Wild Like the Wind (Chaos #5)(63)

Was he sitting?

Or was he something else?

I had to go with sitting.

So why was he sitting silent, alone in the dark and not even calling out when I knocked on his door?

“Hound?” I called carefully, a frog in my throat.

“Right,” his deep voice sounded, cracking through the room like a thunderclap. “Our talk.”

I stood still in his open door.

“You played with my dick,” he stated, matter of fact, like he was reading out instructions for something. “You got your orgasms. You rode that wild wind, Keely. You did that last real good every time you did that on me. Gratitude for that. Now we’re done.”

Oh God.

He totally, totally did not read what I’d been doing with his tat.

“Shep—”

“Call me that again, I’ll rip your throat out,” he growled.

I went solid as the marble of my dead husband’s gravestone.

“Now turn that ass around and get the fuck outta my space,” he ordered. “And if that’s not clear, Keely, that means now and don’t come back. You want your checks, use another brother. You’re done usin’ me.”

Oh yeah.

Fuck yeah.

He totally did not read what I’d been doing with his tat.

“Using you?” I forced out past a closed throat.

“To get your biker bang,” he explained.

“That’s not what it was,” I said quickly.

“Bullshit,” he clipped out, and before I could say more, the shadow of him leaned slightly forward and he kept biting. “Now I’ll say it only once more. Get the fuck out.”

“Hound—”

He took his feet, fast as a blink, and I put a boot back in preparation to flee when he roared, “Get the fuck out!”

It hit me then, panic coursing through my system, barbed, tearing away at the insides of me.

It was past six.

But it wasn’t past eight.

“Why aren’t you over at Jean’s?” I asked.

“Get out,” he growled, his tone, as impossible as it was to believe, deteriorating.

That panic started scoring away huge chunks of me.

“Why aren’t you over at Jean’s?” I repeated.

“There’s no winning this, bitch. You played your hand. You earned your loot. The pot’s dry. Time to cut and run.”

“I—”

“Woman, I do not have the patience for this.”

He might not.

But I couldn’t give up.

Not now.

Especially not now.

Why wasn’t he over at Jean’s?

“I think there’s a lot we need to talk about,” I told him.

“Time when you can talk me into dick so you can play with mine is done, Keely.”

“Really, Hound, honest to God, there are things to say. Starting with why you aren’t over at Jean’s.”

That was when he came at me.

And the manner in which he did, the feel roiling off him and thundering into me, I wanted to do what he said.

Cut and run.

But this was Hound.

He was mine.

And I’d spent two months proving I was his.

If he took a goddamned breath and paid attention, he’d know that, calm the fuck down and listen to me.

So I stood my ground.

It was a mistake.

I knew that when I took his hand in my chest, a hand that slammed me so hard against the wall, my skull cracked against it.

And then I took his fist in the back of my hair and had to expend energy I did not have not to cry out in pain when he used it to jerk my head back.

Finally I saw some of his features come into focus with the weak light from the hall filtering in the door as he put his face in mine.

It was then I knew.

It was then my heart tore apart.

He didn’t even have to tell me.

But he did.

“Jean died in her sleep last night,” he spat.

No.

“Now, just in case you haven’t wrapped that stupid, fucking,” he pulled again at my hair and I failed at beating back a wince, but he was so deep in his grief and his fury, he didn’t notice it or he didn’t care, “head of yours around this, it wasn’t Black’s cock you were sucking. It wasn’t Black’s cock you were fucking. It wasn’t Black’s cock you begged to have thrust up your ass. It was mine. And I’m done. And when a man like me says he’s done bein’ used by some washed-up, washed-out, tired, old, biker groupie pussy, bitch, he … is … done.”

With that, agony tore through my scalp as he jerked me by my hair to the side but he didn’t put me out of his house.

He left me in it, stalking out his door, leaving it open, disappearing into the hallway.

I stood there a long time.

Long enough to hear his bike roaring away.



I drove into my garage, feeling like a functioning open wound.

That must have been why something that had been like a razor’s edge slicing through me for weeks, months, years, but as shit like that had a way of being, it had become part of the scenery, for the first time since that visit when I told my husband I was moving on, I saw his bike under its cover.

I switched off the ignition and sat in my car, my head turned, staring at it.