Wrath (9 page)

Aidan

I was up to my elbows in grease, buried under the car, when I heard a woman’s footsteps on the concrete. 

I didn’t need to roll the crawler out from under the Chevy to know it was her.  She didn’t say a word.  She just stood there, looking at me from the other side of the bay door.  Her face was ashen and her eyes were too bright.

For the first time since I had met her, she seemed fragile, like she would blow away with the first strong wind.  All that bravado and charm had crumbled like an old Pepsi can, leaving behind a haunted stranger.

What the hell
?

Our experiences might be different, but I recognized that pain.  She needed someone to stay with her.  Or a punching bag.  Maybe both.

I didn’t intend on playing the bag, but I could keep an eye on her.

I wanted to scoop her up into my arms and tell her everything was going to be okay, but it wasn’t true and it wouldn’t fly.  Because, if she was anything like me, underneath the fear boiled a deep and violent fury. 

It drew me to her and repulsed me at the same time.

“What’s up, baby?” I asked.

“I needed to… I dunno –”  She ran her hand through her dark hair and then looked around like she was confused.  Like she shouldn’t be here. 

I set my tools aside, making sure they were all together, and began wiping my hands clean.  I’d been thinking about her all day.  Her lips.  Her body.  That kiss.  Few women could make me remember a kiss that vividly, especially in light of what we’d been up to at the time.  But I hadn’t been able to get her mouth out of my mind.

Just thinking about it had gotten me riled up ever since. 

Looking at her now, her hair tousled from digging her hands in it too many times, didn’t calm that down either.  It made me want to touch her again, taste her.

Fuck, I got hard just thinking about it.

I wanted to go in for seconds, and thirds – hell, I wanted to fuck her until whatever was bothering her was driven away.

But I was just standing there, in my coveralls, staring at her.  Part of it was those eyes.  They were wide and the crease between her brows hadn’t set in – the one that told me she could be taunted back from whatever was bugging her. 

So I spoke her the way I would have spoken to my squad-mates.  “Hey.  We’ll deal with this.  I got your back.”

It wasn’t the most romantic thing in the world, but I meant it.  I had her back.  If she wanted me to.

Without a word, Emma crossed the distance between us and put her arms around me.  The grime and oil on me didn’t seem to bother her a bit.  She clung to my chest until I wrapped my arms around her. 

When I kissed her, I meant it to remind her I was there, but my body had other plans.

Apparently, hers did too.

Our kiss quickly became deep and tormented, the kind that feels like hunger and thirst and slow drowning all at once.  The kind that came from pain, or grief, or both.

It was like she was clinging to life itself.

The way her mouth swallowed mine made me grunt, and her hands were all too happy to handle the results.

That’s when I remembered the dipshit with the wrench two cars down.  Tommy.  Damn kid was watching.

“Whoa, baby.  What’s going on?” I asked as I pulled away, grabbing her chin and tilting her eyes up towards me. 

I had left an oil smudge right on her chin.  She made a face as she rubbed it away.  It was cute as hell.

“I needed to see you.  To know you were still… here.” 

“Why don’t we head back to my place?” I asked.  She seemed like she needed to go someplace.  Someplace safe.  Or at least someplace with me.

“You’re sure it’s fine?” she asked, her eyes already wandering in search of my bike.

“Yeah.  It’ll be alright.  I’ll let Rage know.  Bike’s not here, babe.  It was raining this morning.  Brought the car.  Go wait for me by the black Chevelle out there.  I’ll be right back.” 

I handed her the keys and went into the office, trying to find Layla.

Rage’s lady greeted me with a smile, but there as concern in her eyes.

“I have a personal issue.  Requesting a leave –”

“Is it Emma?  I saw her.”  She glanced at the door, as if to check on the woman.  “Kat gave me a call.  Let me know to expect her.  Go on.  I’ll get someone to cover you.”

“Just like that?”

Layla’s smile was rueful.  “She’s one of our own, even if she doesn’t know it.  We take care of our own.”  She said it with such conviction that I nodded.

Rage came in just as I was leaving.

“Hey man, you going to be ready for tomorrow’s run?” he asked. 

I unbuttoned my coveralls and got ready to go.  “Yeah, man.  I’ll be there.  No problem.  Got a little situation right now, though.”

“You take care of what you need to take care of, man.  But you make sure you are back at the club at seven in the morning.”

“Why so early?”

“Cops expect people to do illegal shit at night.  This ain’t illegal.  It’s business.  We do it during business hours.”

I nodded.  Legal or not, we were doing it for the mob.  He was right, though.  In this case, better early morning than night.

“We also need to talk about patrols at Kat’s when you get back.  Got a bit of an outlier going on over there.”

“It got anything to do with what’s got my girl so riled up?”

She wasn’t mine, not yet, but I knew how these men worked.  Same way most men worked.  If you didn’t claim ownership, other assholes would be sniffing around.

“We’ll talk about it later, man.”  He clapped me on the shoulder and I stepped out of the doorway and into the sun. 

I started to head towards her, but suddenly had to grip the wall. 
Shit
.  I winced.  My leg was buckling.  I was going to need an adjustment, and soon.  My socket wasn’t fitting right anymore, and the stub of my leg was already starting to ache. 

Fuck
. 

I had the run tomorrow. 

I didn’t like it, but my leg was going to have to wait.

In the time it took me to talk to Layla and Rage, Emma seemed to have calmed herself a little.  Her frazzled expression had faded, to be replaced with something else.  There was still a trace of fear, but she seemed almost… relaxed.  Like she was in shock or something.

That look sent a wave of concern through me.  What the fuck was going on?

I slid into the driver’s seat and looked over at her.  I wanted to put my arm around her shoulder, but I needed a hand free to shift gears.  So I reached out and pulled her closer.  If I couldn’t hold her, I still wanted to feel her next to me.  The bench seats of my Chevelle allowed her to relax and lean against me. 

I turned the car on, and backed out. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” I offered.

I wasn’t surprised by the answer.  “No… Not yet.  Not here.”

“I feel you.”  I’d been there more than a dozen times myself.  “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

Not now.  Not yet
.  But she would to tell me everything soon.  Good.  I didn’t like playing guessing games.  Better a woman tell me what bothered her.  I’d prefer she didn’t babble about it for hours or talk in circles, but Emma was a straight talker.  When she said something, she just said it.  “No,” “Yes,” “I want,” “Are you…?”

If she said she’d explain later, she would explain later.  And I was glad.

People were confusing enough as it was.  There were games that stirred up the blood, and then there were the games just made a mess of everything.  I loved that she played the first kind and left the other stuff alone.

Emma

“It’s… Wow.” 

I looked around Aidan’s studio, at the exposed brick walls and punching bag in the corner.  There was a bed, a long stool, and a pile of clothes tossed on the floor at the end of the bed.  A dresser against the wall was the only other piece of furniture in the room.  He didn’t even have a table to eat at.  Just a kitchenette that looked like it had never been used.

A man lived here, that was for sure.  Still.  It wasn’t school, and it wasn’t the bar.

“So you wanna tell me what’s going on now, Emma?”

He closed the door behind us and kissed me softly, then headed over to the stool.  When he sat, he immediately adjusted his prosthetic.  It was obviously bothering him, and he was going to fix it, he had no apologies, no weakness.  His hands were steady as was his gaze.  He was watching me casually, like my reaction didn’t matter, but I had nothing to hide.  I had no issue with his wounds. 

But I didn’t know what to say either.

His jaw tightened and he looked down at his leg, agitated by my silence.  “I won’t say please, if that’s what you’re waiting for.”

Standing there, in his flat, I realized I didn’t want to burden him with this.  I just wanted... what?  His company?  It was more than that.  A lot more.

Fuck.  I wanted to touch him.  Feel him.  Make sure he was real.  To escape reality for an hour or two.  Let him drive my fears from me.

I wanted to fuck him again.  But I couldn’t stand just climbing on top of him.  Not with the debris of my past rattling around inside me like a rusty car.  I’d done that before too, and it had gone about as well as opening my mail today.  Rats were rats…

“I- I’ve had a pretty shitty past.”  I swallowed, trying for bluntness.

“You aren’t the only one, woman.”  He gestured to the second prosthetic leg hanging on a stand.  It was the kind with a blade for a foot, the one runners wore.

I cringed.  No matter what I was going through, he’d gone through worse.  I had no business bitching about my life to him.

A shadow fell over his face as he noticed my expression.  “Don’t you go feeling sorry for me.  My life is fine.  You are the one dealing with shit.  Tell me what you need.” 

Oh, that was a loaded statement.  He had no idea what he was prying into.

I sat on the bed, my brow furrowed as I folded my hands.  If my body was tingling, well, we’d get to that. 

“My mom’s getting out of jail.”  There were a few lies of omission hidden away in there, but the bit about jail was sort of true. 

My mother had been incarcerated in a state institution for mentally-ill criminal offenders.  It was part of the corrections department.  A place to remove the mentally unstable from the general population.  For safety reasons. 

Aidan took my words at face value.  Those gorgeous eyes fell to where he was tightening the strap of the runners prosthetic.  “Damn,” he muttered.  “I’m sorry.  I’m guessing you don’t want her out?”

I shrugged.  “She was a shitty mom.  Bad shit happened.  I wasn’t a priority unless she could use me to her advantage.”  It was the best I explanation I could manage.  Telling him that she’d offered to pimp me out, make me a whore, so she could get high didn’t seem like an option. 

God, I had just graduated from middle school at the time…  It had all been so sick.

She’d encouraged me to do well in school until Samuel came around.  After that though, she had stopped caring.  Nothing else had mattered except her getting her fix and fucking for it.

I shivered, remembering.  Sex was great, but what she’d been doing… She’d been lost in a way that frightened me more than I even knew how to say. 

What I did understand was how I had hated the change in her.  It was like I suddenly became invisible.  For a long time, I’d kept trying to distract her, earning better and better grades, trying to bring her back to me and away from
him
. 

But then I started to see what was going on.  That was when I realized that it wasn’t just Samuel anymore.  Maybe it had just been the drugs, but at some point, my mother really had stopped caring. 

After that, my priority became getting the fuck out of that house.

But I couldn’t tell Aidan any of that.  It was too nuts. 

He seemed to understand a lot, though, even without knowing much about me. 

“I have shit parents, too.  Joined the service to get the fuck away from them.  It was going to be career.”  When he stood, he hobbled slightly, and I caught him wince.

“What happened?  It – your leg seemed fine the other day.”

He scowled and braced himself against the dresser, that gorgeous back proud and stiff.  “My fucking stump changes over time, and my socket doesn’t fit exactly right anymore.  It was rubbing at first.  Now it’s sore as hell.”  He cursed under his breath as he sat back down.

I didn’t know much about wound care, or amputation rehab, but I had to admit, after we’d met, I’d done a little research at the library.  Google had helped a little, too.

“Take it off,” I suggested, remembering a few books.  “You probably need a good massage and to double or triple up on your socks until you get to the doctor.”

He eyed me.

I shrugged and grinned for the first time since finding the rat. 

“I want to become a physical therapist, remember?  Being in the military is kind of like being an athlete, so we cover some basic stuff in classes.”  It was the truth, but I’d read this on my own.

“How much can you do?”

Thrilled, I ushered him onto the bed.  “Up.”

“It’s easier if I take my jeans off first.” 

“Then off they go.” 

Oh yes, I certainly wouldn’t mind that
.

My thoughts must have shown up on my face, because he grinned at me wickedly.

“Uh huh, all this just to get me outta my pants, huh?”

I flashed him my pearly whites and began investigating the joint of the prosthetic and his leg.  

“You didn’t need to come up with an excuse, baby.  I would’ve given you a peek for free.”  He winked at me, and I blushed, pleased, as he shucked off his pants, pulling them down and off both his legs. 

Dear god, he was happy
…

When I looked up to stay focused, he put his hands behind his head, those enormous arms thoroughly distracting me from what I was doing.  His shirt was pulled taut against his body, teasing me with what I could and couldn’t see.

If my hand hadn’t found the burns…

I remembered the feel of them from the other night, but they hadn’t bothered me in the dark.  They certainly hadn’t interfered with ability to please.

Still, I had thought I was prepared to see his body in the light.  I wasn’t. 

His sock and socket came up over his knee and a quarter of his thigh.  From there up I could see the burnt tissue.  Scarring mingled with graphed flesh in a swirl of texture.  Unlike his tattooed arms, his legs were clean of any tats.  The burns were the only markings.

He was watching my face, his expression sober now and his voice softer.  “Yeah, it’s an ugly son of a bitch.  Looks like it’s been through the meat grinder.  Goes the whole way up to my ass.”  He looked into my eyes as if he was patiently searching for something.  Revulsion, or pity maybe?  But he found neither in me.  Just shock and a bit of worry.

“You all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” I replied and leaned back in my chair to look at him.  He was so incredible, leaning back on the pillows, the broad striations of his biceps overwhelming me.  I was either going to be sick or climb on top of him.  I wasn’t sure which, and I was fairly sure he’d take me throwing up the wrong way, so I fought that down.

I wasn’t sure what he thought about me staring at him, until he roused himself and removed his false leg.

I was surprised when he handed it to me.  “Put it on the stand, will you?”

Without another word, he started on his silicone sleeve.  I set the prosthetic aside as he had asked and then turned to see him sitting there in his boxer briefs, the stump free.  Like his thigh, the stump was scarred and burned, the line of a deep scar from amputation circling around the front of it.

The flesh was red and angry.

I had to keep things clinical to keep from crying suddenly.  I hated crying. For years I hadn’t been able to help it.  Until I’d started studying to ease physical pain.  There were a lot of reasons I had chosen that particular degree.

“Any sores?” I asked, examining his stump.

If he was uncomfortable, he didn't’ show it.  “No.”

“You have some medicated cream?”

“On the dresser.” 

He didn’t shy away or refuse to let me tend to the swollen flesh.

I had learned how to massage healed wounds and how to soothe swelling, but most of that knowledge was from books, not practice.  What I knew for certain was that he needed was some stimulation in his limb in order to increase circulation. 

I grabbed the cream and got down on my knees, going to work on the stump first.  I carefully massaged it up into his thigh until he visibly relaxed. 

The muscles were tight, and my hands were so very close to the length of flesh I had ridden before.  God…

He didn’t hide his erection – fuck, he couldn’t have if he tried – but he didn’t wave it in my face, either.  Instead he watched me, the tension building in the silence as I kneaded fingers and knuckles up along his stump and thigh.

I repeated my recommendation, trying to stay helpful.  “Double up on your socks, and make an appointment with your doctor.  An adjustment will make it easier to get around.” 

I tried to make my hands behave, but he was no longer interested in that sort of massage. 

When he grabbed me from down on the floor and pulled me up onto his lap, I gasped.  He was so fucking strong, I barely had to do more than push with my toes at the last minute. 

I hadn’t realized that he could
pick me up
.  He did it as if I weighed nothing at all. 

We ended up face to face, and when he spoke, I could taste his words. 

“I’ve never let anyone see me like this before, Emma.  Not anyone.  Not other women, not the doctors, no one.  They want a wounded soldier.  I fuck them, I leave them.  That’s what they want.”

It was blunter than most men would have been.  Blunter than most women would have liked.  But I understood that this was his way of saying that I was different.  Special.

I put my finger on his lips.  “I don’t care about how it happened.  I don’t expect a story, Aidan.  I just want to know who you are now.” 

It was the truth.  I didn’t need to know who he had been.  I didn’t need a sob story or a hero or to know the gory details.  I just wanted him.  Who he was.  Who he was right now.

He threaded a hand through my hair and tugged it gently, pulling my head back enough for him to kiss my lower lip, my chin, and my throat.  The steady tug sent chills shooting through my spine.

When he released me, I was breathless.

My eyes lingered on his lips before he pulled me down into another kiss.  This time it lasted longer, and was deeper.  I loved the way he devoured me, teasing one another with lips and tongues and teeth.

We were lost in each other for so long, it was impossible to tell how much time had passed. 

I needed his strength.  I needed it to carry me into a place of safety.  Into a place where I didn’t have to think about anything else.

I needed to forget.

But he pulled away, holding my face lightly in the palm of his hand. 

He would only say it once.

“My life isn’t pretty, Emma.  It’s filled with all kinds of shit.  Pain, and nightmares, and a hell I can’t escape from.  Are you sure you want to be a part of that?” He looked me dead in the eyes as he said it.

“Yes… but only if you can handle my shit, too.”

“A piece of shit mom?  No problem.  I think we can handle that.”

“And her piece of shit pimp.”

That caused his eyes to spark.  “Ah-ha.  There it is.”

“What?”

“The real reason for your fear.  You think I couldn’t tell there was more?  You were scared shitless.  Who the fuck is he, and where can I find him?” The anger in his voice was so sudden it terrified me.  It was deliberate and cold.  Like he was a completely different person, an executioner getting ready to dole out punishment. 

Now I understood why they called him Wrath.

My skin flushed as his hands tightened on my thighs.  But I didn’t want him wringing someone’s neck right now.

“I don’t want to talk about that, Aidan,” I whispered huskily, my hands drawing his attention back up to me.  I slid my tongue over my lips, my eyes dancing with desire and a very real need to ignore. 

He slipped his hand into my panties and found me wet.  He slipped my clothing off me, a wicked grin on his face. “There, now you are exactly how I want you.”

As he slid a finger inside me, I groaned.  I needed him to tease me and torment me, and help me escape.