“What is it?” I say as I see her face go pale, staring at her screen. “Lauren, what’s the matter?”
She doesn’t give me an answer. She just stares at the screen for a few seconds, looking like a storm of emotions is churning under the surface of her face before she looks up to me. The look in the gaze that hits me with the force of a freight train. She looks pained to speak, but she manages to move her lips anyway.
“I need a minute alone,” she says numbly.
I can’t believe her. One minute she’s hot, and the next she’s cold. One second she’s making me treat her like my little girl and begging me to play with her buttons, and then she’s kicking me out of her room or clamming up and going all creepy and brooding. I can’t make heads or tails of her, but I have a good feeling I know what this call is about, and it’s more frustrating than anything that I can see her closing up all over again after letting herself relax so much.
For a few moments, I open my mouth, thinking about protesting, but finally I just give a curt nod and head back down the hallway as she half-shuts herself in her bedroom to take the call. Once I’m in the living room, I look out the window to check on my bike before sitting down on the couch and glaring at the opposite wall, feeling tense.
Why does this always come up post-orgasm? Am I always going to have to worry about this bullshit when we mess around? But no sooner has that thought crossed my mind that I feel guilty about it, and I run a hand over my face.
Obviously, she can’t help it. Everything to do with her dad and the kind of sick son of a bitch he is drives her crazy in a way that goes deeper than anything I can ever understand. And when I sit back and really think about it, she’s been alone letting that burden eat her up inside about as long as I’ve been on the run from my old crew back in California.
All that time, I’ve been able to find my people. I’ve always fallen in with other bikers who would ride with me, get into trouble with me, and sometimes even get me out of it, if they’re good ones. Those types are rare, but they’re out there. Breaker is one of the good ones, and so are the other guys in the Heartbreakers. We’ve had each other’s backs as outlaws, and unless one of us decides to do something stupid like Buzz and his idiot son did, we won’t stab each other in the back.
Lauren has never had that, by the sounds of things. I try to picture myself packing my own bags at the age of sixteen, getting ready to hit the road with no contacts, no prospects, and no knowing what the next day was going to hold. That last part was true anyway but I don’t think Lauren had the other two luxuries, by the sounds of things.
Part of me wants to be suspicious of her story to some degree, but she’s just odd enough that her behavior fits with the rest of her story. I’m no psychologist, and I can’t explain it, but I believe her on a gut level.
I can’t just let her go on with that conversation without getting curious, so after a few minutes, I stand up and move as silently as I can down the hallway and to the bedroom door. I furrow my brow when I realize I can’t hear the sound of her voice, nor the muffled sound of a voice on the other end of the line. Instead, I hear her shuffling around the room in a hurry.
The door is ajar, and I stand awkwardly parallel to the hallway as I lean in and try to listen for the sounds of voice. But I can’t hear anything, and I’m getting impatient, so I push the door open and stick my head in. I was right—the call is over, and the phone is lying in the middle of a pillow, sunk halfway down the soft cushion as if it had been hurled at it.
The second thing that gets my attention is the large suitcase, open and already a quarter packed on the top of the bed.
“The fuck?” I murmur as I look over to Lauren and see her pulling half a dozen sweaters out of the closet and pulling them off their hangers without acknowledging me. Her brow is knit, and she looks absolutely determined to keep working without so much as looking at me.
“Uh...hey,” I say, finally stepping into the room and looking at her. “What was that?”
She doesn’t answer. She stops herself with the sweaters, sighing annoyedly and glaring down at the contents of her suitcase as if something had suddenly occurred to her, and she set the sweaters aside to bustle to a drawer of socks and underwear and start packing those first instead.
“Lauren,” I say, more sternly.
I see her face twist up for a fraction of a second, but she just murmurs something under her breath and brushes me off.
“Hey, look,” I say, not stepping further inside yet. “I don’t know what all this is, but I sure as hell hope you’re not about to leave me with a giant question mark hanging over us before you withdraw again.” She still doesn’t respond, so I step into the room and block off her route to the suitcase, making her glare up at me with an arm full of two pairs of pajamas.
“Come on, I wasn’t that bad, was I?” I ask with a gruff smile, hoping to lighten the mood in the room a little.
Lauren doesn’t seem to find it half as amusing as me. She scoffs and tries to push past me, but I catch her around the waist and thrust her back in front of me, glaring down at her.
“Look, I’m not seriously going to stop you if a phone call from your dad is going to make you pack up and leave all over again, but the least you could give me is an explanation,” I growl.
“It wasn’t him!” she snaps, squirming away from me and straightening her clothes.
I stare at her, surprised, and she steps back, regarding me carefully as if silently asking whether I’m planning on stepping in and getting handsy with her again. There’s a challenge in the gaze. Part of her likes that, but not right now. I can’t just grab her and shake her out whatever she has going on in her head right now, she needs to be able to deal with it herself.
So, I take a seat on the mattress beside the suitcase, staring up at her and waiting patiently to see what she’d really like to do. She smooths her hair out and closes her eyes, taking a deep breath. Finally, she steps over to me and takes a seat on my lap, something that gives me a swelling sense of pride and joy. I wrap my hands around her hips and hug her to me, breathing slowly to give her a rhythm to calm down to.
“It wasn’t my father,” she repeats more softly. “It was a journalist.”
“Journalist?” I grunt. “What the fuck would one of those want with you? Would have thought the media fiasco would have settled all that bullshit down long ago.”
“There are always going to be people who want a follow-up story on things like this,” she says after a brief pause. “I...I don’t know how they found my new number, but I guess there’s nothing you can’t find if you do enough digging.”
“Well, fuck this journalist,” I say, squeezing her. “If anyone comes around here, me and the Heartbreakers will scare them the fuck off, how does that sound?”
That seems to get a shadow of a smile from her, and I grin at her, but it doesn’t last.
“If they can find me, he can find me,” she says at last, and suddenly, her frantic packing makes sense.
“You’ve calmed down,” I point out, running my hands softly up and down her body. “By a lot. And I know my hands are never cold, but they’re not so comforting that they can do that to just anyone,” I chuckle. “Big part of that was you, sweetheart.” Her faint smile grows softly at that, and she rests one of her smaller hands in mine. “You showed me a part of you nobody else has seen. If you can trust me with that, you can trust me to have your back through this...if you’re willing,” I say.
Without missing a beat, Lauren leans into me at the sound of my words, and I wrap her in a tight, comforting hug as I lean back slowly onto the bed with her. I hold her safe until we’re horizontal, legs still hanging off the edge of the bed, and I lay her next to me to stare into her eyes with a big, stupid smile as we lay there in each other’s arms.
She stares at me with lidded eyes before cuddling closer to me, desperate for comfort, and it warms my heart to give it to her. We sit in silence for some time. I can barely see anything after she gets close to me and her mess of hair gets in my eyes, but I don’t care. I smell her faint perfume with every deep breath, and with her hands wrapped in mind, I can feel her heartbeat settling down moment by moment.
Her form squirms in my arms, and after I loosen my hug enough to let her move, I feel a soft kiss on my neck. I chuckle as she kisses my cheek, then finds my lips, and I kiss her back. This time, I take a tight hold of her again and grind her against me, feeling her squirm on the bed with me and bask in the comfort of each other’s presence. She just feels...good, in a simple way that feels like it needs more expression but doesn’t feel all that complex.
That suits a guy like me just fine.
Her hands wander over my muscled sides and up to my shoulders, where she drags her nails down as she tastes my tongue in her mouth. Our gentle, reassuring kissing is more for comfort than for passion, but there is a little of both in our every motion. It hasn’t even been long since I last gave her everything I had to give her, but my cock is already getting stiff again. It can’t stand every minute we spend apart, and it knows it wants to be lodged deep within her like she needs. This girl needs my help in more ways than one.
“You forgot all about this while we were messing around with each other,” I say in a rough whisper into her ear. I feel goosebumps prickle across her skin when I say it, and she nods softly. “I can push this away for you. It might not be for long, but I can give you a break from your own mind, can’t I?”
“So much that it almost scares me,” she confesses, squirming desperately against me.
She fills me with so much sympathy every time that we touch and every time I hear her voice or see her worry. I want to comfort her and share in that. I want to beat the shit out of her piece of crap dad. And I have half a mind to give the same thing to the fucking paparazzi trying to keep this poor girl from moving on with her life. But I can’t do that unless I keep her close.
“How about this,” I say, holding her and stroking her hair gently. “What if you crashed at my place for a little while?”
She looks up at me suddenly, surprised by the offer but clearly interested. She doesn’t seem to know what to say at first, so I hold up a hand and shake my head.
“I don’t mean like a you-pay-rent kind of thing, I mean you could just stay at my place as long as you like. If this journalist guy comes poking around, I’ll have the guys keep an eye out, but you’ll be somewhere nobody will come looking for you. A biker’s the last place anyone would guess someone like you would go,” I chuckle.
“Would...would you really be willing to do that, Bones?” she asks softly, eyes wide with desire.
“Of course,” I say without hesitation. “You can take your time, and I’ll help you come up with a plan for what to do next. You’ve had a hell of a lot happen in a short stretch of time, Lauren, you need to give yourself a break.” I pull her close again, putting a heavy hand on one of her breasts and cupping it, feeling its weight and shape as I grope her ass and make a warm smile spread across her face again. “And while we’re planning, I can keep your mind off it, every day and every night. How does that sound, little girl?”
“I think…” she says softly, still squirming in my grasp as I slowly work my hand down into her pants, touching her soft lips and making her gasp. I start to move my fingers in small circles, grinning as I tease her while she tries to think, grinning and blushing. “God, fuck you,” she laughs.
“Yeah?” I chuckle.
“I think that sounds good,” she finally says, putting her hands around my face and pressing a kiss to it. “Really good. Thank you, Bones.”
“Then it’s settled,” I say, sitting up and looking around the room. “Come on, let’s get you packed up and get the hell out of here. I can probably make it happen in one or two trips.”
“You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?” she asks, looking up at me with fluttering eyes as I take stock of the room with a thoughtful look on my face.
“Of course I am,” I say, looking down at her. “What kind of man would I be if I wasn’t?” I stand up and start moving around the room to throw whatever I can into the suitcase for her, and she watches me with a thoughtful look in her eyes for a few seconds before she hops up and jumps in alongside me, looking as anxious as she is excited.
And before long, we’re ready to go, and I know damn well I’m getting in over my head. But I don’t care.
I’d go in a lot farther than that for Lauren. We’re both running from something, and for all I know, my past could be as close behind me as hers. But I can’t help but notice how often she looks at her phone, looking worried. I try not to let my mind wander into dark territory, but I can’t help but think…
...was that really a journalist on the phone, or is she covering something up from me?