Terry shakes her head slowly. “This is madness.”
“I agree.” Kade nods. “It is.”
“I’ll go and pack some things.”
Terry leaves my bedroom.
I stand up and lead Kade to my bed by the shoulders.
“You don’t need to keep pacing,” I say.
He sits on the edge of the bed, drenching it. But I don’t mind. He could spray the whole room with hose-water, ruining everything, and I’d still be happy he was here. He rubs his hands together, watching me as I go around my room, packing clothes, packing my writing material. Even when I’m turned the other way, I feel his eyes on me. His breathing is heavy as he watches me. I know that breathing well. Lust and rage are gripping him. He himself probably doesn’t even know where one begins and the other ends.
I pack quickly, and then sit next to Kade on the bed. I don’t make any move toward him. I’m still stinging from the rejection at the town hall. I just sit there, my legs touching his legs, as Terry grunts from the next room.
Finally, Kade places his hand on my leg. I place my hand atop his hand.
He turns, smiles softly at me. “It’s good to see you again, Lana,” he says. “I was worried.”
With my free hand, I reach up and touch his face, stroke my fingers along his jawline. He is cold, but beneath the coldness there is a burning warmth which reminds me of the nights we’ve spent together, the nights when he was too tired to do anything but give me mind-blowing orgasms, and then the nights where we shared love, countless times, again and again throwing ourselves into each other. Dirty, hard pleasure; slow, comfortable pleasure; hungry, desperate pleasure.
“Scud’s gone,” Kade says, and then tells me what happened.
“I’m glad you didn’t kill him,” I mutter.
Kade tilts his head at me. I remove my hand from his face and place it on his knee. He takes a deep breath, that simple touch waking up lust within him. I can tell just by the way he is acting that he has not been with another women this past month.
“Really?” he says.
“Yes. He was a creep, but he didn’t do anything.”
“Tried to,” Kade murmurs. “Anyway, he’s not got a free-pass. If he ever comes back, anywhere near you, my kid, he’s a dead man.”
“Your kid? It’s strange to hear you say that, after . . .”
“I could’ve handled that better, Lana. We both know that.”
“Then why didn’t you?” I ask. I don’t want to ask the question. I want everything to be perfect. But I can’t help it. It just comes out.
“Because . . .” He groans, closes his eyes, as though searching himself for an answer. I know men like Kade—tough men—don’t think about their emotions much. I know this must be hard for him. Finally, he says, “Because I was scared I’d lose you, too, I guess. Duster’s gone, and now you . . . and I was a damn fool for thinkin’ anything happened with you and Scud. I know that. But I guess that’s what I am. A damn fool. And then I told you to stay. I told you to stay at the clubhouse and I thought you’d just do what I said. But then, over this past month, I’ve been thinking. Strange for me, thinking about things I’ve done like that. Second-guessing. I’ve never second-guessed myself. I’ve been thinking and I realize that you didn’t want to tell you anything, did you? You wanted me to ask. But you couldn’t ask me to ask, ’cause that’d defeat the purpose.”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, that is it, Kade.” I smile. “Who says men can’t understand women?”
I watch him, waiting. He’ll say it now. I’m sure he will. I love him, and he loves me. He will say it now.
He opens his mouth, about to speak. I wish I could take a picture of his eyes right now. Burning blue. Brimming blue. It’s like his eyes are the sky and emotion is fluttering birdlike across them.
“Lana, I—”
“Okay, I’m ready.” Terry hefts her bag with a groan. She looks at me, and then Kade, and back again. “What? Am I interrupting?”
Kade rises to his feet, all business again. “No,” he says. “We need to go. Hang on.” He takes his cell from his pocket and begins talking with Noname. “Bring the car around. Be ready. We want to get back to the clubhouse quick. Fuck my bike. You talked to Earl? Locked down? Yeah, yeah, good. Safest place for us. A fuckin’ fort. Good, yeah, yeah. Alright. Be ready.”
He hangs up the phone and walks to the door, joining Terry. Both of them look at me expectantly.
I stand up, make to pick up my bag.
“Oh,” Kade says, walking across the room and picking it up for me. “What sort of father am I goin’ to make, eh? Letting my woman and my kid carry all the heavy shit.” He tries for a laugh. It sounds forced at first, but when I join in with a giggle, we laugh along together all the way to the door.
Terry rolls her eyes. “You two are psychopaths,” she says. “Dragging me from my home and laughing all the way. You make me sick.” She pouts at me as we walk down the stairs.
“Blame him,” I say, nudging Kade in the shoulder. “He’s the one who’s been ignoring me for a month.”
“Oh, I do blame him.” Terry winks at me behind his back. “Maybe we should teach him a lesson. Cook him up in a stew. I’ve been told before I’d make a good witch.”
“Ladies,” Kade says. “The time for jokes will be later.”
“See,” I say, “he’s scared.”
He glances back at me, a smile on his face, before stepping into the rain.
We walk quickly down the street to what looks to be a rental car, a large, luxurious-looking sedan. Seeing the gruff-looking leather-wearing Noname behind the wheel of a vehicle like this is enough to provoke enough round of laughter.
Noname shrugs when Kade raises an eyebrow at him. “You said get a car, Boss.”
Kade packs the suitcases into the trunk and rushes us into the car. He sits in the passenger seat, and even turns around before Noname starts the engine to make sure I have my seatbelt on. It’s strange, seeing him so concerned with my safety, like he’s stopped seeing me as a fuck buddy and started seeing me as—dare I say it—his girlfriend.
Noname pulls away from the apartment, the car cutting through the still-lashing rain, and starts driving back toward Evergreen.
Kade looks at me in the rear-view mirror, looks at me like he never has before.
He’s changed.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Lana
I walk around the clubhouse bedroom, touching everything. I touch the walls and the mattress and the window and the desk. I even go into the bathroom and touch the toilet flush and the showerhead. (The showerhead in particular holds a few memories of mine and Kade’s passion-filled nights.) Terry is in a room of her own and Kade is going around the clubhouse making sure that everything is secure.
I unpack my things and change into dry clothes, and then sit on the edge of the bed, ankles crossed. I can’t help but think of the time I sat in this exact position in one of Kade’s shirts, tempting him, enticing him. I can’t help but think of the way he threw himself at me, the passion, the heat.
Kade walks into the room wearing a hoodie and sweatpants, still somehow looking in-control in the casual clothes.
“Is everything okay?” I ask.
“For now.” He nods. “We’ve got men posted all around the clubhouse, enough food to last us a couple of weeks. We can hunker down here—at least until this situation is resolved.” He walks across the room, stands over me.
“How will this situation be resolved?”
“When Enrique is dead.”
I don’t comment on that. Death is part of his life, I know, but I don’t want to hear about the details. Instead, I stand up and look into his face. He stares back at mine. Then, he reaches forward and takes my hands.
He takes a deep breath.
“I’ve never been a man who can easily share how he feels, Lana,” he says. “I’ve never found that easy. Even with Duster, my best friend, my brother, I could never really tell him. Maybe it�
�s ’cause of what happened with my old man. I don’t know. But it’s never been easy for me.” He pulls me close, wraps his arms around my waist, looks down at me. I feel small, safe. “But I love you, Lana,” he says. “That’s the truth. I love you. I think I’ve loved you for a long time. It was one thing keeping it hidden away when we were just a man and a woman. But now you’re going to have my kid, I can’t fight those feelings. I love you. I love you so much.” His voice almost breaks on the last sentence, but he hardens his features. He may love me, but he’s still Kade.
“You know I love you, too,” I say.
He kisses me on the forehead with surprising softness, and then lays his hand on my belly. “He’s in there, then,” Kade says, voice shaking, but only a little.
“Or she,” I reply. “Yes, he or she is in there.”
“That’s—crazy.”
I giggle and Kade chuckles, placing another hand on my belly.
“There’s a bump there,” he says in a voice of awe.
Tears are sliding down my cheeks, I realize. Warm tears. “A small one,” I say, and now my voice breaks. I can’t fight it. It breaks and I start to sob, but with happiness now, happiness that he is here. The child of my father is here.
“Oh, Lana.” Kade wipes away my tears with his rough fingers. “You’re home now.”
“Home? Do you mean that?”
He nods, determination in his face. “I never want to be apart from you again—from either of you. I want to be a family. If . . . if you can tell me what a family is. I’ve never really known, truth be told.”
“Neither have I. You know that. I guess we’ll just have to figure it out together.”
We stare at each other for a long time, our expressions slowly changing. The emotion remains, but it is joined with pent-up lust. Kade leans down and kisses me on the cheek, and then the chin, and finally the lips.
After waiting a month to feel his touch, my body responds at once. My heart hammers more than it ever has before. My fingers, my toes, everything tingles. My pussy comes to life as after a long sleep, reinvigorated and ready to feel his touch once more. But the lust is changed. It is not just dirty now; there is love in there, too.
He kisses me softly and slides his fingers through my hair slowly, caressingly, and then down my back and around my hips with a gentleness I never would’ve dreamed he possessed. He breaks off the kiss, and his face is open, truly open for the first time. There is nothing between us now. No lies, no hesitation. Just love and lust.
“I want you,” he says, voice low.
“I want you,” I reply, voice high.
He lifts me up, lays me gently onto the bed, kisses my neck. I moan, feeling every kiss like it is the first, feeling things I never noticed before: the texture of his lips against my skin; the little puff of air which accompanies the kiss; the almost inaudible noise of the kiss. Before, there was only lust, my mind screaming: ‘Yes, kiss me! Fuck, yes, yes!’ Now, there is so much more.
I wrap my arms around him as I have done many times before, but before, more often than not, I would tear my nails into his skin, feel the blood, listen to the way he moans in pleasure and pain. Before, I could turn half-animal and gouge at him. Before, after all, we were just a man and a woman, fucking. Just fucking. Now, I smooth my hands down his muscular back, feeling every sinew, every taut muscle, feeling the power of the father of my child.
Kade moves down my body, kissing. And then he takes off my pants and my panties, pulls my shirt over my head, reaches around with an expert hand and unclips my bra in one swift movement. He stands over me, looking down at my naked body. His chest heaves, his arms hanging at his sides in that way I know so well. When he stands like that, he’ll dive on me moments later. Now, he undresses slowly. I watch as he reveals his scarred, muscular naked body. I am warm. Not fire-hot. Not burning. But warm and content.
He strips naked, dropping his clothes into a pile on the floor next to him. His cock is hard, rock-hard, steel-hard. He leans over me and kisses me on the lips. I open my mouth and push my tongue into his mouth. We both moan, softly, intimately. I move my hands down to his hips and feel the twitching muscles there. It’s like there is an animal in him preparing to escape, but the animal is being fought back by this new side of Kade. The kiss intensifies, our tongues brushing together with more force. Kade runs his hand down my body, massages my breasts. He’d normally tweak my nipple, cause me pain-tinged pleasure. Now, he rubs gently, arousing my nipple, making it hard.
I break off the kiss and look up into his face, desperate to see the face of the father of my child. I need to make sure it’s real; I need to make sure that this moment is real.
“I love you,” I say, staring into those startling blue eyes.
“I love you,” he replies.
He means it. I can hear it in his voice. He has let his defenses drop, truly drop, for the first time. Always with Kade, I get the feeling that there is a world within him that he is not sharing, a depth of emotion he is unwilling to reveal to anybody. Now, when I look into his face, his emotional-yet-strong face, I see real feeling there.
Still staring into my eyes, he reaches down with his hand and grabs his cock. He guides himself into me, the tip of his cock probing at my hole, pushing, until my lips widen and become wetter and he thrusts himself slowly and deeply inside of me. I bite down, staring at his face as it contorts in pleasure at the tightness of me, and then brace my hands on his bulging shoulders as he pushes in and in, all the way up to that tingling spot. He holds my gaze as he holds his cock at that spot, our eyes locked, my pussy opening for him, getting wetter for him.
Then, slowly, he slides out of me. Now is the time he would become animal and we’d fuck like two hungry wolves. We’d fuck and there would be some intimacy in there somewhere, buried deep, hidden, but there. We’d writhe and gag and cough and scream, but now he keeps the slow pace and I sink into the rhythm with him. We stare into each other’s eyes the entire time, something we have never done before. But if you can’t stare into the eyes of the father of your child, whose eyes can you stare into to?
He holds himself up with one hand. With the other, he caresses my face, feeling the way my jaw clenches each time his cock slides up my wet pussy and the tip tickles my sweet place. In and out, he slides, and each time I am a wetter and warmer. His fingers are rough on my jawline, his eyes are hard even if they are tinged with emotion. He leans down and kisses me. The warmth in the kiss and the warmth in my pussy combine to make me hot. I shift my hips, drive down with more pressure on his cock. He groans through the kiss and we open our mouths and the tips of our tongues clash. A little faster now, but not manic. Still intimate. Still close.
Up deep inside of me, deeper than he’s been before. Or maybe it just feels that way. Maybe the emotional connection makes it seem deeper. Maybe the fact that he’s kissing me and groaning and making love to me—really making love, not screwing—slowly and passionately makes it seem like he’s closer to me, deeper inside of me. All I know is that point of heat in my pussy grows with each steady-rhythm thrust. Before, it grew frantically, almost desperately. Now it grows in tandem with the brushing of our tongues and the steady loving pressure of his cock against the walls of my pussy.
The baby has made this possible, I reflect. Because, though we are not married, though we have not made any formal declaration to each other, we are now closer than we have ever been before. We can’t help but be closer. We have an immutable connection; it is growing inside of me. Without the baby, this kind of intimacy with a man like Kade would be impossible. Now, we have a reason; both of us have a reason neither of us can ignore.
“You’re beautiful,” he says, breaking off the kiss for a moment. He says it with his lips still close to mine, his breath warm on my face, my chin, my upper lip.
I feel my hands grip tighter on his shoulders. It’s coming. I feel it coming. Not a jolting, surging build-up, but a gradual one, like walking up a low-inclined hill and looking back and real
izing you’re much higher up than when you started, without noticing much change along the way. In and out, he slides, and up and down, I shift my hips. Our rhythm is connected in a way it never was before: connected in a way I think only the child and our newly expressed emotions can make us. I squeeze his shoulder muscles hard, but I do no scratch them. Kade leans back, pushing his cock inside of me at an angle so that it rubs against the front wall of my pussy, ending at the perfect place in the warm spot, as though aimed directly.
“I’m going to—”
I hardly believe it. So slow, and yet so sudden. And that’s our relationship, I think. Sudden at the beginning, the sudden arrival of a man from the mist, a rescuer, and yet slow in its buildup, the unsaid desires, the withheld secrets. When I come, especially with Kade, I think of dirty things. Sweat and sex and muscles and spit and moaning and pain-tinged pleasure. Now, I do not think of anything. I just stare into his eyes. I wanted blue eyes so I could escape; when I was a girl, I dreamed of them. Now here I am, on my back, with his cock inside of me and the sky-blue of his eyes gazing down at me. This is an escape. This is a special kind of escape.
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