Mason: Fallen Angels MC (17 page)

It was a lot harder than it should have been.

CHAPTER FORTY

Once Caro had put herself back together a little bit she locked up the office, and Mason passed her the leather jacket and helmet he’d bought her a few weeks ago. They still felt like they belonged to someone else who lived a very different life as she straddled the back of the bike and wrapped her arms around Mason’s waist.

She’d called bikers “brain donors in waiting” to his face just a few months ago; she’d never anticipated that she’d be here, the smell of leather in her face, the rumble of the machine setting up fascinating vibrations between her thighs. She always came off the bike ready to climb into his lap for a different sort of ride. Or, really, given some of the presents he’d brought her, less different than she might have thought.

But tonight they were going out, which was a nice change. He’d been so busy with the club, and she’d been so busy trying to forget what had happened, that they’d mostly just stayed in. And it was lovely staying in, amazing and kind and sweet, and he was the most considerate lover she’d ever had—not that there was a long list of competitors in that department.

But since he’d taken over the club, other things came up. He got phone calls sometimes, and he’d get this cold look as he picked up his phone—an expression she only saw when he occasionally spoke about his time overseas.

He didn’t talk much about what went on; the power struggles that she knew were ongoing. Declan was gone, and his VP had disappeared shortly afterwards. He’d told a bunch of people that he was sick of the weather, and was heading out to Vegas; Mason had told her that he was sure they didn’t have to worry about him. But he was trying to disentangle the club from the crap Declan had involved them all in while also getting help for the poor kids that Declan had turned into some kind of disgusting stable. And he was trying to accomplish it without getting the entire club arrested.

She hated even thinking about it. She was glad that Mason was stopping it, that he was returning the club to what he wanted it to be—a family who relied on each other, depended on each other, supported each other.

They shared a common bond of the bikes, and yeah, they dealt a little bit on the side—workaday things for workaday folks, just looking to get by, Mason liked to say—but whatever her personal feelings on recreational marijuana, the fact remained that it was still illegal in Vermont. Whenever she let herself daydream about a future with him, an image kept intruding of him being dragged away in handcuffs for selling a little bit of pot.

And it had started that way for Declan, hadn’t it? A little bit of pot had spiraled out into a little bit of hash, a little bit of coke, a little bit of—what, smack, meth, X, roofies, whatever you wanted, he’d been the guy who got it for you. Guns, girls, he’d done it all. What would stop Mason from following that same path?

When her fears got out of control, she tried to remember that he would stop himself. He’d let the memory of his half-sister stop him. She almost fancied that he might even think of her, but then she’d stop. Because he didn’t talk about it, but sometimes he stopped, looked at her, and smiled, and she was quite sure that he was imagining a long series of nights together stretching out into the future.

But what did he see between then and now, in that stretch of nights? That was the part she hadn’t been able to figure out yet.

He pulled the bike into the parking lot of the restaurant they’d decided to try. It was an odd place, neither his style nor hers, really. Before her, Mason admitted that he’d spent most of his time in dive bars full of other vets and bikers, guys who understood that some nights a man might be the life of the party, and another night, he might look like he was being chased by ghosts.

On the other hand, Caroline had been more likely to spend the night at home with a glass of wine and a good book—and when she went out, it was to restaurants, places that offered $30 single-person meals paired with a wine the chef had chosen personally.

This place—it was a diner supposedly run by the sister-in-law of the guy who ran the biker bar. She had no idea if that was actually true or not, but Caroline could smell grease on the air, and it smelled stale and old. “Still excited?” Mason asked her, and she nodded. She wished, though, that she’d told him no, that the cop had creeped her out too much, and that she wanted to just go home.

Not that she had a home to go to. Not really. Her house wasn’t “home” anymore, not when it still smelled like Declan’s stale sweat and the gag he’d stuffed in her mouth. Jack’s house wasn’t home, no matter how long she’d stayed there. Where else was there to go? Nowhere. Nowhere at all.

She could sell the house. She
should
sell the house. But to do that, she’d have to go there, again and again, clean it out, get rid of everything. And it still didn’t solve the problem of where she’d go, or what she’d do once she was there.

At least the house was hers
to
sell. That was something. Not much, but something.

Mason was watching her, and she’d been silent too long. She had to scroll back through her brain to see what question it was that he expected her to answer. “Yes,” she said. “I’m really excited.”

“Great.” His concern was buried deep down, but she could see it anyway, in the delicate way he folded his fingers around hers and steadied her as she swung her leg over the back of the bike, the way he leaned in and gave her a quick kiss before they walked into the restaurant. It was all over him. And she didn’t quite know why it was setting her teeth on edge, but it did. It absolutely did.

She followed him into the diner. The view was beautiful, looking over the valley down onto the lake, and that calmed her somewhat. The waitress brought menus, and Mason pointed out the strawberry lemonade before she saw it on her own, which was a nice touch, and then when the waitress brought it, there was an actual strawberry cut up and dunked into her lemonade. “I wasn’t excited,” she said, finally. “But now I am.”

He was quiet and still, sipping at a beer in a clear pint glass. “Why weren’t you excited?”

She stared out the window, taking in the view, and found her shoulders shrugging in a quiet, sad gesture. “I miss Gloria. I feel at loose ends. I don’t know how to move forward from where we are.”

He was so still that it was as if he were standing on a pressure plate, as if he was carefully searching the ground for the grenade that was about to blow him to bits. “Do you want to talk about it?”

She leaned her cheek on her hand and shrugged again. “I don’t know what there is to talk about. I have to either chill out and move back into my house, or accept that I can’t, sell it, and find somewhere else to live.”

The waitress came back; they both ordered burgers. She disappeared again, and there was a lull of quiet.

“You should bring Gloria back,” Mason said after a while. “I think you really miss her, and having her back would help you feel stabilized.”

“It probably would,” Caroline said, forcing herself to meet his eyes. So much concern, so much caution. Why was he so nervous right now? “But where in the world would I keep her? I can’t really afford to board her locally. It’s only working out now because Emily’s doing it for me as a favor. I can’t bring her to Jack and Missy’s, and I can barely force myself back into the house for clean underwear.”

“Bring her to me,” he said, and she could feel the shockwave roll off the words, changing everything around them in a second, flipping their fun, sex-based relationship into something deeper, more intense, more—well, serious. “I always had dogs when I was a kid,” he said, tripping over the silence and desperately working to fill it. “I miss it, a lot. I miss—I miss seeing you smile, like you did when she was around.”

“I—” She forced herself to breathe deeply and slowly. “I’ve never even seen your place,” she said. “I don’t mean that to sound judgmental, I just—I need her to be safe. You know? I need her to stay safe.”

There was another one of those pauses that could have brought a universe into creation, and then he nodded. “Come home with me,” he said. “After we eat. We’ll go back to my place, crash on the couch, watch a movie. I should have asked you over ages ago.” The waitress delivered the burgers, and he reached across the table, touched his forefinger to the back of her hand. “I was afraid you wouldn’t want to come over. Do you want to come over?”

She turned her hand over, letting her fingers twine together with his. “Yes,” she said. “I’d love that.”

Her heart was slamming around her chest like a frightened bunny. While their relationship had been confined to the guest bedroom of Jack and Missy’s house, it had been different. Safe. Something she could walk away from at any time. It had also been quieter, calmer, less—
wild
than it had been in those first few days, before Declan had ruined everything.

Suddenly, she had no idea what the next few hours were going to hold.

They talked throughout dinner. About the garage, about Caroline’s cousin Teddy—Munch, to the club, and despite many horrible attempts at torture through tickling, Caroline had still refused to tell Mason how he earned himself that name in the first place.

He’d chosen to remain in his position as the club’s enforcer, rather than become Mason’s VP. They discussed Trish, and the work she was doing to help the young girls who were rescued from Declan’s stable rebuild their lives. Some of them he’d illegally brought into the U.S., some of them he’d kidnapped or lured away from refugee families.

It was a story that sounded far too “big city” to have happened in a smaller town in Vermont. And she told him about work, and he listened to her accounting jokes and her finance humor, and he kept touching her hand, so softly that it set her insides on fire.

They skipped dessert.

CHAPTER FORTY ONE

She stood inside the apartment, turning in a slow circle. She could feel him tight and nervous beside her, waiting for her assessment, and it was fun to be the one making him wait for once.

The apartment was small, with a kitchenette, a living space, and what she assumed was a bedroom and a bathroom down a narrow hallway. There was a small table and chairs, a couch that sagged just a bit in the middle, and a beaten coffee table set in front of it. The walls were lined with bookshelves, each shelf crammed with books. Old paperbacks, old textbooks, papers, and file folders. All of it was painfully neat, incredibly clean, nothing out of place.

“So…” he said finally. “Do you like it?”

“I feel like you must have been judging my housekeeping every second you were at my house,” she said, completing her spin and smiling at him, inviting him close with an extended hand. He tugged her into his chest, wrapping his arms around her waist.

“Not at all,” he said. “I understand that not everyone served, and was forced to keep their stuff in ridiculous amounts of order for years at a time. Some people get out, and they refuse to fold anything ever again, but sometimes…” He shrugged. “It makes me feel like one thing is always under my control. That’s helpful on the shitty days.”

“I can see that,” she said, leaning up to kiss him.

His lips brushed against hers, and everything else fell away. In the other relationships she’d had, if they even made it this long, sex had already become perfunctory, something done just because it was a way to pass a Saturday night.

For him, her body still thrilled at his touch, her nipples tightening, a wetness swirling down into her panties. She pressed against him, sighing into his skin, and his fingertips kneaded the flesh of her ass. She could feel him growing firm against her, feel his tension and stress easing, being replaced by a very different type of need and desire.

“So you like it?” he whispered again, and she laughed. She pulled away from him just a little, catching her fingers in the belt loops of his jeans and tugging him after her as she made her way to the couch.

The cushions were worn, but as she stretched out into the arm of the couch and pulled him down over her, there was no puff of dust or stench of mildew. As he covered her with his body, his mouth warming her neck and the tops of her breasts, as his thigh found the space between her thighs and she ground against him, nothing else really mattered.

“This wasn’t what I had in mind,” he said, nipping at the skin of her throat as she sighed and tugged his shirt out of his jeans, trailing her nails up his spine.

“Are you complaining?” As she shifted underneath him her hips pressed up into his, and his head dropped to her chest for a moment as he focused on breathing.

“Anything but,” he said. “I just— I didn’t bring you back here just to have sex with you.”

She reached down between them, running her hand over the thick bulge in his jeans. “What if I let you bring me here to have sex with you? Specifically, to have sex without worrying if other people are listening.”

“Does it bother you that Jack and Missy might be listening?”

She sighed again, and he leaned back, letting her scoot out from underneath him. “Not so much that they might be listening… That’s kind of hot. But the idea that they might hear and not want to. I think that’s what bothers me.”

“I can see that.” He reached out and twined his fingers through hers, pulling her into his lap and snuggling her into his arms. “I can see Gloria being okay here. There’s a yard in the back, fenced in. She’d be safe here.” The pause was so long, so soft, that she knew what was coming long before it happened. “You could both be safe here.”

The silence stretched and pulled. If she answered too fast—or too slowly—it would ruin everything. And if she said anything else… god, she had no idea what to do. “We could be,” she said, aiming for noncommittal. His arms tightened around her, and she found that her head fit perfectly under the curve of his chin.

“Do you really think so?”

“I don’t— I don’t know. So much has happened, and so fast. I don’t feel like we know all that much about each other, and I’m afraid of ruining what we have by trying too hard and too fast, moving too quickly.” Once she started talking, the words tumbled out, one over the other, and she had to choke them off. She waited for the panic to happen, for him to shout or be angry or something, anything.

Staying calm wasn’t what she expected at all. “Things are moving quickly,” he agreed. “But sometimes, I think they simply do. And this thing between us— it’ll last or it won’t, but either way, I’d rather find out than wait around. And I know that when you’re with me, I feel calmer, more centered. That hasn’t gotten worse in the past couple months, it’s gotten better. More true. And so I want you near me more. All the time, if I can have it.”

All the objections, all the complaints, all the explanations of the ways that he was wrong flew through her mind, and she had to push them away with firm hands. This wasn’t the time to protest about the club, or about him following the same path Declan had, or any of it. This was the time to trust. To let herself fall into his arms and be content. There would be time for all the doubt the world could hold— later.

“I love you,” she said, and she’d said it before, now and then, but it was different this time.