“Si!”
Simon squinted across the station lot at Delaney, who stood in the narrow alleyway between the station and the clubhouse. “Yeah, D?”
“Need to talk to you. My office. Grab Gun, too.”
Simon sat in front of the station, jawing with the local old farts, finishing his soda from lunch. He glanced over at the pumps and saw Gunner, flirting with one of the neighborhood grannies, who all just loved him. He’d heard Delaney’s summons, too. He stood straight up and gave Delaney, and then Simon a nod. He sent the granny off with a wave and headed toward the clubhouse.
Simon drained his can of Coke and tossed it in the trash barrel. “See you later, fellas.” The old men nodded and resumed their grumbling complaints about the state of the world.
Wondering why Delaney hadn’t just called the station, Simon looked back through the front window and saw Slick on the phone. He could have used his cellphone, too, but he saw the thing as an emergency lifeline more than a communication device. So whatever the president needed to talk about, he didn’t see it as an emergency.
Still, as he crossed the lot, stiff worry tightened Simon’s limbs. He and Gunner weren’t on the outs anymore. Gun had even waved off the fight he’d demanded. What they’d gone through together, what their women had gone through together, had served to re-forge their friendship and their brotherhood. There was no reason for Delaney to intervene between them any longer. But if he was calling them to the office together, then it had to be trouble they shared. And that could only mean one thing.
But that was all behind them.
Nearly three months since the truce with the Hounds had been made, and things had been quiet. Back to normal. Boring, even. Gun runs on schedule, protection work under contract, the station at full capacity, Signet Models rebuilding. The Hounds had made two payments on their sales in the Bulls’ expanded turf, and a third was coming up. Everything rolled smoothly.
At home, Deb had begun to find her bearings. She and Max, and Simon and Leah, had decided to get the farm back in business and build a house for each couple where the original farmhouse had stood. It was October, so the build wouldn’t start until the spring, but for now, they had an architect hired and had been working out what Deb called their ‘need/want/dream’ lists for the designs.
Meanwhile, she’d taken over his unused dining room and had started crafting again. The woman had boundless energy, and she was happier busy. She created things and sketched out ideas, and she cooked and cleaned and played housewife.
He wanted her not to be playing the ‘wife’ part. He wanted that to be real. But she was still recovering. Her moods shifted unpredictably, and sometimes she still flinched at his touch. For now, he followed her lead toward the future. They meant to live together in that new house. She wanted him there.
Things were good. But Delaney calling him and Gun to the office froze his spine.
~oOo~
Gunner sat in a corner of the ratty sofa against the wall. Simon took up the other corner, and Delaney rolled his desk chair over to face them.
“It’s trouble, right?” Gunner said, his voice full to the brim with reluctance.
“I don’t know.” Delaney heaved a loaded breath. “Got a package from the Russians today.”
“A package?” Simon asked, trying to get his hands around Delaney’s low mood. “You mean a shipment we didn’t expect?” That couldn’t be right. All the Bulls were around the clubhouse or at work today, except Maverick, who was home with his family.
“No.” He spun his chair and picked something up from the bookcase behind him. When he spun back, he had a video microcassette in his hands. “This. And a note to call Alexei before I watched it. I’ve watched it, and I’ve talked to him.”
Simon knew what it was. He dashed a look at Gunner and saw him catch the truth as well. “Fuck. No way. I thought…”
They’d thought that the bomb had destroyed the video that their women had described. Booker Howard, stripping Deb and Leah down, putting hands on them, and filming it.
“Christ,” Simon muttered. He rubbed his eyes like he could erase the images cavorting through his head. All the things he’d imagined, the blank spaces and colors he’d filled in from Deb’s halting, unsteady talk about that day. “You watched?”
Delaney nodded. “Had to.”
“The Russians had it all this time?” Gunner asked. As the question rolled to its end, his voice took on a snarl. “They kept it from us? What the fuck?”
Staring at the microcassette, Delaney answered, “Howard had it with him when Alexei nabbed him. He says they kept it to make sure it stayed out of the wrong hands.”
“That’s bullshit.” Simon thought he was seeing the truth through the red haze of his anger and Deb’s pain. “They kept it to see if they’d need to use it. On us.”
“Probably so.” Delaney nodded. “Probably so. Irina does nothing recklessly. She serves no one and nothing but her own family’s interest. And by family, I mean her and her grandson. Everybody else is expendable. Yeah, I think they kept their hands on this to see if they might need to use it to keep us in line or push us in some way. Now I’m asking you what we do with this.”
“You watched?”
“Yeah, Gun. Like I said, I had to. I’m sorry.”
“Did they…were they… Fuck. I can’t say it. How bad did they hurt them?”
At Gunner’s question, Simon closed his eyes. Deb had said they hadn’t been raped. The ER doctor said there’d been no signs of it. But she still had trouble sometimes being touched, if she wasn’t expecting it. Would she have lied about something like that? Why would she have?
Delaney answered, “You can see for yourself, if you want. I don’t recommend it, so if you trust me, I’ll tell you as much as you want to know.”
“I don’t want to see that shit.” Simon didn’t need any more vivid images in his head, particularly not any grounded in reality.
“Yeah, no. Me either. Just tell us.”
“They weren’t raped. The tapes don’t show that. They were like you found them, tied up naked. Howard just…touched them. The camera follows his hands as he put them where he shouldn’t’ve.”
“I’m glad I cut those fucking hands open,” Gunner growled.
Simon didn’t want to hear details about Booker fucking Howard abusing innocent, vulnerable women. Their women. He wanted to know one thing. “Why the fuck did they tape it?”
“At the end of the tape, he steps into frame, full close-up. He says, ‘Hide and seek, you cracker fucks,’ and the tape ends.”
“The bait.” Simon understood.
“Yeah,” Delaney agreed. “We got to them before they could get the tape to us, but I think it was meant to draw us to the refinery so they could blow us up. They didn’t expect us to find them on our own.”
Gunner scowled at the cassette. “I want it fucking burned. Fuck!” He blew out a harsh breath and threw himself back against the sofa. Simon watched him breathe slow and deep and knew he was trying to calm down.
For his part, he was calm. They’d known how the women had been hurt, and Delaney hadn’t described anything they hadn’t known. The men who’d taken Deb and Leah, who’d killed Deb and Gunner’s father and Patrice, and hurt Maddie, and Kendra and Renee, and all the other damage the Bulls had taken, were dead. Booker Howard had died as hard as Simon could imagine anyone dying. And now they had the tape and knew the why of it.
“Gun. Let’s burn the fucking thing and put this shit behind us.”
Gunner lifted his head and locked hard eyes with Simon. “Yeah.”
~oOo~
Deb knocked on the jamb of his open workshop door. “Hey. Can I bug you for little while?”
Simon looked up from his magnifying light. Since she’d moved in with him, he was repeatedly struck by her beauty. He’d known her for years, he’d been intimate with her for two years, had always thought her seriously hot, and yet, in these few months, she seemed more beautiful than ever. Like she fit perfectly in the frame of his life.
When she asked if she could bug him, she meant she wanted to watch him work. He wasn’t to the interesting detail work on this model; life had distracted him considerably from his leisurely pursuits. But Deb liked the bare, basic stuff as well. She understood that flash was nothing without form to support it.
He held out his hand. “Sure. Get over here. You done with your thing?” She’d been in the dining room, working on a project with a new craft she’d taught herself: quilling, which had to do with making art from tightly rolled strips of paper. It was pretty intricate work, but she’d learned the skill quickly.
As she came to him, she shrugged. “It’s not really happening. I keep starting over and hating it and trying it again.” She glanced around the space. “I miss my room.”
She’d taken the news about the tape calmly, setting it aside as finished business. As calmly as she’d handled the news, though, she seemed restless tonight.
When she took his hand, he pushed back from his table and pulled her onto his lap. “We could make room for another table in here for you, if you want.”
“No. This is your space. You don’t have to give everything up for me.”
“I’m not giving anything up for you, hon. Only gaining.”
She smiled and kissed the corner of his mouth. “You’re sweet, and I love you, but I’m not taking up space in your modeling room. That’s a need, though, for the new house—a room for each of us.”
“Agreed.” He put his face in her hair and breathed in her sweet scent, like powdered flowers.
“What ship is this one again?”
He set his chin on her shoulder and looked at the unfinished hull. “The HMS Vanguard. Sir Francis Drake sailed it at the Battle of the Nile. 1798.”
Her chuckle shook her shoulder, and his head. “I love you.”
“Because I’m a ship nerd?”
“Because you’re smart and curious and kind and gorgeous and strong. Because you make me feel safe and not alone. And because you’re more than a ship nerd. You’re an artist.”
He couldn’t help but puff up a little at the praise. “This is good between us, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” She leaned her head on his. “Have you ever seen the ocean?”
“Not really. The Gulf. And I grew up in Chicago. Lake Michigan sort of looks like an ocean, from the shore. Since I left Chicago, they fixed up the Navy Pier, and now they have a tall ship festival every few years. I would’ve loved that when I was a kid. Hell, I’d love it now. I had all these dumb dreams, of getting on a tall ship crew and sailing the world. Back when I was there, the Pier wasn’t much of anything at all.”
“They have tall ship crews now? In the twentieth century?”
“Sure. They’re mostly novelties, moving from festival to festival, that kind of thing. And there are some that do cruises. There’s still plenty around.”
“But you ended up in Tulsa. About as far from ocean as you can get.”
“Yeah. I wanted to see the world, feel the salt spray in my face. I wanted to be on the ocean and look in all directions and see nothing to stop me. Took my off on my bike to do just that, see the whole country on my way and pull up when I got to saltwater. I took a wrong turn somewhere, I guess. Never felt wrong, though. I found the Bulls here and knew I’d landed where I belong.”
“Have you ever been back to Chicago?”
“Nah. My family and me…” Simon sighed; he hadn’t expected to end up here. They’d never talked about his family. He rarely did, and he’d never told anyone what he was about to tell her. “It’s a big family. I never fit right with them, and I really stuck out, especially after my grandpa died. He liked that I had my own way of seeing things, but nobody else liked it. He held them at bay, I guess. After he died, I was supposed to fall in line. When I decided to go out on my own, my old man did the whole ‘If you walk out that door…’ thing. He meant it. I walked out the door, and nobody took my calls after that. So Chicago holds no appeal.” Needing to change the subject, he added, “Wouldn’t mind seeing the real ocean, though. Maybe back east. There’s a lot of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century maritime history back east.”
“I can’t imagine someone not wanting you in their life. Especially your own family.”
Of course she couldn’t imagine such a thing. Her family had been knit so tightly it was waterproof. “Not all families work, hon. Blood doesn’t always run thick.”
Something in Deb changed; Simon felt her sag a little. She took a deep breath through her mouth and blew it out, slowly, through pursed lips. “I hated my mom.”
He went still, not sure how to react and afraid that he’d hurt her somehow if he gave her the wrong response. But he was surprised. His image of Deb’s life was sunwashed and cozy. She’d gone a fair way toward creating that image herself.
She continued before he could guess what to say. “I didn’t hate her, but I thought I did. From the time she came home from the hospital with Martin and Max, I felt ignored. They took so much of her time and attention. Even after they could move around and take care of their basic needs on their own. Then, it was worse. They were always in some kind of mischief, and she just forgot about me. I understand it differently now. I know she was just overwhelmed with twin boys and a farm to manage, and she knew I could take care of myself, but back then I fucking hated it. When I went away to college, I never wanted to go back. Not even for holidays. I did go back, I always did what I was supposed to do, but I resented the hell out of her. And then she died, and I couldn’t take it back.”
There was only one thing to say. He kissed her temple, letting his lips rest on her. “Sorry, baby.”
“I never told anyone that before.”
“I never said mine before, either.”
She went quiet again, and he held her and closed his eyes, enjoying the quiet intimacy. They’d never be able to say there were no secrets between them; his life would always have secrets. But they were as open with each other as they could be.
After a while, she murmured, “I want to go to the ocean with you. I want to sail on a tall ship with you. And then I want to come home and live on the farm and build up that life again. It was a good life. A good family.”
He turned her head so he could gaze into her hazel eyes. “That sounds fucking perfect to me.”
~oOo~
Later that night, Simon took a hot shower, to ease the knots from his neck and shoulders after hours spent hunched over his worktable. While he stood on the bathmat and toweled the water from his beard, he felt the cool breeze of the door swinging open.
Deb’s hands stroked over his back. “Feel better?”
He wiped his face and wrung out his hair. “Yeah, I do.”
Her arms came around his waist, and her body pressed to his. Her naked body. He’d jacked off in the shower—because why not—but his cock stood right at attention at the feel of her little tits on his back.
He grinned over his shoulder. “Well, hello.”
“Hi, handsome. Wanna fuck?”
Their sex since she’d been taken had been much gentler than their sex before it. Still good, in some ways better, but different. Simon didn’t think she’d expressed her desire in that raw way since that fucked-up day.
“You know I’m always good to go.” He tossed his towel to the closed hamper and turned around.
She got an eyeful of his erect cock and grinned. “Yeah, you are. Let’s go, big boy.”
When her hand wrapped around his rod and she used it like a handle to pull him toward the door, Simon understood that she wanted something less than gentle and more like what they’d had.
When they got to the bed and she crawled onto it on her hands and knees, he was sure of it, and his cock bobbed with anticipation. But still he asked, “You sure, baby?”
She gave him a sultry smirk over her shoulder. Her hair covered half her face, and she looked like a fucking centerfold. “I want what we had.”
“Me too. I’m coming for you. But you say the word, and I will back right off.”
“I know you will. That’s why I love you. In a nutshell.”
He grabbed hold of her hair and yanked her off her hands, pulling her back to his chest. She cried out, but he knew the sound, and it wasn’t fear. Her hands went over her head and found his wet hair. She twisted her fingers in it until his scalp stung.
It had been so long since he’d had her this way that he wanted all of her at once. He wanted to get her off every way he could, with hands and mouth and cock, again and again, the way they’d been before, when she’d get so sore afterward that she’d have to ease her jeans up. That was what she’d wanted of him, what she’d demanded of him. That was who Deb was.
He latched his teeth into her shoulder, knowing precisely how hard was hard enough but not too much, and he took hold of her tits, working them in all the ways she loved until her hips flailed wildly and she was about to snatch him bald.
When he had her frantic and pleading, begging, Come on, come on, oh fuck please, like an incantation, he shoved his hand between her legs, and his fingers were instantly soaked. He got her off by her clit, rubbing hard and fast through her slick wet, while he sucked on her throat and pulled her nipple in sharp pulses. She came so hard she screamed and dropped forward, tearing her body from his hold so she could drive herself harder on his hand.
As the spasms and convulsions of her climax slowed, Simon grabbed her leg and flipped her to her back. He fell on her, catching his weight on his arms, and sucked her tit, the one he’d been neglecting, into this mouth. Her arms and legs flew around him, locking him close, and she writhed and clawed and bit.
Goddamn, he’d missed this. He’d have waited forever, never known this wild fuck again, if she’d not wanted it, but goddamn, he’d missed it. He wanted all of her, everything.
Leaving her tit, he sucked his way to her neck and then her mouth. “I want your ass, baby,” he growled, not realizing that the thought had made words until he heard them. Would that be too far, too soon?
“Yes, fuck yeah,” she panted, letting her legs fall away from his waist. “Oh fuck, yeah.”
Sweet hell, she was back. Without leaving her mouth, he fumbled for the nightstand drawer and got his hands on the lube. As soon as he had it, he pushed back to his knees, between her legs, and slicked himself up. She was so fucking wet she probably didn’t need lube, even for this, but he warmed another dab up and ran his finger around her pretty little flower of an anus. When she moaned lustily and twisted her hips at the touch, he circled her a few times more, then pushed his finger in, just enough to press at the rim. She planted her feet and raised her hips off the bed. He added one more finger, pressing until he felt her body ease up a little and get ready.
“You are a goddamn wonder, Deb.”
“Shut up and fuck me, Simon.”
Laughing, he pushed her legs up, positioned himself, and complied.
His eyes rolled back at that first unbelievably intense sensation, as the head of his cock crossed the rim of her ass. There was nothing remotely like it. She moaned and took a deep breath, and he opened his eyes to check on her. He knew the expression on her face—that balance between pain and pleasure, full of focus. Pushing slowly, steadily, letting her adjust to him, he thought he might come before he’d gotten all the way in.
“Fuck,” she muttered, and flexed her hips, drawing him in a few inches. “Use your hand, too.”
Knowing what she wanted, he pushed a couple fingers into her pussy and found the spot behind her clit that made her crazy. She gasped in a noisy breath and flexed again, and he was all the way in.
“Jesus!” he grunted and tightened down every muscle from his ribs to his knees, trying to hold off the orgasm barreling at him. But Deb writhed and flexed and twisted, surging against his hand, on his cock, chasing her own bliss, using his body to pleasure herself.
She took hold of her nipples, tweaking, twisting, pulling, and he couldn’t fucking stand it. He took over, moving from her pussy to her clit and picking up a steady, firm pace with his hips, driving into her hard enough to shake her body with each thrust.
He was losing control, could feel need overtake attention, but she’d already lost control. She was a wild thing beneath him, driving him over the edge. She came loudly, wetly, with her whole body, and Simon nearly died with relief as he let himself go.
“Fuck!” he gritted out, the word tearing through his throat. His finish about tore through his gut as well. When it was finally over, his head ached and jaw felt like stone. He blinked, trying to clear the stars from his eyes.
Deb lay breathless and damp under him.
“You okay, baby?”
She smiled. He could believe that smile; it filled her whole face. “I am. I feel good. And very well fucked.”
“Me too.” He eased slowly out of her, and they moaned and tensed in unison as he fell free.
He dropped to the mattress at her side. “I think I need another fucking shower.”
“You want company?” she asked, tracing circles over his sweaty chest.
“Always.”