Raw Deal

by Cherrie Lynn

“Habanero, you weenie.”

  “All right. I’ve been effectively emasculated.” He cringed. “Jesus, it’s getting worse.”

  Laughing, she took mercy on him. “Do you want some milk? It might help.”

  “No,” he said miserably, lying back on his pillow. Then he writhed again. “Motherfucker, Savannah. How do you have any taste buds left?”

  “I probably don’t, that’s why I need it. Hang on.” She left him sweating it out to get a glass of milk and a slice of bread from the kitchen, both of which he consumed in record time. “Stick with me and eventually you’ll have a flame-retardant throat too,” she told him as he began to settle down somewhat.

  “Don’t come near me ever again,” he said with mock anger, and she could only laugh harder. She wouldn’t tell him the story about eating spicy crawfish with the aforementioned boyfriend and, not thinking, later indulging in a little oral activity after which she spent the rest of the night sitting in a tub full of cold water near tears. It might give him ideas for revenge, and hot sauce didn’t only burn the mouth.

  “It’s like Satan himself stuck his fucking dick down my throat.”

  That only set her off again, which made her feel bad when he sent her a withering look. Suddenly, though, she had an idea to make it up to him. Leaning over to grab her favorite lotion off her nightstand, she smacked him on his thigh. “Roll over, sissy boy.”

  The suspicious side-eye he sent her was legendary. “What the fuck are you going to do to me now?”

  “I guess I’ll have to go to work after all. It won’t help your mouth, but I bet you’ll like it anyway.”

  Grumbling a little, he did as she asked, and she crawled over him to straddle his tight butt. He chuckled, and she relished the sight of his grin—what she could see of it. Only his profile was visible to her.

  Savannah slicked her hands up and dropped them to his back, letting them sink into his muscles as the breath whooshed from him on a groan. She practically felt him relax as she explored, kneading, testing. Marveling at the gorgeous expanse of flesh, for some reason she thought about the ink on his chest: the grim reaper grinning with a bloody smile. “I’m kind of surprised you decided on your chest piece, after what happened with your mom,” she said softly as her hands worked.

  “It’s not as if I need a reminder,” he said, his voice already a bit drowsy. “But I wanted it anyway. To always remember where I came from.”

  “I guess I can see that.”

  He was silent a moment. “Do you like the Rocky movies?”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Damn. A girl after my own heart. Anyway, you know how in Rocky III, Mick tells Rocky the worst thing happened to him that could happen to any fighter?”

  “‘You got civilized,’” Savannah growled in her best Burgess Meredith . . . which wasn’t very good, but still it got a laugh from Mike.

  “Yeah. If there’s one damn thing I’ve tried to do, even with the victories and the money and the recognition, it’s to stay as uncivilized as I can. I guess that ink was part of it. And I still own the house my brothers and I grew up in. I go there whenever I need a reality check.”

  “Wow,” she said, pausing a minute in her task. “That surprises me.”

  “My brothers don’t get it either. They’d like to strike a match to it, just to know it’s not in the world anymore.”

  “That I could understand.”

  “Just one of those things.”

  “Hmm.” She rubbed at a spot of tightness in his left trapezius, uncovering a trigger point. “You have some trouble here, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, a lot. Damn, Savannah. It’s like you have weights in your hands. It’s amazing.”

  She grinned at the compliment to her skills. He was such a pleasure to touch. It wasn’t every day she had a body with this kind of definition to work on. “This isn’t even deep pressure. You want it deep, baby?”

  “I’m not really sure.” The sound he made started as a laugh but shifted to a groan as she pressed deeper.

  “Just to warn you, I’ll expect payment for services rendered.”

  “Oh, yeah? I’ve got a tip for you.”

  “I need more than a tip.”

  “I’m sure I can manage that too. Your hands are magic. Best I’ve ever had.”

  “You can determine that after just a couple of minutes?”

  “These few minutes have been better than the whole sixty I usually get.”

  “Well, thank you. I think maybe you’re a bit biased, though. And it’s not like you’d tell me if I sucked.” With both thumbs, she pushed a path along his levator scapulae, feeling the tension drain from him, tension he probably didn’t even realize he carried. It gave her a little glow of joy.

  “You most definitely do not suck. Might need you around those mornings I can barely move.”

  His fighting was going to take its toll on his body someday. It probably already had. She frowned at the thought, thinking she’d like to get him on her table sometime. He couldn’t get the full benefit without her being able to go in from different angles. For now, she concentrated on his tense spots, feeling the satisfaction of them giving under her practiced fingers. He fell silent, his breathing slow, deep, and hypnotic as she worked. After a while, she leaned down to look into his face, and found he was sound asleep.

  Chapter Nineteen

  A rumble of thunder woke him, and when he opened his eyes it was to gaze at a blurry, unfamiliar drywall ceiling. For a second, he couldn’t figure out where the hell he was, and then everything came back in a rush. The spontaneous overnight road trip, and Savannah. And Savannah, and Savannah.

  Turning his head, he found her dozing beside him, one dainty hand curled under her delicate cheek. But damn, those dainty hands were deceptive, weren’t they? They’d worked kinks out of his muscles he hadn’t realized were there. Checking his watch, he saw it was after noon. He hadn’t meant to go out on her like that, but after the drive—and the sex, God the sex—he’d been zonked.

  She looked too peaceful to disturb, her impossibly long eyelashes resting on her smooth cheeks, her sweet lips slightly parted with her slow, slumberous breath.

  Funny, smart, caring, passionate . . . he couldn’t have dreamed up a more perfect woman, couldn’t believe she actually existed and that she wanted to have shit to do with him. She talked about deserving, but fuck, she could do so much better. Someone who wouldn’t rip her family apart. Someone stable and without a career that would force her to live in fear. He told himself this all the time; it was like a loop in his head, but he still couldn’t seem to stay away.

  Maybe he could give it all up for her. Maybe. He didn’t know. When he really started to itch for a fight, he needed it. It wasn’t just something he did. After all these years, it was a part of who he was, it was the answer to any problems he had, the only way to soothe the savage beast within that roared to be set loose.

  But maybe he’d found another way. A touch from the woman lying next to him and he was as docile as a kitten.

  As if she sensed him looking at her, she opened her brown eyes and a smile curved her lips. “You look like you’re thinking hard about something,” she said sleepily, then engaged in a long stretch that drew his attention to the way her shirt pulled tight over her breasts and her nipples poked against the fabric. He slid his hand across them, interrupting her, and she laughed, flattening to the mattress again.

  “Thinking about you,” he said.

  “Well, I’m right here.”

  “Yeah, I like that about you.”

  Savannah rolled toward him and tugged the sheet away from his hips, leaning over to kiss a path down his abs to where his cock began to twitch in interest. He groaned, putting a hand to her soft dark hair, loving the feel of it tickling his skin as she went down on him, sucking him to rapt attention. When he stood hard and ready, she straddled him, still wearing her gray nightshirt and those funny thigh-high socks, and guided him to the warm, wet entrance hidden from his
view.

  His fucking soul left his body as her tight heat swallowed him whole, her head falling back in shared ecstasy, his fingers clutching her thighs so hard it had to hurt. He reached the end of her and it still wasn’t enough; he wanted more. More of her body, more of her life, more of her.

  “Yessss,” she whispered, beginning to move in sensual undulations that let him feel every part of her. All he had to do was lie back and watch the beauty of her seeking her pleasure from him, finding it, taking it.

  And when they lay side by side sweating in the afterglow, she lifted her left hand to her face . . . and he caught a glimpse of it.

  Her fourth little pink heart tattoo was on the outside of her left ring finger, right where a wedding ring might cover it up.

  Mike didn’t know how he’d missed it before, but seeing it made his mouth run dry. It was sort of a thing I did to determine who I was going to marry.

  She would probably freak the fuck out if he let her know he’d seen it, so he clamped down on the words and let the moment go. Imagine a woman like her wanting to link her life to a guy like him. Of course, it was only a silly game she played, but still, it cast a brooding pall over him that he didn’t understand.

  “Are you okay?” she asked later, when they’d both reluctantly rolled out of bed and sought more sustenance in her kitchen. He liked her little apartment; it was warm and cozy and feminine and . . . her. Though he found his eye drawn too often to the family portrait hanging on her living room wall—Tommy with all the people who still mourned him.

  “Yeah,” he said, going for a reassuring smile and wondering if he quite managed it. Savannah tossed him an apple to go along with the sandwiches they’d put together.

  “Looks like the rain let up a little,” she observed, leaning over to gaze out her kitchen window. “Do you want to go for a walk or something?”

  Hit bit into the apple, chewing slowly for a minute as he considered his next words. “There is something I’d like to do,” he said after swallowing, “but I’m not sure how you’ll feel about it.”

  She turned from her window, lovely but grim faced, her tousled dark hair falling over one shoulder. “You want to go visit Tommy, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” he said, absently turning the fruit around in his hands while he monitored her expression. “But it’s up to you, of course.”

  “I think I would like that,” she said softly after a moment. And she smiled, a little sad, but sweet all the same. “I’d like that a lot.”

  Often, soon after his mother’s death, Mike had gone out to her grave to cry or to rage at her or to just sit in silence and wonder what the fuck it was all for. All the pain, all the unfairness. Soon enough he’d given that up when he realized it wasn’t for shit, that everybody ended up another stone in the ground like countless others, and all anyone had control over was the time they had left.

  Being at the cemetery again, at Savannah’s side, brought back the horrible day of Tommy’s funeral in a rush, and he felt a blunted sense of the helplessness he’d experienced that day. He hated it, but at least he was going to finally get what he’d come here for. To see up close the final resting place of the man he’d put there.

  “They seal the tombs up after a burial,” Savannah explained quietly as they navigated the mazelike pathways. “There’s a plaque with all the names of our family members buried there. It goes back well over a hundred years.”

  “Is that a little unsettling?” he asked, taking her hand. The air was thick and humid under a dense gray sky, mists of rain still falling intermittently. Savannah carried an umbrella in her other hand but didn’t have it open. She’d pulled her long hair through the back of a baseball cap, claiming it was so frizz-prone she would look like a poodle after being out in the damp. “I mean, knowing you’ll be there someday. I know a lot of people buy their plots early, but . . .”

  She shrugged. “It’s kind of comforting, actually, at least to me.”

  “I guess I can see that too,” he said thoughtfully. That way, at least you knew where you were going to end up. Where you eventually belonged.

  They turned a corner—the very one he remembered hovering by with Zane when he was watching the service from afar and first saw her and Rowan break away from the others. As they did so and the tomb came into view, he and Savannah froze in midstep unison.

  Two women stood in front of it, one tall and slender with dark hair, the other petite and blond. Like some terrible sense of déjà vu. The blonde’s hand was on the plaque, her head bowed, her shoulders shuddering.

  “Oh, shit,” Savannah muttered at his side. “That’s Rowan and my mother.”

  “Okay,” he said calmly. “What do you want to do?”

  Her hand flexed in his grip. She looked uncertainly back the way they’d come, then back at the women. The flowers at their feet made splashes of soft color in the damp gray marble-and-cement world around them. Savannah’s bottom lip quivered, and he knew she wanted to go to them. He also knew that he wouldn’t be welcome.

  “Listen, you go, all right? I’ll go back to the car,” he said.

  “I don’t want you to go back to the car.” She almost sounded like an angry child not getting her way, but it was the most endearing damn thing he’d ever heard.

  “Well, then, I’m with you. Whatever you want to do.” Maybe he would finally get that cussing or pummeling he’d always thought he deserved.

  And suddenly the debate was a moot point, because one of the women called out, “Savannah?”

  It was her mother, he saw, as she was staring in their direction, but Rowan’s head jerked around at the sound and she spied them as well.

  Savannah drew a deep breath, tightening her grip on his hand. He was there to follow her lead, so when she began taking slow steps toward the women, he went too, steeling his spine for whatever they flung at him.

  So far, they weren’t flinging anything. They only stared with open grief, and maybe a little disbelief at what they were seeing.

  “Mom, Rowan,” Savannah said as they approached. Her mother was nothing less than an older version of her, lithe and beautiful despite the lines of grief on her face. She was dressed casually in jeans and a blue slicker. Rowan, well . . . she was a mess. But she grabbed Savannah in a hug all the same, and then her mother embraced her as well. “We wanted to come,” Savannah told them simply, and returned to Mike’s side. “We didn’t know you would be here. Michael, you’ve met Rowan. This is my mother, Regina.”

  He didn’t know what the fuck to do or say, because it damn sure wasn’t nice to meet her under these circumstances, and the only contact she most likely wanted to have with him was to spit in his face. So he settled for the truth. “I wanted to come and tell your family how sorry I am for your loss, Mrs. Dugas.”

  Her slender fingers gripped the handle of her umbrella so hard the plastic creaked. Rowan only sniffled and looked away. “I appreciate that,” Savannah’s mother said at last with surprising graciousness, though he saw what it cost her. “We, um . . . we didn’t know you were in town.” Her gaze shifted to her daughter as she said that, consternation written across her features. If they had seen Savannah last night and she hadn’t mentioned his presence, obviously they thought she’d been holding out on them.

  “He got in early this morning,” she explained. “I called him late, and he drove over from Houston.”

  Mrs. Dugas’s finely drawn brows rose in her forehead. “That’s quite a drive, isn’t it?”

  “Five hours, ma’am.” He shared a look with Savannah, taking her hand again, and for a moment nothing existed outside of the two of them. “But it was nothing. She needed me.”

  “And you got here this morning? You drove all night?”

  He nodded, looking her in the eyes as he said, “I would’ve walked it for her, if that’s what it took.”

  Except for Savannah’s slight indrawn breath, silence settled for several seconds while her mother digested that. Even Rowan was looking at him oddl
y—actually looking at him, perhaps, for the very first time. “Thank you for being here for her, then. Rowan?” Mrs. Dugas reached over to take Rowan’s arm. “Let’s leave them alone.”

  Rowan didn’t look at all happy about that, but she nodded all the same. Then, kissing her fingertips, she touched them briefly to Tommy’s name on the plaque. Mike stroked Savannah’s hand with his thumb when it seemed to tremble in his grip. He had to release it, though, because the other two women came in to hug her goodbye. Then they were leaving, walking out in the direction Mike and Savannah had come, Mrs. Dugas’s arm around Rowan’s shoulder.

  “She’s not doing well at all,” Savannah said quietly as another mist began to fall. “I’m so worried about her. She’s pregnant. All these emotions, all this stress . . . they can’t be good for her or the baby, and it’s all my fault.”

  “This probably didn’t help,” he said grimly. “I’m sorry. Bad idea.”

  “No, not a bad idea. Just bad timing.” She looked up at him for a few moments, her eyes contemplating underneath the bill of her cap. “Maybe . . . maybe Zane could help, if he really is willing. I know I was against it initially. But that night was the happiest I’ve seen her since all of this happened.”

  “No, I think you were right. He would be good for getting her mind off her problems, but her problems would only still be there when he splits.”

  “She needs a friend, though. She doesn’t have many; she never did. She needs someone, aside from my parents. She always had me, but I can’t be that friend for her right now. I’ve hurt her too much.”

  “I’m not sure how well Z would do with the whole friend thing.”

  “All right,” she said miserably, scuffing at the pavement beneath their feet with the toe of her shoe. “It was just a thought.”

  “Hey.” He tipped her chin up with the crook of one finger. Her brown eyes searched his, heartbreakingly, for an answer. If only he could give it to her. “If you want me to, I’ll set it up.”

  Those eyes drifted to her brother’s name on the memorial plaque, freshly inscribed. She seemed to come to a decision. “Tommy wouldn’t want her like this. He wouldn’t. But he wouldn’t want her hurt, either. Zane can’t hurt her, or . . .”