Leave a Trail (58 page)

She was there now, watching him, her face pale and stricken.

“Isaac, no. Don’t.”

His heart felt like it had been sliced open and spread wide. “Lilli. God, baby. My God.”

She walked over and tried to take the page from his hands. He let her. She gathered all the pages he’d taken out and read, and she put them neatly back in the drawer, then slid the drawer into its slot in her nightstand.

“I’m so sorry, Lilli. I don’t—I…” He let the sentence die. No words were worthy of the regret he felt.

She sat next to him on the side of the bed and took his hand. “It doesn’t matter. You’re home. That matters.”

Turning his hand and linking fingers with her, he pulled her onto his lap. She laid her head on his shoulder. “Your strength has always amazed me. You are a warrior, Sport.”

She smiled sadly and scoffed, a quiet, gentle sound without bite. “Not anymore.”

With a tug on her ponytail, he brought her head back up and looked into her eyes. “You are. I think you still know it’s true, even if you forgot. My life turned your life to shit, but you made it into something. You stuck it out and raised our kids and ran business and kept everything going.”

“Isaac, I’d say you had a harder sentence than I did.” She brushed her fingertips over the scar across the bridge of his nose, made by a guard’s baton, and then over another scar, in the corner of his forehead, earned in the stalls. “Wouldn’t you?”

“My choices, though. I made the choices you had to live. My life turning yours to shit.”

Something altered in her eyes then. They went hard, and she pushed off his lap and crossed the room.

Standing in front of her dresser, she muttered, “Don’t be an asshole, Isaac.”

Still reeling with guilt, he couldn’t comprehend the change in her, but he couldn’t tolerate the thought of her anger with him so soon. Every moment of their connection was precious. He stood and followed, standing directly behind her, his hands reaching for her hips.

“Lilli. I don’t understand.”

“It’s not your life and my life. It’s
our
life. Just one life. I’m not some fucking passenger in your life.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Yeah, it is. When I chose you, I chose all your choices, too. And vice fucking versa.”

He took her arm and turned her to face him. “You can’t tell me you haven’t been angry.”

Again, that stony chill in her lovely eyes. When she spoke, her voice had the sharp edge it got just before she erupted, and Isaac was surprised at his reaction to that sound—excitement. Pleasure. Arousal. He hadn’t seen fire like this in her in a long, long time, and it made his heart pick up and his cock stretch out.

She hit his chest with the heel of her hand, mostly for effect, he thought, but with some pop. “Yes, I’ve been angry!” She hit him again, harder.  “I’ve been so packed with rage for so long that my soul feels stretched out of shape. I’m
sagging
with rage.” And again. “But not at you. For this, never at you. It would have been easier to be angry at you. That’s focus.” Again. “It would have been easier to be angry at myself.
Something
”—another hit—“I could take it out on. But there’s been nothing. Nothing.” Both hands, now, hard enough to make him grunt, but if she’d been trying to hurt him, she could have. “NOTHING.” The next hit had force enough to push him back a step, and then her eyes changed again, and Isaac knew that one of two things would happen next, and that his move would determine which. All of this was blessedly, intimately, fantastically familiar. He made a choice.

Moving fast, he shot his arm out just as she was winding up to hit him again, and he grabbed her ponytail. It was damp from her run, and his cock swelled more. God, he loved the smell of her after a run. So real, so hot, all woman and exertion and badass power. His hand around the long, thick fall of hair, he jerked her forward and crushed her mouth under his, shoving his tongue deep.

The heels of her hands dug into his chest at first, and then slid roughly up over his shoulders until her fingers snarled in his wet hair and pulled hard, toward her. She let out a breath like a growl, and he shoved his free hand into her tiny black running shorts and between her legs.

He flashed to the first time they’d ever fucked. She’d been dressed just like this, in little running shorts and a tight, midriff-baring running top. He’d been waiting for her, on the redwood porch of the old Olsen place. He’d known only her name and the way her mouth tasted, the way her ass felt cupped in his hands. She’d come back from a run around town, causing a commotion. And they’d fucked harder than he ever had before in his life. She’d been as ferocious and insatiable as he.

Fourteen years ago. More than half their life together had now been spent apart.

They had some making up to do.

He took his hand out of her shorts, loving her visceral whine of disappointment, and instead yanked her top up, breaking their kiss to get it over her head. As he did so, she toed off her shoes. He bent then and took a breast into his mouth, suckling her, drawing energy from her writhing, arcing body, the way her hands tangled again in his hair and held him to her.

His head rocked with caroming sensations and emotions. Ever since he’d come out of the bus station, he’d been in a constant state of hyper-stimulation, the world and its people so much brighter and busier, so different and unpredictable. His world had been grey and brown for so long. For more than seven years, he’d lived a life a near-perfect routine, ruled entirely by counts and clocks, his sense of himself and the world constantly balanced on the sharpest edge. He’d been driven always by the need to both stand out and blend in at all times. To be someone who was not noticed but who was also acknowledged and respected. Keeping his memories of his real life and the emotions that went with them fresh and close without allowing them to drive him into madness. Becoming hard enough to survive the life inside without killing the things that made him the man who belonged in the life outside.

The perpetual and simultaneous denial and assertion of self.

His whole life had been driven by the need to get to the next minute. The next hour. Day. Week. Month. Year.

And now he was back in his real life. With friends and family who had spent those seven and a half years doing more than merely growing older.

And right now, right this second, his wife’s breast was in his mouth, and her hands were in his hair, and his fingers were inside her again, and he could see and taste and feel and smell and hear her, and she was beautiful and sweet and soft and earthy and moaning and
real
. She was real, and she was his, and he was with her.

When he bit down and sucked hard, she yelped and gasped, “I need your cock. Isaac, your cock. Your cock, your cock.” His mind stopped thinking and let instinct and need take over.

He spun her around and pushed her to the bed, yanking her shorts down and then shoving her forward. She fought him and stayed standing, then shimmied all the way out of her shorts and climbed up to kneel on the bed as he ripped open his jeans and pulled himself free.

Tugging her back to the very edge of the bed, he guided himself into her dripping wet, searing heat and, her hips clutched firmly in his hands, he yanked her backwards as he thrust toward her, setting a frenetic, punishing pace. They grunted together every time their bodies collided, and he could feel the walls of her sheath contracting and pulsing around him faster and faster. She put one of her hands between her thighs to work her own clit, but he was jealous of that, wanted to be solely responsible for all her pleasure, finally again to be the one who could get her off, and he wrapped her ponytail around his fist and snatched her up off the bed with such force that her body hitting his knocked the wind out of them both.

Her whole body now at his mercy, he clutched a breast in one hand took her clit between the fingers of the other, and tucked his face in the crook of her shoulder, breathing her in, tasting her sweat and her scent as he thrust and pinched and rolled and rubbed. Her hands covered his and encouraged him to go harder, faster.

“More, more, more,” she chanted, and he gave her more and more.

She came with a guttural scream—God, he missed her screams—her pussy clenching, her clit throbbing, and then he shoved her back to all fours, took her hips in his hands again, and pounded into her until he was shouting “Fuck! Fuck! Lilli!” And they both collapsed forward onto the bed.

They lay there, face to face, him half on her, their legs dangling half off the bed. Lilli opened her eyes.

Isaac smiled. “Missed that, gotta say.”

She smiled back. The smile became a grin. The grin began to beam, and then she was laughing—a full-throated, raunchy sound. “I love you, Isaac Lunden. I fuckin’ love you.”

Now
he was home.

~oOo~

In the afternoon, Lilli drove over to Show and Shannon’s to pick up the kids, and Isaac, not yet ready again for more people than Lilli, Gia, and Bo, stayed home and wandered around, reacquainting himself with the house he’d grown up in. Kodi had decided that he was okay, and the dog padded after him, allowing Isaac to ruffle his grizzled head. He’d been only a pup when Isaac had left, not even a year old. Now, for such a big dog—Lilli said he weighed about a buck-fifty—he was old.

They went out into the yard, and Isaac marveled at the changes there. Inside, much was the same. A few pieces of furniture had been rearranged, but for the most part, the first floor looked as he remembered. The kids’ rooms upstairs were a lot different, but, then, so were the kids. He’d left a kindergartener and a preschooler and had come home to two middle-schoolers.

Outside, though, everything was different. The barn had been refurbished and now housed four horses and a pony. Lilli’s kitchen garden had tripled in size. The flower beds that she’d been developing for years were now well established and looked to be practically self-sustaining. Except for the kitchen garden, his grandmother’s rose garden, which was twice the size he’d remembered, and some decorative beds, most of what Lilli had done was native planting, and those plants flourished. The yard he’d neglected for all the years he’d lived here alone, and that his father had neglected for years before that, was a fantastic riot of color and scent.

In addition to the storage and tool sheds, and the barn, and the garage, and his woodshop—which he wasn’t ready to think about yet—there were two new outbuildings, including a treehouse, well built into a big old oak at the side of the house. That hurt Isaac a little—a lot, really—because he’d planned to build one for them but had wanted to wait until Gia was a little older. Then he’d gone away. What had been erected—by the Horde, he was sure—was a good, strong house, but his hands had not built it.

The other building was Bo’s schoolroom, a little house, painted a cheery blue with a bright red, glass-paned door and two big windows on either side. Isaac went into it now, Kodi at his heel. It was a good room, about ten by ten, the floor clean, unvarnished planks. The interior walls were drywalled and painted with chalkboard paint, on which Bo had drawn the repetitive, intricate patterns he seemed to want to draw all the time.

One wall was all shelves, cabinets, and cubbies, filled with books and supplies. Along another wall was a cheap loveseat that looked like it might fold out. A big dog bed lay on the floor at its side. A long bulletin board hung on another wall. In the middle of the room was a round, white table and four bright red plastic chairs.

He was not shocked at all to see that Lilli had gone all out. All out was pretty much her only speed.

One thing he had not needed to worry about while he was away was the family’s finances. The B&B was doing great and had started to make a real profit as the tide for Signal Bend had really turned. The exurbs had finally spread out far enough from the Greater St. Louis Area that the people who wanted some room and some quiet but still needed to work in St. Louis, or at least St. Louis County, had been pushed out their way, facing a two-hour morning commute at best. Isaac wasn’t sure he liked that—he’d liked being remote and ignored—but it didn’t much matter how he felt about it. It was done. Signal Bend was prospering.

That meant that the B&B was prospering. And Valhalla Vin. And Tasha’s clinic. And the reestablished Signal Bend Construction. The club was still the town’s de facto police force, contracted by the business owners to maintain order. As a member of the Horde, Isaac had been pulling in his share of its profits, though it was a lesser share than he would have had as President, lesser even than he would pull in now, as an active, working member of the club. But between Lilli’s income and his, his family was secure. Legitimate business had made them more secure, in more ways, than outlaw work ever had.

So far, the town had managed to maintain the balance between prosperity and selling out. There was no Starbucks, no McDonald’s, no Walmart. There was the IGA and Marie’s. And there were a couple of new, independently-owned restaurants and shops. A bookstore, too. He hadn’t seen any of this yet, but Lilli had kept him apprised as the changes had been happening. Reading and hearing about them and making the differences happen in his mental image of his home were two different things, though, and he felt some trepidation about going into town.

Speaking of trepidation, there was only one building he hadn’t checked out, only one place in his home. Not entirely understanding why the thought of opening his woodshop made the acid in his stomach roil, he turned in the middle of Bo’s schoolroom, intent on climbing that hurdle.

Bo was standing in the doorway.

“Oh. Hey, little man. I didn’t hear you guys get back.” He looked around and realized that Kodi wasn’t in the room with him, either. He’d really gotten lost in his thoughts.

“I like your school. Is it okay that I’m in here?”

Bo nodded.

“Did you have fun at Uncle Show’s?” There were so many children in the family now who didn’t know him. Loki. Millie and Joey—his godchildren. Badger and Adrienne’s three little ones: Henry, Megan, and Caroline.