Unwinding an arm from her leg, Gunner brought his hand to her pussy and slid two fingers in, keeping the same beat against her g-spot that his tongue played on her clit, until she was rocking back and forth and keening, and her hands had abandoned her tits to clutch at the bedspread, twisting the soft chenille into wads and dragging the spread from the pillows.
Feeling high and happy, he tried something. Turning his hand inside her, he pushed his thumb back until he felt the tight rays of her anus.
She drew in a loud breath and froze. He went still as well. Easing his mouth from her, just an inch, he brushed his thumb over that ruched circle of skin. “Tell me not to,” he murmured and kissed her thigh. “I won’t ever do what you don’t want.”
He had a memory, faint but there, of the night of the rave—a guy standing behind her, fucking her this way, while he was inside her. In the haze of the Molly, it had felt amazing, but it wasn’t a good memory, not now, not anymore, because Leah was only his.
The way he understood her now, Gunner thought it probably wasn’t a good memory for her, either. He could take it away for both of them. Give them something much better.
When she said nothing but was still frozen solid, he drew his thumb toward her pussy, through the slick heat of her juices, and then traveled back to her anus. She eased a bit at that touch and moaned quietly.
“Tell me not to, Lee.”
She said nothing, and he pushed his thumb in. At the same time, he moved his fingers inside her and sucked her clit into his mouth.
An harsh, deep grunt erupted from her lips, a sound too wild and bestial to have come from his Leah, the girl who said gosh, but it had. Her body moved like a piston, driving downward, onto his fingers and thumb, with such force that he could barely keep his tongue on her clit. With every surge onto him, that grunt burst from her mouth—and then she came with a throat-tearing scream, flooding his hand and face.
“Damn, Gun! Don’t break her!” Griffin shouted, and a chorus of hilarity filtered through the walls.
Laughing as well, Gunner crawled up onto the bed beside Leah, who’d clapped her hands over her face. “I’m so embarrassed,” she muttered, breathlessly, into her palms.
He tugged her hands away. “Don’t be. That was about the hottest fucking thing I’ve ever known. You taste amazing.” Leaning down, he murmured, “Taste yourself,” and kissed her.
She did, pushing her tongue against his, burying her nose in his beard, sucking on his lip, all while trying to drag his much bigger body onto hers. He helped her, settling between her thighs.
“I love the way you feel on me,” she whispered into his beard. “I love the way the hair on your body rubs and scratches my skin.” Her hands dragged down his back and clutched his ass. “I love that your back and butt are so smooth and your legs and chest are so hairy. I love your chest on my boobs and your legs between mine. I love your beard between my legs, too. Everything about you makes me wet.”
Sex talk? From Leah? Gunner might well cream himself before he’d gotten in. “Fuck, Lee. Where’d this come from?”
“I don’t know. I just want to say it. I want to tell you everything.” She met his eyes and held them with her own. “I don’t care about where you were tonight or what you do when you go off with the club. I don’t care about my dad or my mom or anything from before. I don’t care about anything but this. Being with you, every way I can. You are everything.”
He wasn’t, he wasn’t everything or even enough, but just then, he believed her. “Love you,” he groaned as he shifted and sank deep into her tight, perfect sheath. “Love you so much.”
“Oh my gosh, fuck me,” she breathed. “Fuck me, fuck me.”
Smiling, he held her close and did just that.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Besides his silver Harley, Gunner also had a bright red Chevy Chevelle SS. 1972—older than she was, but as shiny as new. Leah knew the year, make, and model, just like she knew his Harley was a 1990 Fat Boy, because he made sure she knew. He called himself a ‘gearhead,’ and he spent a lot of his free time with his hands in an engine.
On this Saturday in early September, Leah was leaning on the fender, under the hood with him, because her other option had been sitting inside by herself. They’d closed the complex pool the Monday before, on Labor Day, and sitting inside alone on a sunny Saturday was not her idea of a good time. In Grant, her Saturday afternoon would have likely been scheduled to the gills with church stuff—a social event or charity work or something. Now, unless they were at the club, there was nothing.
She had no friends. Even Ashley had cast her aside with the rest of Grant, and Ashley wasn’t even really part of the town. Plus she’d been the only one to know the sinful side of her. But she hadn’t forgiven her for bailing on her friend-watching responsibilities. They hadn’t even talked since that night.
The Bulls were her friends now, she guessed. Them and their old ladies. She really liked everybody in the club— Eight Ball wasn’t her favorite, but even he wasn’t quite as big a jerk as she’d thought—and she enjoyed being with them, but she didn’t feel like she could just call anybody up and see if they wanted to do something. She needed Gunner with her to feel comfortable with his people. That would probably change, if they lasted, but it hadn’t yet.
So she leaned under the hood with him and tried be a help and not a pain.
It was interesting to watch Gunner work. His strong, agile hands moved with calm confidence over metal and rubber engine parts that seemed scary and dangerous to her. She watched the inked fingers whose touch she knew so well dig deep into the engine, and she saw the muscles of his forearms flex, making his tattoos writhe over his skin. He wasn’t wearing a shirt; the day was summer-hot, and he’d yanked off the tattered Metallica t-shirt he wore to work on his engines. Beads of sweat drew sleek lines down his back, marking the contours of muscle.
It was more than interesting to watch him work. It was sexy. Leah sighed and pressed her hips to the fender, as if the sun-heated steel could ease that ache.
“Can you hand me the small socket set?”
Leah turned to the sidewalk and studied the toolbox, like a big metal tackle box, with accordioned trays, that Gunner had opened wide behind him. Small socket set…small socket set…
“In the orange case.”
Her dad wasn’t handy; when he needed something done, he called a professional. So Leah didn’t know much about engines or even tools. Hammer. Screwdriver. Pliers. That the complete list of tools she’d known. Now, she knew that there were several different kinds of hammers, and screwdrivers, and pliers, and thousands of other tools as well.
She found an orange plastic case and opened it. Rows of thick silver circles nested inside. When she held it out to Gunner, he took it from her and put a metal stick into one of the circles and locked it in.
“Thanks.”
He didn’t see her grin of triumph, but that was okay. She took up her place under the hood and watched him work some more.
“What are you doing?”
He glanced up, his eyebrows lifted with light surprise. “You want to learn, or just curious?”
“Curious.”
He might have been a little disappointed in that answer, but Leah didn’t want to be a gearhead. She just wondered what he was doing to an engine that wasn’t broken.
“Trying to goose a little more ass out of this baby.”
As explanations went, that sucked. He might as well have spoken in German or some other language Leah didn’t speak. “Huh?”
He laughed. “For the races tonight. I want to win. So I’m opening up the flow a little. It’s tricky, though. I already have it close to maxed out. The wrong mixture could blow up in my face. Literally.”
“You’re trying to make it go faster?”
That made him laugh a lot more. “Yeah. Exactly.” He held out his grease-grimed hand. “C’mere.”
She went, and he pulled her so that she stood between him and the engine, w
ith her back to him, surrounded by his warm strength. She had on a halter top, and the damp curls of his chest hair brushed her bare shoulders. Oh, the temperature had nothing to do with how hot this was. She was more than half tempted to turn and wrap her legs around him right there on the parking lot.
His hands skimmed up her arms, and she knew he was feeling the same thing. Casually, like she didn’t know she was doing it, she pushed her ass back just enough to press against him. He groaned softly and rocked his hips forward.
With his arms framing her and his mouth at her ear, he pointed to something like a deformed cylinder covered in pleated fabric. “You see that?” His voice was silked with sex. At her nod, he continued, “That’s the air filter. It’s connected to the mass air flow—there.” He indicated a hose thing. “And here’s the cold air intake.” He pointed at another part. “The more air that goes through the engine, the faster it will go. Too much air could start a fire or even an explosion. I don’t want that, but I want as much flow as I can get, right up to that point. I’ve got the NOS, too, and that adds another layer to balance in and find just the right mixture.”
She knew what ‘NOS’ was. He’d taken out the Chevelle’s back seat, so behind the front seats was a whole bunch of engine-type stuff, including a big canister that said ‘NOS’: nitrous oxide. Which apparently made the car go like a rocket.
Also big speakers. He liked his music really loud.
“You’re so good at this stuff.”
He kissed the side of her head.
“Why don’t you do this at the station—work on cars?” The Bulls owned the Sinclair station next door to the clubhouse, and most of them worked there. Gunner was an attendant at the full-service pumps. Or, as he called it, a ‘pump jockey.’
He stepped back and pushed her to the side, roughly, killing their moment of intimate closeness. Without answering her question, he bent over the engine again. Leah didn’t know what she’d done wrong.
“Gun?”
“I need to get this done, Lee.” He spoke into the engine.
The change had been so abrupt that Leah felt lost and insecure, so she didn’t push. “Okay. I’m going inside if you don’t need me.”
He didn’t answer, so she went inside, alone and confused.
~oOo~
Half of her head yelled at her to go back down and make him explain what she’d said that was so wrong. All she’d done was ask why he didn’t work on cars for work, and he’d gone from practically ready to fuck her on his open engine to icing her out.
Half of her head wanted her to crawl into bed and cry, because his dramatic shift in mood had made one in her, too, and now she was depressed and beginning to imagine scenarios in which he was about to dump her.
Half of her head shook its finger and told her that she’d made a terrible, awful mistake, tying herself to a guy she’d barely known. She should have done what her father wanted and made everything right in Grant.
That was too many halves, and her head ached. What she ended up doing was sitting on the ugly sofa, her legs tucked up, pretending to read one of the books she’d bought when she’d gone shopping with Mo, Maddie, and Joanna: Insomnia, by Stephen King.
When Gunner came up about half an hour later, she pretended not to notice. He went around the corner to the kitchen, and she heard him wash his hands, then fill a glass from the tap. She stared at the page she was on.
He came back and sat down at the other end of the sofa. “I’m sorry.”
It took her a second to shift gears again, so she didn’t look up. He leaned over and set a newly clean hand over the page. “Leah. I’m sorry.”
She met his eyes. “I don’t know what happened. What’d I do?”
When he looked away, toward the dark television, Leah racked her brain, trying to understand what had changed, why that seemingly innocuous question had shut him down so hard. Nothing made sense that she could think of.
“I can’t read.”
Leah let her book drop to her lap. All the thinking she’d been doing had brought her nowhere near a thought like that. “What?”
She winced at the incredulity in her voice, and he flinched like she’d slapped him. “I mean, I can. I’m not a moron. It’s just…it’s hard. The letters don’t stay put, and when I get through a page, I can’t remember what I read from the page before. I suck at school. I suck at tests. D wants his mechanics to be certified, and that means school and tests. So I don’t fix engines for work.”
More than two months together, and she’d had no idea. She should have, though. When she’d first come to the apartment, she’d noticed that there were no books, no magazines, no newspapers, no computer. Now that she had this frame to fit the pieces into, she thought about the picture they made. When he played PlayStation, he always spent a frustratingly long time on any screen with more than a few words of text. He studied his pager carefully when it went off and checked the number obsessively as he dialed to answer, even when it was the clubhouse. His handwriting was atrocious, like a grade-schooler’s. He hated leaving notes and would never write more than a few short words when he had to. When the hospital had sent him home with a sheaf of written instructions for diet and wound care, he’d never even glanced at them. He’d relied on Leah to read them and know what to do. She’d just thought he was being lazy and obstinate.
The signs had been there; she’d simply never put them all together.
“You have dyslexia?” One of the girls in the last Sunday school group she’d taught was dyslexic. Her mother had given Leah a pamphlet about it so she would understand how to make accommodations for her.
Gunner shrugged. “I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s where your brain doesn’t process letters right. It doesn’t have anything to do with intelligence—it just means the link between your eyes and brain has a short circuit somewhere. Nobody ever tested you or anything? Or even brought it up?”
Again, a shrug.
“Gunner, you should get tested.”
“Why? I’m not in school anymore. It’s not like I’m gonna learn to read better now.”
“Why not?” She thought of that pamphlet. “There are, like, therapies. Things you can learn to make it easier.”
“I’m almost twenty-nine years old, Lee. It’s too late.”
“Gun—”
“No!” He leapt to his feet. “No. Let it go. If you can’t deal with it, that’s on you. But back off me.”
Trying to sort through her shock and his anger and figure out what to say, Leah couldn’t meet his eyes. He’d put his t-shirt back on before he’d come inside, and now she stared at the cracked and faded design. Stretched-out cotton, tattered the edges, with holes here and there, including where the first ‘A’ in ‘Metallica’ should have been. A few short strands of chest hair poked through.
He looked good in it, though. Then again, he looked good in everything.
The distraction gave her time to know what to say. “It’s not about me, Gun. Knowing this doesn’t change how I feel about you. You’re exactly the same person you were five minutes ago, and I love that person. But if you could have something you want, why wouldn’t you try to get it?”
He walked away, getting almost to the dining table before he stopped and turned back to face her. “Nobody knows, and I don’t want anybody to know. So fucking drop it. I mean it.”
“Nobody?”
“My brother knew. Now you know. That’s it. Leah, I fucking swear. I’m about to lose my shit over here. Drop this right now. Right now.”
“Not even the rest of your family?”
His only answer was a white-hot glare. Not even his family knew? That couldn’t be true. How was that possible?
That didn’t matter. He’d never told anyone. Except his twin—and, now, her.
Leah pushed the forgotten book off her lap—how ironic that she’d been holding a brick of a novel through that whole exchange—and went to him. When she took his hands, she felt that strange tens
ion in him, like the night at the cabin, when he’d come back from whatever he and the others had gone off to do.
Her dad had liked model trains when she was a little girl. They were all packed up now, but when she was little, the extra room upstairs, across from her room, had been like a fantasyland, with a whole tiny world, people and animals and cars and buildings, meadows and mountains and streets and streams, tracks that curved and crisscrossed it all, the whole thing laid out on a table that nearly filled the space.
Under the table, neatly arranged on the floor, had been a row of small black boxes her father had called ‘transformers.’ They’d been plugged into a row of outlets that he’d had specially installed.
Twist (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 2) Page 23