Wolf (The Henchmen MC #3) (17 page)

Yeah, well. At that point, it was pretty much impossible to keep thoughts about that particular body part out of my brain because suddenly, there it was in all its glory, hard and straining.

I wrenched away from him, reaching inside the shower and putting the water on hot. "Alright, um, you need to get in here and get that blood off." I sighed when I didn't feel movement behind me. I turned back, grabbing his arm, and dragging him toward the enclosure. He stepped in with encouragement and stepped under the spray. I yanked the curtain closed, hoping that when I came back he would have at least thought to wash up as I gathered his clothes and shoes and took them outside.

That far in my stay, I had yet to find a washing machine, leaving me stumped as to how he had managed to clean my clothes from the night of the bombing. At a loss for anything else to do, I overturned a five-gallon bucket full of rock salt and filled it with water and bleach from the kitchen, submerging the clothes and shoes. It would ruin most of it, but at least it would eat up the DNA. I found another smaller bucket and went to work on the interior of the truck which wasn't nearly as bad as I had been anticipating.

There were many fun parts of working at Hailstorm: the guns, the bombs, the martial arts, the blurred lines of legality that generally allowed us to end up on the right side of morality. But that being said, it wasn't always a glamorous life. It was obnoxious how much time we had to spend covering our tracks, cleaning up crime scenes, erasing evidence. I'd had so much freaking practice that I could do it in my sleep. It wasn't the most impressive of skills to boast about, but it sure came in handy at times.

Thirty long and sweaty minutes later, I went inside to scrub the floor where Wolf had walked, washed my hands and arms in the sink, grabbed fresh clothes for Wolf who was still in the shower, and went into the bathroom.

"Did you wash up?" I asked, not expecting an answer and not getting one. I pulled the curtain to find him standing under the spray that had managed to wash a fair amount of the blood down the drain. But he hadn't washed. In fact, the only thing he had managed to take care of was, well, his raging hard on. But that was... kind of a relief especially given what I had to do now.

On a sigh, I climbed into the shower in my tee with nothing else but my panties on. "You're determined to make this difficult, huh?" I asked, grabbing the bar of soap and sudsing it up in my hands before reaching out toward him. His body stiffened as my hands pressed down onto his shoulders. "Relax," I said, but I wasn't sure if I was telling him or myself. I scrubbed down his chest, over his arms, down his stomach, pausing awkwardly. "Um... face," I mumbled, sudsing up my hands again and reaching up to scrub the soap into his beard, eyes on his face, watching him watch me. I reached up to wash his hair, making me need to press forward and go up on my tiptoes. It was right then that I realized that Wolf, or Wolf-The-Animal-Version, had a really fast turnover time for hard-ons.

His hands moved behind me, sliding down my back and landing on my ass with firm pressure, using it to shift me down slightly so his erection pressed between my thighs. An involuntary moan escaped my lips as my forehead fell to his shoulder. God. It didn't even matter that he was out of it, my body still wanted him. And, obviously, his body wanted mine as well.

His fingers dug in and stroked me over him again. My hands curled into the skin on his back as I tried to take a deep breath and think straight. On the third stroke that was driving me upward faster than I could have imagined possible, I choked out a strangled, "No." There was a pregnant pause, his hands still holding me hard, his cock still pressing against my pussy. Then his grip lessened and his hands fell away completely. I went down on my flat feet as my body screamed a painful objection to the loss of contact. I took a step back, reaching for the soap and pressing it into his hands. "I can't," I said though I wasn't sure he was paying any kind of conscious attention.

I pulled the curtain and walked out of the bathroom, stripping out of my wet tee and panties and rummaging around for the jeans and tank I had worn the night Wolf picked me up. I slid those on then threw on Wolf's flannel, buttoning it. Layers. I needed lots and lots of layers.

On a groan, I went to the kitchen.

I needed to make him food.

And, well, see, I have a bunch of talents. Cooking had never been one of them. As in, I couldn't do it. At all. But if he couldn't exactly remember how to wash himself, I doubt he had been in the right state of mind to feed himself either. So I pulled out the eggs and bread, deciding it was pretty hard to fuck up scrambled eggs and toast.

Food done, I took a deep breath and went into the bathroom to find the water off and Wolf dry. Though still naked. Because my hormones really needed that sucker punch.

"Clothes," I said, taking them off the counter and shoving them against his chest. "Then food. Hurry up, it's getting cold." Not that I thought the warmth of it would make it taste any better. The toast was burnt to shit and the eggs were the weirdest freaking consistency, kinda almost rubbery. I don't know. Maybe that was how they were supposed to be. Whatever. He needed to eat.

I sat down at the dining table, cradling a coffee cup. My stomach clenched painfully at the idea of trying to shove food into it so I just stared at his heaping plate until I heard the door open and Wolf walked out and sat down. He looked at the food for a long minute, brows drawn together, before he stabbed a forkful of egg and brought it up to his mouth.

He chewed for all of two seconds before swallowing hard.

Then the weirdest thing happened.

His fork clanged down onto the plate and he threw his head back and laughed.

Laughed.

Not a chuckle or a those rumbling things I'd heard him do before.

This was a real, genuine belly laugh.

The deep, masculine sound of it boomed off the walls and shivered under my skin.

Then his head lowered, his honey eyes on me.

"Woman..." he said, grinning.

FOURTEEN

Janie

It was stupid to say I missed his voice, but I did. I didn't even realize it until I heard it again.

I felt my lips tip up. "I thought we talked about how 'woman' isn't a sentence."

"You talked," he agreed, lips twitching.

"And you apparently didn't listen. Woman what?"

"Worst fucking eggs ever," he chuckled again, shaking his head.

I should have been insulted, but, well, they looked like rubber and they kinda smelled awful too. Still, I had to say something. "I think you're supposed to say 'thank you for uncuffing me and cleaning me up and making me food when I was all Hulked out'." If I hadn't been watching him so closely and if he wasn't always so silent and often spoke in tiny nuances of expressions, I would have missed it. As it was, I saw it. Guilt. "Wolf, it's fine. I really didn't min..." But then the guilt got mixed with something else, something a little boyish, a little wicked. "You bastard!" I said, half-angry and half-amused. "When did you clue back in?"

"When you stepped in."

When I stepped in... to the shower. Oh, that shit! There I was worrying about him and his seemingly unbalanced mental and emotional state and the fucker was in his right mind again. While I was in the shower with him. When he was
naked
and
hard!
"I soaped you up!"

"Yeah you did," he said, his face losing all of the guilt and looking almost devilish.

"That was so juvenile," I lowered my eyes at him, crossing my hands over my chest.

"Yep," he agreed, pushing his plate almost completely across the table toward me like he didn't even want it anywhere near him. He took my coffee cup from my hands and took a sip himself.

I wanted to be annoyed at him. I really did. He crossed a line. It wasn't a particularly bad line to cross, but it wasn't cool and I wanted him to know that. But that being said, I was happy he was himself again. I was too relieved to hold onto my indignation.

"Are you alright?" I asked when the silence stretched on.

"Yeah."

Augh. I needed more than that.

"You sure? Because you were pretty, ah, shaken up not that long ago."

"Over it."

Over it?
Over it?

Alright so my hands weren't exactly clean. I've had blood on them before. I'd done some things and I had gotten over them. Some things needed to be done. But still, he went full on rage monster to the point where there wasn't an inch of him that hadn't been covered in blood. Hell his hand looked like it had reached into someone's chest cavity and pulled out their heart. That was how much blood he had staining his skin and shoved under his fingernails. He couldn't just be... over that.

"Wolf..."

"Tired," he said, getting up so fast the chair scratched across the floor then tipped over. He walked toward the bed without picking it back up.

I took a deep breath, steeling myself for beating my head up against a brick wall. I mean... talking to Wolf. I righted the chair and skirted around the opposite side of the bed. He was facing the door to the bathroom, away from me. I got on my knees behind him.

"You need to talk about it."

"No."

"Okay well then... I need to hear about it."

"No you don't."

I closed my eyes, willing myself to stay calm. How could he know what I did and did not need to hear? "Did you kill Lex Keith?" I asked and when I opened my eyes again, Wolf had rolled onto his back, his eyes boring into me.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"You have nightmares."

"Plenty of people have nightmares. Are you going to kill the elementary school teacher who used to make me wake up crying because of that one time he yelled at me in front of my whole class?"

"Janie, he raped you."

Those words landed like a blow, pushing all the air out of my stomach. It was one thing to know it, to have lived through it and tried to move on from it. It was another thing to hear someone else say it. No one had said it before, not to me, not about me, not around me. Lo had been careful to use phrases like 'what happened to you' or 'what that bastard did'. They were phrases that almost detached me from the act, let it seem something impersonal. But putting it the way Wolf just did, it threw me right into it. Lex raped me. It didn't get more personal than that.

I swallowed hard. "Women get raped every day, Wolf. In fact, a woman is raped every two minutes in the United States alone. Are you going to track down all those men and kill them too?"

"Someone should."

"Answer the fucking question."

He sighed. "No."

"Then why?"

"Drop it."

"No."

"Fucking stubborn," he said, shaking his head before his arm swung out, snagged me around the waist, and pulled me down to his chest.

"Yeah, well you're pretty fucking stubborn too. But, guess what?"

"What?"

"I'm pretty freaking sure I can out-stubborn you."

"You can try."

"You need to talk about..."

"Shut it."

I tried to jerk upward, but his arm tightened around my hips, holding me in place. "Did you just tell me to
shut it
?" I sputtered.

"Yep."

Then I stole a page right out of his book; I growled. Which only succeeded in making him chuckle, his body shaking beneath me. "Let me go."

"Nah."

"I'm angry with you," I reasoned.

"You'll get over it."

"Yeah maybe if you stop being such a pain in my ass."

"Not gonna happen."

"This isn't over."

"Sure it ain't."

"It's not," I insisted, but I could feel my commitment to the argument dwindling. That was always how I was- I burned hot and fast and fizzled out just as quickly. He could totally out-stubborn me, damn it.

"Go to sleep."

"Stop being so freaking bossy."

"Stop making everything difficult."

"Did you just use
two
words with
three
syllables in each in
one
sentence? I think hell might have just frozen over."

"Woman..." his voice held warning this time.

"Fine," I grumbled, relaxing onto his chest. It felt too good to be close to him again to keep ruining it with useless arguments.

"Thank Christ," he sighed loudly, but tempered the statement with his hand moving into my hair and stroking it in the familiar way he always did.

A while later, he slept.

A few hours after that, so did I.

For the second time in the better part of a decade, dreamlessly.

--

"You've got to be
freaking
kidding me!" I yelled into the cabin, making Harley and Chopper's heads snap up. "Seriously? Seriously?" I ranted, storming over to the bathroom and going in though I already knew it would be empty. I threw the front door open and stomped out. Of course his truck was gone.