"They can wait, baby," he said softly and I felt a shiver run through my insides.
"My ribs hurt," I said next when I couldn't take the silence.
To that, I felt him nod as he slowly released me. "Okay. Let's get you home then," he said and then proceeded to do just that.
Which put us in my bedroom. I had kicked out of my shoes and used the toes of each foot to shimmy off the socks of the other. When I reached for my shirt, though, Paine's hands pushed them away and reached for it himself.
"I know," he said, then pulled the material gently up, waiting for me to lift my hands so he could get it off me.
I really could undress myself. While my arms and palms were wrapped, they had left my fingers mostly uncovered so I could do basic things to take care of myself.
The air of my room made my skin prickle and when Paine's fingers whispered down the center of my belly toward my pants, well, let's just say... my libido didn't get the message that it had been the shittiest day to end all shitty days and I was hurting all over and couldn't have sex. All that horny bitch realized was how good it felt to have Paine's capable hands on me. His eyes went up to mine as he started to pull the material down, then lightened, almost as if he knew where my mind was going.
"Breathe babygirl," he said as my pants pooled around my ankles.
I sucked in a hollow breath and Paine's hand moved to rest gently over the huge purple and blue bruise covering part of my belly and side. "It's okay," I said, reading the darkness that shuttered his eyes.
"Elsie, it's not."
"Well it's not okay okay, but I'm alright. And it's not your fault," I added, needing to get it out there, despite standing in the middle of my bedroom in nothing but my bra and panties and feeling way too tired for a relationship conversation.
"Elsie..."
"It's my sister's fault. D doesn't work for you. D didn't even know I belonged to you. To him, I was just some random chick. He didn't know El was my sister either. It was just... a bad situation. Maybe if I hadn't hit him..."
"Tomorrow morning, I'm running out and getting you pepper spray, a tazer, a cat-shaped stabbing weapon for that janitor's key chain of yours and a mini expandable baton. Then as soon as you're all better, I am teaching you some basic self-defense. When you get good at that, I am dragging your ass up to Hailstorm and they are going to give you the royal treatment."
"Hailstorm?" I asked, brows drawing together. I was pretty sure Hailstorm was the name of that weird storage-container community up on a hill with their guarded gates and dogs and stuff. I was also pretty sure they were just a bunch of survivalist freaks who thought the apocalypse was imminent or something like that.
"Yeah, Hailstorm. Hard to explain. They're like a lawless military. Most of the people there are ex-military. Those who aren't, have just as good of training. They can teach you the shit you'd learn in basic, but they can also get you up to snuff on things like Krav Maga and street fighting."
"I really don't think..."
"Enzo let your sister go, baby. I know you love her and no matter what happened tonight, she's still family to you. But we can't say she's not a threat. We also can't say for absolutely certain Third Street isn't a threat. I'll be taking better care of you from this point on out, but I'll breathe easier knowing you can handle yourself when I'm not around. Besides, it's a good workout. We can spar together."
Now, as a woman who has dated men who generally showed their feelings with flowers, jewelry, or even nice vacations, I had to say, nothing... no diamond earrings, no three dozen white roses, no trips to Fiji... nothing ever gave me the warm, gushy feeling in my stomach as what Paine just offered me. Maybe because jewelry and flowers and beaches didn't mean anything. It meant something that Paine wanted to keep me safe, to teach me to protect myself, to offer to train with me toward that goal.
"What?" he asked, watching my face, his lips tipping up and I realized I was doing the goofy smile I usually reserved for looking at his drawings in the morning... alone.
"I just... I really like you, Paine," I admitted with a small shrug.
His smile softened and his hand slid up my belly, between my breasts, then landed at the side of my neck. "I like you too, babygirl," he said, leaning down and planting a chaste kiss on my split lip. Then his hand slid back down and around my back, unclasping my bra.
"Paine!" I yelped as I tried to hold the cups to my chest.
"Seriously?" he laughed, shaking his head. "You're gonna be shy now? I've seen your tits before, baby. I've had them in my hands and mouth."
"Oh my God, stop," I begged.
His smile went a little wicked as he reached out and moved the straps of my bra down my arms, tugging when I didn't release the cups, completely exposing me, my nipples hardening against the cool air. As soon as the material fell to the floor, he reached behind his back, pulling off his shirt and tossing it to the side before reaching to unfasten his jeans. And, well, his near nudity was doing nothing to help the need I felt building low in my stomach.
"Now we're even," he said, standing in front of me in nothing but black boxer briefs that were doing nothing to disguise the hard-on he was sporting that made my sex clench hard in anticipation.
"I... ah..." I mumbled, shaking my head and looking away.
"Hey," he said, putting his thumb and forefinger under my chin to make me face him again. "Baby relax. It's gonna be a while before I can fuck you again and I'm fine with that."
"Obviously," I said, waving a hand toward his crotch.
"Looking at you, being close to you, especially when you don't have anything on, baby, that's gonna happen. But nothing will be happening until your ribs at least get a couple days of rest. That being said..." he trailed off, his devilish smile spreading as his hands moved down to cover my breasts. An involuntary moan escaped me as his thumbs stroked over my nipples until they were so hard they were almost painful.
"Don't," I said, finally finding my voice.
"Why not?"
"Because it's uneven," I reasoned.
"Elsie, look at you. You got beat to hell tonight. Look at me, I'm good. So I think it's pretty much my job to try to help you... feel good too..." he said, his hands moving down my belly and sliding his fingers into the waistband of my panties, pausing for a second before pushing them off my hips.
"Paine..."
"Bed baby," he instructed, walking me backward toward it.
"You don't have to..." I said, sliding carefully up onto my spot on the bed, wincing a little before I settled on my back, Paine's body moving over me, but not touching me at all, supported by his hands and knees.
"Nope. Want to," he corrected, lifting to balance on one palm as his other hand moved lower, his finger sliding up my slit to stroke over my clit, making my legs fall open in invitation as I struggled to breathe through the mix of pleasure and the pain that prevented me from getting enough air.
His body shifted lower, kissing down one of my inner thighs before he shifted inward slightly and his lips closed over my clit, sucking it hard and making my whole body shudder. He hummed a "Mmmm," around me and it was almost enough to make me come right then and there. His finger moved downward, slipping inside me and turning to work over my G-spot as his tongue moved out to stroke over my clit.
It happened fast, faster than I ever usually got off from oral, likely due to an over-tired mind and over-wrought body. His tongue had barely started working me when the tension got tight and snapped, sending a hard pulsating orgasm through me, making me cry out as my inner thighs started to shake. Paine was unrelenting through it, working my clit and G-spot harder and faster, drawing every last drop of pleasure out of me before he removed his finger and took his tongue away. He leaned up, planting a kiss at the triangle above my sex before moving up my body.
He settled onto his side beside me, reaching down to snag the blankets and cover our bodies. Finished, he settled down with me, one arm draped low on my hips, the other under my pillows. And then he leaned sligh
tly over me and rested his head on my chest above my breast.
"You can't sleep on your side tonight and I like being close to you when I sleep," he explained as one of my bandaged hands went across his back, the other settled on the side of his neck.
I liked being close to him when I slept too.
So even though his weight was making it even harder to breathe, I fell asleep quickly to his warm breath on my chest and my arms around his strong body.
And as I drifted off, I was all-too aware of a small little feeling that started in my chest, right under my ribcage, and spread outward until it enveloped my entire body. And that feeling was: right. Being with Paine, even after the worst night of my life, it felt right. It felt like it was where I was supposed to be.
TWENTY
Elsie
Sunday, I woke up alone like I did every morning. The only difference would be that the past two mornings I woke up alone but only because Paine was downstairs brewing coffee and making me breakfast. I learned this after waking up on Friday morning alone, achy, feeling whiny and pathetic. And when I reached for the bedside table for my sketch, it wasn't there. Now, despite the good ending to the shitty night before, my mind immediately went to the worse case scenario, making me throw the blanket over my head on a tear-less sob and wallow in my painful self-pity.
For all of, say, three minutes before I heard something clang down on the nightstand and the blanket got peeled back from my head. "You gonna come out of there to eat or am I going to have to get creative here?" he asked, moving to sit down beside me.
There was no ignoring the squeezing sensation of my heart in my chest when I looked up into those perfect light green eyes in that perfect chiseled face of his and realized he hadn't left me, that I was being a worrywart for no good reason.
"Eat?" I asked, my belly doing a painful twisting thing due to not having any dinner the night before and, no doubt, taking the prescribed pain medicine on an empty stomach.
"French toast," he offered. "And a side of fruit so you don't feel too guilty," he added with a smile as I moved as quickly as my screaming side would allow to sit up against the headboard.
"Gimme," I said, holding out my hands to him, fingers opening and closing rapidly in excitement.
Paine chuckled, grabbing the tray and putting it on my lap. Looking down at my tray stacked with four pieces of powder-coated deliciousness, a bowl of cantaloupe, strawberries, and grapes, and a cup of coffee made just how he knew I liked it, I almost felt a little teary-eyed. Almost. Okay, not almost. There was some definite glistening.
When I looked up at him to thank him, the sexy little smile he had on made the words slip away. "What?" I asked, wanting to be in on whatever was giving him that look.
"Glad we're over that bullshit shy thing," he observed and it was in that moment that I realized I had sat up in my bed completely freaking shirtless and the blanket was pooled around my waist. What can I say? I almost never went to bed naked. It hadn't even crossed my mind to cover up because I usually just... was covered up in the morning. "Don't," he said, shaking his head like he knew I was going to try to figure out how to move the tray whilst simultaneously try to cover my breasts... all with sore, wrapped hands and arms. "If it's a thing, I'll head back down..."
"No," I interrupted, my word too urgent but I didn't care. "Stay."
"That's better," he said, moving around the bed to climb in with me, planting a sweet kiss on my temple.
And, well, when I lifted up the pain medicine bottle to take one, I got my sketch. I unfolded it, trying to force my lips to stay in a straight line but when I saw a drawing of me in a karate gi with a black belt at my waist, I couldn't help it... I goofy grinned my face off.
Saturday morning I woke up alone too, but only because he had gone to grab muffins and coffee after the gym. My sketch was on my brown muffin bag- a simple picture of our hands holding each others, mine all fixed and flawless. I cut the side out of the bag and put it in my jewelry box.
Sunday, I woke up alone because, as Paine had told me the day before after an extremely long conversation on the phone with his mother, then it sounded like both of his sisters, his aunts and his grandmother, they had requested his presence to help set things up for dinner. And Paine, being the good son he was, didn't even pause to offer his help. So I sat up slowly, only wincing a little at the twinge in my ribs. They were feeling better. I didn't need the pain meds anymore and Paine had locked them up in my safe for me the night before. The picture was on a normal sheet of paper that he, I assumed, took out of the printer that I kept under the counter in the kitchen. It took up the entire page and I figured he must have gotten up super early because it was extremely intricate. He'd drawn what, I imagined, was his mother's house and he'd drawn every single person who was supposed to be present at dinner: I saw us, Shooter and Amelia, Breaker and Alex, his mother, two women his mother's age who I took to be his aunts, two younger women who I guessed were his sisters, his grandmother, and... Enzo. Enzo was going to be at dinner?
I didn't put the picture in my jewelry box mainly because it would require me folding it and I decided that I was going to take that one and get it framed as soon as I looked less like I was one of those too stupid to live chicks who somehow managed to live through the horror movie despite their aforementioned too stupid to live-ness.
I left my arms unwrapped, all of the cuts having healed over. They were still all red and ugly, some bigger than others, but there was no longer any risk for infection. Besides, the bandages thing was too much of a hassle. I was over it.
I showered, spent way too much time fiddling over my hair and makeup, using a liberal amount of the tattoo cover-up, then hemmed and hawed my clothing choices for an embarrassing amount of time. It sounded like a casual event so there was no way I was showing up in a dress and pumps. But I didn't want to show up looking like a slob when I was meeting so many people for the first time. Normally, that was something I would have run past my sister.
I felt a stab of something akin to grief pierce through me. It was a feeling I knew I would have to get used to, a feeling that would never go away. Because, for me, it wouldn't matter if Elana decided to clean her act up and want her old life back... she wasn't my sister anymore. I put up with a lot of abuse from my father and, I imagined, I would continue to do so. But my father had never raised a hand, let alone a gun, to me. And if I knew my sister, that gun was absolutely loaded. Even if she never had any intention of using it on me, she was taking a major risk. What if something scared her? What if her finger twitched on the trigger? She could have killed me because of her selfishness.
I wasn't sure if I was big enough to forgive that.
And I knew I would never forget it.
So I envisioned a lot of moments in my future where the void she left in my life by her own actions would ache, would make me wince, would make me sad.
On a sigh, I reached for a pair of gray skinny jeans, a lightweight v-neck black sweater, and black bootie heels. Simple and understated, but still classy.
With a knot the size of Texas in my stomach, I drove to the florist, picking up a simple bouquet of mixed flowers for Gina, then made my way over toward the townhouse complex where his mother lived. It was the same housing complex that I had originally planned on buying a place in. It was a nice, winding complex of modest one or two bedroom houses, green lawns, and tons of kids. Even in the dead of the winter, they were out in force, on their bikes, on skateboards, playing hopscotch. It was so quaint that it belonged on some campaign commercial for a politician.
I spotted the cars before I spotted the people: Paine's Challenger, Breaker's SUV, Shooter's expensive sports car. The men were all standing in the driveway talking to another man in a leather jacket with a Henchmen logo on the back, his blond hair long on one side and shaved to a buzzcut on the other. His arm was thrown around a blond woman, tall, leggy. I couldn't see either of their faces as I tentatively parked my car behind all the others which would give me a
second to think about what it meant that Paine, Breaker, and Shooter were friends with a member of a lawless bike gang. I grabbed the flowers and got out, deciding it probably made a lot of sense. They were all presently, or had at one time, been criminals. I guess they all ran together. Or at least got along.
"Hey babygirl," Paine said, reaching out to sling an arm around my hips as I moved in beside him.
Up close, I finally got a good look at the biker and his woman. And, well, he was hot. Fantastic features, deep green eyes, tattoos, cocky grin. His woman was a little older than him and freaking gorgeous in a way that said she could disarm you with a smile then slit your throat before you could see it coming kind of way. Her brown eyes focused on me for a second, taking in my arms and lingering on my cheek like maybe she knew what was underneath the makeup.
"This is Cash and Lo," Paine explained, nodding at the couple.
"Heya sweetheart," Cash said with a smile that would make any woman's (who didn't belong to Paine) knees wobble.
"Cash is Mom's neighbor. And a friend. Lo runs Hailstorm."
Lo runs Hailstorm? Lo? The pretty blond-haired, brown-eyed bombshell with boobs that made my sister's look minuscule actually ran what Paine had referred to as a "lawless military"?
"So are you the one who is going to turn me into a badass?" I asked, meaning it as a joke.
Lo smiled. "Damn straight. Between me and Janie, you're going to be a force to be reckoned with."
"Janie?"
"Her husband refers to her as 'hell and headaches' when she gets on a tear," Breaker explained with a smile that said he agreed with Janie's husband's comment. "She makes all the rest of us look like teddy bears."
Lo rolled her eyes. "Don't listen to them. She's only like that when you piss her off. In which case," she said, looking back at Breaker, "you deserve all the piss and vinegar." I felt myself smiling. When Lo looked back at me, she smiled back. "Don't worry. The girls club will take care of you."
Savages Boxed Set Page 68