was lying down our sides, but the other was across my stomach and bent with her hand on my bare chest. I should’ve left my goddamn shirt on, but it was hot as fuck in the room with so many people in it and I hadn’t wanted to sweat through the only clean one I had left. I was seriously reconsidering my choice when she started kneading my chest, like she was making sure I was actually there. When her hand strayed close to my nipple, my dick practically jumped in my jeans and I quickly grabbed her hand and held it in the middle of my chest.

  “Not going anywhere,” I reassured her with a kiss on her forehead. I thought about telling her to go back in with Rose, but I knew she wouldn’t sleep if she did. I had a feeling the minute she thought I was asleep, she’d be on her way back out, waking up the men on the floor again.

  “I’m sorry I’m being such a pain in the ass,” she whispered, relaxing her body into mine. “It scares me when I can’t see you.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything. I just listened to her breathe until a little snore came out of her mouth. Her nightgown had ridden up, so her bare inner thigh was pressing against my stomach, and the heat in the room was making our skin sweat and stick together. Fuck me; I was never going to be able to sleep. I took a deep breath, pulled the thin blanket Rose had given me over us so the boys didn’t catch a peek of her ass, and tried to get my dick under control.

  I must have finally fallen asleep, because I woke up to a bit of sunlight shining through the windows and Rose standing over us with a soft look on her face. It took me a second to figure out where I was, and I almost relaxed, but it was then that I realized that while one of my arms was innocently draped over Callie’s back, the other was beneath the blanket gripping her thigh, my hand so high up that my index finger was just barely inside her underwear and resting on hot, soft skin.

  Chapter 14

  Callie

  I woke up the next day alone on the loveseat. I felt like an idiot for climbing in with Asa, but when I’d woken up in the dark my instinct had been to find him. I lay next to Gram, trying to force myself to stay put, but I couldn’t. My anxiety had built and built until I’d finally crawled out of bed and went to find him.

  Now I couldn’t see him anywhere. The house was really quiet, a big change from how crowded and noisy it had been the night before. When I sat up and started to fold the blanket I was using, I noticed two men out of the corner of my eye. They were sitting casually at the table, turned toward me, and the dark haired one I’d kicked in the face gave me a little smile.

  “Your Grandma went with Poet to get your brother from the airport,” he informed me, watching closely. Knowing that I must have looked like a basket case the day before, I met his eyes calmly and nodded nonchalantly, as if to prove that I wasn’t going to start screaming and running around the house like a lunatic.

  I’d caught some kind of second wind, and the weak little girl I’d been the day before was pushed to the back of my mind as I stood up slowly and turned my back to him. I was afraid, that feeling wasn’t going away, but somehow in my sleep I’d formed some sort of a barrier between my emotions and my actions. I wasn’t panicking. The fear was a throbbing mass in my belly, constant but controllable.

  I focused on cleaning up my sleeping area and quickly walked to Gram’s room to get dressed before I asked where Asa was. I was trying to act relaxed, but it felt like I was going to jump out of my skin. I knew Gram wouldn’t have left me alone with those guys
if she didn’t trust them, but I was still uncomfortable that they’d been in the room while I slept. The longer I was awake, the more aware I was that I hadn’t seen Asa, and by the time I was dressed, I was almost in a full-blown panic. I guess I wasn’t as calm as I’d thought. I knew it wasn’t rational. I knew that I was acting like a freak, clinging to him when I barely knew him. He was probably irritated as hell that I wouldn’t leave him alone. But I couldn’t stop myself; it felt like he alone could protect me from the outside world.

  I stayed in Gram’s room for as long as I could, straightening her bedding and going through the bag I’d brought with me. Asa hadn’t packed much, but at least he’d remembered the essentials. I found my iPod at the bottom of my bag and held it to my chest, thankful that he’d thought to pack that small piece of technology. It was silly, but it felt like one piece of normalcy in my suddenly upside-down life.

  When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I took a deep breath and made my way out into the living room. The men were still sitting at the table, and I stepped as close to them as I could make myself, stopping six feet away. I battled with myself whether or not to ask where Asa was when he suddenly walked into the kitchen from the small hallway leading from the bathroom. He was fully dressed, his hair wet, and he held a towel up to his beard, rubbing it from side to side.

  I stood in silence until he noticed me, running my tongue over the cuts in my mouth to keep me from speaking. I catalogued where my braces had rubbed against my cheeks and tried to focus on remembering if I had wax in my purse or not, acting as though I wasn’t waiting for him to acknowledge me. I refused to be the one who spoke first or to run to him like I wanted to; I needed him to come to me.

  “Hey, sleeping beauty. These boys wake you up?” he asked me with a small smile, walking slowly toward where I was standing. The men at the table hadn’t noticed that I’d come out of the bedroom, and both their heads swiveled around quickly in surprise.

  “No, they didn’t wake me,” I replied, begging him silently to come closer.

  He seemed to understand what I needed, or maybe he needed it too, because he came right to me, wrapping his arms around my waist and lifting me up in a bear hug until my feet were dangling off the ground. His beard tickled across my neck and I grasped his shoulders tighter in response. It was exactly what I needed.

  I was disappointed when he let me down, but he kept his hands on my hips once my feet were safely on the floor. He was about to say something, but I’d never know what it was, because just seconds later the front door banged open. The noise startled me so badly that I jumped up, knocking my forehead into his chin as I wrapped my arms and legs around him. I wasn’t tall enough, so I ended up lower than I’d wanted and ended up pulling and scratching my way up his chest until his hands gripped the back of my thighs and hoisted me the rest of the way.

  It must have only taken seconds, but by the time I was safely in his arms, I heard my brother yelling.

  “Who the hell is he? What the fuck? Let go of my sister!”

  I wanted to go to him. His voice was so strained it was cracking like it hadn’t done in years, and I knew he would be embarrassed, but I was too wrapped up in making myself breathe that I didn’t have the capacity to comfort my brother.

  “Cody, that’s Callie’s friend. You just leave them be a minute and she’ll come talk to you,” Gram told him in a no-nonsense voice I’d heard before.

  “Screw that! That guy’s like forty years old! What the hell is going on?” he yelled again, his voice once again his usual deep tenor.

  They argued some more, but I didn’t catch what they were saying, because all of a sudden we were moving and Asa was speaking quietly in my ear.

  “It’s all good, baby, but you need to climb down. Your brother’s about to stab me with one o’ your Gram’s kitchen knives and she’s gonna be pissed,” he told me in an amused voice, his hand rubbing soothingly up and down my back.

  I’d finally gotten my breathing under control, so I slid my legs down the outside of his body and stepped away, mumbling, “Sorry,” before I faced my brother.

  Cody and I faced each other across the room, both of us uncomfortable with our audience. Any other time, we would have already been hugging and pushing each other around, but we were so far out of our comfort zones that we just stood there staring. He didn’t want to seem like a pussy to the men who filled the house, and I was embarrassed that he’d just seen me wrapped around Asa, so neither of us made a move until I finally found my voice.

  “I don’t think he’s forty. Maybe thirty,” I told him with a small grin.

  That was all it took.

  We met in the middle of the room, wrapping our arms around each other as he swung me around slowly. It was what we always did when we saw each other for the first time during his visits. A few years before, he’d grown taller than me, and to prove that he was bigger he’d swung me around, teasing that he wasn’t the little brother any longer.

  Having my brother near always made me feel like the world was right again, but this time I knew it was just an illusion. Nothing would ever be right again, and breathing in my brother’s familiar scent reminded me in a flash that I was the reason we’d lost our parents.

  How I’d managed to put it from my mind, I didn’t know, but the minute he set me on my feet, I stumbled to the side as if hit, hearing the voices of the men who killed my parents inside my head.

  They were calling me by name.

  He reached out for my arm, an alarmed look on his face, but I pushed him away, unable to bear his comfort.

  “It’s my fault,” I told him, surprised. “Oh, my God. It’s my fault they’re dead.”

  His face drained of color as he watched me, but I didn’t see anything else because I was running for the bathroom with my hand over my mouth as if to hold in the vomit that was pressing at the back of my throat.

  Chapter 15

  Callie

  I wasn’t sure if I should be thankful that I didn’t actually throw up or disappointed that I hadn’t purged the nastiness in my stomach. I rinsed my face over and over with cold water, filling my mouth with the cool liquid—but nothing could take away the bitter taste of bile in the back of my throat.

  A knock at the door warned me that someone was coming in before it opened. When Gram pushed her head in and walked inside, I wished for a moment that I would’ve taken the time to lock it. She was pissed.

  “Calliope Rose Butler, what in God’s name was that all about?” she hissed at me, crowding me into the space between the countertop and the bathtub. “If I didn’t know you were hurting so bad, I’d slap your mouth for spewing crap like that to your brother!”

  I don’t think she expected me to answer her, but I felt the need to defend myself, so I stood up tall and answered her.

  “They were calling my name, Gram,” I told her, sucking in my breath with a deep sob, “I could hear them!”

  I clenched my eyes shut, the pain of those words seeping through my body as I lost all sense of control. I couldn’t hold it in anymore; my voice was making god-awful noises, like the barking of a seal. I couldn’t hold them back.

  Gram reached for me as I started to slide to the floor, wrapping one arm around my waist and the other at the back of my head.

  “You are absolutely not to blame here, Callie. Not at all, sweetheart,” she whispered into my hair. “You got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s all it was. Those men weren’t after you, baby.”

  The tone of her voice had me raising my head as I tried to understand what she was alluding to. She wasn’t giving away anything with her expression, but once she knew I was keeping it together, she pulled me by my waist out of the bathroom and down the hallway.

  Once we reached the kitchen, she sat me down at the table and walked to the fridge where her apron was hanging on the handle. It reminded me of a suit of armor as she tied it on; it was a way to protect herself.

  “Poet, Asa, and Cody!” she called to the
guys sitting in the little living room. “Get in here. We need to clear some things up.”

  As the men made their way to the table, she started pulling things out of the fridge and setting them on the kitchen counter. That’s when I knew that the conversation we were about to have wasn’t going to make anyone comfortable—Gram was cooking.

  As Asa walked into the kitchen, he stopped behind my chair and rested his hand on my shoulder for a second before sliding it across my collarbone and up my neck. When he reached my chin, he tilted my head back so I was looking at him upside down.

  “You okay, Sugar?” he asked me quietly. Once I nodded my head, he leaned down and kissed the spot between my eyes slowly. “Okay, I’m gonna sit over by your Gram so your brother can sit here. You need me, you just rub that spot between your eyes, and I’ll get you the fuck outta here. Okay, baby girl?”

  When I nodded again, he swept his hand back down my throat and moved to the other side of the table. He was so gorgeous; I couldn’t help but watch his movements, but when Cody sat down next to me I had to stop myself from cringing in guilt at the train of my thoughts.

  “Hey, sister. You okay?” he mumbled, his eyes sliding between Asa and me.

  “Yeah—” I cleared my throat and tried again. “Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry,” I told him, my eyes locked on his face. It seemed like every time I didn’t see him for a few months, his cheeks became more chiseled or he had just a little more scruff on his face. He was growing into a man, and I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with that.

  He opened his mouth to speak when Gram interrupted him, her voice rising above the noise of pots and pans clanging as she searched for the one she needed. “Poet and Asa, Callie is under the impression that those men were there for her. Apparently they were calling her by name. You boys want to explain that to her?”

  If I hadn’t turned to look at Asa when Gram started talking, I wouldn’t have noticed the color leach out of his face before he stood abruptly from the table. “Callie—”