Simon stood on the back porch, watching Deb and Leah shoo the chickens into the coop. After the men had all finished cleaning up supper, Gunner and his dad had gone off to the equipment garage, and Simon hadn’t been invited along. With the women out doing their chores, and Gunner and Sam off at the garage, Simon was alone in the Wesson house. He didn’t know quite what to do with himself.
Standing on the porch with a beer, watching his woman in the shadowy glow of near sunset, seemed like a good plan.
The Wesson farm was a postcard of peace in every respect. The cooling, late-spring evening. The golden wash of a low sun gleaming against the white boards of the house. The smells of life and earth. Every sound that touched his ears was a happy one: the gentle chatter and flutter of chickens trotting to their roosts, the rolling song of crickets, the rhythmic creak of a bullfrog keeping time for the peep of spring peepers.
Out here, there was no such thing as the Street Hounds, or Booker Howard. No Volkovs, no Mafia, no war. Just peace and quiet.
Simon wasn’t a country boy. Since moving to Tulsa, he’d spent some time in the country, at Dane’s place, or up at the Bulls’ cabin in the Osage. Or here, a few times. Everything seemed different out here, like another plane of existence. Even family seemed different.
He’d been raised in a middle-class area of northwest Chicago, surrounded by extended family, all of whom lived nearby, and most of whom worked in the family’s fireworks factory. He, his brothers, and all his cousins had all attended the same schools. His entire childhood had been spent surrounded with blood family. Holidays had been chaotic affairs, always ending in wild displays of public drunkenness on the part of the men of the family. Many family brawls had ensued.
It hadn’t been that different from his Bulls family, in that way.
But tonight, around the quiet table, with four other people, he’d seen a different kind of bond. Even with crazy Gunner sitting across from him, glaring at him every time he looked at Deb or touched her, the table had been peaceful. Everyone had talked together, and laughed. But it had been different. It wasn’t just the lower decibel level. Something else had touched him. Since then, he’d been trying to understand what.
Watching Deb and Leah laughing together as they chased the last errant hen, he felt the same thing. What was it that made this place so calm?
He had some time to put to the question. Miraculously, he and Deb were spending the night together. It felt a little strange, to think about fucking her not only in her bed but while her whole family was in the same house, but that wasn’t going to prevent him from getting all up in her, every way he could. Who knew when it would be safe for her to come back to Tulsa, or when he’d have another chance to get out here. In a few days, Irina Volkov could well blow the lid off the beef between the Bulls and the Hounds.
So tonight, Simon would enjoy this strange, peaceful, beautiful alternate reality.
The women closed up the coop and headed back. Leah caught Deb’s hand, and they walked up to the house together. Deb smiled when she saw him, and he finished his beer, set the empty on the porch rail, and hopped down to meet them.
“Where’s Max?” Deb asked as she hooked her arm around his waist.
He brought her close. It felt good to be ‘out’ with her. It felt good to have someone he could touch like this and have it mean something. It felt good that that someone was her. “He went with your dad to look at some kind of farm implement.”
She laughed. “City boy.”
He gave her a squeeze. “Hick. So, since you got me stuck out here all night, what do you hayseeds do for fun after supper?”
Leah answered as Deb gave him an elbow in the gut for his snark. “Sam likes to work the crossword and watch television. Deb does her craft stuff. I read.” Her mouth twisted in a bashful smirk. “We party hard, is what I mean. But…I was, uh…I was thinking maybe Gun and I would…we’d go to bed early.”
Simon and Deb both laughed. “I think you should,” Deb said. “Just keep it down. Don’t wake the livestock.”
Leah stuck out a little, pointed tongue and trotted up the porch steps. The screen door screeched as she went into the kitchen.
Simon and Deb were alone in the yard, arm in arm. She smiled up at him. “You want to go to bed early, too? You were complaining about your back earlier. Want me to rub you down?”
“God, yes. I want you to rub me down. Then I want to rub you up, down, and sideways. But I want to do something else first.”
Curiosity tightened her brow. “What’s that?”
“Show me your crafts.”
“Ooh, dirty.”
He simply smiled in response. One thing he’d understood today, watching her working her—pretty damn elaborate—produce stand, seeing her ease with her customers, and her happy glow all through a long day of hard work: he barely knew her.
That wasn’t true. He knew her, and well. Her personality, her humor, the way she saw the world, her tastes—those things, who she was, he knew, and he loved. But how she’d been made, what her life was—he’d had only the barest sketch of understanding.
He’d known that she was artistic, or at least crafty, because she’d watched him work on his models a few times, and though she’d never spoken extensively about the work she did, she’d asked the kind of questions that someone who knew the tools and skills of crafting would ask.
Now he knew that she did weaving, because Leah had told him she’d woven the fabric bags she’d sold off the hook all day. She’d also painted the sign for the stand, with its intricate close-up images of fruits and vegetables and a perspective image of the Wesson farm. She had real talent. And she had a craft room, the door to which had been closed all day. He wanted to see the Deb that lived inside that room.
“You’d really rather see my crafting room than get a naked back rub?”
“Absolutely not. I want to see your crafting room and then get a naked back rub.”
He couldn’t read the look she gave him, but a smile followed it. “Okay. Come on. It used to be Max’s room, and Leah’s been staying in it, so we better get in there before Max gets back and they get busy.”
~oOo~
Her craft room was a lot like his, at its core: neatly organized, extremely functional. Hers was more crowded, with a worn sofa sleeper and a floor loom taking up large chunks of the space. But the wall of shelving, all of her materials and in their places, a bulletin board where he kept a pegboard, the worktable, the pieces in progress—he recognized the flow of work in this room.
Deb’s crafting was considerably more varied than his own. He had one craft: ship modeling. She seemed to have a dozen or more. Weaving. Knitting. Painting. Mosaic. Dyeing. And a bunch of materials he couldn’t guess at. It all added up to a riot of color in her tidy room. His workspace was mainly…brown. Wood, canvas, hemp, stain, wood glue, sandpaper—all of it some shade of brown.
He wandered through the room, touching those things he could without disturbing her order. “How many different things do you do?”
A noncommittal lift of her shoulder was her only answer at first. Then she elaborated. “I do whatever catches my fancy, I guess. I see something, get an itch, learn it, do it.”
Did she understand what she was saying? He stopped and faced her straight on. “Anything you tried and couldn’t do?”
Another indifferent shrug. So, no, then. She’d never failed at anything she’d tried. Jesus.
“It’s all just learning.”
“No, hon. You can’t just learn to do everything, not and do it well.” He picked up a thick fold of cloth. Once it was in his hands, he understood that it was a rug, and he shook it out. A small area rug, about three feet by five. A beautiful, elaborate pattern, all in subtly different shades of red and yellow. “You wove this?”
“Yeah.” A smile lifted one corner of her mouth. “I like that one. It turned out pretty good.”
“It’s gorgeous. It’s art.” He folded it back up and set it on her worktable again. “And you fucking well know it, too. What’d you tell me about my ships? That it doesn’t matter they start with plans I buy. There’s art in what I make from them. The plans are, what…just an idea.” If he took the time to think back on the past year and a half and find when his friendly affection and carnal desire for her had tipped over into something much more real, he thought that that moment, when she’d stood at his side and watched him finish up the cargo hold of the Revenge, said her bit about the plans not being the creation, and made him see that he was an artist—that moment might well have been it. Months ago.
“A guess,” she corrected, smiling broadly now.
“Right. A guess. If my ships are art, then all this is, too.” Scanning over all the different things she’d made, all the different skills, the talents, she had, he shook his head. “And damn, girl.”
She crossed to him, the old wood floor creaking under her feet. He pulled her into his arms.
“You know,” she purred, combing her fingers through his beard, “all this sweet talk has me super hot for you. If you’ve fondled my textiles enough, I’ve got some other stuff you can fondle in my bedroom.”
~oOo~
The first and last time Simon had walked into Deb’s bedroom, she’d been wrapped around him and his tongue had been deep in her mouth. He’d spent a couple of hours in here, but he couldn’t have described it other than to say that he was pretty sure there had been a bed. He’d been fully focused on the surprising experience of fucking Debra Wesson.
Now, holding her hand, letting her lead him into her room, he paused at the doorway and took a look—this was her most private space. It would be brimming with insights about her life.
The trip from her crafting room had been awkward. Passing the living room, where Sam sat with his paper, his reading glasses perched on his nose, had made Simon feel like a sixteen-year-old boy, sneaking up to Karen Gorecki’s bedroom. He was thirty-fucking-eight years old, but all it took was a girl’s father to make him feel like a gangly teen. That and the fact that he’d been hiding a gigantic erection on his way past.
But Sam had simply called out a “good night” and gone back to his paper.
That was something he knew about Deb, had always known: family was the most important thing in the world to her. She didn’t live with her father at her age because she was frail or weak or a failure, or because he was. She lived where she wanted to live, because she loved her family and this farm and wanted nothing as much as she wanted that.
She hadn’t wanted a romantic relationship chiefly because she hadn’t wanted anything that would interfere the life she’d chosen. He’d always known that; she been forthright from the start. When they’d decided to be more together, they’d decided not to worry about complications right away. But now, after spending the day here, Simon thought maybe it wouldn’t be a complication after all.
He thought, maybe, he could imagine living this life, too. If they got to that point. Not farming or anything; he didn’t know shit about that. But living here while Sam and Deb did their thing. It would put him a fair distance from the clubhouse, but Dane lived nearly as far away. Delaney lived a ways out, too. They made it work.
He shook those thoughts off. Getting just a wee bit ahead of himself there. It hadn’t yet been a week since they’d gotten serious. To cover his little mind-stumble, he slid his hand from hers and started a tour of her little room. She closed the door.
Deb had lived here continuously for just about her whole life, so it hadn’t been preserved like a time capsule. He had no insights into her childhood, studying the décor and furnishings of a grown woman’s room. But he could see her, who she was now. In the framed art on the wall above her bed: a cluster of photographs and prints, each one of a different door or passageway. In the small desk with neat stacks of paperwork and books, and a wicker organizer for pens and clips. The books on organic gardening. The Farmer’s Almanac.
Her tall dresser, with a blue leather case in the center, and a couple of bottles of cologne—one full, the other about half so—behind it. Deb was clearly not a woman who liked clutter. He picked the full bottle up and lifted the cap to take a whiff. Strong and spicy. He’d never smelled it on her. The other was softer, had a powdery scent under something like flowers. That, he recognized. His already aching hard cock pulsed.
On the wall above her dresser hung a framed black-and-white portrait photo of her as an infant, in a white lace gown, in her mother’s arms, mother and child gazing at each other. Deb looked a lot like her mother, with the same wild, wavy hair. An identical framed photo hung in the living room, beside another of her mother holding her twin sons, also in their christening gowns.
Gunner had been a twin. Simon hadn’t known that until today. He hadn’t known how Mrs. Wesson and Gunner’s twin had died, either, until today.
He’d learned a lot about Gunner, too, today. But it was Deb he wanted more of. Wanted all of. He could see her here, in this room.
Better yet, he could recognize her. He’d known, he’d had, more of her than he’d realized.
He went to her little stereo—not anything high-end, probably a Wal-Mart sale item—and the plastic tower of CDs beside it. He’d known for a while that her taste in music ran to the angry chick variety, and her CD rack was full of it. Everything from Joan Jett to Alanis Morissette, Sheryl Crow, Melissa Etheridge—if a chick singer was angry about something, Deb dug it. There’d been a stretch a few months back when she’d been fixated on Meredith Brooks. He must have heard the song ‘Bitch’ dozens of times—and back then, he’d only seen her a few times a month, but she’d brought that CD in with her. She’d liked to fuck to it. Hard.
He liked that song a lot, come to think of it.
As Simon considered pulling that CD out and putting it in her cheap little player, Deb’s arms snaked around his waist.
“You’re a Nosy Nelly, you know that? And easily distracted.”
He gave up the idea of music and turned around.
“Shit, you’re naked.” She stood there bare, her hair loose and lying over her shoulders and chest like a dark cloud. He couldn’t resist nudging those soft locks away and brushing the back of his fingers over one of her little tits. Its nipple went taut and tall, and his mouth watered.
“And you’re not.” She plucked at his t-shirt. “You should be. I want to oil you up and rub you down.”
Fine by him. He lifted the hem of his shirt and pulled it off, taking care not to drag it over his face.
“Hey.” She swept her fingertips over his cheek, under his stitches, and then down his bruised nose. “You sure you’re up to this?
Oh, he was definitely up. “Probably not a player for eating you out tonight, but otherwise, I’m good. Very good. Very up.” He grabbed her hand and laid it on him so she would know how up.
Grinning, she gave him a firm squeeze—and then, keeping her eyes on his, she dropped to her knees.
“Fuck, yeah.” He spread his legs a bit and steadied his stance as she opened his belt and fly and pulled him out over the waistband of his boxer briefs. When she sucked just the tip into her pretty mouth, he reached back and grabbed onto the back of her desk chair; he didn’t trust his legs.
She did this thing when she gave him head—focusing all of her attention on just the tip of him, holding his shaft firmly just behind it, forcing all his blood up into the head. It drove him totally fucking insane. He needed more, and yet it was too much. She could deep-throat him, too, and take almost all of him, and that was fucking outstanding as well. But he’d throat-fucked plenty of girls. Most of the sweetbutts had full control over their gag reflexes. In fact, it was weird—most of the sweetbutts gave head the same way, same moves. Like they had rehearsals together or something. Fuck, for all he knew, they did.
It was different with Deb, and this devotion to his head was something no other woman had done, not in this way. With her tongue, she laved and licked and flicked. With her lips, she sucked and kissed and swept her soft skin over his. With her free hand, she ticked and scratched. Sometimes, she’d push her tongue into him, just barely. And never would she move her hand on his shaft or pay any other kind of attention to it, until his tip was engorged like a goddamn balloon and he was desperate and begging.
He’d only come this way one time, and it had been weirdly intense and dissatisfying all at once. He needed the firm slide of a full fuck to get off right. So she’d drive him to madness and then take him all the way in and let him fuck her mouth. Best head of his damn life.
He didn’t know who’d taught her this, and he never, ever wanted to know. There were a few things she did to him that he didn’t want to know where’d she gotten them. One or two things he’d prefer the guys didn’t know he liked. But he knew how it all felt, and he knew he needed to hold onto to her furniture so he didn’t fall in a heap to the floor.
“Goddammit, Deb! I need it. I gotta fuckin’ come.”
She smiled up at him and flicked her tongue over him.
“Fuck!”
“Shhh. My dad’ll hear.” She blew over his weeping, desperate head, and even that was too much. He bit down on his lip.
“Honey, let me fuck your mouth.”
Finally, she sucked him all the way in. A noise like a growl erupted from his throat—shit, he hoped Sam was still downstairs—and he twisted his hands tightly in her hair, holding on for dear life. When her hands came up and clutched his hips, he knew he was free to do what he needed to do. He held her hard against him and thrust into her, feeling his swollen tip slam down her throat, feeling her fucking uvula. He knew how far he could go, and he held on to just enough sense not to go any farther. Their rhythm had become familiar. He knew how to move with her.
When he came, his half-vision went dark and starry, but he managed to keep his mouth shut, and the only sound that made it up from his chest was a long, strained grunt. She swallowed as she pulled back, and the shifting pressure of her tongue and throat just about took his legs out from under him after all.
“Holy God, you’re good at that.”
She grinned. “It’s been said I’m an artist.”
“At everything. Yeah.”
“Come on. Strip. Lie down. You need a back rub.”
He’d forgotten that his back had been sore, but he wasn’t about to refuse a back rub. Deb straddling his ass, naked, rubbing herself all over him? Only a fool would turn that chance away, and he was no fool.
Still a little shaky, he worked his way out of his boots, and dropped trou.
A brightly-colored quilt covered her queen-size bed, and four big pillows and several small pillows mounded across the head. While he shed his socks, not steady enough to do it without leaning against her dresser, she pulled all the pillows off and turned the quilt and top sheet down to the foot of the bed.
At her instruction, he lay in the center of the bed, and, just as he’d hoped, she hopped up and straddled him, setting her sweet, sweet pussy on his bare ass. He groaned and shifted, rubbing himself on her.
“Easy, fella. How’s your head? Does it hurt your face to lie like that?”
It did, a little, though he had his right side on the mattress and most of his injuries were on the left. The pressure was awkward, more than painful. “Can I get one of those pillows?”
She did some gymnastic feat he couldn’t see and snagged a pillow from the floor without getting off of him. When she handed it to him, he shoved it under his chest. The new position took the pressure off. “Perfect. Thank you.”
The scent of baby oil wafted over him, and he heard her hands sliding wetly together. At the mere thought of what was to come, Simon got hard again. Every single time he’d been with Deb, he’d come multiple times. She was the only woman for whom that was true.
Everybody else had been a sweetbutt or a random pickup, and there was no point hanging around with those long enough to get to a second orgasm. They’d fucked, they’d come, they’d finished. But from the first time with Deb, even when they’d thought it was a one-time thing, he’d stayed for a while. They’d talked, and then they’d gone again.
Because they’d been friends already. They’d liked each other. And some part of him, even then, understood how special she was.
He groaned as her hands kneaded into the oil-slicked muscles of his shoulders. She had strong hands. They weren’t large, or rough, but they carried in them the strength of hard work. Her gardening, her cooking, her crafts—everything she did spoke of the grace and talent and strength in those hands. The care in them.
At first, she rubbed him therapeutically, putting pressure into every sweep and rub and knead. She massaged until his skin had absorbed the oil, and then she filled her hands and did it again. And again. Simon lay beneath her with his eyes closed and felt more than the ache of hard work leave his body. The tension beyond that—the stress of his life, his worry, the tautness of unacknowledged guilt for the innocent he’d killed—she reached that, and it swirled up inside him, filling his consciousness as it flowed up from the deepest recesses of his body.
He’d killed a regular guy. A guy who worked with kids, who had kids of his own. A guy in a regular life, with regular problems. A guy whose life should never have been touched by their world. Simon told himself that it hadn’t been him alone, that the guilt belonged to the whole club, but it didn’t matter. He’d designed the burn. He’d started that fire.
These weren’t thoughts he could think and still function, so he’d shoved them deep and held the door shut on them. Now that they were loose in his head, pushed out under Deb’s strong, gentle hands, what he wanted more than anything was to tell her. To say it out loud and let the blame have him. To be judged in her eyes and know the full dimension of his guilt. To find, maybe, redemption as well.
But he couldn’t. It was a burden he couldn’t share with her, because he did share the guilt with his brothers. With her brother. He couldn’t do that to her.
As she rubbed his body and his soul wrung itself out, Simon felt buffeted, caught in a war of irreconcilable feelings. Guilt. Love. Shame. Need. Sorrow. Happiness. Fear. All of it wrestling for primacy. Guilt and fear rose up above the rest and howled, and, racked with psychic pain, Simon moaned into Deb’s pillow.
“Shh,” she whispered, leaning close to his ear. Her hair brushed over his back. Her lips caressed his ear, barely more than a breath. Her voice, her touch, grounded him again, reminded him of her love. The guilt and fear quieted, receded, fell back into its hole.
He took a breath of his own and let it out. Simon realized with a start that a lump had grown in his throat. He was near tears.
At about the same time, the tone and tempo of her attention changed. Her massage became a caress. She leaned her body closer, so that her tits brushed lightly over his back. Her sweeping hands moved farther down, and she shifted, settling herself at his side rather than over him.
Filling her hand again with oil, warming it between her palms, she rubbed his ass, and his legs. When she hooked her hand over his knee and tugged, he let her spread him, and she slid up his inner thighs. She found his cock, lying on the mattress between his legs, hard as hell, and she tickled his tip until he clenched and groaned.
“Shhh,” she whispered again, calming him again, with long, soft sweeps over his ass and thighs, again and again.
He wasn’t surprised when her fingers delved between his cheeks and grazed his anus. At the same time, her other hand reached again between his legs. This time, she took hold of his cock and stroked, long, firm strokes, brushing his balls again and again, each time she moved up his shaft. One hand stroking his cleft, the other pulling on his cock, she took her time, moving firmly, slowly, exactly right.
It wasn’t long before he couldn’t be still any longer. Without his active intention, his body surged with her strokes, meeting her rhythm, seeking what she offered.
“You want it?” she asked, her voice soothing, enticing. She knew that he wasn’t entirely sold on this thing she meant to do. But she also knew how hard he came when she did it.
He knew that, too.
“Baby, you want it?”
She’d never called him baby before. He liked it. “Yeah,” he managed to grunt through a thick throat and a body on fire.
Jacking him off in that slick, hot hand, she picked up both tempo and grip. He lay at her mercy and felt her pull the orgasm out of him, dragging it up through his limbs, his gut, his head, until his every exhale came like a steam engine. At the same moment that he began to climb inexorably to his finish, she pressed one finger against his anus. He accepted her, and she found his prostate and pressed short, gentle strokes against it while her other hand went wild on his cock.
There was no precise way he knew of to describe that feeling, no way he’d ever even try. But what it did was turbocharge every nerve in his cock and everything attached to it.
And that was that. His whole body simply exploded with fiery sensation, beyond pleasure, beyond ecstasy. “Oh…fuck…fuck…Jee…sus…FUCK FUCK FUCK AGH!”
“Well, everybody heard that,” she laughed, working him until he was done and nothing was left of him but a boneless mass of bliss.
He felt her moving on the bed, and knew when he opened his eye and saw what little he could see from this position, it would be her face. And it was. Smiling.
“You’re pretty proud of yourself, aren’t ya?” he asked, struggling for the breath to do it.
“I am, in fact. Artist, remember. At everything, apparently.”
“Everything.” He found the strength to lift his head, then leaned over her. “I’m pretty talented, too, I hear.”
“You are. An artist, just like me.”
He kissed her. As her eager mouth met his, he felt desire enliven his exhausted body and knew they were nowhere near finished sharing their art.