“We’ll see.” I crawl up her body, placing kisses on her hot, sweet-smelling skin. I’m practically planking over her when I reach her mouth.
“I think you should be inside me now,” she pants through our kisses.
The way she says it, the way those words sound coming from her full, biteable lips, almost makes me cave. I stay strong, though. “Sorry, sugar. You were a bad girl. Only good girls get what they want.”
I leave her there on the floor, naked and still panting.
FOURTEEN
REBEL
Cade’s not in the clubhouse. Normally after taking a girl up to my cabin for a couple of hours and then reappearing looking frustrated as fuck, I’d garner a few catcalls from the other Widow Makers, but tonight the mood is overly drunk and sombre. After Bron’s short and simple funeral, no one’s in the mood for jokes. They’re in the mood to get fucked up and fight.
Three chairs and one table have been smashed by the time I manage to make it across the clubhouse bar and up the back stairs to the handful of bedrooms we have set up there. No one lives here permanently. The Widow Makers have either chosen to live in town with their families, or they have rooms in the many outhouses that make up the compound. That’s probably why people think we’re some sort of fucking sex cult. Cade has a place above Dead Man’s Ink in town, but he won’t have gone back there tonight. Not without speaking to me first. He’ll be holed up in the one room that’s permanently reserved for him on the top floor, waiting to spill whatever bullshit lies Maria Rosa told him when I left the two of them alone.
I lay my fist against the last door on the right, not surprised when Cade opens it right away. He must have heard my boots coming down the corridor. A gift from the U.S. Marine Corp: the ability to hear a man sneaking up on you from a mile away.
Semper Fi.
My brother in arms looks absolutely exhausted. He steps back so I can enter the room, which is sparse and OCD neat. He claps me on the back, giving me a tired smile. “You look much better than you did before, man. I think you got out of there at the right time.”
“Did she say anything else?”
He shakes his head. “Nope. She did try and convince me to fuck her, though.”
“What is wrong with that woman? She gets shot and waterboarded, and in the next breath she’s trying to get you to stick your dick in her?” Cade gives me a rueful look that tells me it might have been worse than that. “Jesus. I don’t think I want to know,” I tell him.
“I’m sure you don’t. Come on. Let’s do this.” Cade knows where we have to go next. He knows what has to be done next, too. Raphael Dela Vega has polluted Widow Makers ground for too long already. I won’t have him here, freaking Sophia out, causing trouble amongst the club members. They know Hector Ramirez’s right hand man is in one of the holding cells underneath the barn. It won’t be long before someone’s suggesting we chop the motherfucker’s extremities off and send them back to Ramirez in ziplock baggies.
The guy has got to go. No way are we sending him back to his employer, though. No. No fucking way is that happening. If I’m honest, I’m all for the chopping off extremities and leaving them for Ramirez to find, the same way he did with poor Bronwyn, but we don’t have time for that. Gunshots fired? A convoy of strange, unlicensed, shot-to-hell black cars burning out of town, headed straight for us? It’s a goddamn miracle that Lowell woman isn’t hammering down the gates already. There was nothing to be done about him until dark, though. With a long range scope—paranoid perhaps, but a possibility—it would have been all too easy to spot a couple of guys wrestling with a noncompliant Mexican guy in broad daylight. Now we just have to hope that if Lowell is out there and she’s got people watching us, they don’t have heat imaging or night vision. If they do, we’re gonna be fucked.
There’s a goddamn riot unfolding in the bar downstairs as Cade and me sneak out the back. Normally I’d start knocking heads together, but it’s better for everyone involved if the guys continue raising hell here instead of following us. Outside, the desert air is cold and the sky is an explosion of stars.
Cade jogs across the courtyard—there’s still blood everywhere. I should make Maria Rosa come clean up her fucking mess before I even consider setting her free—and opens the barn door, slipping inside. He holds the door open for me, and then we’re shrouded in pitch-blackness. A pale yellow flame is struck into existence, which sends long fingers of narrow shadows stretching up to the barn rafters. Cade looks like some sort of horror movie character as he holds the tarnished zippo he’s lit up to his face.
“You want me to turn on the overheads?”