Shelter From The Storm (The Bare Bones MC Book 6) (23 page)

“Get inside!” I cried.

His face was so placid, so calm. As though he stood in the eye of a hurricane. “Not ’til I’m sure they’re all dead. You get back inside.”

But I wouldn’t leave his side. Wolf came across the street now, a little machine gun slung across his back. Luckily there wasn’t much traffic up here if you didn’t count hunters, fishermen, or people looking for their lodging. He looked so cool and collected, like Clint Eastwood walking calmly through the carnage, until the fuel truck exploded.

Fox had made sure to park it away from the motel. He probably thought it would catch fire a lot sooner and give a needed distraction to the Ochoas.

Wolf must have forgotten that. He was crossing the highway and had made it almost to the unpaved part of the parking lot when the thing just detonated, flaring up in a giant mushroom cloud and sending a shockwave that knocked him on his ass.

I was surprised how heedlessly Fox ran out there to get him. No one else did. They were too busy making sure the women were safe, or making sure the Ochoa they’d gunned down was truly dead. Some men were already involved in dragging bodies, flaming or not, into one of the rooms that hadn’t been renovated yet. Speed had found a fire extinguisher and was running around putting out fires in cars, motorcycles, and flaming Ochoas. Now he ran to the fuel truck.

But by the time I reached them, Wolf was standing, grinning his trademark grin. Fox had his hand on Wolf’s upper arm, as though Wolf was disabled. “Come on. We’ve got to get inside, start cleaning up this mess.”

Faux Pas and Knoxie ran past with fire extinguishers too. I wondered what we were going to do with all the burned bikes and cars. A few were unscathed, but we wouldn’t want to be caught dead with them on our property.

“Boy, this is the last thing Randy Blankenship wants to see.”

“I’m sorry,” said Fox. I hadn’t realized I’d said it that loud. “It was all we could think of at such short notice. I guess I didn’t have to blow up the fuel truck, but I couldn’t stop the gas from flowing without getting out and turning off the valve.”

I put my arm around Fox’s waist as we mounted the front steps. He was still holding onto Wolf’s arm, so we were a very affectionate threesome. I said, “It’s all right, darling. I think you pretty much saved the fucking day.”

He smiled crookedly down at me. “I don’t think I did, pussycat. What was up with you and your bow?”

I smiled too, until I realized we’d have to step over the body of that cleaning woman who had been caught in the crossfire. I tried not to look. “Oh, I got one inside the lobby here,” I bragged.

“Good for you. They would’ve gotten us if we hadn’t gotten them. That’s how to look at it.”

“Damn straight.”

The lobby was a blur of activity. Maddie, a nurse, had found the first aid kit and was bandaging Ford’s forehead where he’d been pistol-whipped bloody. The building inspector Paul had some sort of bullet grazing injury to his upper arm, and June was tending to him. And Gollywow’s entire white T-shirt was a mass of bloodstains, although when he took off his shirt, he looked intact. Maybe he’d just gotten splattered by an Ochoa.

I started wiping the blood off my desk and shredding the bloodstained papers. The guy I’d buried was gone, dragged off. My lobby had suddenly become a command station for a natural disaster. As Wolf and Fox fell to helping me, we developed a copacetic rhythm. Wolf carried a trash can over. Fox handed me a roll of paper towels. Everything was getting done like clockwork. Maddie had even finished bandaging Ford and went over to check out Paul. It was like a triage station in there, and before I knew it, Wolf had whisked away the trash can, moving on to wiping blood from the floor. I could sit at my desk as though nothing had ever happened. I could always reprint those blood-soaked purchase reqs.

Fox perched on the edge of my desk. With his hands folded between his thighs and his devilish grin, a sheen of sweat just barely breaking forth on his forehead, he looked like he’d just come from a rousing baseball game—one that his team had won, of course. “So now you know.”

“Know what?”

“How to create your own story. See what I mean? Now you’re truly Pippa Lofting of the Smoky Mountain High cannabusiness.”

“That’s for fucking sure. And you’re forever going to be Fox Isherwood of the Bare Bones MC.”

He shrugged. “We’ll see.”

I lightly slapped his arm. “After this? How can you say no?”

He just smiled enigmatically. “Come on. Let’s see if there’s any food for these folks.”

FOX

“A
nd the Leaves of Grass plantation in conjunction with its dispensary, A Joint System, is proud to be the underwriters for this noble, mellow, and truly harmonious undertaking,” said Lytton into the microphone. “With all the overpopulation, pollution, fracking, terrorism, and racial tension in this world, it’s an honor to contribute to such a peaceful venture. When Pippa Lofting first came up with this idea, I thought ‘you’ve got to be kidding.’ A bud and breakfast where people can sit around enjoying a peaceful bowl—where cancer patients can come to get over their recent bouts of chemo. But Slushy here looked up the laws, and sure enough, it’s perfectly legal with a medical card.”

Lytton gestured at Slushy, who stood near the red ribbon with his trusty pair of giant scissors. People had told me he’d do that, but I didn’t believe it until I saw it for myself. He was truly just dying to cut that ribbon. We had built an enclosed patio in the back near the office and kitchen where people could eat their breakfast, toke up, read, or have cocktails in the afternoon, so we’d put the ribbon on that gate.

“He’s just chomping at the bit,” Pippa whispered.

“I’ve seen him cut through strands of garlic and sun dried tomatoes when opening up a farmer’s market,” confided Wolf. “He’s just mercenary the way he goes to town with those scissors.”

“Maybe he should’ve been a Bare Boner,” I said.

I was currently wearing a
PROSPECT
patch above the front pocket of my cut. If a year ago you would’ve told me I’d hang up my
sicario
holsters and adopt the colors of a club of men, I would’ve shot you dead.

Pippa’s gracious, loving influence had altered my life so irrevocably. Somehow, she made me want to stick around a place, to put down roots, to nest. After giving up her trashed apartment, we’d found a nice 1940s bungalow in an old subdivision on the way out of town toward Mormon Lake. I was working fulltime at the raptor conservancy and had even filled in for the director when he’d gone away on business trips a few times. We were a normal, homey family, especially with the addition of Pippa’s giant mutt, Monstro. WITSEC had finally seen the error of their ways and had allowed her to take custody of her dog.

“Oo, that guy’s cute. Is he spoken for?” asked Sally.

Oh, that’s right. I should say with the addition of Pippa’s dog
and her sister
, now known as Sally Decker. You heard right. Randy Blankenship and I had developed such a great rapport that I liked to believe it was me and me alone who had convinced him to rattle some cages and get Sally transferred here. I let him know in oblique ways that the Jones matter was taken care of, sewn up, concluded. They would hassle us no more. And he went to bat for Pippa.

“Oh, gross,” said Pippa. “That’s Russ Gollywow. He rarely takes a shower. I don’t think he’s spoken for, if that’s your style.”

“That guy’s cute, too.”

“Oh, even grosser. That’s Maddie and June’s brother Speed.”

I listened to the rest of Lytton’s speech. “I want to stress that first and foremost we’re a club in the most intense sense of the word. We are truly brothers in arms. And when we created this idyllic oasis on the shores of Mormon Lake, we created a new sort of club. A brotherhood of people who have a deep, abiding appreciation for the splendors of the glorious weed. Huzzah!”

Lytton lifted up a bong, and the crowd went wild. Pippa’s first customers were there, too, to partake in the grand opening. She’d listed her inn in a web database of bud and breakfasts, and already she was booked three months in advance. It was truly a booming business, although Gunhammer had pulled out once and for all after Abel Ochoa and twelve of his workers had gone missing.
No thanks
, Gunhammer had told the remaining Ochoas.
It might be legal, but it’s still too risky for me. And it’s still illegal in the eyes of the feds.

Lytton introduced the mayor of P and E, who started yammering about the greater good of all and the camaraderie of a close-knit community. I couldn’t ask Pippa to step away from her own grand opening, but I was itching to bang her. I held her closer to my side, my left hand draped over her shoulder straying down over her chest. In turn, her hand at my waist traveled over my ass. She put her little hand in my back jeans pocket and squeezed. Maybe she was bored with the mayor’s speech too.

I bent down. “Do you want to—”

“Yes!” she answered instantly. “The Eminence Front Room!”

Each unit had been named for a strain of Lytton’s pot. We practically jogged out of the patio area, shoving our way past Ford and Maddie, who gave us annoyed, and then knowing looks. The same happened with Faux Pas and Sapphire as well as Duji and Monique.

“Go get ’em, Prospect,” Duji growled in his gravelly, Al Pacino voice.

I had wondered how Pippa would react to being seen as a
belonging
to a man. She seemed hyper-independent, but then, so did most of these club old ladies. So when I’d offered her a
PROPERTY OF
patch, I was pretty sure she wouldn’t take it. She’d been property of Lieutenant Commander Heston for so long, then she’d been a slave to the Joneses in that warehouse. Of course she was going to balk at being labeled my property.

But to my surprise, she’d taken the patch. She’d even personally sewn it onto the back of her jean jacket. “I know I’m not literally your property, Fox,” she’d said. “But it gives me a sense of security knowing I’m tied to you emotionally. I can’t just leave. You can’t just leave. We’re bound to each other in ways that a ring or a patch can’t achieve.”

That had bothered me. It had stuck in my craw, her mentioning a ring. I felt too inadequate to give her a ring. The bud and breakfast looked to be booming, but no one made a bundle at a nonprofit bird place, not even the assistant director. I’d been living off my
sicario
savings, which was formidable, but I felt guilty as hell not having asked her to marry me.

I wanted it. Hell, after what I’d been through, I liked security as much as Pippa did. Who said men didn’t like having a nice house with decent furniture? A food processor, lawn chairs, a view of red rocks? We had all that now and I wanted to think it was enough for her, but I often wondered.

I slammed and locked the door to the Eminence Front Room, pressing Pippa between my body and the door. My cock was up like a hammer against her belly, and she squirmed and purred with delight. She rocked her head back and forth against the door, her silken hair now dyed nearly the same fiery shade of red as mine. That always got to me, her ultra-feminine ways. Some men might call them wiles even, but since they didn’t bother me in the least, they were just sexy, seductive ways.

I took a big bite from the pit of her throat. “How those balls feeling?”

She rolled her hips like a belly dancer and ruffled my hair with her hand. “The balls are turning me on, sir.” No one had asked her to call me “sir.” Because she did it on her own, I never protested. And who didn’t like being called “sir”? “It was all I could think of listening to Lytton’s speech.”

I reached down to crunch the hem of her skirt in my hand. “You’ve kept them inside you the whole six hours?”

She smiled like a cat. “The entire fucking time.”

Now I rubbed the glans of my cock against her belly. Arrows of pleasure shot through straight to my ball sac, tightening it up, bringing it closer to my body. I had to bend at the knees to travel my greedy hand up her inner thigh. I could feel the moisture halfway up, little trickles of pussy juice. Those Ben Wa balls never failed to do their job.

“You like holding them inside your cunt?”

“Mm. I like how they make me think of you. You and your big, plump, long prick. How our bodies fit perfectly together. How good you fuck.” Pippa punctuated this by squeezing my ass.

I slipped my middle finger back and forth against her clit. She hissed and jumped like hot drops of water in a pan. I could tell by how extended and swollen her button was that she’d already been primed. And, knowing how hot I was, we could be back outside in time for the celebratory punch bowl.

“You think I fuck good?” I wanted praise as I unsheathed my cock, rubbing the head against her clit as my fingers slid inside of her to retrieve the balls. One by one they dropped into my palm like satiny eggs, and I stuffed them in my pocket.

She had one boot up against the back of my leg, telling me she was wide open for me. “The best,” she murmured. Her eyes were heavily lidded, her features perfectly tranquil, and why not? Everything was going her way, for once. “It’s like my body isn’t fighting you. We’re perfectly yin and yang. When your cock’s inside me I’m full—
ah!
”