Break Me Open (Desert Wraiths MC) Read online

  “Glad?” he said.

  “Glad that I have time to think.” I smiled.

  “It might be a lot of time,” Ghost said. “I was easing you into the idea. It might be much longer than a couple months.”

  “And you’ll be with me?” I asked.

  “If that’s something you want.”

  His voice rose with promise. It drummed away all thoughts of my weakness and reminded me that I had some strengths. Strengths that I was just now learning to enjoy using with him.

  “My memory’s weak,” I said, as delicious warmth seeped through me. “Come remind me.”

  I dropped my blanket. His mouth edged up in a smile. He pushed off the chair and landed with his mouth on my nipple. We ground back into the bed, my world already a bright explosion of wet pleasure.

  He drank up each of my breasts, stopping only to rip my shirt off. I needed him so bad. At least I had chosen him. That one decision I could cling onto, my fists full of his flesh. Maybe if I kept at him, I’d know how to go after other things I wanted.

  He kissed hot peppers of ecstasy up my neck and onto my mouth. His pants zipped open and he shoved my legs up onto the bed at the same time his member ran through them and into me. I yelped into his mouth and felt him smile against my face.

  God I loved that smile. I kissed the edges of it as he pounded me closer and closer to the edge of the bed. I threw my legs around him, draped myself deeper over his rod, but it still seemed like I might fall off. His arms curled around me, and held me dangling over the side of the bed while he thrust into me again and again.

  If he was all I had left to hold on to, then I would hold on for dear life. The thought made me press back against him harder. Our grinding burned hot and soon, I was wailing out to the wall just to let it out. He gushed into me and I broke, gushed back onto him, my hot wetness soon mingling with his.

  We lay panting wrong-ways on the bed. Ghost played with my damp hair.

  “Does that mean I can trust you too?” he said.

  Not just to keep the secret anymore. He was asking whether I would stay by his side through this thing.

  “I hope so,” I said.

  “A ‘maybe.’” His chuckle rumbled the mattress. “That’s all I get?”

  I wondered how much he could want. He already had me. What I needed was to peel myself a little bit away. Not too far, just enough to see who I was.

  “That’s all that’s fair,” I said.

  He patted my scalp. “Can’t ask for more, I guess. So when are you going to tell me who you are?”

  “Once I figure it out for myself,” I whispered. Once I know.

  I rose in time to get to the window and watch the sun bloom over the empty land. Just a few hours of sleep separated this day from the last. I’d come full circle since last week.

  Only now, that little sleep was refreshing. And instead of medicating with whiskey, I had ridden myself to exhaustion on Katie. I turned for the dozenth time to make sure I really had her. That this wasn’t just another long dream.

  She slumped peacefully under a tumble of sheets, rustling with each faint breath. My mouth lathered up just watching the dark points at the center move. This wasn’t a dream. No dream could be as perfect as those heavenly clouds.

  Heavenly wasn’t exactly the right word for Katie. We’d been crazy together that first day. I’d worn myself out. I thought that at least, but last night, she’d woken me up with a little hand already slipping up and down my shaft. When I climbed into her, she had sighed, as if any time apart had been misery.

  I had ridden her so many times after that. She’d started to open up more than her body. Between each session, she’d offered up a morsel of her mind. Her parents were dead, she said after the first time. After the second time, while we ate more burgers from the fast food place nearby, she told me I was her first. That had been mind-blowing. All that wait, just for me?

  That little remark took us straight into our next tussle.

  After that, she had just run her hand over my body and asked me about my ink. I had told her the names of my units in the army. About things between Wraiths and the Scorpions and then her hand wound up at my mid again. After we finished, we had slept. At least, for a couple hours. Until I woke with a sudden wetness on my crotch only to find her mouth wrapped around me.

  My kind of heaven.

  Strange how the right lack of sleep could leave a man refreshed. I was renewed in more than body. I had no doubts anymore. The Wraiths went or Katie did, and that was no choice. My mind flared red whenever I thought about the club. About Nico. I shouldn’t have let Trig off so easy when I had him in the dirt.

  I locked up Katie nice and tight and went out for a jog. I stuck to the road, limited myself to 5 miles. I could do the 8, but when you were gearing up for war, you didn’t burn yourself out on the training.

  Especially not when you’d gotten plenty of exercise another way.

  I came back across to our room with a steaming sack of sandwiches and coffee. Katie still nestled in her spot so I set the food aside and sipped the brew. I looked at the desert and schemed. The haze clouding my mind had lifted. Each sip brought parts online that had lain waste for years. Tactical positioning. Guerrila operations. Counter-surveillance. The full use of my enhancements.

  I heard the shuffle of blankets. I waited. Small feet pattered across carpet and then delicate hands cupped my shoulders.

  “Anything good out there?” she breathed. Her nipples sat hard against my back. I almost spun around and dragged her off to bed again. There would be time for that.

  “Nothing good,” I said. “Just options.”

  “Options?” She joined my side, completely nude, completely at ease. I brought her tighter to me.

  “On how to take down the Wraiths.”

  “You want to take them down now? Your own club? Your brothers?”

  “I already said. They’re no brothers of mine. The Scorpions were just trying to get you to talk. My brothers tried to have you killed.”

  She shrugged. “I am a witness.”

  I looked down on her but her eyes looked out. “You’re saying it’s right to kill innocents.”

  “I mean, not for me…but it’s not much worse than normal operations right? Drugs, guns, murder. They kind of go together.”

  “They’re your real problem though. Not the police. Not even the Scorpions.”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t want any death done on my behalf.”

  Her body ran rich with the sunlight. She might not be an angel, but her little figure seemed otherworldly at my side. Some voice of conscience. A beacon of peace in my swirling oasis of rage.

  “I know you want to go back," I said. "But if we do, then it may not be a happy ending for everyone.”

  She processed the information carefully. “Ok. So what are our options?”

  I sighed and turned back to the horizon. It went on forever it seemed, though I knew that I was seeing at most 5 miles ahead. After that would come another 5 miles, then 5 more of the same. This land was vast, but if we kept going it would spill over into another.

  “We could just leave,” I said.

  “You sure they wouldn’t come after us?”

  “The clubs run local. No reason to chase us to LA or Denver or Houston.”

  She turned to me. “The cops?”

  “Small town case. I’ve got some cash. If we stay low for a few months, the whole thing will go cold. We’ll be free enough as long as we stay away for a good long while.”

  She took this in and did that slow nod again. “Or maybe longer. I could sell the house from anywhere. I already talked to a guy about that a while back.”

  “You could be a vet anywhere,” I said.

  “I could apply to nursing school,” she said. “Well, after some filler coursework.”

  I nodded as if that meant something. It had just been an idea but watching it work through her made me feel my mood sink. Sure it meant just her and me for a whil
e, but what place did I have in the life of a girl like that?

  She seemed to notice. “What about you?”

  What about me? Who wouldn’t want a war machine with an odd chemical dependency. “I could find something.”

  Another nod. Probably she knew I wasn’t worth a damn and didn’t want to press it.

  I looked out another way. North, I figured. A few hours of chasing the horizon and we’d be back at Gilsner. The place that had birthed me and her - the only place that needed me anymore.

  “We’re not leaving are we?”

  It came out as calm as the rest of her questions, but it still startled me. “We can leave. It’s fine by me.”

  “You don’t want to go either.”

  I tried to find a way inside me to leave the business I had started unfinished. To leave this mission that I had never asked for. I didn’t find the exit.

  “I don’t.” The words came out like a confession.

  She stood on her toes, brushed her lips into my ear and whispered.

  “Good.”

  I still saw him in my dreams sometimes. The man that changed my life.

  He lurches out toward me in the darkness, a red smile on the new mouth that's been opened in his throat.

  This is the man who brought those fiery blue eyes on me. The ones which now lay shut behind me, within that mass of muscle sleeping under the tussle of motel sheets.

  I stood at the window, completely nude. Still chill and fresh from the condensed sweat we'd built up a half hour ago. Ghost had clutched me to him after, but he'd drifted off quickly. The first night we were shacked up here, he had told me to ‘watch my flank’ and ‘pull back’ in his dreams. Now he slept like a baby.

  Thinking about that made me smile. But then I remembered the things he had said while fully awake last evening and the happiness fell from my lips.

  The moon beat down on the desert floor. It wasn't very bright anymore. I should have never lived long enough to see it like this, I reminded myself. If I wanted to see it drop further, his plan was the best way.

  It was the only choice we were willing to make.

  I tried to repeat the thought in my head like a mantra. It derailed quickly, remembering instead his voice as he told me the plan. Rich and cold at the same time, like a caviar. Usually that voice ran warm down my spine, but not this time.

  This time, it held a simple question: join his biker club or fight it? The edge was there to tell me that his body was mine to command for either task.

  "No death." I said, remembering the sound of a man's last breaths.

  “Fine,” he said. Then he added, "But I can't promise that."

  What could I say? This was his world, and I had made the only choice before me.

  This time tomorrow, I would be a member of the Desert Wraiths motorcycle club.

  Or maybe I'd be dead.

  Not before Ghost though. He might be at rest now but in action he was something beyond human. Literally, considering the modifications the army had made to him. If anyone even glanced at me the wrong way, he could drop them before they finished their thought.

  The desert kicked up a cloud of dust. I wondered all of a sudden where out there that dead man was buried. If he would stay buried with the wind lashing down.

  A heavy weight set upon me. My eyelids drooped. I'd worried myself to exhaustion. One of my few true talents.

  I walked around to my side of the bed. Ghost had the side nearer the door - even in sleep, shielding me. I stroked the thick trunk of his leg through the sheets. Even with the night smothering my brain, even with tomorrow promising an uncertain end, of all that muffled muscle sparked a little fire. A fire, I realized, I wanted to keep burning.

  It was a strange thing for me. Choosing to wade in deep instead of hiding from the water. I'd spent years in limbo, and in the end it wasn't seeing a man die that had gotten rid of it. Not truly. It had been the sight of those fiery blue eyes. Augmented by genetic tampering, designed for warfare, and still seeing nothing else in the world but me.

  I snaked under the sheets and sank into the cloud of heat. This was not the life I wanted. To be part of a 1% club. To have to cover up a murder and hide from the law to save myself.

  But this was the man I wanted. This was the body I needed. If there was a future for me, he was my way to it.

  I shut my eyes and nestled into him.

  My eyes were shut, but I could almost see her walking around the room. I could feel the swell and curves of her little body in the subtle shifts of the air as she tilted her head one way or the other. For the longest time, my enhanced senses had been a curse in civilian life, making me snap up at the slightest irritation. But Katie took my poisons and turned them into salves.

  I could spike and almost taste her scent, let that taxpayer funded chemical delivery system flare my senses even further. I didn't need to anymore. I knew her form better than my own by now. I had sniffed and tasted and pinched every inch of that dream to convince myself that it was real.

  That I had finally awoken into the world and found this perfect creature waiting for me.

  Her breath escaped her in a soft sigh. It sounded like surrender. She could be feisty when needed, but she was just as at ease lying back and letting me take charge. She could whimper and clutch me and play the damsel in distress. As if I had been the one who rescued her.

  But rescued her into what?

  The Desert Wraiths had been the second tightest brotherhood I had ever known, but it was a long ass second next to my unit back in Special Ops. It was an ok place for me, but no place for a girl like her.

  And yet, she had to go there. For the other option involved spilling blood. Blood of my brothers, cause there was no chance I could abide Katie parting with a single drop of hers.

  Well, by violence in any case.

  There was that grunt humor. The sort of dirty shit we filled the transport with to keep our fear from finding oxygen to bloom. My chest felt that same familiar tightness. Only difference was, now it wasn't for me, but for her. It was the sort of pain that brings you alive. That was the thing about leaving your shell. You find out that you built it up for a reason.

  But Katie was more than worth taking a chance on.

  To save her, I would have to drag her into the belly of the beast.

  She sighed soft again, rubbed that plush skin. I knew she had the strength to handle the club. Endure it for as long as she had to. I'd just have to make sure it wasn't long.

  Her feet shushed across the carpet. Her heat wafted around the bed. I almost gasped at the fresh scent of her. Like I was some animal in heat. Maybe I was, but this girl was more than just a flash in the pan. She was a campfire, an engine, a nuclear reactor. We were both broken, but deep down we both had amazing power. She was making me see that. Once this whole mess was sorted out, we would make each other whole again, and find a life worth living.

  Her hand graced my leg, small and curious. Her breathing stalled, quickened. I couldn't help but smile. Her body glowed with heat, and she buried herself under the blanket with me.

  She would have to come deeper into my world to stay safe.

  I reached out and clasped one of her smooth legs. Her mouth gaped into my ear.

  She would have to trust me more than she might have ever trusted anyone.

  I grabbed her butt and yanked her flesh against my vast plains of muscle. She yipped and her body pulsed heat even harder.

  She needed to become mine.

  I pulled myself onto her, crushed my lips to hers and drove into her.

  And me? I needed to prove myself worthy of her. This night, tomorrow and every moment that came after.

  She deserved that. So did I.

  The engine cut off under me. The silence that followed held the weight of the world. My world, at least.

  We were parked in front of the club bar and it was my first time seeing it in the daylight. I’d been stressing about how I’d feel at the sight of it, but now that I was here, it
didn’t amount to much. Maybe it was cause the place looked run down. It was a weathered brown building which looked like an over-enlarged shack. A square sign out front read The Oasis in cracked blue paint.

  We stopped on the edge of the stamped dirt between the road and bar. Ghost parked his tan chopper right by the line of black choppers, gleaming under the mid-day sun. He tried to help me off but I hopped down on my own. No use making his job harder. I needed to show I could belong in this club.

  The same club whose standing orders were to see me dead.

  "Wait here," he said. He squeezed my shoulder, but a bit hard. Like he'd have preferred to pack me into a cube and carry me in his pocket.

  As he started across, the front door peeked open. A stocky guy in a mustache brushed through and then leaned himself on the wall next to the door. Another guy joined him and took the other side. Ghost stopped. If he was nervous, he didn't look it, but his hand stayed by his waist. He could pull out his gun and send those two slumping on tracks of their own blood before they saw sunlight glint off his barrel.

  Other faces joined them in the shaded windows. No one had a gun drawn yet. I took that to be a good sign.

  The door flung open and a compact, chestnut-skinned man in club colors strode out. His eyes held no shades, just a stern look. His shaven face sat dipped in a frown. He stopped nose to nose with Ghost. Even though his only came to Ghost's shoulder, he peered up as if that were an irritation and not a disadvantage.

  I remembered him. Nico, the club president. I could see why now. If even Ghost didn't quite impress him, what would he make of me?

  He peeked around Ghost's massive frame and shot me a look that said I wasn't off to a great start.

  "I take it she's not a gift," he said to Ghost.

  "Letting you see her is gift enough."

  Nico manage to chuckle without dropping the frown. "Christ, Ghost. I would never have guessed that a little pussy would be what came between us."

  "It's not her pussy. It's her heart. I want it to keep beating."