Wolf (The Henchmen MC #3) (21 page)

"Your face when I do this," he clarified with a devilish grin as he started thrusting up into me, fast, barely-controlled. "There it is," he smiled, his free hand moving up to the side of my neck and curling in hard.

Yeah it was. There, that is. Right there. My orgasm. After what felt like an endless game of keep-away, I felt it getting closer, getting stronger.

On a moan, I found his pace, shoving my hips downward as he thrust up, taking him as deep as my body would allow each time. "Wolf I..." I whimpered, losing the pace, staying still as he drove it home.

"Come," he demanded, thrusting deep as my walls contracted hard around him. My arms went to jello and I landed on his chest on a moan, my entire body going taut for a second then shaking as the waves kept crashing. My fingers dug into his shoulders as he thrust through the orgasm, drawing it out, giving every last bit of pleasure my body would allow. Then he buried deep on a low growl, his body shuddering under mine as he came.

He went still beneath me, one hand heavy on my ass, the other limply holding my neck.

I came back down slowly. The shaking stopped; my breathing evened out; my heartbeat slowed. My brain seemed the last to return home, feeling cloudy with the dopamine from an orgasm. The full weight of what I had done settled down on me and I felt myself smiling against his chest.

I had no way of knowing, but I had been missing out.

I didn't need an hour and a half of grappling to get rid of the anger and restlessness I tended to carry around with me. Nope, I just needed a good roll in the hay. Every inch of my body felt languid and heavy. Satisfied. I felt satisfied. And safe. With him still inside me, with his arms around me, I had never felt safer. Unbidden, tears stung at the backs of my eyes.

"Jesus Christ," I grumbled into his skin.

His entire body went tense beneath me. "What?" he asked, hands going to my shoulders and pushing me upward like I weighed nothing. Which, to him, I probably did. My hands planted on his chest to take my weight and his hands immediately went to my cheeks and brushed at the tears. "Janie..." he said, his voice deep and concerned.

"God, I'm being such a
girl
," I said, scrunching my face up which only succeeded in making more tears slip out.

"You are a girl," he said, giving me a smile that said he didn't understand.

"Yeah but I'm not a
girl.
Augh!" I growled, sitting back on my ankles and wiping at my cheeks myself. "Next thing you know I'll be crying over fucking greeting cards and shit." I felt his chest start to shake underneath me and tried to give him a hard look which, well, was impossible when you were still freaking crying. "It's not fucking funny!"

"Yeah it is," he countered with a smile before he pushed up to a sitting position, one arm going around my hips, the other going to my jaw. "With me," he started, his eyes soft, "you can be a girl."

"Fine. But you're not allowed to tell anyone," I countered, moving off of him and throwing myself backward onto the bed. "Or I'll drug your morning coffee and while you're passed out, shave off your beard. Got it?"

He was still chuckling, moving over me to plant a hard kiss on my lips. "Got it," he agreed, moving off toward the bathroom.

"I mean it. Snip snip! Bye bye mountain man!"

"Heard ya," he said, coming out of the bathroom still gloriously naked and moving to stretch out beside me, one arm cocked under his head, the other reaching for my hand and entwining his fingers with mine.

"You don't think I'll do it."

His head turned to look at my profile. "You like my beard."

Yeah, well, he had a point there.

SEVENTEEN

Detective Collings

"Got a body at the morgue," the young blood said. Without looking up, Detective Collings could see he was practically pissing himself in excitement. Oh, to be young again.

"What else is new?"

"Doc Fenton just called. Said it wasn't just any body."

"The suspense is killing me," he dead-panned. He didn't want to take an unnecessary trip to the fucking morgue. He wanted to finish his mountain of paperwork sometime before nine at night and get home already. Not that he had anything to get home to, but that was beside the point.

"Lex Keith."

If there was one name Marco could have said to actually pique Collings' interest, that was the one. His head snapped up. "He's sure?"

"Positive. He wants us to come down though."

"Why?"

"Didn't say, but come on, it's Lex Keith. Curious to see how someone finally did him in."

Yeah, well, so was Collings.

He sighed, tucked his paperwork away, grabbed his gun and badge, then followed his new blood out to the cruiser.

Collings hated the morgue. He imagined it was not really the kind of place anyone actually liked except maybe those crime freaks who were always trying to sneak in. He told 'em once, they wanted to see some dead bodies, become a cop. Sometimes he felt like he saw more dead ones than lives ones: crushed against a steering wheel, through the windshield of a car, splattered on the ground after jumping, overdosed in an alley, shivved for stepping over an invisible turf line. Man, if he had a dollar for every body he'd seen he could... fuck... get the fuck out of this godforsaken town.

The young blood was a ball of energy as they moved through the office and got onto the elevator, hitting the button for the basement.

The walls were all sterile white with scratches around hip level from where the gurneys sometimes scraped the paint. It was a marked twenty degrees cooler down there, half because it was underground, and half because they kept it cold for the stiffs. Collings followed his new blood through the door into the crypt, expecting to see Doc Fenton, but almost running into a short curvy blond instead.

She let out a muted screech, her hand flying to her chest over her mint green scrubs. "Shit. Sorry. I'm, ah, not used to anyone
living
down here," she fumbled, giving him a wobbly smile. "Can I help you?"

"Detective Collings," I said, gesturing toward the badge on my belt.

"Is Dr. Fenton expecting you?"

"Got a call."

"Right, I'll just go get him for..." He didn't know if she was nervous for some reason or just clumsy, but she ran right into the stainless steel cart covered in medical instruments and sent everything, including herself, flying.

"Jesus Christ. Again?" A voice mumbled from his side and Collings looked over to see Doc Fenton standing beside him, shaking his head at the girl in a way that suggested she was wearing on his every last nerve.

Doc Fenton wasn't what you expected from a medical examiner. First, he was relatively young, somewhere in his mid-thirties. He was also a good-looking man- tall and fit with dark hair and dark blue eyes. Under his lab coat, he had on black slacks, a fitted dark gray dress shirt, and shiny black shoes. Collings thought he preferred Doc Green, the man Fenton replaced two years back, with his thin graying hair, fat face, drab, bleach-faded blue scrubs, and sensible orthotic shoes.

"Ali relax," Fenton said, his tone at once frustrated and resigned. "You're going to cut yourself again," he reminded her as the blade to a scalpel narrowly missed getting grabbed.

"Sorry, detectives," Ali said, piling everything onto the tray and lifting it off the cart. She gave them a wobbly, insecure smile. "Didn't mean to paint this place in a bad light. I promise I'm the only
incompetent,"
she spat the word, looking at Doc Fenton like maybe that was a word he used to describe her, "one here. I'll just go get these sterilized again and get out of your hair."

Collings gave Fenton a smile, gesturing toward his own new blood, showing he understood what it was like. "She talks to the bodies," Fenton shared, shaking his head, but Collings was sure he saw a bit of a smile before the doc turned away. "Alright so Lex Keith," he said, sounding all-business again as he walked over to one of the fridges, pulling the handle, then dragging out the tray. "He's not going to vomit is he?" he asked Collings, jerking his head to Marco.

"We'll see," Collings said on a shrug.

"It's not pretty."

"They never are," Collings said as Doc Fenton pulled the sheet. "Christ," Collings hissed, shaking his head.

Fenton was right; it wasn't pretty.

It was the absolute definition of 'overkill'. Someone didn't just want to take out Keith, they wanted to make him suffer. His chest was hacked open, marks covered almost every inch of him, looking like he had been clawed. The heart that should have been connected with tubes and shit was completely separated from the rest of his chest... like it had been torn out.

"Looks like he was mauled by dogs," the new blood said.

Collings shook his head. "No. Not a dog... Wolf."

"We don't have wolves around here," Doc Fenton said, shaking his head.

Collings' lips curved up, but he stayed silent.

Oh, they had a Wolf alright.

EIGHTEEN

Janie

I heard him rummaging around. From the tentativeness of his footsteps, I imagined he was trying to do so quietly. But, well, a man his size could never really be quiet. When I forced my eyes open, he was leaning down and tying his boots.

"Why do you always sneak out when I'm sleeping?" I demanded, still half asleep but always ready for a fight.

"Never sleep. Not waking you."

That was nice. Considerate. But still.

"Why don't you leave a note?"

"You want notes?"

"They'd be nice. Save me from all the 'dead in a ditch' thoughts, y'know?"

He gave me a lip twitched and moved over toward the kitchen, grabbing a pen and a pad and scribbling.

"I didn't mean
now.
I'm awake now. You can just tell me." God, he was so dense sometimes.

"Wanted notes, got a note," he said, moving to the bed and placing the note on the nightstand.

I wasn't positive, but I was pretty sure he was fucking with me at that point. Humoring him, I picked up the note. "You're going to the laundromat?"

"That's what it says." He lumbered over to where he had a giant bag stacked beside the door and hauled it up.

The next words were out of my mouth before I could temper how desperate they sounded. "Can I come?"

"Like that?" he asked, a wicked grin pulling at his lips and I realized I was sitting up in bed, sheet pooled around my waist, shirtless.

I rolled my eyes, snatching up the sheet and holding it to my chest. "Real mature. No not like this. I'll put on my..."

"In here," he said, jerking the bag up.

"I'll figure something out," I said, pulling the sheet with me as I climbed out of the bed. I couldn't exactly wear his tee out in public. But maybe if I took his flannel and belted it so it looked like a dress? That could work. I moved toward the hook by the door, snatching the flannel off. "What?" I asked when Wolf just stood there staring at me, brows drawn together.

"Sheet."

"What about the sheet?" I asked, looking up at him.

"Fine naked last night."

He wasn't wrong. After we had had sex, we had both stayed on top of the blankets, both gloriously naked, me babbling, him giving me his usual short answers. Occasionally, his hand would move over and drift across my belly, down my thigh, over my breasts. But it was chaste, like he was just trying to get to know every inch.

I hadn't ever been a particularly insecure woman. We had very little privacy at Hailstorm. I'd seen Lo naked more times than I could count and she could say the same of me. Besides, I didn't really have all that much going on body-part wise. I liked how I looked, but I was flat and boyish, straight up and down. There didn't seem to be much to be insecure about to be honest.

"That was last night," I said to cover my own confusion at my actions. "This is this morning."

To that, I got an exaggerated eye roll. His arm moved out and snagged the tuck I had made above my chest and pulled it free. The sheet pooled to the floor. "Better," he said with a nod.

"I needed to put this on anyway," I said with a chin lift as I slipped my arms into the flannel. He wasn't going to get a rise out of me over that. Nope. No way. And I didn't feel a pleasant flush of warmth as his eyes took me in hungrily as I buttoned up his shirt. "Do you have a belt?" I asked, expecting an immediate yes as I cinched in the waist.

"Got rope."

I looked up, fighting a smile. "You can't be serious," I said, shaking my head. He shrugged a shoulder and then, well, he got me some rope.

It wasn't high fashion, but it didn't look as absurd as it sounded either.

So off to the laundromat we went.

See, here's the thing: I'd never been to such a place before. Growing up, we had our own machines and at Hailstorm, the girls co-opted their own set separate from the guys too. So I had never been introduced to the washer and dryer-lined walls and the white folding tables down the center. I use the word "white" loosely here because there was brown stuff of indeterminate origins in the crevices. Why? I couldn't tell you because they were for
folding
the clothes, you know...
after
they had been
cleaned.
At a machine in the center, a woman with a baby in a sling was hauling crib sheets into the washer with a huge yellow stain in the center. Now, I'm no baby expert, but I knew a piss stain when I saw one.