Slowly, one corner of his mouth goes up in a wicked grin, and I’m sure I’ve said it out loud. But then the grin is gone and his eyes turn wild, almost savage. His voice wraps itself around me like a rope pulling me toward him, and I can’t escape — God, I don’t want to escape.
“Jesus Christ, Alix,” he growls low and deep in his throat, almost angrily. “I can’t resist you no matter what the fuck I try.”
Then his mouth crashes down on mine, and it’s not tender, or sweet, or even kind. It’s borderline vicious, borderline painful… and exactly what I want. A moan rips from my throat as he grabs a fistful of my hair and forces my mouth open, his tongue finding mine and claiming it. Instantly, I’m dizzy, my center of gravity shifting, and then I realize he’s lifted me up and brought my whole body down onto him so I’m straddling him. As our mouths devour each other, I feel the hot steel of his need between my legs, pressing against my throbbing core. Gasping at how good it feels, my body takes over, and before I even know what’s happening I’m grinding myself against him, my body in control, my mind only a helpless witness to it all.
He unfists my hair and pulls my shirt off over my head in one motion, barely breaking the kiss. Then my bra is off, and he’s taken one breast in his large, callused hand. His lips and the rough stubble of his beard slide against the skin of my neck, soft/hard, until he reaches my sensitive nipple and catches it between his teeth. A loud cry rips from me as I jolt against his cock, the pleasure-pain sending an electrical current straight to my core. I’m soaking wet, I can feel that I’m soaking right through the fabric of my jeans, and all I can think about is less fabric, I need less between us, I need to feel the heat of him against my pussy, oh god… Then my fingers are fumbling clumsily at his waist as I keep grinding against him, trying ineffectually to unbutton his jeans and mine. My brain is frantic, and I’m so close to coming I think it might even happen before I can get any closer to him. He sucks and teases at my the tight bud of my areola until I think I might go insane with need. I can hear myself pleading with him, nonsense phrases I just keep repeating with his name, but he seems to know what I mean, because with a grunt he picks me up off the couch and carries me down the hall to his room.
Then I’m on the bed on my back and he’s unbuttoning and yanking off my jeans. I lift up my hips and help him. Inside I’m saying oh, god yes, thank god, oh please oh please… as he pulls off his shirt and kicks his jeans to the side. His cock springs free, huge and gorgeous, and I think about stopping to take him in my mouth, but then he’s on top of me, grabbing my wrists and holding them together over my head.
“This will be my way,” he growls, his jaw tight. “Beg if you want.”
Then his mouth comes down to nip and suck at my other breast, and I cry out again, writhing underneath him. He teases and teases, his free hand maneuvering the head of his cock to slide against my soaking lower lips and entrance. I gasp again and angle my hips, trying to trick him into sliding partway in, but he yanks roughly up on my wrists, showing me who’s boss. I can only wait for him to enter me, to make me come — half out of my mind and my breath rasping painfully in my throat.
He slicks against my painfully swollen clit, over and over. He chuckles low in his throat at my thrashing, loving that he’s driving me higher and higher, but refusing to give me what I need. I can hear his breathing speed up, too, and I know he’s getting closer. I pray like hell for the moment he’ll lose control and have to take me. Finally, just when I think I’m going to go completely insane, he lets out a low, tortured groan and raises himself up.
Gunner reaches down over the side of the bed for his jeans, and then he’s rolling on a condom and I want to cry with relief as he slides it on his pulsing shaft. He looks down at me, lids hooded with desire. Our eyes lock for a long moment. The calm before the storm.
Then, with an almost angry growl, he grabs me by the thighs and pulls me roughly toward him, thrusting his hips hard as he enters me all at once.
It’s… incredible. I gasp, my eyes flying open and then closing again as the wave of pleasure hits me like a tsunami. He pulls out and thrusts again, and I cry his name, bucking my hips against his. It’s explosive, both of us caught in the throes of something larger than the two of us. It’s more intense than anything I’ve ever known. I don’t even realize how close I am to the edge again until I’m coming, my whole body shaking and writhing with an orgasm so powerful I’m almost frightened by the force of it, but all I can do is let go and surrender to it. A few seconds later Gunner tenses, then I hear him roar his release. He explodes inside me, thrusting again and again, until he finally slows and stops, both of us completely spent.
We don’t speak afterwards. Not for a long time. I’m still gasping for air, so shaken that I’m clutching the bedsheets almost as if I’m afraid I’ll fly away if I don’t anchor myself to something. Gunner collapses next to me, a wall of heat and mass. For a few moments, I listen to the steady rhythm of his labored breath.
“Fuck me,” he mutters.
“Just did,” I manage to gasp.
He starts to laugh, so hard he ends up in a coughing fit. “Goddamn it, don’t do that. I’m trying to catch my breath here.”
“Do what?”
“Be funny.”
“Sorry,” I say, but I’m smiling. After the intensity of the last few minutes, it’s a welcome moment of levity. Also, it’s sort of thrilling to hear him laugh and know that it’s because of me. It feels sort of normal.
Also, it sort of helps to temporarily lessen the awkwardness of the fact that I just had the most amazing, explosive sex ever with a man I barely know
I’ve never had a one-night stand in my life. I could never understand how a person could just get naked and bump uglies with a person they just met. God, I’ve never even had sex with someone I wasn’t in a relationship with before.
And I sure as hell have never had sex that felt anything like that.
Is this normal? Is this what casual sex is like?
Not according to any of my girlfriends back home, it’s not.
So, maybe this is just what it’s like with Gunner.
I shiver.
Beside me, he yawns noisily and pulls me to him. “You cold?” he asks. Without waiting for an answer, he yanks the bedspread up to cover both of us, and closes his eyes. A few minutes later, his breathing deepens and slows.
In my head, the fog of sexual satisfaction lifts a little, to give way to a thin thread of worry.
I don’t quite know what just happened. I don’t know what, if anything, it all means.
And I haven’t got the faintest idea how I’m supposed to act around Gunner tomorrow.
12
Gunner
I wake up in the middle of the night next to Alix, hard as a rock.
Somehow, even though I feel like I just emptied my entire body inside her, I didn’t get nearly enough of her the first time around. It’s like I’ve been starving for food and didn’t even know it until now.
In the darkness, I pull her sleeping form against me. She stirs and wraps her arms around my neck, then whispers “yes” so urgently that I reach my hand between her legs, parting her thighs to find her wet and ready for me. I stroke her slickened nub until she cries out in pleasure, thrusting and quivering against my hand. Then I push myself inside her again, groaning at how goddamn good she feels pulsing around me, and come so hard I have to stop myself from calling out her name.
The next morning, I’m up before she is.
As I watch her sleep, and think about waking her up to take her again, alarm bells start to go off in my head.
This was probably a mistake. I mean, it felt fucking good as hell, so it definitely wasn’t a mistake in that way.
But I can’t have Alix thinking what happened last night means more than it does. I don’t want her to get the wrong idea.
And it’s not just that.
I liked it too much. Way too much.
I don’t regret it. Hell, that w
as the hottest fucking sex I’ve ever had.
But my dick is starting to fuck with my head a little bit. Alix is addictive. That’s not good. I should be fucking women I can take or leave. Which up until now has been all women in the general population, regardless of how hot they look, or how good they are in bed.
Alix moans softly in her sleep and rolls over. A lock of hair falls over her face. I frown and resist the urge to move it so I can look at her some more.
Fuck. I can’t have this.
Alix staying here at my place was a bad goddamn idea. She hasn’t even been here one night, and she’s already sleeping in my bed.
Not that I begrudge her staying here. Not at all. But if I’m gonna help her, we’ll be spending a lot of time together until we get to the bottom of where Eden is. And with Alix, the sex is good. Really, really fucking good. And I don’t need any complications. Hell, neither does she.
Staying with her here, after tonight — well, that would be a hell of a complication if we got even more tangled up with each other.
I’ll sleep at the clubhouse until Alix leaves town, I decide, ignoring the disappointment that floods my head at the thought. I’ll let Heather take care of my dick until Alix is gone. To keep the edge off. Heather will fucking love that. She’s been doing everything she can to get my attention lately, anyway.
I slide out of bed, take a quick shower, and manage to leave the house before Alix wakes up.
I’m up early enough that the club’s garage isn’t even open when I get there.
The garage, Twisted Pipes Custom Chopper and Auto, is our main legit business. At the garage, Hawk’s the man in charge. It’s his brain child; he built the place from the ground up, with the club’s approval. Most of us with any sort of knowledge of bike and auto repair work here — which is all of us. But the custom work we do is the responsibility of a few of the more talented guys. Hawk, Brick, and Ghost do most of the custom engine work. Brick’s a fucking wizard with a custom paint job. I do a lot of the shit like twisting pipes on special custom built choppers. Which is what I’m working on now: a set of custom exhaust pipes for a Harley Ironhead XL.
I lose myself in the work for a while. Eventually, other brothers start streaming in. First is Beast, looking like he’s coming in from a night of hard drinking. Then Hawk arrives, looking serious and ready to work like always. After him, it’s Thorn, with a shit-eating grin on his face that tells me he’s ready to greet the day and start bugging the shit out of people just to get a rise out of them. Bullet, one of our newer members, trails in next, looking like he needed about two more hours sleep. Eventually, Geno shows up. He’s the club’s treasurer, and does all the bookkeeping for the garage.
There’s the usual banter and shit-giving. Geno makes some of his piss-water coffee in the office. Brick wanders in about half an hour after Geno. He’s brought his own coffee, from his old lady Sydney’s coffee shop downtown. He brings in some pastries and shit, too, which Sydney makes in the shop. Predictably, the brothers swarm him as soon as they see the bag he’s carrying. Sydney’s baking is fucking delicious, and she always makes extra for us.
All the food’s demolished in about ten minutes.
The morning passes pretty quickly. With Alix out of sight, it’s a little easier for me to force her out of mind, too. At least her body, and what happened last night. Instead, I focus on what she’s told me about Gonzalo and her sister, and try to think of a plan.
A little after lunch, Tweak stops by the garage. He doesn’t really work here, but stops by sometimes just to hang out and geek out on mechanical and technical stuff. I lift my chin at him and motion him over.
“Hey, brother, good timing. I’ve got some shit I wanted to talk to you about.”
“What’s up, brother?” He looks over at the bike I’m working on with an appraising eye. “Nice pipe work.”
“Thanks.”
“Whadda you wanna talk about?”
“I’ve got someone I want you to run a check on. Background, location, any priors, who he hangs out with. Any intel you can find on him. Trouble is, I only have one name for him, and I don’t know if it’s a first or a last. Gonzalo.”
Tweak nods thoughtfully. “I can do that. What else do you know about him?”
“Only that he was hanging out at the Smiling Skull over the weekend. I don’t think he’s a biker, or if he is he wasn’t wearing a cut.” I pause for a second. “He tried to roofie this chick there. And apparently he had some connection to the chick’s sister at one time.”
Tweak’s radar goes up. “What chick?”
“Keep your dick in your pants,” I tell him. “Just some chick from out of town that came looking for the sister, who’s gone AWOL.”
“And you’re helping her?” Tweak’s expression is perplexed.
“Yeah,” I say flatly. My tone makes it clear that’s all I’m gonna tell him about it. “So. Can you get me the intel?”
“Sure, I can do that,” he replies. I know wants to ask me more about Alix, but I’m not having it.
“Good,” I say gruffly. “Let me know what you find out.”
I go back to working on the bike. Tweak asks me a couple more leading questions. I just grunt and keep working. Eventually he wanders away.
After work, I go into the back and clean up a little. The Lords are having church later, to talk logistics for our upcoming gun run with the Death Devils. But before that, I’m gonna go pay my ma a visit, then stop off at my place and get some shit so I can stay at the clubhouse for the foreseeable future.
It’s been a few weeks since I’ve seen Ma, and I know from experience there’ll be hell to pay if she has to call me and ask me to come over. Ma’s a force to be reckoned with when she’s pissed.
I ride across town to the small green Cape Cod style house where I grew up. When I get there, a familiar figure in a Lords of Carnage cut greets me out in the front yard.
“Smiley!” I hail him. “The fuck you doing out here?”
“Hey, there, son,” he calls back. “Just cleaning out these gutters for your mom.”
Smiley’s one of the original members of the Lords, meaning he’s been there since the club was founded. And since he was a medic in Vietnam, he’s our resident doc as well. He’s also my ma’s ex from way back.
Smiley’s actually how I ended up getting involved in the MC in the first place. When Smiley and Ma were dating, way back when I was a young teen, he used to bring me around the club, much to my ma’s dismay. After high school, I went into the military, but when I came back I started hanging around the club again, and eventually got patched into the Lords. Smiley and my ma broke up a little while after that. I was never clear on whether my joining the club had anything to do with it. I also could never figure out why the two of them didn’t get back together once my ma got used to me being a Lord. Smiley and Ma are clearly crazy about each other, even after all these years. They flirt like hell whenever they’re together, and Smiley comes over pretty often to do stuff for her. I suspect he stays over at her place from time to time, too. Plus, since my ma’s a nurse, they have a lot of similar knowledge in healing people.
Ma must hear me talking to Smiley, because a couple seconds later she appears at the front door. She’s dressed in old blue jeans and a faded Rolling Stones tank top. Her light brown hair, streaked through here and there with gray, is piled up on top of her head in a messy bun. I gotta admit, she looks pretty damn good for being almost sixty years old. Anyone who met her for the first time would think she’s in her early fifties at most.
“Ma,” I complain as she comes over and gives me a hug. “Why didn’t you ask me to do these gutters?”
“Oh, you know. Smiley offered.” She shrugs her shoulders and smiles. “I didn’t want to bug you. I know you’re busy.”
“For fuck’s sake, Ma, it’s no trouble.” I glance over at Smiley, who’s getting up there both in years and in pounds. “You sure it’s a good idea for him to be up on that ladder?” I murmur in
a low voice.
“Language,” she says with a twinkle in her eye. It’s a long-standing joke between us. Ma swears almost as much as I do. “And for God’s sake, Gunner. Smiley’s my age. He’s not a damn fossil.”
I snort and shake my head, but decide not to push it. “You’re right. Sorry. How you doin’, Ma?”
“Just fine, like always. Zappa hasn’t been feeling too well, though.” Zappa’s her aging pit bull. “He hasn’t been eating as much as usual. Probably have to take him to the vet one of these days soon. Other than that, can’t complain.”
“Glad to hear it. How’s work at the hospital?”
“Good.” She nods. “Heading over for a shift this afternoon. I’m covering for Wanda. She’s out of town for her son’s wedding in Pennsylvania.”
“Lucy!” Smiley calls down from atop the ladder. “You might wanna get out of the way. I’m gonna turn on the hose and flush this shit out.”
“Come on in the house, Gunner,” Ma says, pushing open the screen door. “You want something to eat?”
“Sorry, I can’t stay,” I apologize. “I just wanted to stop in for a bit and see how you were doing. We’ve got church in a little while and I gotta run home first.”
Ma looks at me skeptically, one hand on her hip. “You mean to tell me you came all the way over here just to pay me a visit for five damn minutes?”
I laugh. “I did. But I promise to come over again in a couple days for longer.”
She harrumphs and purses her lips. “Uh-huh.”
“I swear.”
“Fine,” she huffs. “Get out of here, you damn degenerate.” Ma rolls her eyes like she’s mad, but I know it’s just an act.
I kiss her on the cheek. “See you soon.”
She waves me off with an irritated snort and goes back inside. I chuckle and call out to Smiley that I’ll see him later at the clubhouse.
13
GUNNER: Lords of Carnage MC Page 7