Total pages in book: 124
Estimated words: 126840 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 634(@200wpm)___ 507(@250wpm)___ 423(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126840 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 634(@200wpm)___ 507(@250wpm)___ 423(@300wpm)
He’d been living in that house for two years.
But he’d never come home to it.
He’d just come home.
He heard her car in the garage, and outside turning to face where he’d first see her when she came in, he didn’t move.
Nanook showed first, racing toward him and jumping up on his hind feet with his front paws to Core to show the love.
Christ, yeah.
He was home.
He gave his dog a rubdown and caught Hellen rounding the wall that housed the laundry area and hid the kitchen that was open to a dining table space he hadn’t bothered to fill since he never threw dinner parties.
She stopped moving and started talking the minute his eyes hit her.
“Okay, the wallpaper is removable and everything else is returnable. I kept the receipts. It’s just that I told Kyra about our Sunday, and she works for an interior design firm. She got all excited because she’s never done anything for a man, much less a biker. She kept sending me these ideas, and they were so cool, I couldn’t stop myself. Full disclosure, she and Marcy came over one night to help.”
He needed to tell her.
He needed to tell her about the trailer. About how gentle and loving and broken and used his mother was. About how brutal and sleazy and detestable and foul his father was.
He needed to tell her about finding them, the smashed-up furniture, the blood, the gore, the clear indication his mother knew this time it was different and the last thing she did on this earth was put up one helluva fight.
He needed to tell her about going into the foster system after that, and how dicked up that was.
He needed to tell her he got in trouble delivering beat downs and doing stupid shit even before his father killed his mother. And how he lived with the shame he put his mom through that and the guilt that ate at him because she died maybe thinking she’d created another man like his dad.
He needed to tell her he hoped in her final moments she remembered that golden time, when they were good, safe, and he bought her a dress, which made her face light up and showed him for the first time how beautiful she’d been before his old man stole everything from her.
He needed to tell her how all this meant he needed somewhere to belong where he knew he was around men who got him.
He needed to tell her he found that in Bounty, but it was fucked-up because they all had a story that drove them there, but they not only let it fester, they fed off it and it took them where none of them ever wanted to be.
He needed to tell her he got so wound up in that life, it led him to participating in a gang beat-down of a defenseless woman.
And he needed to tell her all that came after in what would be a lifetime of all of them making amends.
He needed to give Hellen the information that was necessary for her to make the decision if she wanted to sleep next to that man, take his cock, and buy a cool-as-all-fuck picture to mount over his couch.
He wasn’t going to tell her.
Not now.
Not while she stood there in her tan slacks and her short-sleeved silky mocha tee and her shiny beige pumps, watching him closely, openly worried she’d stepped over a line.
He couldn’t do it.
It was fucked-up. Selfish. Wrong.
But that was who he was at his base.
He was fucked-up.
Selfish.
Wrong.
“You hate it,” she murmured, disappointed and still worried.
“I’ll pay you what it cost because it’s the absolute shit.”
Her face lit up.
Just like his mom’s did when she got that dress.
And that was why he was selfish. That was why he was an asshole.
Hellen liked him. She trusted him. She enjoyed being with him.
She wanted him.
And for the life of him, he couldn’t take that away from her.
Not now.
Not yet.
He wasn’t kidding himself. He knew that was selfish too.
He still was going to give her time, them time, he wasn’t going to waste too much of hers, and then he’d give her what she needed to decide.
But now he was going to give her what she wanted.
For a while.
She started moving to him. “Did everything go okay?”
“It’s done.”
“Good.”
She stopped moving when he announced, “I’m gonna fuck you in a second.”
Heat hit her gaze and he felt it drive through his dick.
“I’m gonna do it hard and I’m gonna try not to scare you while I do it,” he warned. “It gets too intense for you, you say, ‘skull,’ and I’ll back off. That’s gonna mean I’m gonna leave you and finish myself off. But if you walk right now to my bedroom, that’s what’s gonna happen.”
She didn’t even take a second to think about it.