Rest & Trust (14 page)

When he actually
did
hit the back of her throat, it felt completely different from anything else so far—and was less weird and scary than she’d expected. Like a boundary crossed and no longer unknown, it gave her a burst of confidence—as did the harsh sound of barely-restrained pleasure that came from Sherlock.

As she took him down again, he surprised her by putting his hand on her throat. He massaged her lightly with his fingers, and it wasn’t until then, feeling herself swell against his touch, that she realized that he was deep enough to stretch her whole throat. The knowledge surprised her, and in a reflex, she swallowed.

“Fuck!” he yelled in a strange, strangled voice. “Pull back—I need to come.”

She pulled away, off of him, and he grabbed his cock and started to pump. But she wanted to be the one to get him off, so she knocked his hands away and took care of him herself. He let her, too, dropping back to the pillows, his hands flopping away to grab at the covers.

When he came, he did so with a roar, and in a huge, high-pressure arc that landed over his belly and legs.

Sadie was fucking proud of herself. Not only had she overcome her anxiety without doing anything stupid, but she’d done a pretty damn good job of getting him off, too. Feeling something close to elation, she grinned down at him and licked her fingers. He tasted salty, but not bad.

His eyes flared. “Jesus fuck, little outlaw,” he panted. “You learn fast.”

“Honor student, remember? Didn’t get you all the way down, though.”

He smiled and reached down for a shirt off one of the piles on his floor. “We’ll have to work more on that, then.” He wiped himself off and dropped the shirt back to the floor.

Smiling back at him, she put her thumb in her mouth and sucked it clean. He sat up and caught her hand, pulling it away from her mouth. Then he kissed her.

“Now I’m gonna make you feel that good,” he rumbled as he rolled her over and pinned her to his mattress.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The knock on his office door surprised him; no one had ever knocked on that door before. Sherlock got up, unlocked the door, and opened it to Sadie, standing in his hallway, dressed again in her pretty black dress. Her hair was wet now, slicked back against her head, and her pearl jewelry, he supposed, was in her purse.

He’d meant to shower with her but had gotten a call. Sadie hadn’t had to say a word; her spikes had jabbed him with just a look. That was a problem they were going to have to address, he knew. He didn’t want his club life getting between them, but he couldn’t allow her to get between him and the Horde. Ideally, he wanted a way to keep these parts of his life separate. He’d been able to do that with Taryn; she’d never been to the clubhouse, and only a couple of his brothers had ever laid eyes on her. He hadn’t hidden her; he’d simply kept his club life and his personal life separate.

But he and Taryn had made no commitments to each other, no promises. They’d been a couple of convenience. From the first moment, he and Sadie had been more than that.

The next couple of weeks or so, his club life was going to take over his whole life. He was going to be gone a lot, and he hadn’t explained that to her yet.

A balance had to be struck; he didn’t want to lose her. They’d been together a month, and where women were concerned, it had been the best damn month of his life. He’d meant to take things slow, but fuck that. He wanted to be with her every chance he had.

He liked everything about her, even her spikes. Maybe especially her spikes—he got off on turning that frown upside down, and he always could. And Jesus fuck, the way she gave over to him. Even when he kissed her, she bent to him. He got off on that, too. She needed him; she trusted him. It felt good. Filled him up.

He’d seen how nervous and even afraid she’d been at the thought of deep-throating him, but she’d done it because he’d wanted it. She’d done it, and she’d gotten him deep. She wasn’t the first woman to take him deep like that, but it had felt more significant with her. He thought she was the first woman who’d done it out of…affection for him.

Sherlock would never forget the feel of her swallowing around him or the sight of her long throat swelling full of him. Christ.

When he stepped into the hallway and closed the office door, she scrunched up her brow. “You locked your door? From me? What are you doing in there?”

“Just work.” Which included nearly thirty security monitors with eyes on Horde properties, none of which she needed to see. He smoothed his hand up and down her arm. “Sorry I couldn’t get wet with you.”

Still manifestly dissatisfied, Sadie chewed on her thumb. “Yeah. Well, I have to go. I have work, too.”

Sherlock pulled her hand away from her mouth and held it. “Can we talk for a minute?” As long as she was bent about the Horde, he might as well get the rest of it out now, too.

“I’m going to get fired if I keep logging on late.”

With his thumb, he brushed over the lines creasing her forehead, as if he could smooth the suspicion away. “Five minutes.” He took her hand and led her into the living room.

Her birthday cake still sat in the middle of his coffee table. Now, though, it was thoroughly demolished. They’d eaten it for breakfast, feeding each other handfuls until they were sucking frosting off each other and fucking on the floor. He was still sticky from the frosting, what with his shower being derailed by work. At least he’d washed his face and beard; he couldn’t stand to get crap in his beard. About his body, he was not a slob.

He sat her down on his sofa, smiling when she checked first to make sure she wasn’t going to sit on anything gross. Any time now, she was going to ask to clean his place; he could sense it looming. He’d certainly let her. He wasn’t a slob out of any sort of political or philosophical stance; he simply found housework about the dullest activity on the planet. He lived alone, so he couldn’t come up with a single good reason to bother. He cleaned his kitchen when it got rank; he did his dishes when he ran out of clean things to eat and drink with. Admittedly, it probably took him longer to notice than most, but oh well.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, her eyes narrow.

He sat next to her. “Nothing’s wrong. I just need to tell you that I’ve got a lot of work stuff coming up in the next few weeks, and I’m not going to be around much.”

“Can I ask what kind of stuff?”

Already she knew he wouldn’t say much about his work, and he could tell that she’d been trying to fill in the holes with her imagination. He considered it progress that she was asking like that. “Nothing bad. Just some recreational runs. There’s a charity run that winds up in L.A. It’s a national thing, picking up riders from D.C. all the way to L.A., so it’s huge, and we’re one of the closest clubs to the terminus. So we’ll be wall to wall bikers for a few days.”

“I read about that online. The Miles of Smiles thing, I think? Bikers bringing toys to sick kids?”

“Yep. That’s it. They’ve been stopping off at hospitals en route. There’s a big rally in L.A. on Saturday and a party that night up in Malibu.”

“
Malibu
?” Her surprise at that cleared the suspicion from her brow.

Malibu admittedly seemed, to the civilian, like a strange location for a biker blowout. “There’s a biker bar up there. Anyway, riders are coming in Friday, and they’ll be hosted for the night at a few different places, including our clubhouse. So it’ll be wild. And I need to be there the whole time. Then right after that, a lot of us are heading to South Dakota for the Sturgis rally, and I’ll be out of town for a couple of weeks.”

“So you’re partying for all that time? That’s your ‘work’?”

“It’s more complicated than that, but yeah, there’s gonna be a lot of partying. That’s why I haven’t said anything before. It’s not a place for you.”

“When you say wild…like drugs and booze and naked girls?”

“Don’t get caught in your head about that, sweetheart.”

She laughed, but not like she thought it was truly funny. “How hard are you going to be ‘working’?” She made the word ‘working’ positively
bleed
sarcastic quotes.

He took both of her hands in his. “Sadie, you listen to me. I am telling you not to get wrapped up in this. What’s going on between us is special to me. So trust me.” He didn’t know why he didn’t just come out and promise not to fuck around on her, but it seemed like a wrong thing to say. Why that would be wrong, he couldn’t guess, but something held his tongue. Instead, he simply asked for her trust.

“Are you going to drink? Get drunk?” He didn’t drink around her; he could count on one hand the number of times he’d been truly drunk since they’d met. Well, since they’d first fucked, anyway.

“Absolutely. I guarantee that I will be drunk. A lot.” He bit off the assertion that getting drunk was not a problem for him, but he felt he’d proved conclusively that he was not, in fact, the alcoholic she’d first thought he was. He could, in fact, quit whenever he wanted.

“Drugs?”

“Weed for sure. Probably speed when we’re riding. It’s a long ride to Sturgis. I don’t play around with the other shit.”

“But it’ll all be around.”

“Yes. That’s why it’s not a place for you.”

She chewed on her fingernail. “I don’t like it.”

“I understand. But it is what it is.” He pulled her hand from her mouth, but she yanked it from him and went right back to chewing.

“That’s such a stupid thing to say. ‘It is what it is.’” She repeated him in a voice dripping with derision. “What is that supposed to mean?”

There was no outcome to this conversation in which he wouldn’t be spending the next few weeks away from her, steeped in club life, so he let her question and her derision go and instead asked, “Do you trust me?”

She sat up straight and stared at him, her eyes narrow and her lips drawn tight. Then she sighed. “I trust you. I don’t like this, I don’t like the way it makes me feel and I don’t understand it, but I trust you.”

He brought her hands up to his mouth and brushed his beard back and forth over her knuckles until she sighed again, in a different way. Less huff and more whimper. “It’ll be fine, little outlaw.” He kissed her hands. “I’ll stay with you through Thursday night, and then I’ll be back after Sturgis. We’ll keep in touch, and it’ll be fine.”

She pulled her hands away. “Okay. I have to get to work.”

~oOo~

On Thursday afternoon, Sherlock started to back his big GMC pickup onto his mother’s driveway, saw that Thomas’s rusted-out piece of shit was blocking him, grumbled “Fuck!” and parked on the street instead.

The manzanita hedges had nearly overtaken the driveway, too. He’d cut them back in the spring, but Thomas had obviously done nothing at all to the yard since, except possibly walk the mower over it a couple of times.

His mother and brother lived less than thirty miles from him, and he knew he should take the time more often to check in. But an afternoon over here was mostly work, frustration, and depression, and it was easy to let himself be too busy.

When he neglected, though, then the whole place went to shit.

Their mother had been on disability now for years. She had been a heavy woman throughout Sherlock’s memory, and a life spent working on her feet had caused her a list of medical problems. As had the simple fact of her weight. She had diabetes, arthritis, high blood pressure, compressed discs in her back, and countless other ailments. She got around okay, but only for short stretches of time. These days, the radius of her life went about as far as the Walmart about a mile down the main drag, and the medical center the same distance in the other direction.

Thomas, his forty-three-year-old brother, had moved back home when she’d gone on disability, ostensibly to take care of her. It hadn’t worked out that way. Within the first year, Thomas had stopped even bothering to work at anything other than random day laborer jobs, and his more or less casual relationship with meth had become a full-blown addiction, one that was bleeding their mother dry.

Thomas had done a lot of Sherlock’s raising. Their mother had stopped paying neighborhood girls to babysit them when Thomas was ten and Sherlock—Timmy, back then—was five. He’d picked him up every day from school and walked him home, protected him from bullies, taught him how to fight, cooked his dinners, helped him with homework, read comics to him at bedtime, taught him how to make a monster-proof fort to sleep in.

Most days, their mother had been around only in the mornings, still wearing her LPN uniform. She’d been there to wake them up, pour them cereal, sign their school notes, ruffle them on their heads and send them off for the day. She was usually gone by the time they got home from school.

Sherlock loved his brother like only a boy raised by a brother could love. For a long time, his prevailing feeling about Thomas’s decline had been heartbreak. He’d done all he could. He’d used club contacts to find him work, which he’d always bailed on. He’d paid for rehab three times, from which Thomas had bailed each time within a week. He’d even tried club rehab, which consisted of grabbing him up in the middle of the night, locking him in a motel room and forcing him to gut out withdrawal cold turkey, and then threatening him with doom if he used again. But that threat had no teeth; he couldn’t hurt Thomas. He couldn’t do that to their mother.

Now, his prevailing sentiment toward Thomas was anger. The guy just did not care about anything as much as he cared about his high. So Sherlock tried to ignore that mess and let it play out however it would, and he tried to protect their mother from it however he could. He paid her bills. He made sure her medications and healthy groceries were delivered every week. He knew that Thomas took most if not all of her disability checks, but Sherlock had had to let that go. He took care of their mother. It was all he could do.

As he walked up the driveway, pushing overgrown manzanitas out of his way, Sherlock understood that his anger toward Thomas was even greater now, since he’d known Sadie. She’d been an addict for years, too, but she hadn’t torn anything down with her, not even while she was high. And when she began her recovery, she’d stuck to it. She wanted it. She was strong. Just a little bit of a thing, with a hundred times the character and strength his brother had. Thomas was a fucking waste.