Eight years since I’ve tasted this woman. And even only having just woken up, morning breath on the menu, she’s Frankie. My Frankie. She tastes exactly as I remember and even better at the same time. I taste hints of age and wisdom. Of life experiences. Want. Need. Hesitance. It’s all there as I continue to press harder against her.
She moves one hand to the back of my neck to grip my hair at the nape and pull me down as she lies back on the pillow. When she moans it’s soft and elongated and the sound moves through me to stop at my cock, a cock that wants this woman again as much as the rest of me.
Her back arches, tilting those beautiful breasts my way, her hard nipples protruding through the T-shirt, my T-shirt, that she’s wearing. It’s been too long since I’ve been laid. Even though it hasn’t actually been that long, it wasn’t with Frankie, and I can’t resist her, moving my body over hers to situate between her thighs. I suck one pert nipple in my mouth through the thin shirt and grind my hardened length against her panties.
Oh, fuck. Frankie. She widens her legs to accommodate me better and arches her back to a point I think it has to be almost painful. I take her other nipple in my mouth, continuing to rub the first until I can’t take it anymore and move my hand down her satiny skin to dip below the elastic of her panties. Her moan as I split her lips would’ve had me coming in my boxers if I’d still been sixteen. As a reward, I glide my finger through the wetness and press down when I’ve found her clit.
I swear her eyes roll back in this sort of euphoric reverie as she silently writhes beneath me, and I move my thumb to replace my finger on that magic little fun button in order to dip my two fingers inside her, the way she always used to like. Apparently, that’s one move too many. When her eyes pop open and she pushes me off her, I know I’m screwed in ways I don’t want to be.
I’m so fucking hard with Frankie so fucking wet. The memory of her moans still echoes in my ears. Her hot, heaving breaths tell me she wants this just as much as I do.
“What’s the matter?” I ask, my voice low and raspy. I swallow hard because I fucking want to touch her again like I don’t remember even wanting to touch her the first time we were together. Because this time I know—I know—how good it can be, how incendiary we were together and with age and experience on our sides the potential we have’ll be off the fucking charts. The memories of this woman, the woman of my dreams, shuffle like a playlist through my head as I stare into her gorgeous eyes, guiding me to an edge I desperately want to leap over.
“We can’t, Rory.”
“Oh, I think we can,” I tell her, forcing a chuckle.
“I can’t. Not again.” She swallows hard. “Not ever again. You broke my heart. Crushed it. I don’t trust you.”
Tears roll over her cheeks and as much as I want to comfort her, I find myself pushing away instead. I broke her heart? This woman fucking crushed my soul, yet here I am, trying for a second chance. How can she even utter those lies? For Christ’s sake, I asked her to move in with me. There wasn’t a woman before or since that I felt close enough to live with. I fucking couldn’t wait to get away from my own mother. But Frankie? She’d been my everything.
“Not exactly as I remember it, lass.” Shit. This morning started so sweet. I sit up to turn my back to her, my feet to the floor. My dick is so hard, it pains me pressing against my boxers. Elbows to knees, I press the palms of my hands to my eyes.
“Not how you remember it?” she asks, though it’s more of an accusation, and she tries to take steadying breaths. “I wanted you to come to Cold Springs with me. I had visions of a home and family,” she cries. “And all you wanted was a plaything. ‘Easy pussy.’ Weren’t those the words you used? We move in together and you could have pussy any time you wanted. And I could have your cock.”
Goddammit. I’d said that. Exactly that. But I’d not meant it the way she took it. The woman came from a fucked-up broken home. I’d come from an even more fucked-up home. She’d been scared to take the next step with me because of those demons haunting her. Frankie loved my cock. She’d used those exact words on too many occasions. ‘Rory, I love your cock.’ I heard that every time I moved inside her. She’d be lying if she said I didn’t love her pussy as I was inside her more than I wasn’t when we were alone together, back then. Making dinner, I’d bend her over the table to fuck her. Watching a movie, I’d split her legs and shove inside. Hell, I remember times when she’d only just step inside my apartment when I’d unzip her pants, spin her around, and take her against the closed door.
Frankie was made for me. Always ready to take me. As much sense as we made while fucking, we made equal sense when we weren’t fucking. Goddammit, this woman was my best friend. The good. The bad. Everything in between. If it happened, she was the first one I wanted to tell.
But the further she went in school the less she involved me in our life together. Making decisions instead of talking things out with me. We had a life in Lexington. By the time she’d ended us, she’d been finishing up her two years at Bluegrass Community College. We both had jobs. I’d felt like she was pulling away because we were getting too close, but I’d wanted everything with her. Fucking ready to put a ring on her finger. Then the next thing I knew, she was informing me she was attending Northern Kentucky in the fall. No discussion. No applying to universities closer to where we lived. She was going and I could come if I wanted. That was the moment I knew where I stood with her.
With all this mess running through my head, I guess I stay silent too long, feeling her weight leave the bed. “Francesca Cardone, sit your arse back down before I pull you over my lap and spank it good and hard for the nonsense ya pulled.”
All this time wasted—for what?
She gasps and says, “You don’t get to tell me what to do.” But she does it, sitting her arse back down.
“I was crazy about ya. Don’t pretend now that ya didn’t know, woman,” I grumble because I’m feeling ten kinds of stupid right now. Her response is to keep quiet. Good. Because I have things to say and she’s not leaving here until we’re on the same page again. “All that shite you thought could’ve easily been cleared up if you’d just have called me on it. Told me what ya were thinking.”
“You let me go,” she says. “I got into a good school to better my future—our future and you just let me go.”
“Woman, tell me ya didn’t say that. By not even mentioning ya’d applied to that fucking school, ya told me how ya thought of us. And not once did ya ask me to move. ‘I’m getting an apartment’, that’s what ya said. So, tell me how I was supposed to act any different?”
When she opens her mouth, I’m prepared for her to argue but she doesn’t. No, she begins to fucking giggle when I’m being fucking serious here. Giggle? What’s worse, I love the sound, miss the sound. “What’s funny?” I demand to know.
“I forgot how strong your accent becomes the more you get worked up.”
The more I get worked up? Jesus, this woman’s going to be the death of me. None of that other shite matters now. We got a second chance here and we’re taking it. Don’t care if I gotta drag her along with me kicking and screaming. We’re taking it. “Yar mine.”
“I’m not.”
“Really?” I ask, raising my eyebrow at her in my ‘I’m not fucking around’ way she wouldn’t have forgotten. “I’ll give you a second to rethink that conclusion.”
“God, were you always this bossy?”
“If I wasn’t, then I should’ve been.”
Her gaze travels from my eyebrow to my lips and then she licks her lips nervously before she looks away. She was an active participant in the aftermath of when it happened a few minutes ago. It takes everything I’ve got to not let it go there again, but we can’t go there again until we get this bullshite hashed out. Though, our separation proves too much and I stand to walk around the bed, kneeling in front of her to put us at eye level—so she knows I mean business—and I grip her arms. “Frankie,” I say gently. “Yar mine, lass. Ya
know it. The fact that ya showed here instead of heading home proves it.”
Frankie places a hand to each of my cheeks and looks me in the eyes. “Miscommunication or not, you broke my heart.” When I open my mouth to protest, she moves one hand over to cover my mouth. “Please, Rory. Let me finish. How I remember it, no matter if it’s right or wrong, is that you broke my heart. I’m scared to go back there with you. Mollie and Macie are so precious. The more I’m with them, the deeper I fall in love with them. What happens if we lose our way again? It’s not just us. You’ve got girls to think about. Girls who can’t be getting attached to every woman you bring around, only to have that woman ripped away from them, too.”
That’s unfair and pisses me off. “Francesca, I would never put those girls in the way of hurt, and ya damn well know it. I would never put you in the way of hurt, either. I’ll give ya time to get to know me again, but I’m never letting go. This is it, so ya best get used to the idea. Yar mine. Period.”
She closes her eyes to breathe in and out, slowly centering herself. And surprising the hell out of me, she bends in to kiss me. A sweet, tender press of her lips that reignites my love for her in spite of all this who-hurt-whom past crap, a love that might have settled to burning embers over the years we were apart but was never extinguished. Could never be extinguished. Not even someday when in death we do part.
Oh yeah, she’s definitely my old lady.
Frankie moves her lips away to search my face, running her thumb down the scar that cuts through my eyebrow. Something new since the last time we were together. The remnant of a bad decision made from a wild broken heart and the abandoning of senses to follow. When she left, I didn’t care what happened to me and I predictably found trouble.
Then she moves her fingers to the scars on my chest. “What did you get yourself into, Rory?” she asks, but she’s not really asking. More wondering out loud.
I have a few more of those. Bullet wounds. Life tumbled into a never-ending pit of booze, women, and hard living after she left. I’m not the same Rory she fell in love with the first time. Self-destructive Rory took over, leading me down a path that was sure to end my life if I hadn’t found the brothers. Sometimes I ran my mouth on drunken bravado, sometimes I took offense when someone else did. And some of those women weren’t exactly single.
Fuck, I’m not proud of that time in my life. I’m not in a hurry to let her know just how badly it tore me up when she left. That knowledge gives her power and despite how badly I want her again and know she’s mine, I’m not ready for her to wield that power over me.
“I’ll tell ya anything you want to know, but not right now,” I whisper and close my eyes, pressing my nose to her cheek. “Don’t want to scare you, lass.” She was right. As I calmed down, my accent rescinded.
A pained expression on her beautiful face, she bites down on her bottom lip this time, thankfully learning not to lick it. “You scare the hell out of me, Rory MacGregor.”
“But you still love me,” I tease, hoping to elicit a reaction, in the affirmative if being honest.
“What am I going to do with you?” she asks, bending in to take my mouth again. We press our foreheads together, then as she holds my face and she swallows. “I have to go to work.”
“But yar coming back here?” What is she thinking? God, I can’t lose her again.
“I’ll bring the girls with me.”
That’s not a fucking answer.
6.
Frankie
Rory and the girls arrive at my apartment complex first thing in the morning. It’s Saturday, the Saturday after he’d been arrested by that jerkwad Rodrick and I promised Rory a nursery. They get me because we need his truck to haul our bounty home and I certainly plan on hauling back a bounty. What can I say? I’m a woman. I love to shop. And what’s better to shop for than baby stuff?
Answer: Nothing.
There is nothing better. Not shoes. Purses. Clothing for ourselves.
He looks gorgeous sitting behind the wheel idling in the parking lot in front of my building, having texted me when they arrived so he didn’t have to unhook Mollie and Macie, and it was the right call. Through the windshield I can see he’s got on one of those skintight because his muscles are so big, thermal Henleys under his leather cut. It’s black, just like his cut and I’d be willing to bet that he’s got bootylicious black jeans on too. Rory tends to like his black clothing.
“Donuts?” he askes when I slid in the front seat next to him. I don’t even have the door closed yet, but my tummy answers for me in the form of a growl. I answer him anyway.
“Donuts sound amazing. I am so in the mood for Long Johns.”
“Ya do like your cream filling,” he jokes with me and I roll my eyes at his inference. Ever since I let him tackle my mouth with his tongue, he’s been trying to get me to recreate that morning. Though he won’t recrate it. I think he’s waiting on me, which I actually think is a super sweet gesture. I’m just not ready yet. Hopefully I’ll be ready sooner than later because Rory’s lips are magic. Pure unadulterated magic.
And he’s getting to me, too.
I mean, he’s Rory, how could he not?
We roll out of the lot onto the street and head in the direction of this new donut shop Glazed and Confused, it’s only been open for a few months but I think they’ll be around for a long time. Only a five-minute drive from my house, it’s early enough that the line isn’t long at the drive-thru. I order a large coffee with two creams and a stevia. He takes his with cream and no sugar because he’s going to eat donuts. But what kind of person drinks coffee without sweetener? Serial killers, that’s who. The Rory of ol’ didn’t drink unsweetened coffee.
I narrow my eyes at him and then at his cup and snarl, “I don’t even know who you are.”
He bursts out laughing loud enough to startle the babies who’d fallen back asleep from the car ride.
It takes us an hour and a half to reach Lexington and when we do all the good memories come pouring back. I’m surprised he remembers all the old haunts, but he drives us past several locations, pointing them out and starting every sentence with, “remember when we…”
Yeah, oh hell yeah, I remember. I remember everything about our time together. The best seven hundred and thirty days of my life until they weren’t.
We finally turn in to the parking lot of the mall and park. Rory backs that massive machine into the spot. Backs it in. Showoff. He needs one of those double strollers, something I plan to rectify once we get inside our destination, a store called Baby Central. Until then, we each carry a baby carrier inside and rent one of the mall’s double strollers. It’s big and clunky but works for the time we need it to work.
“Ready?” I ask before heading inside Baby Central. Rory peers through the glass doors and through the windows, beyond the window displays to the pandemonium inside, slowly shaking his head no. “It’s their Columbus Day sale,” I tell him. “It’s like a Black Friday event. The sales are crazy.”
“How would ya know that?” he asks.
“Commercials, duh.”
“But—”
“Rory, I work at a daycare. A daycare that accepts infants. Infants, along with children of all ages, require all kinds of things. Not to mention what we keep on hand for when a parent inevitably forgets something crucial like diapers or wipes. Can’t leave a baby marinating in their own stench all day, now can we?”
“I s’ppose not,” he answers, then sighs a resigned sort of sigh. “Right, I’m ready. Let’s do this.”
And we do.
Our first stop is in the baby clothes section to begin filling our cart with all the necessities involved with raising baby girls. It’s a clothing extravaganza. I’ve found my happy place. That being standing beside Rory with two beautiful baby girls to shop for. That’s also when we decide to split the colors. Totally my idea. In all honesty, the man looks to be one frilly dress away from total nuclear meltdown.
Because they look so much a
like, in order for people who aren’t around them often enough to tell them apart, Mollie gets the colors pink, yellow, and green for her wardrobe choices. While Macie gets purple, orange, and blue.
The first thing I pick out is a puffy-sleeved layered dress with more frills and bows than should probably be legal. It comes with a matching headband, also with a big bow, available in both pink and purple. I squeal and do my own mini version of a touchdown dance.
The dress I lift from the rack is the pink one. “This will look so cute on Mollie!”
Rory doesn’t even have to speak in order to convey his disagreement on that point. He stares at the dress like I’m holding a rock of airplane sewage in my hand.
“What?” I ask, sort of pouting. Okay, really pouting. “It’s cute.”
“The lassies have a fucking Lord for a dad.” And then he yanks the hanger from my hand, hangs the dress back on the rack, rather roughly if you ask me, and begins pushing the stroller to a different section of the store. “We don’t do frills in the MacGregor house,” he grouses.
He means every word. I know he does. That doesn’t stop me from chuckling because he’s right. What kind of self-respecting biker dresses his girls in frills, ruffles and bows? Since shopping is my middle name, all I need are the parameters he wants me to stick within. We stop in front of, believe it or not, baby Harley tees, jeans and the sweetest little leather jackets.
“Badass baby chic,” I whisper, and I go wild.
From clothing we walk along the back wall of the store, the area with all the cribs, dressers, rocking chairs and all other manner of furniture one might need for a nursery. Rory splurges for two new cribs instead of one—deciding to give back the one from the center—because both his babies get new, he says. He decides that they need the matching changing table, and also purchases a dresser, a rocking chair, a table with a table lamp, and a bookshelf so he can read to them. All painted black. All slick, badass pieces.
Scotch: Unraveled (Brimstone Lords MC Book 4) Page 6