Lead (The Brazen Bulls MC, #8)

by Susan Fanetti

  Her mother had never known this.

  That understanding broke Sage’s numb shock. Grief rushed up from her soul, crashed through her chest, surged into her head, and tears came. She clung to Becker and wept.

  He closed her up even more tightly, rolled her to her back, wrapped both his arms around her, sheltered her with his whole body and simply held her while she sobbed for her mother.

  Not for her death, but her life. Her ceaselessly difficult, endlessly sad, eternally painful life.

  Sage held on, pressed her face to Becker’s shoulder, and cried until she was dry. Even after, she held on as the grief ebbed back and found the place it would live inside her. His body made a nook for her private sorrow. She was encompassed, sheltered, safe.

  But she wasn’t close enough. She needed to be closer, to be fused to him, to crawl inside him and stay.

  She turned her head and kissed his throat, right where his pulse beat, steady and sure. When she put her tongue out and tasted that spot, the warm salt of his skin, his chest swelled with a deeper breath.

  Needing more, Sage kissed him again, sucked his flesh between her teeth, moved higher, over the sandpaper of his blunt jaw, across his cheek. She found a wet trail there; her tears had made his own fall.

  His head turned, lifted up as if he wanted to see her, but she followed him, kept her mouth on him, made her way to his mouth, and claimed it.

  Becker kissed her, but when she opened her mouth and pushed her tongue against his lips, he pulled back. The room was dark, but she discerned his face, his eyes, his worry.

  “I’m here with you,” she said, unable to find a better way to say all that she needed, all that she felt.

  “Yeah, you are.” His head came down again, and his lips found hers. This time, he claimed her mouth, opened his, pushed his tongue in deep. Sage sighed at the relief of it. To be claimed, to be loved, to be here with him. Safe.

  While their mouths moved together, their tongues twisting and twining in that shared caress, Becker’s hand went to her hip, found the slim band at the side of her underwear, and yanked it down. She helped him, lifting her ass, flexing her legs, kicking the flimsy fabric away. He writhed to shed his own underwear and then shifted his legs, settling between hers. All that was left between them was the thin cotton of the skimpy little beater she’d put on that morning, in a different life.

  No—not a different life. Wasn’t that the point? Wasn’t that what she felt now, the source of her guilt, and of her relief? This life, with Becker, in this house, away from her mother’s life—it was hers. The life she had now, the life she’d had this morning, and the life she’d have tomorrow. Here with him. Safe.

  Propped on his elbows, Becker loomed over her, his heavy, hard, hot body on hers, pressing her down, covering her, sheltering her. His hands tangled in her hair, held her head. His mouth covered hers and claimed it over and over. Sage lifted her legs, circled his hips, crossed her ankles at the small of his back.

  The tip of his cock brushed her folds, and the bright spasm of pleasure made her moan. He canted his weight onto one arm and threw the other arm out, toward the table at the side of the bed, the drawer that held their condoms.

  Without thinking about anything at all more than her want and need, of him, for him, with him, Sage threw her own arm out and clamped her hand on his forearm. His muscles flexed under her fingers.

  “No, don’t.”

  Becker went still, his arm extended, hovering in space, her hand clasping what she could of it. In the dark room, she felt his eyes locked on hers, burning deep.

  “Sage.”

  The idea—the urge, the need—formed as she lay beneath him. What she wanted for her whole life was him. She wanted to be full of him, to be part of him, and for him to be the same of her. She wanted him all through her, in her blood and bone and every molecule of her body. She wanted this life he’d given her, quiet and simple here in their home, no matter what went on beyond its walls.

  She wanted to be his family, to make a family with him.

  “I want ...” the words fell away, too heavy and full with need to stay aloft.

  Still, he was still. Staring down at her, his body frozen, except for the swell of his breaths and the beat of his pulse. His cock was a solid heft against her pussy.

  “Are you sure?”

  Pulling softly on the arm she held, she drew it close again. “I want.” This time, those two words made a complete sentence and said everything.

  His arm settled where it had been, folded so that its elbow took its share of his weight. He stared through the dark at her for a few more seconds. Sage stared back.

  Finally, he flexed his hips, and his bare cock slid into her.

  “Fuck. Jesus,” he groaned as he pushed all the way in, steadily but not too quickly.

  Right then, and not before, she remembered that she’d been afraid of the size of him without the lube of a condom. She needn’t have worried. The stretch was a bit more, but his heat, the soothe of his skin, only him, just them—it was so good, so much better, so real, that there was no pain at all. He fit her as he should. Completely. Just them. Fully joined. Nothing else.

  Once seated inside her, he was still again, staring down at her. His arms had taken on a subtle tremor. Sage laced her hands together on the back of his neck.

  “I love you, Beck. Love me.”

  “I do. I really do.”

  His head came down, his forehead rested on hers, and he loved her.

  It was slow, and quiet. A little sad, with the sound of her earlier tears a dim echo yet in the room. But more than anything, as this man filled her and held her and loved her, Sage was safe. She was here with him.

  She came quietly, the orgasm rolling up over her, not surprising her, not slamming through her, not making her see stars or stopping her breath. Light and calm vibrated through her in waves. Becker came the same way, with a soft groan and a tightening of his hips. He came inside her, and then he relaxed on her, still holding some of his weight, the pounds that would be too much for her, in his arms.

  His head dropped to the pillow beside her head. Sage held on.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  When Becker offered to call in the club to clean out Sage’s mother’s house, she’d emphatically rejected the idea; she didn’t want anyone else to see what her life had been. Rad, Gunner, and Caleb had been in the house already, but she didn’t even want them there.

  She wouldn’t hear of staying away herself and letting him handle it on his own, either.

  The Bulls had all known need and strife of one kind or another, and so had their women. He knew there’d be no judgment or pity, only understanding.

  Still, he understood—it was less about who’d see the house and all about who’d see her deal with her conflicted, uncomfortable, guilty grief in the place where the last roots of her childhood had shriveled. And she couldn’t stay away because it was her childhood, her former life, her mother, that had died.

  So, the morning after they’d picked up a metal canister holding all that was left of Patsy Cleary and dumped it in a pretty cove at Keystone Lake, and three days before the landlord wanted possession of the house, Becker put Sage in his truck and drove around the block to the last home she’d shared with her mother.

  Such as it was.

  For most of the morning, they worked in quiet, with few words between them but the questions Becker had about what to keep. Her answer was almost always no—she wanted virtually nothing from this life to live on in her new one. As for what was trash and what could be donated, he used his own judgment, and they worked through the house, room by room, leaving the dining room to the very end, in unspoken agreement.

  Becker made sure that he did the kitchen, so Sage wouldn’t have to confront that mountain of vile decay. He’d dealt with plenty of rot and gore in his life, but even so, by the time he’d cleared out all the filthy dishes and rotting, verminous garbage, his stomach was sour. The stench was just incredible—the ro
t in the kitchen, the dusty neglect and general uncleanliness all around, and the lingering reek of a gory, ignominious death.

  When he’d come upon her mother’s body, he’d been immediately sure that she’d killed herself. Not simply because her body was alone in an otherwise empty house—there had been enough time between the shot and their getting to the scene for someone to have fled out the front door. No, the scene itself had told him: the truth was in the lay of the sawed-off on the floor—movies got it wrong; when you blew your own head off, you weren’t still holding the gun in death, and the brisk force of the firing meant it didn’t just drop away, either. It was in what was left of her body, too—the way it slumped partway against the cratered wall, and in the way she was dressed. Most particularly, the state of the house told the truth. A corpse had been living here even before she’d put a sawed-off barrel in her mouth and pulled the trigger.

  But damn, she’d wanted to make sure she got the job done the rest of the way.

  He hated that Sage had seen it, that he hadn’t been quick enough to pull her back. But she was a tough little shit, his girl. After sleeping through most of that bad day, she’d been steady since. Sad and quiet, but strong and moving on.

  He heaved three heavy-duty trash bags into the back of his F-250. They’d already done a run to Goodwill—that load hadn’t been nearly as full as this one for the dump. Not much in that house had been worthy for anyone to use. Sage had offered up some decent tools and a few pieces of cookware to the next-door neighbors. But by Becker’s estimate, a good eighty percent of the shit in this house was going straight to the dump.

  Here in the early afternoon, there wasn’t much left but the dining room, which they’d avoided all morning, until Becker had carried the last of the boxes stacked in there out to his truck. Now all that was left was the death scene.

  The cops had, as cops did, left the mess behind. They’d collected the body, done a cursory collection of evidence, and turned their back on the rest. Becker had been glad—in fact, he’d done all he could to see to it they didn’t get overly curious, because he didn’t want Sage to have to deal with them—but what they’d left behind was not pretty. Rad and Caleb had gone with him that same night, after the cops were done, and cleaned up the worst of it, but signs of her mother’s violent death remained: the burnt-red tint of old blood stained the plaster wall’s deep crater and myriad divots, and streaked thickly downward to the floor, where it had soaked into the dried-out planks as it spread out into a malformed circle. One part of the stain arced out from the pool like a tongue; Becker could still see Patsy’s ghost-white hand lying there as if it floated in the blood, an almost perfectly round chunk of her own brain in the palm of her hand.

  Deciding to take this load to the dump and drop Sage at home before he came back to deal with the dining room, Becker went back in to collect her.

  She was carrying a yellow plastic mop bucket, full of soapy water, into the dining room. She wore pink rubber gloves that came nearly to her elbows. Her hands met at the middle of the bucket’s handle, and her little biceps strained at the weight of her burden.

  “I’ll take care of that, honey.” She ignored him and went to the corner where her mother’s body had been. Becker followed her and crouched beside her, covering her hands with his. “You don’t need to do this.”

  “Everything else is done.”

  “I know. So let’s get the truck to the dump, and I’ll come back later and do this.”

  Shaking her head as she shook his hands from hers, she picked up the scrub brush floating in the pail. “No. I want this done. I want to do it.”

  “Then let me help.” He got up, went to the kitchen, and grabbed a big sponge from their box of cleaning supplies. She didn’t protest when he got to work on the wall as she scrubbed at the floor.

  After a few minutes of quiet scrubbing, Sage sat back on her heels. “I think she saw us.”

  He looked down at her. She’d bound her hair up in a kind of a twist and had one of his bandanas tied around it, like a housewife from the Forties. In another setting, with her little denim cutoffs and black sleeveless top, the look would be adorable, like rockabilly or something. Even now, even here, Becker saw the subtle shape of the barbells in her nipples and would have been lying if he’d said he couldn’t imagine them in his mouth.

  Sick fuck, he was.

  He focused on what she’d said, which he didn’t understand. “What do you mean?”

  She stood and went to the window. He and his brothers had taken down the cheap curtains and vinyl mini-blinds after the cops were done; they’d been covered in congealing blood and gore. When he stood beside Sage now, he saw that they’d missed the blood on the glass and in the creases of the frame.

  “You can see our yard from here. The peach tree.”

  He looked where she was looking. From here, none of the obstacles between the houses—the shed, the fence, the old magnolia in this yard—obstructed the view. Becker smiled at Lemmy, who was chasing something in the air—a butterfly, maybe—around the yard, his tail wagging with gleeful abandon.

  “Yeah,” he said, not understanding the significance.

  “That day. I was lying on the blanket, reading. Lemmy was with me, playing with his frog. You came over to be with us. I put my head in your lap. I think she saw us.” Her shoulders lifted as she drew in a deep, sad breath. “I think she saw that I was really gone.”

  Now, he understood. “No, no, no, no, no, shortcake. Don’t go there.” He drew her into his arms. “She did not kill herself because she saw us laying out in the yard. She killed herself because she didn’t want to be alive anymore. End of story.” Getting a grip on the scrub brush in her hand, he tried to take it from her, but she pulled it away and turned out of his hold.

  Over the course of this week—longer than that, since she’d been beaten and turned away from her mother—Becker had learned something about the way Sage handled sorrow. When she was happy or angry or irritated or playful, or just about any other way of feeling, she threw it out into the world with both hands. But when she was sad, she curled up tightly and held it close.

  He’d been surprised at first, since she was so effusive in everything else, but it was the tendency to pull inward that he empathized with. He wasn’t especially demonstrative himself, and he understood the need to keep bad feelings close, where their flame might stay small and eventually gutter out. He also knew that sometimes the flame flared up and burned everything up from the inside.

  So he kept close to her and caught her before she ran headlong down gasoline-soaked paths of guilt like that one, but otherwise, he let her be sad. Now, he let her go back to scrubbing, and he went back to work as well.

  After a while, she said, “I never knew what to do to make things better for her. I think I made it worse. I think I helped her be fucked up.”

  “It wasn’t your job to make things better for her. Women like your mom, and mine, they don’t know another way to be. And we were their kids. They were supposed to make things better for us.” He crouched before her. “I know you need to think shit like this, and I want you to keep saying it out loud for me, okay? I don’t want that getting trapped in your head.”

  She lifted sad brown eyes to his. “I don’t miss her. I feel sad, and guilty, but under all that, I feel like I can breathe. I’m sitting here scrubbing her brains out of the floor, and I feel relieved.”

  He dropped the sponge into the red water and grabbed the brush from her as well. “Okay, c’mere.” Standing, he pulled her to her feet, and he led her through the kitchen and out the back door. Once he had her down the steps and in the yard, he turned and set his hands on her shoulders. “You remember how we met?”

  She nodded, but he told her anyway.

  “You were standing on those steps, holding the same shotgun, and that bastard who hurt you had a gun in your mom’s mouth. When I stopped him, it was me she yelled at. And that was hardly the first time she told me to get out of the way of
that guy and the hurt he brought. So, Sage, when I tell you your mom’s life was her own doing, I mean what I say. And when I tell you that of course you’re relieved all that poison is out of your life, I mean what I say. It’s fucking healthy. You hear?”

  Again, she nodded, and then she dove in, clamping her arms around his waist, burying her face in his t-shirt.

  He held on and kissed her head. “Let’s get this done and close the door, shortcake. Put it all in the rear view.”

  ~oOo~

  Becker finished the chapter and closed the book—East of Eden, a book he’d read so often he’d worn through two paperbacks, and this third one was starting to look a little raggedy, too. As he set it on his nightstand, he saw the time on his clock. Damn, it was past two in the morning. When he got involved in a book, even one he had memorized, time disappeared. Books were like time machines—they grabbed you by the throat and took you away from your life, and then they made that life speed by.

  He’d discovered reading in prison, when he’d most needed his life to speed by. By the time of his release, he’d read easily a thousand different books, and his favorites multiple times. The prison library had hardly been stocked with overwhelming variety or many new titles, but he’d read everything, from mechanical manuals to translated French poetry. He’d read every single one of Shakespeare’s plays at least once—Henry V he’d read a dozen times by now. He’d read Jane Austen and Mary Shelley. He’d read Dickens and Eliot. He’d read the Romantic poets. He’d read Melville and Hawthorne, Emerson and Thoreau. Whitman and Dickinson. Steinbeck and Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald. He’d read philosophy and history. Autobiographies and biographies. Books about art and music. Self-help books and how-to manuals. About ten cookbooks. And a book from the 1950s on home decorating.

  Those strange tastes had followed him throughout his life, and he would still read nearly anything, or at least give it a chance. This summer, he’d even tried some of Sage’s books about gay vampires. He was pretty sure they were gay. They seemed inordinately interested in clothes and shopping. When they weren’t turning little girls into monsters, they spent their time draped over fancy furniture in fabulous clothes.