That Girl is Trouble (Soldiers of Sin Book 2), page 17
Me: You want to find out what happens when I come looking for you?
Three dots jump at the bottom of my screen as I wait for her answer, anger already prickling at my neck, a tingle already working its way to my palm. I flex my hand.
Kat: I’m just having a little fun.
Me: What kind of fun?
Kat: The kind I’m supposed to be having. I’m getting drunk in the woods.
Me: You better be joking.
Kat: Don’t parent me. I get enough of that shit from Graves.
Me: What is this? You looking for attention? Not getting enough hugs at home?
Kat: Why does everyone always ask me that? It’s like therapy all over again.
Me: Because the last time I saw you, you were offering up your pussy to half the club.
Kat: No. The last time you saw me, I had your dick in my mouth.
I chuck my phone at my couch.
Fucking woman.
Those thoughts I keep trying to push out are immediately pummelling into my brain. Kat. Wet. Naked. Coming on my showerhead. Tits pressed tight to my chest. Her nails biting into my shoulder as her whole fucking body shook against mine.
My phone vibrates loudly on the couch cushion, and another flush of irritation heats my blood when her name flashes across my screen.
Kat: Think you can figure out where I am? Three guesses. We can play a game.
Me: No games, Kitty. But keep acting like a little brat, and I’ll throw you over my knee and make you sorry.
Kat: Shouldn’t tempt me like that. I’m a little drunk.
Drunk. Image after image flips through my head. Kat. Sloppy and stumbling. Some fuck groping her in a dark forest. Her like she was in my shower. On her knees. And not for me.
When I get my fucking hands on her—
Kat: Hint #1. There are trees here. Lots of them.
I’ve lived in South Bay all my life, and the one thing I know for sure? Things don’t change here. Kids still go to the same place they did fifteen years ago when they wanna get fucked up.
Cursing, I grab my jacket and keys and stalk to my bike. My phone vibrates in my pocket. Maybe it’s Kat giving me another useless hint, but I don’t look at it.
I know exactly where I’m going.
It’s what I’ll do when I fucking find her that I’m still working out.
I rip across town, slowing as I turn onto Old Burwash Road towards Bailey Bridge. Road used to be the main way into town, but once they four-laned the highway and most of the farmland around here was left abandoned, this road all but ceased to exist. City doesn’t do much upkeep, no life for miles, and unless they’re coming out here looking for trouble or a party, people steer clear to avoid the deep potholes and cracked pavement.
Not tonight though. The road leading to the bridge is lined with cars. I kill my bike, and in the silence that quickly falls around me, the distant sounds of laughter ring out from the dense forest. Teenagers. College kids home for the summer. The town degenerates looking for a fix. It’s where they all come.
I take the overgrown path down from the side of the road and under the graffiti-littered bridge. My boots crunch on broken glass and crushed beer cans as I follow the river towards the light glowing up ahead.
The thick brush makes for a slow trek through the wood, but after a couple minutes, I hit a well-lit clearing. It’s packed with bodies circling a large fire. Gotta be a couple dozen people in this place—drinking, smoking, and by the sounds coming from the tree cover to my right, fucking. There’s a dude doing blow off some chick’s tits, her head tipped back, and for a second, when I note her long, dark hair and leather boots, I think it might be Kat.
For that second, everything slows, and I reach for the blade secured to my hip. I wrap my hand around it, eyes focused on the woman, on the man who’s gonna die if it’s Kat’s tits he’s got his face all over.
But then she laughs, and the tension in my shoulders immediately unwinds. Not Kat’s laugh. Not her body. Not her tits. I let my grip around the hilt of my knife loosen.
“Is that…?” comes from a few feet away.
“Yeah,” someone whispers back. “What’s he doing out here?”
A hush washes over the crowd as more people note who’s crashing their party. Eyes dart away, people step back. I get it. This may be my town, but showing up at a pit party and bumping shoulders with types like this? Not really an Axe Donovan kind of move.
Ignoring the sudden quiet that’s fallen over the clearing, I continue my search for Kat.
Twenty feet away or so, I spot her. Eyes on her phone, beer bottle in hand, nodding her head absentmindedly at the guy who’s got his hand a little too low on her hip.
Clenching my fists, I stalk towards her. The asshole touching her notices me before she does and stumbles back. Kat jerks her head up, and her lips part in surprise. And then she smiles. A smile that sends a twitch to my dick. Because it’s the same one she gave me when she was on her knees. Wet. Naked. My cock disappearing between her lips.
I let my anger show as I approach, just a little. So she knows how much shit she’s in. It only makes her smile grow.
“Let’s go,” I grit.
She opens her mouth and sucks in a breath like she might argue, but when she lets it out, ready to protest, I quickly interject. “Don’t think I won’t cause a scene, Kat. I follow you out or I carry you out. You pick.”
There’s a flex in her jaw, the light from the fire pit illuminating the red blotches flushing over her cheeks. More whispers, and Kat shifts, her eyes darting around the clearing.
Silence stretches between us for a long moment, and then she downs her beer and pushes the empty into the chest of the gawking asshole standing next to her. Shoving past me, she throws me a scathing look and then starts the trek back through the forest to the bridge. I’m hot on her heels, but silent, and she says nothing to me as we walk back to my bike.
Once I’m settled on the seat, I give her my helmet and motion for her to get behind me. Without a word, she complies, her hands settling loosely at my sides as I kick my bike to life and take off.
Could take her back to her sister, where she should be. Could take her to the clubhouse, where I know she definitely shouldn’t be.
Instead, I drive past the road that leads to both those places and gun it down a straight stretch towards the edge of town. She slips her hands around my abdomen, holding me tighter, her thighs sliding taut to mine as I hit my throttle and fly down the road. The wind slams against my face, the air biting into my skin and cooling my temper. Mostly cooling my temper. Only one thing will do that tonight, and it’s not liquor or a fight or a damn ride.
After another minute or so, I slow and turn onto a hidden driveway. It’s a long, narrow laneway, but I’ve been in here so often the last few weeks that the dark shrouding us does nothing to impede me as I weave around the bumps of the uneven dirt road.
When I kill the engine and the rumble of my bike quiets, we’re thrown into darkness. The only light is the moon above, half-hidden by clouds.
“Why are we here?” she asks, a note of discomfort in her voice.
I ignore her and push off my bike, giving her my back and letting the silence sit. Letting her squirm under the weight of it.
She slides off the seat. “Axe?”
I sigh, my hand twitching to touch her. I don’t look at her when I speak. “Turn around and bend over my bike.”
“Why?”
Because I’m pissed. Because I want to see that little ass of hers as red as those sweet cherry lips. Because I didn’t like seeing another man’s hands on her. Again.
“You know why,” I say, finally turning to her. I can’t make out all the details of her face in the dark, but the mix of fear and curiosity is obvious. So is the hunger. Same look I caught in her eyes in my shower. At the Slam. Every time she’s fucking looked at me since she showed up at my door.
“And if I don’t?”
I shrug. “Guess we’ll find out.”
Kat tilts her head, sizing me up, as if trying to decide how far she can push me. Eventually, she nods and turns around, pressing her palms flat to my bike. Advancing, I grip her waist and flip her over the machine, pulling a yelp from her when she loses her footing and her ass arches up. Perfect angle. Perfect ass.
I pull down her jeans and underwear, and then I slide my hand over her bare ass, my pants suddenly too damn tight. Goose bumps rise across every exposed inch of her skin, and she trembles under my hand as she readies for me.
“I don’t like the way you were talking to me tonight, Kitty,” I murmur.
“I wasn’t—”
Slap.
She gasps the moment my hand slams down onto her skin.
A tingle of pain rushes over my palm as I bring it high and slam it down once again.
Another huff of air slips from her lips.
“I ask where you are, you tell me. Understand? No games.”
She nods, and I still my movements.
“Words, Kat.”
“Yes.”
Slap. Slap. Slap. Slap.
My dick is hard and pressing painfully against the zipper of my jeans, and with each hit, with each moan that falls out of her mouth, I’m another fraction of a second away from pulling those pants down a little farther and sliding my cock inside her tight little cunt.
Finally, breath ragged, I let up and step away.
She struggles to pull her pants back up, so I yank her around and tug her into my chest. Tears spill out of the corners of her eyes, and I slide my thumb over them before bringing it to my mouth.
“Good girl, Kat,” I say, humming as I suck the salt from my skin. “You did good.”
“You like that? Hurting me?”
I cock my head. “Did I hurt you?”
“Yes.”
“But you liked it.”
“Yes.” She looks thoughtful for a moment, and then she asks, “Why is that?”
“You like things that make your heart race. Pain does that.”
To demonstrate my point, I press my hand to her chest. Sure enough, her heart is an erratic thump against my palm. Grabbing her hand, I replace mine with it and hold it there.
She stills, listening, feeling, her brows knitted. She’s holding her breath, and after a second, I realize I am too.
“See?”
She nods. “Why… do you like it?”
“Never really thought about it.”
She tilts her chin up and scrutinizes me. “Something you like to do to all the women you fuck?”
“Not all of them. And I’m not fucking you.”
“Why not?”
“You’re seventeen.”
“Eighteen soon.”
“I’m not having this conversation.”
“If you’re worried about the law, age of consent is—”
“Don’t,” I say, cringing. “Jesus Christ, Kat. Enough, all right?”
“So… too young to fuck, but not too young to be on my knees? Or bent over your bike? Not too young when it serves you. Got it,” she bites as she pulls out of my grip.
I scrub my hand over my face and sigh. “No. Too young for all that. I’m just a bastard with no self-control.”
She hums in response, circling my bike slowly as she takes in the heavy wood around us. “What is this place?”
The road ahead goes deeper into the brush. Eventually, it opens up into a huge slice of land with a condemned barn and an overgrown wheat field. There’s so much abandoned land in these parts that it’s been easy to scoop up property when it suits me. The idea came to me after all that shit went down in December. Someone was already buying up real estate little by little. I imagine the intent is to take over, develop, build up the tourism, push out the South Bay Sinners. But this is my fucking town. I can’t have that, so I started too.
Hasn’t been all that easy with the cash flow problems I had after losing so much product in the fall. Had to do a lot of shady shit these past few months to keep us afloat. But now that things are on track and we’re making money again, I’ve started to reclaim what’s left.
“Old farm down there,” I tell her. “Couple acres. Thinking about buying it.”
She snorts. “For business, I assume?”
“Why?” I grin. “Can’t picture me livin’ in the sticks?”
“Definitely not.” She holds up her cell phone. “Practically no service here. You’d go nuts without your phone.”
“You get reception until you hit the tree line. Trees circling the valley block the signal. Kind of why I like this place, actually. Wi-Fi or sat phones. I get to decide who talks to who.”
“That tracks. Axel Donovan always telling people what to do,” she teases.
“You baiting me?”
She notches her teeth into her lip. “Is it working?”
“No,” I say with a low chuckle. And because I’m an asshole, a selfish one who can’t keep my mind clean when she’s around, I say, “But you better hope it doesn’t. Next time, I’ll take my belt to you, and you won’t sit right for a week. How’s your ass?”
She bites down on her smile. “Sore.”
“Good. Let’s go. I gotta get you home.”
“I don’t want to go to my sister’s,” she argues.
I sigh. “Thought you two were good now. You gonna tell me what this is all about? Why you’re lying to her again?”
Kat only gives me silence, and so I ask, because I told Triss I would.
“What’s going on with you?”
“Nothing.”
“She said you didn’t go to prom. Or your grad. Don’t all you women love that shit?”
She shrugs. “Didn’t seem important after… after everything. After him.” Anger bubbles to the surface with that last word.
“Gotta live your life, Kat. Jess wouldn’t have wanted you to put things on pause ’cause of what happened.”
“Yeah? Well, he doesn’t get to want much of anything anymore, does he?” she says, a little more edge to her voice, warning me to drop it, to back down.
“No. Guess he doesn’t. So what do you want? Why are you suddenly back? Last time we had words, you were throwing a set of keys at my face and telling me to fuck off.”
Kat steps into me, her crossed arms bumping my chest, and for the second time today, I’m having a fucking showdown with a Danforth woman.
“What’s it to you?” she asks.
I sigh. “Why you talking to me like I’m your enemy, Kat? You wanna compete for biggest asshole, I’d say the shit you pulled at the Slam makes you the winner. Your sister practically had a fucking heart attack, and I almost got my ass beat because of you.”
She arches an eyebrow. “Almost?”
“I won, didn’t I? What was that? A test? See if someone would put themselves in front of a fist to protect you?”
She doesn’t answer. Doesn’t move.
“Well, did I pass?”
“You think that was about you?”
“Wasn’t it? Or was that little visit you paid me in my shower a couple days ago about someone else?”
Kat finally drops her eyes and takes a step back, putting some distance between us. “I just wanted…”
“Wanted what?”
“I don’t know. To feel something other than this… nothingness.” Her eyes meet mine, and she wraps her arms around her torso. “Do you ever get that? Like you can’t feel? It’s like I’m… numb, I guess. To everything.”
I’m all too familiar with it, yeah. In lockup, I lived the same day over and over again. The same walls, the same sounds pounding at my ears, the same faces and iron bars. It’s enough to make a man lose his mind. So I learned to turn it off, detach, disassociate. It’s how I survived. It was only four years, but it felt like ten. But maybe it would have felt longer if I hadn’t been so good at shutting off my brain.
“Yeah,” I admit. “Yeah, I’ve felt that.”
“What do you do? How do you fix it?”
Locked up, there wasn’t much I could do but welcome the numbness. But out here, it’s rare that feeling creeps in. Living this life, leading my men, knowing that at any moment, I’m one bullet away from being put into the ground, that’s what drives me. Out here, I survive on violence and adrenaline. And as wrong as it sounds, it’s how I keep my head on straight. How I remind myself I’m still breathing.
And Kat? She’s the same. I could smell it on her the day I met her. It’s how I knew she’d be trouble, that whatever shit I pulled Jesse into, she’d be trotting right behind, ready to jump into the thick of it with the rest of us. Except Kat isn’t supposed to want this, and I sure as hell won’t be the one who drags her into it.
“Never anything good.”
Kat likes doing shit that gets her blood moving. Dangerous shit. Shit that’s only going to push her farther in the direction I should be pulling her back from. “It’s late. Come on. You can sleep in your old room.”
Sleep in her old room. I know she won’t. The girl can barely say Jesse’s name, and there’s no damn way she’ll be passing out in a bed they used to share.
Despite that though, the lie between us, she nods. So I hand her my helmet and throw a leg over my bike. She loops her arms around my stomach, and I kick into gear, then rip down the road and back through town to the clubhouse.
I park my bike and then trail behind her through the door, across the bar, and up the stairs towards that room—Jesse’s old room. Neither of us says another word.
When I’m in my bed, I make a game studying my ceiling. Waiting. Staring. I count the blades on my fan. Watch the lights flash across the walls as cars go by on the dark street below. My ears pick up every squeak and shift of the building. And then I hear it. The creak of a door. A shuffle across my living room. And I feel it. The presence of another person. My mattress dips, and there’s a pull on my sheets, a warm body sliding in next to mine.
I sigh. “No touching, Kat.”
“I know.”
“Can’t sleep?”
“He’s… everywhere up there.” She moves closer, and then her head is on my chest, hand on my stomach, hair in my face.
Time ticks by, but she doesn’t fall asleep, and neither do I.
