“Jules, you need to learn to watch what you say. For Christ’s sake, there’s a child in the back seat,” Lou said.
“I am grown!” Tavi snapped.
“I was talking about Reign,” Lou countered.
There was a pause. Then they all burst out laughing.
“Screw you, Lou,” Reign snorted in her laughter.
“Well, I don’t thinkanybodyshould be discussing screwing in front of Stormy. I thought she was going to bone every man she danced with right there on the dance floor. Especially the humongoid dude.” Jules was an athletic Japanese-American woman, but at five feet three, anyone over five feet ten was big.
“He was really intense,” Reign said.
He was an asshole.
“He thought I was a prostitute,” she muttered.
“Wait, wait, what? He offered to payyoufor sex?” Tavi asked. “First, nasty. Second, did he at least offer you a decent amount?”
“What the hell is wrong with these millennials?” Stormy asked the other women in the car who were all nearing forty. “You know how many times it has literally pained me that I didn’t smother her in her infancy?”
“Yeah, yeah, like I haven’t heard that before. Come on, how much we talking?”
“Money, clothes, cars.” She shrugged. “He told me to name it and he’d give it to me.”
Blessed silence reigned in the car for a full two minutes.
“You have lost your goddamn mind,” Lou said. “Did you see his big fine ass? You should have been paying him to knock the cobwebs off your old-assed cooch.”
“You should’ve taken it back to God and asked for another one years ago…or at least a refund,” Tavi chimed in, her words petty payback from being denied the Aryan biker.
“He called me ahooker.”
He hadn’t actually, but he’d assumed, which was close enough.
“You’ve been called worse, usually by me!” Jules yelled in her ear. True. Tires squealed as Lou hugged a corner too fast.
“You’re getting as bad as Reign, putting too much on minor shit, Stormy,” Lou said. “You didn’t have to marry the man or take his money; all you had to do was allow him to fuck you bowlegged, that was it.”
The city of Marin sparkled against the dark horizon, still miles away. At least the celebration wasn’t completely a bust, Stormy thought, soon they would be in their own luxury hotel rooms overlooking the ocean for the rest of the weekend.
“Tonight was a good night though, right, guys?” Reign whispered as they sped down the road.
“Tonight was a good night,” they echoed back.
Delilah rested her forehead on the bedroom wall, flattening her hands over her lower abdomen.
Her womb still felt heavy, ripe, ready to release with ecstasy again, and again, and again. Groaning, she slid her hand down her bare pubis. Widening her stance, she parted her lower lips, dipped her fingers into her liquid center just as he did. Lucas Beaumont, otherwise known as Big Country, had opened her to possibilities she never believed existed. He was her pleasure and her salvation.
Her smile turned wicked as she worked her fingers in and out, rolling her hips in a rhythm she’d learned with him. Cupping her breast with her free hand, she massaged, tugged her nipple, pushed her fingers harder and faster into her sex until for the second time in her life, she orgasmed, sobbing and weakened, yet it still wasn’t as powerful as the completion he had given her. She could only be completed by him, could only be freed by him.
As her body calmed, she turned and faced the shadowed guest room she’d claimed in the worn Victorian. Crossing over to the second-story window, she peered out, unconcerned with her nakedness as the house was tucked back from the main street, too enshrouded by trees and tall shrubbery to expose her to would-be prying eyes.
Unlike Lucas Beaumont’s modern home with its wall of windows offering an unobstructed view of the bay, this secluded home was ideal for formulating plans and determining how those plans would impact the bond she’d already formed with the lovely Mr. Beaumont. The man was delicious, strong and imposing, gentle and charming,and funny… God, who knew that laughter could be so filled with joy? Her father, the Good Shepherd, preached that laughter was an undisciplined act and therefore a punishable offense against God. He taught that emotions were best used to connect to those in need of God’s salvation.
Delilah had initially discovered Lucas as he packed up the apartment of Sabrina Samora, one of the two people she was ordered to eliminate for killing the son of a wealthy patron of the Shepherd’s Keep, the religious order run by her father. The intense and unexpected attraction she’d felt for Lucas couldn’t be described as anything other than divine intervention, and tonight, in less than two hours of his presence, she knew God had set Lucas Beaumont upon her path. He was meant to be her gift, her means of freedom, her future.
And once she sent the killers of Maxim Kragen III to hell, Lucas would be her reward.
