The party was still going strong. Everyone surrounding us celebrating Stone’s life. Celebrating the man he used to be.
“This fucking sucks,” Seanshine murmured. “I’ve lost men with me in Afghanistan that didn’t hurt as much as this.”
Sean was rubbing his sternum as if his pain were a physical thing.
“That’s ‘cause he was like a second father to you, kid,” Big Papa stood. “I need to get home myself. Kay’s going to be wondering what is keeping me.”
Kay, I’d found, always wondered what was keeping Big Papa. She was a bitch, and never even tried to act differently.
Stone had died forty-eight hours ago, and Big Papa had spent the majority of it here or at work. Kay, though; well, let’s just say that Kay was a bitch to an exponential degree. She didn’t care that he’d lost his best friend. She didn’t care that he was needed elsewhere. She only wanted him there, with her, and that was that.
Nobody in the club liked her, me especially.
I knew what that felt like. I’d experienced it for years with Lynn.
I knew the overwhelming urge to pull your hair out when she started on one of her rampages. The bad thing was that every single one of us knew that she was a bitch. It had been the same in my situation.
At the firehouse where I used to work, nobody made it a secret that they didn’t like her. When she came around, they made it a point to leave. I should’ve read the signs.
Big Papa should read the signs as well.
Before it was too late, and he had something shitty happen to him like had happened to me.
Beep-Beep-Beep.
Tommy Tom’s phone started to chime, and we all looked, waiting.
“Dr. Bones.”
Sean started to snicker.
Tommy Tom, or ‘Dr. Bones’ gave Sean a quelling look.
Knowing where this was going to end up, I shifted Imogen in her seat, got a hold of her around her knees and behind her back, and stood.
“Going to your room?” Ghost asked.
I nodded once.
“10-4.”
Without another word, I walked through the stragglers of cops and bikers, nodding at the president of the Benton, Louisiana chapter, Silas Mackenzie, and kept on walking.
I’d meant to talk to all of them tonight, but we’d been pretty closed off, and the majority of the attendees knew that.
I’d get the chance to talk to them in the morning. A lot of them were camping in the woods beyond the clubhouse, most of them getting closer to the lake that was just beyond the trees.
The clubhouse was pretty simple. Living room and dining room the size of a small gymnasium. Kitchen the size of a postage stamp. Twelve bedrooms.
It was a mini mansion that was an old cotton plantation—or had been originally. The place had been built using old, reclaimed wood from one. It needed fine-tuning, and was slowly getting the facelift that it needed, but that’d all been done by Stone.
He’d been a master at carpentry.
The rest of us were okay, but all the fine details that Stone had put into the outside, as well as the living room, wouldn’t be in the rest of the house.
None of the others in the club had the same skill set, and it would show when we finally started fixing it up again.
“Tired.”
I looked down at the woman in my arms, my sadness floating into the back of my mind as I stared.
“You’re staying with me tonight,” I told her.
“M’kay,” she agreed. “Gotta text Mom, though.”
I pushed through the final door that led to the bedrooms, and headed straight for the back bedroom, the one furthest away from the rest in the house.
I was thankful that I’d gotten this back bedroom. It was quieter than the others, and it also had the best airflow—something that I’d found I had to have due to my night terrors. Having the room cold tamped down the feeling of being trapped and burned alive in a car—I viciously shut those thoughts down.
There was a time and place for thinking about that day…and with a snuggly woman in my arms wasn’t one of them.
And she was snuggly.
She was curled up in my arms, her face smashed into my pecs, and both arms tucked into her body, like she didn’t have a single care in the world.
When I placed her in my bed, she immediately shivered.
I kept it cold.
Very cold.
It was colder at my place, but in deference to the other men that lived in this house, I kept it at sixty degrees instead of the fifty-five at my apartment.
Though, at first the thermostat wouldn’t get that cold. I’d had to do some hacking into the box—as well as a little breaking and entering into the super’s place—to make it possible to get it as cold as I wanted it.
“Need to text Mom,” Imogen repeated.
She rolled over to her belly, both arms underneath her in an effort to get warm, and in doing so, gave me better access to her phone that was in her back pocket.
Slipping it out of her pocket, and extremely careful not to touch her ass in the process, I tried to open it but stopped short for two reasons.
The first one was the background picture.
It was of Thor.
Literally, a picture of Thor, holding his hammer up high in the air, was her background photo.
The second thing that stopped me was her passcode.
Not thinking it was going to work, I typed the obvious ‘1111’ into the phone, and then immediately shook my head as it opened up.
Resisting the urge to tell her she needed to change her passcode, and in turn waking her up, I tapped her messages and immediately found the one labeled ‘Mama Bear.’
Typing out a quick ‘I’ll be gone for the night. Don’t wait up.’ I placed the phone on the nightstand, plugged it into my charger, and went to the bathroom.
After relieving myself and brushing my teeth, doing all this without looking into the mirror or even turning on a light, I headed back into the room only to stop short when I saw her cocooned in not just one blanket, but all the blankets, sheets included.
The only thing poking out beneath the mound of bed clothes was her boots, which I divested her of about twenty seconds later.
The last things to go were her socks, which were bright pink with white polka dots.
Socks that fit her personality perfectly.
The moment the cold air hit her feet, though, she roused.
“My pants, too.”
I froze.
There was no way in hell I was taking her pants off.
“You want those off, sugar, you’re gonna have to take them off yourself,” I told her, tossing her socks to the ground next to her boots before I followed suit with my own boots and socks.
The next thing to go were my jeans, which I immediately replaced with a pair of sweats.
I didn’t normally sleep fully clothed, but I had a feeling I needed all the layers of protection I could get when it came to this woman, especially when she kicked her pants out of the hole at her feet only moments later.
The belt clinked loudly on the floor with a resounding crack, and I had a premonition of things to come.
Things that I wasn’t quite sure I was ready for.
But did that stop me from getting into bed with the woman?
Hell no.
Did that stop me from yanking the blankets out from around her and covering my feet with them?
Again, hell no.
So I got what I asked for.
I only wished I thought about the repercussions of what could happen in that bed beforehand.
Had I, I would’ve definitely had condoms at the bedside.
Because, apparently, in the throes of passion, neither one of our brains worked properly.
Imagine that.
Chapter 12
I like big cups and I cannot lie.
-Coffee Cup
Imogen
I was warm.
So freakin’ warm that it was on the verge of getting too hard to breathe.
The source of that warmth made itself known moments later by shifting at my back, and I had a bleary thought that maybe Aaron didn’t realize he was cuddling.
Maybe if I moved away from him, he’d let me go.
But the moment I tried to move, his grumbled, ‘Don’t move’ had me pausing in my escape.
“I’m hot,” I told him.
“So kick the blankets off.”
I sighed and did as told, keeping the sheet, and letting the rest of the big blankets fall to the floor.
Which was a mistake.
Before, the blankets had been a buffer.
Now, not so much.
Now, I could feel him from knees to head, and everything in between.
And by the in between, I meant I could feel his big dick on my ass.
And by big, I meant big.
Like Superman big. Maybe even Thor big.
Not that I knew those superheroes had big dicks. I could only assume right along with the rest of the female population.
I didn’t have to assume with Aaron, though. I knew the man had a big dick. I could feel it spanning my ass cheeks.
I was in my normal sleeping position. Meaning I had one foot cocked up, putting me mostly on my front, but partially on my side.
And Aaron was laying on top of me, as was his cock.
It started at one booty cheek and laid against the length of it.
One of his arms was under the pillow I was laying my head on, and the other was wrapped snugly around my belly, pulling me in tight and keeping me securely in place in case I decided to move.
Which I did.
Because hells bells, his dick was on me!
How was any rational woman going to be able to function with that kind of beauty in her life? That’s right, no woman. Not a sane one anyway.
So there I lay, in the dead of night, and contemplated my life.
I’d not had a man in a long time, and by long, I mean really long. There were likely cobwebs.
I was sixteen when I lost my virginity.
I was also sixteen years old when I decided that the next man I had sex with was going to mean something to me.
I’d been close a lot of times, but I’d also never been put into a position like this. With a man who I truly did care about at my back, pinning me to the bed, his hand anchored around my waist keeping me still.
I thought about everything in that five minutes, including the fact that we’d forgotten about his dog.
“Hey!” I snapped. “You forgot about Tank!”
Aaron snapped awake like I’d zapped him, and scrambled.
“What?” he asked from a position up on his knees.
“You forgot about Tank!”
“Shit,” he groaned, clapping. “What time is it?”
With Aaron’s clap, the light beside the bed turned on, surprising me.
I looked around for my phone, my watch, anything.
“I don’t know.”
He turned and grabbed not his phone, but my phone, and cursed.
“It’s three in the morning,” he growled. “I’ll be right back.”
I snorted and followed him up, snatching my pants off the end of the bed where they’d fallen, and pulled them on clumsily.
He followed suit, divesting himself of his sweatpants, and enabling me to see his boxer-brief-covered cock in all its glory.
Oh, God. He really was big. And hard.
I snapped my eyes down, but not before I caught him cottoning on to the fact that I’d been staring.
Grabbing my socks, I sat on the bed and yanked them on just as the door opened, and a click-click announcing dog paws started to enter the room.
“Heard you awake and thought I’d let him in,” Big Papa murmured. “Ran by your place to let him out since I figured you forgot. Brought him here.”
Aaron blinked.
“Thanks.”
The door closed and I dropped the boot that was in my hands.
“You’re a bad doggy parent,” I told him.
Aaron snorted.
“I’ve never had a dog before,” he admitted. “In fact, I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to even have this one.”
“Why?” I asked curiously.
“I’m not a cop. I may have passed the courses and have the credentials…but I’m a firefighter. Always have been, and always will be. Having a trained police dog like this scares the shit out of me. What if I get him killed?”
“I read in the paper when they got Tank that the officer has to have specialized training to deal with them. Is that true?” I questioned.
He nodded. “I had that training, too. I was waiting to hear back from my old fire department on whether or not I could start back to work, and decided to go ahead and get triple certified in fire, police and EMS. The K-9 portion of my training happened on a whim.”
“Hmm,” I murmured.
“What was that ‘hmm’ for?” he wanted to know.
“Just seems to me that it’s meant to be,” I pointed out. “Why else would you have gotten all those certifications done if you weren’t meant to use them?”
He didn’t reply.
When the silence stretched out uncomfortably, I reached for my boots.
“I should go home anyway.”
“I told your mom you weren’t coming home. You go in there now, and you’ll wake them all up, and scare them since you aren’t supposed to be home,” he pointed out.
I glared.
“They’ll be fine.”
“Sure they will…” he admitted. “But what’s wrong with finishing the night sleeping in my bed?”
I didn’t have a good answer.
“I’ll give you a good reason to stay.”
The undertones were enough to send shivers down my spine. Pleasant and soothing, as well as waking up my nerve endings.
“And what’s that?” I teased. “A back rub?”
He grinned.
“If that’s what you want to call it.”
Laying down on the bed in a huff, I ripped off my socks and threw them across the room, then jumped and jiggled back into place before yanking the covers up off the floor and back over me.
“Has anyone told you that for such a small woman, you’re a cover hog?” Aaron asked in amusement.
I rolled my eyes and didn’t answer him, instead clapping my hands twice like he had, plunging the room back into darkness.
“Thanks,” he muttered.
I heard him moving around the room, his belt buckle tinkling as he removed his pants, and then I felt the bed depress.
I tossed and turned with him on the other side of me for a whole five minutes before I finally decided that I was going to have to take my pants back off.
They were too restricting.
And why couldn’t I? He had!
With him not wrapped around me any longer, I felt safe enough to remove them, so I did.
Grunting and groaning, I pulled the belt free, and then kicked them off, shoving them to the bottom of the bed and out from under the blanket with my feet.
“That’s real talent right there,” he teased. “It’s like you have monkey toes.”
I looked at him through the dark of the room.
“Can you see me?” I asked him.
“Yep,” he confirmed. “But only your feet.”
I breathed a sigh of relief and started to turn my body, freezing when I brushed up against his bare foot.
“Your foot’s on my side of the bed,” I pointed out to him.
He snorted.
“My bed means both sides are mine. You’re the visitor,” he pointed out. “And even if we were doing sides, I’m most assuredly on my side, not yours.”
So here’s where I should’ve restrained myself.
But I didn’t.
I chose to roll over, reach over him, and feel his side of the bed.
I also chose to practically lay on top of him, allowing my mound to brush against his erection.
I then froze, effectively telling him with my non-movement that what I was feeling I liked.
And I did.
I liked it a lot.
So much so that I started to grind my hips down on top of him without even realizing it until his hand stilled my ass with only a touch.
“Shit,” I whispered, getting a knee under me to push away.
Or would have had he not grabbed me around the waist, threw the blanket up, and dove underneath it with me.
The move put him on top of me, squarely between my thighs, though. Thankfully, it was his taut abs that were pressing against my needy center and not the long column of his cock.
“Don’t do it,” I whispered worriedly. “This would change everything. I have to see you every day at the complex. You have your car in my shop. You also are a police officer.”
“What does being a police officer have to do with anything?” he asked, humor lacing his voice.
“It has to do with the fact that I find men in uniforms sexy, and if we do this once, we’ll be doing it again,” I snapped at him. “And you better be sure, because I’m a grade A clinger. You put that big wiener in me, and I’m going to not be responsible for what I do next.”
“What kind of clinger is a grade A clinger?” he asked. “Can you give me the definition? Maybe use it in a sentence?”
“Imogen won’t stop calling. We have to get Imogen away, she’s a grade A clinger,” I tried.
The bed started to shake, and I realized that it was his laughter that was making it shake.
“Hey!” I said in annoyance, slapping my hand on his back twice.
The light next to the bed turned on, and I got my first good look at Aaron’s face. His laughing face.
“I’m being serious. I will suck you dry. I’m needy. I have a problem with worrying about my loved ones. You do this, you open this can of worms, and I’m going to be calling you every five minutes to make sure you’re okay. I’m going to want to be with you. I’m going to be that woman that you can’t peel off your back even if you want to.”
His face still look amused, even after my explanation.
“You know, what you just described is my ex-wife,” he said soberly. “But, right now, I can’t find it in me to care that you want to know that I’m all right. Or that you want me to know that you miss me.”
Beard Mode (The Dixie Warden Rejects MC Book 1) Page 10