Cash (The Henchmen MC Book 2) (12 page)

Maybe it was just desire. I could be that base and simple at times. If the woman was hot enough, I was willing to jump through hoops and look past a lot of crazy shit to get a taste of her.

And, having had a taste of Lo, well let's just say I wanted more. I wanted it all. I wanted to know what she felt like writhing beneath me. I wanted to know what my name sounded like being gasped from her lips as she came. I wanted to know how it felt to have her lips wrapped around my cock. I wanted to know if she was as wild and wanton as I imagined her to be. Did she dirty talk? Was she open to different positions? Could I get her to the point of no return, where she was willing to say, cry, beg for me to give her release? Could I get underneath her walls and peek at the woman underneath?

“Jesus Christ,” I groaned, getting to the car, shaking my head at my reflection in the windows.

I needed to figure out what her problem was, fix it for her, and get her the hell out of my life before there was no turning back.

Twelve

Lo

I heard the car a few hours later while I was elbow deep in cooking ingredients. To my surprise, and utter delight, Cash actually didn't have a bachelor's fridge (meaning full of meat and leftover takeout and wholly devoid of essentials like butter, eggs, or garlic). He was stocked to the gills and I couldn't help but wonder about him moving around his kitchen with the practiced ease he seemed to handle everything in his life, making meals.

Then, of course, I imagined him making meals for his women because, well, who went whole hog making a huge, multi-step meal for just themselves? Along with that thought came an intense and almost overpowering jolt of jealousy that was so unwelcome that I had to throw myself into something to distract myself or I would drive myself half-crazy about it.

Seeing as his house was almost freakishly tidy, I set my mind to cooking.

I was a fair cook, having spent endless hours making food for my father when I was younger after my mother died. Him being a bit...
traditional
(read: chauvinistic) about women's roles in life, that meant it was my job to learn to handle the stove at the tender age of eleven. I had a fair amount of burn scars on my hands as testament to those first awkward, unsafe fumblings. Then, when I was on my own, living in the safe house, I never so much as hooked up my stove. If I couldn't make it in the microwave, I didn't eat it. I was sick of the task.

At Hailstorm, a bunch of the guys and even one or two of the women actually enjoyed the chore and even had more than a little skill at it, so they ended up being the ones who took turns feeding the rest of us.

I had been out of practice for the better part of twenty years but, well, it wasn't exactly something you could forget how to do and I was almost a little tickled to get to do it again... without a man expecting it to be done.

The door opened while I was chopping carrots for the stew I had starting to simmer on the top of the stove, the meat already cooking away in the broth and tomato mixture.

“What smells so good? You order in?” Cash asked and I could hear the sound of my bag hitting the floor in the living room and his boot-clad feet moving toward me. I didn't answer and when he moved into the doorway, he did a slow up-and-down inspection of me standing at his counter, wearing nothing but his tee, my hair in a messy knot at the top of my head, chopping away. “Are you... cooking for me?” he asked, a strange breathlessness in his tone that had my head snapping up to watch him directly, unsure where the inflection came from.

Unsure what to say, I waved the knife casually around. “We needed to eat, right?” I asked, feeling a bit insecure about the whole thing.

“I've never had a woman cook for me before,” he said, watching me with eyes that were too intense and completely devoid of his usual jocular lightness.

“It's not a big deal,” I said, having to look away from him. There was something passing between us and it felt too intimate, too
something
I didn't quite understand.

I had barely had a chance to get another carrot out of the bag before I felt him move up behind me, as in
right behind me
, as in... his whole front was against my whole back and he was looking over my shoulder, his chin resting there casually like it was nothing new for us to stand together while I chopped vegetables, like we did it every night of our lives. His hand moved across my belly, pressing in slightly, and I swear the contact shot right between my thighs.

“It is to me,” he said and my brain was racing a million different ways and I had to struggle to remember what he was responding to. Oh, right... me saying it wasn't a big deal. It was a big deal to him? Great. As if I didn't feel insecure enough about doing it.

“Don't get your hopes up. I'm not that great of a cook,” I said, forcing my hands to focus on getting back into motion while I was pretty sure that the last thing I should have been allowed to handle at that moment was a sharpened object.

Cash's head shifted downward and then I felt his teeth sink into the exposed skin on my shoulder which his too-big shirt had slipped to the side to reveal. It was just the barest of bites, but holy hell, I
felt it.

Then he moved away to stand next to the pot on the stove, arms behind him, grabbing the counter as he casually watched me work. And I
was
working, if for no other reason than to not have to look at him.

It was crazy that I was so turned on by him. True, he had given me some really good reasons to be turned on around him after the events of the night before. And, well, let me say one thing: a lot of men could fuck. A lot of men could climb on top of you, slip inside, and plow into you until weren't sure what your own name was anymore. But it took real skill, real understanding of women and how their bodies worked to get them off with oral. Sure, a lot of guys could manage it by sheer dumb luck. The clit was sensitive, you raked over it enough, eventually she's riding the waves. But Cash was in a whole league of his own. Cash ate me like he was a man in famine, like it was the only thing in the world that mattered to him, like it gave him what he needed to go on. He knew when the intensity was bordering on pain, and moved away. He knew when the motion was getting old, and changed directions. He paid attention. And, well, there was nothing like a man who paid attention to a woman's pleasure.

I had never came that hard from oral before. I had a sneaking suspicion that I never would again.

So, yeah, I was having trouble meeting his eye.

“Tell me something no one knows about you,” he said out of the blue, making me narrowly miss slicing off the tip of my forefinger as I startled.

“What?”

“Tell me something no one knows about you.”

“Why?

“Why not?”

“What are you twelve?”

“Christ, woman, would it kill you to answer the question? It's not like I am asking you what your favorite position is. Though,” he said, his boyish smile creeping across his lips, “I wouldn't mind knowing that either.”

I looked away, taking a deep breath. Tell him something no one else knew about me? It wasn't like it was a hard thing to figure out. Most people didn't know anything about me and positively no one knew everything.

“When I was seventeen,” I started, shocking myself way more than him that I was willing to give him any of my secrets, “I really wanted to go to this show in town, but I was grounded. I snuck out when my dad was sleeping and had a blast. When I got home, I cut the lights on my car so he wouldn't see me pulling in. And, I kind of... tapped the bumper of my dad's truck because I couldn't see.”

Cash's smile turned a little warm, a little too sweet. “He never found out?”

“Oh, he found out alright,” I admitted, the bitter taste of the memory making me feel queasy, “about the sneaking out, not about the car. It was the only thing in my whole life that I could get past him. His truck was a real piece of shit, covered in dents and dings.”

“Did you get in trouble?” he asked, still looking a little too pleased to get the information he wanted out of me.

He had
no
idea the kind of trouble I got into. “Yes,” I said, with finality, and his smile fell. It was such a sad sight to behold, that I found my mouth opening again before I could stop it. “And... lotus.”

His brows knitted together, trying to make that information make sense. “Lotus?”

I felt my own lips quirk up as I met his eyes, lifting my chin slightly. “My favorite position,” I clarified and was rewarded with him throwing his head back and laughing. I was helpless to do anything but watch, a full smile spreading across my face, making the bruises smite, but it was worth the pain. “Your turn,” I said, unable to stop myself.

He stopped laughing, but the smile remained, his head tilting to the side a little. “You have the sweetest pussy I have ever tasted.”

The words hit with actual impact, making me take a step back, my face, no doubt, twisting in a mix of surprise and arousal. Who said things like that? In the kitchen? To someone they all but hated?

Apparently, fucking Cash did.

I swallowed hard, trying to pull myself together. “Classy,” I tried, attempting to put a shield back up.

“Tight too,” he went on, making the place in question, well, tighten.

“Cash...” I said, tone half pleading as I shook my head at him.

“Yeah, I like it when you say my name. I'll like it even more when you say it when I have my cock inside you.”

Oh, hell.

There was absolute chaos between my thighs at that idea.

“That's not going to happen, Cash,” I said, remembering my words from Summer's dinner party that suddenly felt like it happened ages ago.

“It is,” he said, shrugging a shoulder like it was inevitable, like my objections didn't hold any weight.

“No,” I said, my tone as firm as I could make it, and seeing as I was raised by an ex-marine of a father and learned from the best, that was really freaking firm.

“Honey, why you fighting it so hard?”

“Why are you pushing it so hard? You don't even
like
me Cash.”

Again, another shrug. “True.”

Holy hell. He wasn't even going to try to deny it? He thought it would be a good idea to tell me he didn't like me and then expected me to still spread for him whenever he wanted?

“But what does that have to do with anything?”

He could not be serious. “It has to do with
everything.
”

“Why?”

“Because I don't have sex with men who don't like me.”

“Baby, just because I don't like you doesn't mean I wouldn't treat you real good. Do you need a refresher of last night?” he asked, giving me a sexy little smirk as he pushed away from the counter and made his way over toward me.

My hand raised instinctively, pressing the flat side of the knife against his chest to still his approach. “You try it, your balls will be part of that stew,” I offered, pressing the knife a little harder against him.

“While I think you are perfectly capable of chopping a man's balls off, Lo, I know you're all bluster.”

“Try me, Cash,” I threatened.

“What was the dog park about?” he asked, once again throwing me off my game with his unusual change in conversation.

“What dog park?”

“When Reign, Wolf, and I came to Hailstorm to ask you for help with Summer and you took us to your command center... you had all kinds of shit on your walls: information on the local crime syndicates, plans for hits, mugshots of bail jumpers you guys were chasing down, and a fucking... flier for a dog park. What was the dog park about?”

“Why?”

“What? Are you twelve?” he asked, throwing my words back at me.

There was no reason not to answer, but I found myself not wanting to. Still, chances were, if I didn't, the conversation was probably going to turn sexual again and I needed for that not to happen.

I shrugged, pulling the knife from his chest. “We do a lot of different jobs. Like you said, hits for hire, catching skips, some private security, all that jazz. But sometimes we get wind of things and do stuff just because.”

“What could you have gotten wind of at a dog park?”

“Six dogs died after having the water bowls poisoned with anti-freeze,” I recalled easily. Janie had been so fucking furious about that case. She had worked day and night for weeks to come up with leads.

I remembered asking her one night as she downed her third energy drink why that case in particular was affecting her so much. She looked up, exhaling a breath, her face looking unusually open and vulnerable and said in a quiet voice (which was also not like her. She tended to bitch and yell and scream), “No one should get away with hurting defenseless creatures.”

I didn't ask what she meant. I didn't need to.

“You guys were trying to figure out who did it?”

“We
did
find out who did it,” I clarified.