Cruz : A Dark MC Romance (A Dark and Dirty Sinners’ MC Book 5)

by Serena Akeroyd

  Then, he surprised me again. He ran his hand over my legs, testing here and there, his touch firm as he looked at me, trying to see if I was uncomfortable. His fingers trailed over my thighs, up my belly, and to my arms, where he did the same thing, squeezing each finger, making sure I was okay.

  Just when I thought he'd tell me to get dressed for dinner, his hand snapped between my legs, and he yanked my panties off me.

  I yelped in surprise, then groaned when his fingers delved between the lips of my sex, unerringly finding my clit.

  Even as he stroked me there, he thrust three into my cunt as he started to fuck me, hard and fast. He scissored those fingers, wide and wider, before raking them up against the front wall of my pussy.

  It took me no time at all to scream out my orgasm, no time at all to be rolling on the bed again, falling onto my side as he carried on, not stopping fucking me with his hand even as I reduced his access, as he played with my clit and drove me wild as he gave me what I hadn't known I needed.

  Release.

  I howled when the second orgasm hit, but the third had me shuddering on the bed like I'd been tazered.

  When the slight break inside me happened, I didn't feel it. Just knew something was different. Strange.

  Then he moved his hand off my clit, pushed down on my belly, and I yelped as he fucked me harder, harder, harder still, until he didn't.

  Until he pulled his fingers free, and I came.

  Liquid trickled out of me in a short, pressurized mass, and I groaned as the pleasure was painful when it ricocheted around my being, darting off the joints that ached from being restrained, off the mind that was tired of thinking.

  "Open your mouth," he instructed, and I didn't think to disobey as he slipped his fingers between my legs, touching the mess he'd made before he shoved them between my lips.

  Like always, he wasn't tender. I didn't need that. He was rough. Hard. And he made me gag before he pulled back.

  Before he left me, a wreck on the bed, he pressed a kiss to my dirty mouth and whispered, "Get your breath back."

  Who the hell was I to argue?

  I lay there in my stupor. It could have been for five minutes or five hours for all I knew, but the scents of roasted chicken, baked veggies and a tangy sauce caught my interest.

  He didn't call my name, didn't tell me to get ready for dinner, so I didn't move.

  I didn't have the energy to.

  I just lay there, a little insensate, a lot blurry, and waited for his next order.

  Not that it came.

  He moved to the bed once more, and bundled me into his arms. When he carried me out of the bedroom and toward the living room, I saw the TV was playing The Goldbergs, and there was a dish on the coffee table. A large one. No knives or forks though.

  A little perturbed, my brow puckered as thoughts intruded, but I should have known he had it handled.

  Cruz had everything handled.

  Always.

  He seated us in the corner of the L-seater sofa, not stopping until my back was pressed against the cushions even as I was on his lap, still bundled in his hold.

  The coffee table was, I realized, closer than usual, so he didn't even have to lean forward to grab the bowl.

  He placed it on the cushion, then dipped down to grab a piece of chicken. He swirled it in a sauce I hadn't seen him make, then pressed it to my lips.

  "Open up, Indy."

  I obeyed.

  Keeping my forehead to his throat, I kept half my attention on his fingers when he fed me and on the TV, listening to the dialogue but also to his cues:

  "Chew, Indy."

  "Open your mouth, Indy."

  It was freeing. Not to think, not to even feel, just to do.

  And when he placed his sticky fingers on my chest, coating me with sauce, I thought nothing of licking his fingers clean, of sitting there, dirty.

  He wanted me like this?

  That was how he'd get me.

  And I was more than okay with that.

  Fourteen

  Bear

  "Hey, kid. What's up?"

  "A lot."

  Rex had written the playbook on not only a poker face, but a poker voice, but I heard him loud and clear.

  He didn't have to say a word, I just knew.

  "Need me to come back?"

  Silence.

  Then:

  "I swear, I'd think you were a goddamn mind reader if the idea of that didn't freak me the fuck out."

  My smirk made an appearance, not that he saw it, and most of it was wasted on the side of a warehouse where I was watching a couple of DEA agents pull a deal with a Colombian cartel that was trying to make a go of it just off the Florida/Georgia border.

  They'd already managed to sweep through Arkansas, peddling coke that had more goddamn rat poison in it than coca leaf, and were trying to merge into the upper eastern seaboard.

  I knew NYC was safe thanks to that lunatic Aidan O'Donnelly, but I'd never liked the Colombians on principal. They were nasty cunts. Always willing to come in, slice throats first, ask questions later.

  Not that they were my reason for being here.

  The DEA agents were.

  See, they weren't wearing their little Kevlar vests emblazoned with the alphabet, but that didn't mean they weren't here without being under the radar.

  Something stank worse than horse shit, and I knew I needed to get a level on it before things derailed even further.

  "I'm no mind reader, kid, I just know my son. What happened?” It hadn’t been that long since I’d seen him in West Orange. I rode up there every now and then to visit my Old Lady's grave, and he always seemed to know and would join me out by the MC’s cemetery. “You don’t normally call.”

  "This a secure line?"

  I snickered. "Mav gave me the phone, Rex. Yeah, I think it's secure."

  "Just checking." He sucked in a breath, which keyed me into the fact that he was trying not to lose his shit.

  And probably failing.

  On the outside, I didn't doubt he'd look calm. His men wouldn't know he was falling apart, because that poker face of his was world class.

  But I knew my boy. Better than he knew himself.

  "What is it, Rex?"

  "It's about Mom."

  Rene.

  The love of my fucking life.

  A woman I'd under-appreciated throughout our marriage, and who I spent more time worshipping now she was fucking dead.

  There was no justice in this world, I knew that already, but I wished I'd known that before I lost her.

  "What about her, son?"

  "She was murdered."

  The words didn't hit me as hard as I knew he thought they would.

  "Dad? Did you hear me? She was murdered? We think it was the Italians." He grunted. "Scratch that, we know it was the fucking Italians. It had to be."

  "I know, son. I know."

  "What?" It was a soft whisper of confusion at first, but it morphed into a boom of outrage. "You fucking knew?"

  "Of course I did. But I paid to cover it up, because I wasn't about to have your mother sliced and diced in a second autopsy that'd tell me the only truth I needed to know—she was dead, and someone paid a lot to cover it up.”

  "You're fucking messing with me, Dad, you have to be."

  "I ain't. Wish I was. Why do you think I left, boy? Why do you think I've been on the road all these years. I've been trying to find answers. Trying to find a way to get justice for her."

  "You should have told me," was Rex's stony retort.

  "Maybe I should have, maybe I shouldn’t have. All I knew was I needed you right where you are now, not joining me on the road with some fucked up vigilante plan in mind, half-cocked with no real chance of success.

  "I knew I needed you to rule over the men who are like family to us. Who need us to rule over them so they can feed their flesh and blood.

  "What use would you being with me, here and now, serve?"

  Silence hit
the other end of the line, and I wasn't mad. I got it. For a second, I wasn't even sure if he'd put the phone down on me, but I didn't hear a click, and slowly, I heard a soft soughing breath.

  "She didn't deserve to die."

  "No, son, she didn't. Not for my sins." The pain was still as acute as ever it was. Just as strong, just as numbing and soul-destroying, all at the same goddamn time.

  I'd thought I'd known loss in my life, but until Rene had died, I'd never truly understood it.

  And now that I'd pissed years away on playing at Prez, preferring to be with my brothers than her, that stupidity smacked me in the goddamn face every day.

  She was supposed to be here, riding bitch as we traveled down to Florida to winter there. We were supposed to be regular goddamn snowbirds, with me getting bored off my fucking rocker while she sunned herself and I took full advantage of her having an all over tan.

  I wasn't supposed to be sitting here, watching a bunch of corrupt agents doing a deal with some Colombian cunts who were bringing poison into my fucking country.

  I wasn't supposed to be hearing the heartbreak in my son's voice as he learned about his mother's end.

  Nothing about this was ever supposed to have happened, yet here we were, dealing with hard truths.

  Because reality fucking sucked.

  "Do you have any answers?"

  "Some. Not enough." I cleared my throat. “What I can tell you is that you’ll think your old man is losing it.”

  “Right. Like that's going to happen.”

  His derision wasn’t much comfort. “Rene died because I was sniffing around in places where I shouldn’t have.”

  “What do you mean?” I heard his tension. “You were—”

  “I’m not talking about cheating, Rex. Dammit. You know I stopped doing that a long time before she died.” I was still ashamed about it though. Even more so now when I’d fucking kill to be climbing into my Old Lady’s bed tonight, no other bitch’s. “I’m talking about some dirty pigs who managed to smear me with their shit.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  "I'll be home in a few days, son. I'm in Florida now. It'll take some time to get back. I don't ride as long as I used to but I’ll tell you when I’m home."

  When he didn't joke about me being an old man, I knew my kid was hurting. And who the fuck could blame him?

  “I don’t think I can wait that long, Dad.”

  “Eight years is a long time to wait,” I agreed, reaching up to pinch the bridge of my nose. “There’s a kind of organization within an organization. They work like specters, because they dump their crimes on people who look like they fit the bill.”

  “They stitch ex-cons up?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who’d do that?”

  “Law Enforcement,” I said gruffly. “But, look, I don’t want to talk about this anymore on the phone. Safe to say, I got us into this shit and I’m working hard to get us out of it.”

  “You’d have gotten further if you’d just cut me and the rest of the Sinners in on this, Dad. For fuck’s sake, what Mav can do—”

  “I don’t want to argue with you,” I said firmly. “I’ve done what I had to in order to keep you safe. Wasn't about to lose you as well as your mother. I’ll be there in a few days,” I repeated.

  He grunted under his breath, the noise one of exasperation. I was used to that though. ”Stay safe," was all he said, before he cut the call, and prevented himself from saying anything else.

  My lips curved a little at his bullheadedness which was definitely my fault, and I put down my binoculars, rested them on the handlebars as I tried to process what had just happened.

  Rex learning the truth hadn't changed anything, not in the grand scheme of things. I needed to be here, keeping my finger on the pulse, but Rex was the only thing I had left that mattered to me.

  If he needed me, that was more important than a vendetta that was years in the making, and years away from even a hope of coming to fruition.

  I turned away from the shady deal going down, touched the kickstand with the toe of my boot, then rolled down the hill where I'd set up my position to watch the deal unfold.

  Letting myself freewheel in neutral, I didn't kick the engine into touch until I was a few minutes away from the scene, and then, and only then, did I let my hog ride free.

  But without Rene at my back, freedom didn't taste as good as I'd once dreamed of.

  Fifteen

  Cruz

  A few days later

  "Since when did you tap Indy's ass?"

  For a second, I thought he meant literally, so I froze when Link posed the question, before I realized he just meant fucking.

  The last thing I needed was Nyx to think I was beating his sister up, for Christ's sake. And having seen how vicious the bastard could be with a goddamn hacksaw as he helped me chop up David's corpse, I didn't need that level of rage anywhere near my face.

  That depth of insanity deserved respect, and I was more than willing to respect a man who'd kill me to protect his sister.

  After what that sister had been through, I was fucking glad for it too.

  "You gonna answer or just gonna stare at me? You look like I could land a golf ball in that open trap of yours."

  I narrowed my eyes at his joke before I poured him some tequila. "I'm sure you'd like it if someone asked you the same fucking question about Lily."

  Link smirked at me. "That's the difference between you and me, Cruz, I want the fucking world to know she's mine."

  I rolled my eyes at him. "Since you put a ring on her goddamn finger, do you know how much of a prick you've been?"

  "He's sharing it around verbally because she's got his dick in knots," Rex grumbled, and while I understood that this wasn't as big of a celebration as it usually would be, because patch-in parties were no joke, he made a beggar at a feast look cheerful.

  Link guffawed. "You know what, Rex? You're right. Absolutely right on the fucking money. She's got my dick in knots, but..." he whistled under his breath. "What she can do with those knots beats that handiwork of yours, Cruz."

  That had me frowning. "What handiwork?"

  Rex eyed me, and apparently reading between the lines, murmured, "The way you tie up the trash. How you wrap stuff up. He ain't talking about anything dirty."

  "I wasn't, but I sure as fuck am now." Link leaned into me. "You for real? Indy seriously lets you tie her up?"

  Steel perked up at that. "What's your poison? Cuffs or rope?"

  This was not how I'd imagined my shift going down behind the bar tonight when, after waking up wrapped around Indy, I'd gotten a text, warning me that we were patching in Jaxson and Hawk tonight as well as swearing in a couple of Prospects.

  The council, for whatever reason, were hanging around me, and while I was the one wielding the bottles of liquor, that was unusual. Rex normally held court on one of the sofas by the pool table, and the others tended to mosey around in circles.

  Although, now that I thought about it, the last time we'd had a party like this, not one of these fuckers had been tied to an Old Lady.

  I guessed it figured that they didn't know what to do with themselves when their cocks were, as Link had so charmingly phrased it, in a knot for their Old Ladies.

  Normally, they'd have been boning anything that moved, well, apart from Nyx who’d always been particular, but I'd seen Link and Steel's bobbing asses more than I'd ever seen my own, that was for sure.

  Sin, whose back was to me, his gaze on the crowd of wild animals that had taken my brothers' place for the evening, murmured, "The Old Ladies are heading outside."

  "Did Giulia show you that sketch?" Rex asked Nyx, who'd popped up from out of nowhere.

  With his attention twisted between the women and the Prez, Nyx murmured, "Which sketch?"

  “Indy's tat. Giulia wants an MC brand."

  I blinked at the notion, then Link groaned. "Oh fuck, that would be so hot. We need all of them to get one. Jesu
s, I'd bust my wad every time I looked at Lily with my MC's brand on her."

  Rex snorted. "You're a fucking pervert, do you know that? Since when did you jones after ink?"

  "Since I got a woman I want the whole world to know is mine?" He shook his head. “Jesus, Rex, ain't you listening? I'm not like Cruz—"

  I shot him a warning look, then cast a glance at Nyx who was still watching the women as they retreated through the crowd.

  He grinned at me, but made a zipping motion with his hand over his mouth.

  "I'm interested in the idea, to be honest," Rex said, surprising me because women were good for fucking or wifing, nothing in between.

  I never said this world of mine wasn't misogynistic.

  "You are? I'm surprised," Sin commented, evidently on the same mental path as me. "I didn't think you'd like the idea."

  "Tiff showed you too, huh?" Rex retorted. "And you like the idea?"

  Sin's eyes lit up, but his grin was sheepish. "It's hot."

  "I want it as a tramp stamp just above Lily's ass." Link groaned, then jacked himself. "Fuck, my eyeballs just came."

  Steel shoved him in the shoulder. "Dirty fucker."

  "You know it," Link agreed, totally unabashed by his actions.

  Which was how it should be.

  When it boiled down to it, we were all just shooting the shit with family. Especially the guys in front of the bar.

  They'd grown up together, had come up together through the ranks of the MC. Me? I was an outsider, but with my ties to Indy, it surprised me to realize that, if only by proxy, I'd be considered family as well.

  If I branded her.

  I wouldn't do that just to get access to the council, but the idea of being included, of being a part of a bigger whole did something to me.

  Nothing like what the woman herself did. A woman who wasn't here.

  Who'd fucking refused to come.

  I swore, that woman of mine didn't know when to quit. Her ass was going to be sore in the morning for her insolence, that was all I fucking knew.

  "They're all doing more for the club than any of our moms ever did," Rex was saying, and I tuned back into the conversation, interested by his take on things. "Seems only fitting they should get some representation."