I’d nearly finished with it by the time he’d shown, freshly showered and ready to eat.
“Just explaining a little more on John,” he answered evasively.
I narrowed my eyes at him.
“What about him?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“Well,” he hesitated.
I glared. “Tell me.”
“Not really much to tell. He wanted you back in prison, and he was hoping that by making you ‘break the law’ he’d get you back there. Except he didn’t really count on us. He thought that by you getting in trouble with the law, it’d break your parole agreement,” he said finally. “The more stuff you got away with, the uglier he got until he was more desperate than not. Cutting your brakes,” his voice broke. “That was a spur of the moment thing. After all his other attempts at getting people to manipulate you, he took it into his own hands and finally took care of matters himself.”
I closed my eyes, and suddenly I wasn’t feeling anything but sorrow.
It really was my fault.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered as tears started to brim at the lids of my eyes. “I never would’ve thought he’d go that far. He was always so laid back. He was there in the courtroom when I was being sentenced. He didn’t even look upset.”
I felt lower than low.
But Sterling’s hands on my face jolted me out of my misery as he took my face in his hands and shook me slightly.
“Stop it,” he demanded. “Stop it now.”
I blinked.
“What?” I asked, tears starting to slip over.
“You need to get your mind off of whatever happened. I hate to say it…” he started. “But I’m glad it wasn’t you. It makes me a terrible person…but I’m fucking glad it wasn’t you.”
I face planted into his chest, and I cried.
For the loss we’d suffered.
The injustice of it all.
For everything.
My life had been absolute shit.
Wasn’t it fucking time that something went right?
Didn’t I deserve it?
Didn’t we deserve it?
“I’m so fucking over this life, Sterling,” I said into his chest.
“You’re not done with it until I say you’re done with it,” he growled, rolling over with me until I was underneath him.
My hips were cradling his thighs, and he was looking down at me with such ferocity that I couldn’t breathe.
“Okay,” I said breathlessly.
“You’re mine and I’m yours. We’ll make our lives good together. We’ll have babies. We’ll buy a house. We’ll grow old together until we can’t see the other’s faults. We’ll be together forever. And then, when we’re done on this earth, we’ll leave it together, because I deserve happy, and so do you. We’re fucking due, and I fucking love you,” he growled, looking so serious that I couldn’t help but think that it might actually happen.
With Sterling’s determination, and my belief in him, I knew we could make great things.
“I’m scared to have babies,” I whispered.
He leaned down and pressed a kiss to my lips, so whisper soft that I barely felt it before he pulled back.
“You’ll have my babies,” he growled.
I laughed at his high handedness.
“Says who?” I asked.
He grinned and maneuvered his body, surprising me when I felt his naked cock pressed against my bare vagina.
Then, with little to do, he slid inside me to the hilt, and I remembered why I would have his babies.
Because he had the most perfect cock in the freakin’ world, that’s why!
I groaned and lifted my hips, pressing my heels into the bed to allow me the extra range of motion that would allow him to reach deeper inside of me.
He didn’t like me having so much control, though, which was why he lifted my legs over his shoulders and started to shuttle inside of me.
“Missed you,” he breathed against my lips.
“Missed you more,” I replied back.
Thrust.
Retreat.
Thrust.
Retreat.
“Love you,” I breathed.
He growled.
He bucked when I said those words, and suddenly we were both coming.
Weeks-months- of no sex had both of us barreling toward explosive orgasms that left us breathless.
“Jesus,” Sterling groaned as he spurted deep inside of me.
“Yes!” I agreed.
“Take me. All of me,” he ordered.
Always so high handed!
“Yes, sir,” I acquiesced.
He laughed into my mouth as our breathing returned to normal, our orgasms so sweet that I was smiling.
“What’s with that smile,” he asked. “You look evil.”
I snorted and he pulled back, his cock slipping from me and leaving me bereft.
“If I was evil, I would say how amazing it felt to have sex with my stepbrother,” I teased.
He laughed.
Full, belly roaring, laughed.
“Don’t say that anymore,” he said. “Not in public, anyway.”
“You know you like it,” I whispered, eyes getting heavy.
“Yeah, see how much you like it when our friends hear that shit!” He challenge as he started toward the bathroom.
I snorted.
“How do you like the new house?” I asked, the question that’d been on my mind since we’d gotten home and he’d gone to talk with Silas.
“Like it,” he said. “But we’ll need to go to look at houses soon. It’s not big enough.”
My brows furrowed.
It was two bedrooms with an office.
Why would he need something bigger?
“What? Sterling,” I said, getting out of bed and following him into the bathroom. “It’s two bedrooms with an office. What’s the reason for more room?”
“I have plans for babies to fill up those rooms…” he said as he bent over to wash his face.
I admired his bare ass and the way the muscles bunched and unclenched.
My mouth watered, and I turned on the shower so I wouldn’t jump his bones again.
He had to be tired, and I didn’t want to wear him out too much on his first night home.
I’d have to work him back into shape before I expected much more from him.
“Well, then we’ll start looking, but it’s kind of hard to do anything without you here. I have no credit to speak of, and you disappear at the drop of a hat. We’ll need to find someone willing to work with us,” I said as I stepped into the shower.
Water started to pour down over my hair, wetting it down until it was slicked back all the way.
Once I was done, I opened my eyes, then screamed to find Sterling standing directly in front of me.
“Shit!” I gasped, hand going over my heart as it galloped away in my chest.
“You’re being exceptionally good natured about my job. Are you sure you’re okay with it?” He asked.
I nodded. “It’s your job. Your passion. What else would I be but accepting? I love you. That means you. All of you. Your job. Your stupid quirks about not leaving the towels on the towel bar. You not picking up your things. Everything about you, I love. Even your job.”
“So you’ll be okay if I leave every couple of months for a job without any notice? You’ll get home one day from work and I’ll just be gone?” He pushed.
I nodded again.
I mean, it would suck balls, but I’d get over it.
As long as it made Sterling happy, I was there for him.
Through thick and thin.
He was it for me.
“Yeah, I’ll be able to handle it.”
He moved forward quickly and gathered me into his arms.
My back met the cool tile of the shower and I gasped.
“Sterling,” I
squawked, arching forward.
He laughed, then slammed his mouth down on mine.
“Good.”
“Well, now that I know you’re in a good mood…we need to talk about your mother,” I said, touching on the subject that I knew had been bothering him since we’d gotten home.
He sighed and dropped his forehead down on mine.
“What about her?” He whined.
“You need to talk to her.”
“I don’t want to talk to her,” he said.
I sighed.
“You need to. At least to find out why she did what she did. There may be more to the story…plus, you need to find out about those letters,” I said carefully. “Find out what happened. Because if she tried to touch base with you, you have something going on that has nothing to do with her.”
He stiffened, then his eyes were on mine.
“You think someone took the letters?” He asked slowly.
I shrugged. “Why else wouldn’t they have gotten to you?”
His jaw clenched.
“Shit.”
“Yeah, shit.”
Chapter 20
I hate you, and then I love you. It’s like I want to kick you in the balls, then kiss them better for you.
-Ruthie to Sterling
Sterling
“What are you doing?” Garrison asked me.
“He’s about to fuck a cop up, which is why I’m with him,” Loki said, sounding slightly annoyed.
I grinned at him.
“What makes you think I’m going to fuck her up?” I asked.
He gave me a look that said he wasn’t dumb, nor was he going to believe my nonchalant act.
“Because you flipped out on me this morning when you asked where Thomasina lived. And when I wouldn’t tell you, you yelled at me,” Loki said dryly. “Then you found out anyway.”
That was true.
I’d done my research with Garrison.
And the only thing we could come up with as to why the letters weren’t delivered to me was that one of us took them.
Our foster father was not only lazy, but refused to do anything he didn’t have to do.
That included cleaning the kitchen. Walking his dogs. Washing the trucks. Mowing the lawn. Getting the fucking mail.
Getting the mail, though, was one of the easier jobs, and usually given to Thomasina.
So after Garrison and I got to talking this morning, after Ruthie left for her shift, (and I had to admit that I liked being that close to Garrison without actually being in the house) we realized that there really was only one person that would’ve been able to slip letters out of the mail without us realizing it.
Thomasina.
Hence, why I was now walking up the pathway of her house after receiving the information from Silas, who used his vast network of contacts to obtain the information for me.
“I’ve had enough trouble from her over the years…it’s time to clear the air,” I said stiffly, raising my fist and pounding on her door.
I didn’t have to wait long.
Thomasina answered the door within moments.
Surprisingly, she looked good.
Really good.
I’d only ever seen her in her police uniform over the past ten years.
Seeing her in yoga pants and a cute t-shirt reaffirmed the position that she was, indeed, a female and not a ball busting cop who tried to appear less female in a male world.
Then she spoke, and all thoughts about her being feminine fled.
“What the fuck are you doing here, fucker?” She growled, narrowing her eyes into slits.
I didn’t waste time beating around the bush.
“Did you steal my letters from my mother?” I asked, crossing my arms across my chest.
She blinked, then looked down at her feet.
“He told me to,” she whispered.
We all knew who ‘he’ was.
The question was, was that what would he have done to make her do it.
I knew Thomasina wasn’t the type to blindly do something.
I knew she was a good cop.
I also knew that my irrational hatred for her wasn’t felt by other people. Only me and Garrison…and Cormac.
So I knew she was a good person.
Knew that she wouldn’t have done it if she wasn’t provoked.
I just wanted to know why.
And where the fuck my letters were…if there were any letters at all.
Taking the word of someone else wasn’t my thing.
I had to see the real thing with my own eyes, and right then, I knew that the letters were real, even if Thomasina had taken them.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
She looked down at her hands.
“There are things a man can do to a woman that don’t show scars, Sterling,” she finally answered.
It felt like a lead anchor had been dropped in my gut.
No.
NO!
“Fuck me,” Garrison whispered somewhere behind me.
I studied Thomasina.
Realized precisely when she was herself.
The nice little girl who followed us around.
And knew the instant that foster father of ours had gotten to her.
“You could’ve told us,” I said gruffly.
Her eyes turned up, and the vulnerability there was staggering.
“You never knew that I knew you were beaten,” she whispered. “You always thought I was jealous. And in a way, I was. Just not jealous of you ‘spending time with him.’ I was jealous of you getting beaten…and me getting…what I got.”
My eyes closed and I realized my monumental mistake.
So huge that I didn’t think I’d ever be able to make it up to her.
“God, I’m sorry, Thomasina. I wish I’d known. I would’ve done something,” I whispered.
Garrison was suddenly at my side, and I moved to let him speak his peace.
And it was then I realized that the two of them had had some sort of relationship.
Whatever that may consist of.
And maybe Cormac had known they had something, and he was mad at her for hurting Garrison. I made a mental note to ask him about it later.
“The real question is, is after all that we shared, why the hell you couldn’t tell me something like that,” he asked roughly.
I moved back, not worried about the letters any longer.
They needed some privacy, and I needed room to think.
“Where are you going?” Loki asked.
“To The Clubhouse. I need some time to think.”
***
Three hours and a fifth of whiskey later, I was fucking blitzed.
Then again, there were six men drinking with me, and they were all blitzed just as much as I was.
It’d turned into somewhat of a ‘glad you’re home and not dead’ party with the rest of the Dixie Wardens.
We’d also somehow migrated from the clubhouse to Halligans and Handcuffs.
I vaguely remembered moving in a truck, but I’d not stopped drinking my whiskey the entire time.
At some point Ruthie had shown up for work, taken one look at me, and had shook her head.
She’d been around, but not around.
And it was starting to get on my nerves.
“Where’s my woman?” I finally asked.
Loki was on the bench next to me.
“With mine. They’re talking about all that evil stuff that women talk about,” Loki answered.
“They’re talking about babies,” Sebastian said from my other side.
I looked over at him.
“He did say evil,” I told him.
He laughed.
“My kids are evil,” he agreed. “But I wouldn’t trade them for Trance’s kids.”
“Hey!” Trance said from the other side of the bar. “They only did that one thing once.
”
The ‘one thing’ he was talking about was Trance’s son lighting the table on fire.
He’d been playing with a lighter that Trance had thought was empty.
Turns out it wasn’t, and he’d lit the tablecloth on fire, which then had taken the old wood table underneath it with it.
Trance and his brothers had carried the table outside and had then watched it burn.
“That’s nothin’,” Cleo said. “My wife told me about Torren’s kid getting into that butt paste shit and smearing it all over their new couch. They had to throw it away.”
“That was true,” Torren said. “It was a two-thousand-dollar couch, and since the ass cream is water resistant, there was nothing we could do to get it up. Of course my kid used the industrial sized tub, so it was all over the entire couch…and the wall…and the coffee table…the area rug,” he laughed. “But I didn’t like the area rug anyway, so it wasn’t that big of a bad thing for me.”
Torren was sitting behind the bar, directly in front of me, so I could see the evil smile on his face.
“If I didn’t know you better, I’d say that you gave that cream to him, hoping he’d do his worst.” I said.
He shrugged.
“Mebbe’,” Torren said. “Backfired like a bitch, though.”
I couldn’t help it…I laughed.
Hard.
“What are you laughing at?” A woman’s voice said from my back.
My woman.
My heart.
My love.
My fucking soul.
“That’s sweet,” she whispered. “But your friends are looking at you like you’re crazy.”
I hadn’t realized I’d said that out loud.
Oops.
“You done yet?” I asked.
She nodded. “Got done about two minutes ago. You ready to go?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Seems I have to go see my mother tomorrow.”
And go kill my foster father.
“You can’t go kill anyone,” she said. “Just like I told you with my ex’s father. Killing them means jail time and dishonorable discharge. Can’t have your pretty ass in the prison system. It’d get too worn out.”
I grabbed a hold of her hair.
“Nobody will get near my ass,” I told her.
She laughed.
“Honey, I’m pretty sure you’d let me do anything, even if it involved your pretty ass.”
I growled at her.
Right To My Wrong (The Heroes of The Dixie Wardens MC Book 8) Page 19