Crash (Brazen Bulls MC #1)(97)
He saw it when her own pleasure entered the equation; her focus on him blurred just a bit as her blinks became longer. Then her hands moved up from her thighs, brushing over her own skin, over her belly, to her breasts.
Rad groaned when she caught her nipples between her fingers, and he couldn’t help but reach out to cover her hands with his own.
And f*ck—his shoulder. He grunted and tensed; he couldn’t help that, either. Willa stilled on him and gave him her disapproving nurse’s glare, the power of which was diminished somewhat by her own panting breaths.
He dropped his hands. “I’m sorry. Don’t stop. I won’t move.”
“You’d better not, or I’ll get off you and make you watch while I finish myself off.”
“That’s cold, baby.”
“That’s tough love.” She resumed her perfect rhythm, and Rad behaved himself and was still, reveling in the feel of her clutching, twisting, pulsing, silky-hot * on him, in the sight of her hands on herself, in the sound of their mingled breath, growing louder, faster.
Without breaking her tempo, she moaned loudly and dropped her hands down, between her legs. Rad felt the fingers of one hand slide around him, and he saw the fingers of the other rubbing herself, and it was more than he could withstand. All that bleak introspection—his dark worry about his worthiness, his ambivalence about what he’d done mere hours before, his fear that he could hurt her—it all crashed onto the rocks of a single truth: he loved her and she loved him. She made him worthy. She made him good. They took care of each other, and they gave each other what they needed.
Out of fire and ash, they had made this, and it was the world.
That was the thought that carried him over into an orgasm so strong it erased every other thought in his head. Dimly, with ears deafened by the beat of his own heart, he heard her cry out and felt her body close tightly around him.
He slept well that night, with Willa snuggled at his side, unbothered by pains in his body or mind.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Don’t look that different from the town I grew up in,” Rad mused, ducking his head to look around as he drove down Duchy Avenue.
Ollie had his nose pressed up to the glass of the passenger window, take big snuffles from the two-inch crack Willa had made at the top. It was too hot to drive with the windows open, and Willa was hemmed in on both sides by males who couldn’t stand to be cooped up inside a ‘cage,’ as Rad called cars and trucks.
She ducked her head and looked in Rad’s direction. Across the top of a faded yellow building was a long, whitewashed board sign that read DUCHY HARDWARE & DRY GOODS in dingy red letters. But for the new ATM for West Texas Bank just outside the door, one might imagine horses tied up at a hitching post.
“It’s probably not. Little country towns like this are all the same, I think. Only thing that’s different is the landscape.”
She couldn’t see it from the center of town, but even so many years later, the clear memory of the low, barely rolling fields and plains of the Permian Basin rolled out before her. She could smell the cotton fields and hear the oil pumping units, even as they drove down Duchy with the windows mostly up and the AC blasting.
“You’re right. I ride through towns like this all the time. They got a look about ‘em, don’t they?”
They passed the Cornerstone Baptist Church. Its sign noted that Sunday Service was held at nine a.m. and Sunday School/Bible Study was at ten-thirty—that hadn’t changed in all of Willa’s life. The inspirational message was IF GOD IS YOUR COPILOT YOU’RE IN THE WRONG SEAT ~PASTOR ED.
That was new—both the pastor and the amusing take on the message. Willa smiled; if they had a minister now who styled himself an entertainer, the old folks would be up in arms.
“You okay, Wills?” Rad asked, giving her thigh a squeeze. “You been quiet since we got close.”
They weren’t all that close yet. Another twenty minutes before her folks’ place. But they’d been on the road for nearly nine hours, counting their lunch break, so twenty minutes was nothing. Willa’s stomach felt sour, and not because of the baby. This felt like…stage fright. Or that feeling when you get to the head of the line at the Texas Giant at Six Flags.
“I’m okay. I just haven’t been back here for more than ten years. Almost nothing’s changed. Even the cars seem the same.”
“That’s why these old towns all look alike. They settle in. Even the people stay the same—nobody ever moves in, nobody ever moves out, so it’s just new generations of the same faces.”
She thought of the saying ‘you can’t go home again.’ She’d read the book of that title, by Thomas Wolfe, and remembered the line in it that explained that you couldn’t go ‘back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time.’ She thought it meant that you never could see your past the way you lived it, and that what you’d lived could never be relived. Nothing ever stayed the same, not even in memory. Everything always changed. Even Duchy Dry Goods and Cornerstone Baptist Church, the two oldest buildings in town.
Even the people.
Even her family.
“I moved out. I left home.”
As the rolled out into the country beyond the edge of the town proper, Rad turned and studied her for a second before returning his attention to the road. “Yeah, you did. So’d I. But you got somethin’ to come back for.”