The Skeleton King (Dartmoor Book 3) (24 page)

              He was exhausted, deeply satisfied…and worried about her, still. She’d stayed through the night with him, face peaceful and lovely in the first light of dawn, her hair wild across the pillow. She’d murmured and snuggled against him when he’d kissed her forehead. She’d thanked him for the coffee when she came down from the shower, wearing his shirt. And she’d had the distinct look of a woman who’d been fucked well and liked it.

              But they hadn’t talked about anything.

              “…to do?” Aidan was saying beside him, and he refocused.

              “What?”

              “I can hang around for a while, if you need me, if there’s something you want me to do?” The guy looked hopeful, almost, energetic.

              “Okay, no offense, mate, but why would I need you to do anything?”

              Aidan made an exasperated sound. “It’s like I said before. I wanna help you run this place.”

              Walsh frowned. “Is this just to be closer to the rich girlie? I think she’ll let you bang her whether you’re around or not.”

              “No.” He rolled his eyes. “I want to manage something. Co-manage.”

              “What about the shop?”

              “Merc’s taken that over, and we both know that.”

              “Aidan, bro, you know nothing about farms. Or horses. Or managing.”

              Aidan pressed his lips together in obvious frustration. “Yeah, you’re right.” It sounded like it took tremendous effort to say it. “But how the hell do I get better at managing if no one will let me manage anything?”

             
I have my own problems to sort
, Walsh wanted to tell him.
I got married yesterday, and I got people calling my wife a junkie bitch, and I’m trying to hold onto this farm so the developers don’t get it.
The club’s burial ground was in danger of being discovered, and here was Aidan worried about finally becoming a man at age thirty-two.

              But Walsh knew that his accident last year had shaken him up, gotten him thinking about the bigger picture. Because he was still Aidan, it was a skewed view, but nevertheless, bigger than it had been previously.

              So Walsh said, “I need to hire a new groundskeeper.”

              “What, like, mow the lawn?”

              Walsh shrugged. “Or find me someone who can.” Before Aidan could interrupt, he added, “Look, I appreciate what you’re trying to do. I get it. You want to step up. But around here, Em runs a tight ship and I’ve got all the financial stuff handled. I don’t need a co-manager.”

              Aidan glanced down at the toes of his boots, blowing out a tired-sounding breath.

              “I’m not trying to hold you back,” Walsh said. “It’s just the way things are right now.”

              “Yeah. I get it.”

              Maybe a kinder VP would go after the guy as he ambled back toward the truck to help Carter load the pressure washer, but he was too distracted for that.

              He found Emmie in the feed room with Becca, adjusting the rations on the whiteboard with eraser in hand. Both glanced his way.

              Becca’s expression was stricken, like she wasn’t sure whether to give him a cheeky atta-boy grin, or a vicious, friend-supporting scowl.

              Emmie looked at him with a clear-eyed, unreadable calm.

              “Give us a minute?” he asked Becca.

              “Sure.” How a teenager could pack such attitude into one word, he’d never know. She clapped the eraser down on a feed can and left with her nose stuck up at a defiant angle.

              “Take it she doesn’t approve of our new living arrangement.”

              Emmie shrugged and capped her marker. It had left black smudges on her fingertips, and he found that cute and real, for some reason. No flawless manicures for his woman. She was all work and sacrifice.

              He loved it.

              “She doesn’t approve of a lot of things. Right up until she does,” Emmie said. “She’ll come around.”

              He took a few steps further into the room. It smelled like molasses and feed pellets, and he’d always loved that smell; he took a deep breath of it now and fixed his old lady with a questioning glance. “And you? You coming around?”

              When she didn’t answer right away, he said, “I thought we ought to talk about some things.”

              She nodded and moved to sit on an upturned bucket, booted toes tucked together. “Living arrangements, for one thing.” Her voice quavered with sudden nerves.

              “Yeah. You know you have to stay up in the big house with me.”

              “For appearances.”

              “And so…”

              “We can have more of last night.” She blushed. “I…” A line of tension appeared between her brows and she rubbed at it with her ink-smudged fingers. “I’ve been thinking,” she started again. “Really thinking.” Her eyes lifted to his. “If we’re going to make this work – living together, trusting each other, me being your old whatever.”

              “Old lady,” he supplied with a slow grin.

              “Right. That. If I’m going to be that, I need to know more about you. Real, deep, where you came from, who you are kind of stuff.”

              He nodded slowly.

              “Is it so wrong to want to know who I married?” she asked quietly.

              “No, love.” He felt a tingling across his skin, apprehension at the idea of breaking himself open the way she was asking him to. “It’s not too much.”

Twenty-Six

There were so many things she should have been thinking about as she packed several days’ worth of clothes in a duffle bag. The lessons she had to teach the next day. The flexion exercises she needed to work into Apollo’s routine. The fact that Brett was clearly trying to imply that she was the source of the heroin that had killed Davis, and therefore the killer. The fact that she hadn’t heard from Dad – or Bell Bar – in a few days, and Maryann would no doubt leave soon, throwing her back into the role of DD.

              But those were the things she’d thought of every day, for as long as she could remember, with no time off, no vacation, no relief. So Emmie wanted to think about the big house on the hill, and the man waiting for her inside it.

              Her man.

              She had showered, and dressed now in a loose white tank top and clean cutoffs, rolled a coat of gloss across her lips before she doused the lights and headed up to the house.

              There were honest to God butterflies in her stomach.

              She went to the front door, because that was the one Walsh seemed to use most, and found it unlocked, let herself in. The scent of food hit her first, and when she stepped into the cavernous living room, she spotted a dinky leather sofa, a chair, a little table…and Walsh.

              “You’ve been busy,” she said, because she didn’t know how she wanted to greet him just yet.

              He shrugged and scratched at his chin stubble in a self-conscious movement. “I brought over some stuff from my old place. And there’s frozen potato skins in the oven.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the kitchen. “If that’s alright.”

              She nodded, and inwardly, took a deep breath, bracing herself for whatever the night held. “Sounds good.”

~*~

Mags and Ava both had funeral dresses. And sometimes, if she was going to school or some sort of writing meeting, Ava would wear slacks and pumps. But none of the women in Aidan’s life dressed like
this
.

              Across the white tablecloth and flickering candles, Tonya looked poured into a wine-colored dress that hugged every graceful line and swelling curve of her body. She was flashing a lot of cleavage, and a trio of diamonds on a silver chain disappeared down between her breasts, drawing his eyes there again and again. Her lipstick was dark, her eyes ringed in black, her hair a spill of shadow down her back.

              Aidan had been staring at her for a solid minute, all his charm drying to dust on his tongue.

              “Everything alright?” she asked, slicing into her tiny serving of chicken-whatever-the-hell.

              This was the third time he’d ground to a conversational halt since they’d sat down. It had to stop.

              “Yeah.” He pushed a grin across his face, hoped it was cocky enough. “Just thinking I ain’t dressed right for this place.”

              Her dark eyes moved up and down him, taking in his carefully pressed plaid shirt, the unholy amount of gel in his hair. Her smile was small, didn’t show any teeth. Predatory, almost, and how weird to think that about a woman. “You look fine.” There was a purr in her voice, and something that was definitely her foot slid up the inside of his leg under the table.

              Okay, so that answered the first date question.

              He felt his grin become easier, more natural. “I always wonder why chicks wanna get so dolled up all the time.”

              She made bold eye contact. “I wanted to look nice for you.”

              She was a seductress, this one. Like the more forward groupies, but with more style, and a better wardrobe. The thrill, though, is that she wasn’t part of his usual string. This was a classy girl, one with money and power and influence. She was unlike anyone he’d ever bedded before.

              A change, his father had said, and this was a change. Boy, was it ever a change.

              “I don’t think ‘nice’ covers it, sweetheart.”

              Her foot reached his knee, heading between his thighs.

              “Well then you’ll have to elaborate,” she said, smiling wide, “later.”

~*~

“So what do you want to know? Or shall I just start at the beginning?” Walsh asked as he dragged two greasy potato skins onto his paper plate and then licked his fingers. He’d forgotten napkins, damn it.

              Emmie didn’t seem to mind that. She popped a speck of bacon into her mouth, touched her tongue to her fingertips – a potent reminder of all the things he still wanted to do with her. Her brows tucked together over her eyes. “I swear you look nervous.”

              “Hmm. Only a bit.”

              She grinned. “Well that’s nice for a change.” She squared up her shoulders, gave him a serious face. He loved that about her, the way she could be all business. “Okay. Well, I think the beginning is best. And then you’re welcome to my beginning, however lame that is.”

              Never, in his entire life, had a woman offered up her beginning to him. Her history. The little horrors that had brought her to his bed. He couldn’t squander that. Couldn’t hold anything back.

              He ducked his head over his plate, took a deep breath and said, “Well, Mum was easy to fool. You ought to know that…”

              The words poured out of him, faster and smoother than he’d thought possible. He told her about the squalid London flat into which his husbandless mother had brought him home. About them being hungry, the rare treat of a sweet, the elbows and fists from the other boys bigger than him.

              “I was a tiny thing,” he said, hearing his accent deepen with remembrance. “Everyone picked on me.”

              Her face was full of sympathy. She was small too. She understood.

              And so he moved onto Rottingdean, his grandparents, Gramps with his vicarious dreams. To Brighton Racecourse, and his short-lived time as a jockey. His epic failure after the rider beside him went down. And died.

              “Oh God,” she breathed. “But you didn’t mean to. You were defending yourself, and it was an accident.” She slapped her plate down like she wanted to storm off and track down the officials who’d banned him. “They couldn’t just do that to you!”

              “Can and did, love.”

              He didn’t tell her about Rita, because he didn’t want to spoil things. He didn’t want to tell her about a woman rejecting him, and his seed. Didn’t want to give her any ideas.

              But he told her about finding out that Phillip Calloway, the then VP of the London chapter, was his half-brother. How he’d joined the RAF instead. He faltered in the middle of the Afghanistan story, and she stared at him, deeply concerned, but didn’t press. Didn’t ask him about that medivac mission, about the woman garbed in black who’d been used as a human shield for the rat bastard who’d gunned down the two injured soldiers he was supposed to be rescuing. He didn’t tell her about killing that woman, as he’d put a bullet in the scum behind her; she seemed to know it, though, and her hand covered his on the tabletop.

              It was a short sprint to the finish after that. Back home he’d prospected, been patched, then been sent to Knoxville for a job, and stayed.

              “The Money Man. That’s what they call me.” His gaze was fixed on her tiny fingers, the way they stroked mindlessly across his knuckles again and again. “They send me in when a chapter needs to make some cash.” He offered her a half-assed smile. “The strip club fixer, that’s me.”

              Her frown was concerned, curious, but not disapproving. “The farm fixer too, apparently.”

              “This place was my idea. I thought we ought to make a go of it.”

              “Because you hate high density condos? Or because you hate high density condos next door to…however many bodies are over there?” Her fingers stilled, and then closed tight over his, asking. There was fear in her eyes, but there were bright shards of trust, too. She was giving him a chance to help her see, and that was sweeter than anything a woman had ever given him.

              He turned her hand over, cleaved his palm to hers. Chose his words carefully. “The club works a certain way, pet. Some things have changed a little, over time, but most haven’t. It’s not modern, but that’s how it is.”

              “It’s a crime ring,” she said quietly.

              “It’s protective. Of itself. It’s self-sustaining. Which means there are some things I can’t ever tell you. Only a man with a patch on his back and a seat at the table can know all the secrets. The club doesn’t go around trying to break the law, but club comes first – club law trumps city, and state, and country law. Yeah? We protect it, and it protects the people who belong to it. The men who wear the patch. And the women we love, and the children they give us.”

              Her lips parted and she inhaled deeply. “Walsh–”

              “When someone tries to hurt us – any of us – we put ‘em down. Simple as that. It’s what we have to do to keep everyone safe.”

              “How many…” She swallowed. “How many people are buried over there?”

              He squeezed her hand. “I’ll tell you as much as I can, but there’s some things you can’t know. You’ll have to trust me on that.”

              “That’s going to be difficult, given the circumstances.”

              “I know, love, I know.” He threaded his fingers through hers. “But I promise you – I
promise
– that I won’t let you get hurt. You’re my wife, and even if it’s just pretend, it means something to me.”

              Okay, time to look away now; he couldn’t drop all that on the poor girl and expect her to handle it well.

              But he couldn’t. His gaze was riveted to hers, and he was shocked by the softness in her face

              She twitched him a bare smile. “My turn now, right?”

~*~

When Tonya asked if he wanted to come up, as they stood at the base of her expensive high-rise building, he accepted, and he ran through the advice his sister had given him. He needed to compliment her place, say the sorts of ridiculous, flowery things chicks always wanted to hear. He should be sure not to track mud onto her floors, and hold the doors for her, and…

              All that well-meaning shit fled from his mind the second they stepped into the elevator and Tonya turned the most unmistakable look his way.

              He moved toward her, but she met him partway, and when he caught the back of her head in his hand, she reached behind him and gripped his ass. The kiss was a crashing together, and it didn’t feel hesitant, or tender, or like a first kiss at all.

              She bit his lip hard, and he hissed, pulling back. “Shit.” He touched the spot with his thumb and drew back with a drop of blood. “Are you serious?”

              “Very.” Her hands moved up his stomach, smoothed across his chest. She leaned into him, pressed her breasts against him. Her face was flushed, eyes heavy-lidded. “That’s not a problem, is it?”

              If she wanted to play rough, he could play rough. “Nah.” He grinned. “Just wanna make sure you don’t get hurt, darlin’.”

              “Trust me. I won’t.”

~*~

“Mine’s not very exciting,” Emmie said, a self-conscious blush warming her cheeks as she sank down low against the back of his cracked leather bachelor pad sofa. She wouldn’t admit it, but she’d always loved old leather couches like this. They were so cool against her skin in summer, and the leather never really lost its earthy smell.

              Walsh was beside her, his arm thrown over the back, so that if she wanted to, she could lean sideways and lie against him. That felt too intimate somehow, in this moment of secret-spilling, so she stayed in her slouch.

              “The farm I already know about,” he said, helpfully.

              “Right. And that’s most of it. Pretty much all you need to know about me is that I live, breathe, and sleep Briar Hall.” She sighed. “But here goes. Mom left when I was eight. Right after she put me in riding lessons. Dad didn’t drink then, but he was a sappy kind of guy. A bit of a nerd, incurably uncool. He was sweet, though.” She sent him a wan smile that he returned. “He always brought her flowers, and he had these hokey pet names for her. He adored her.

              “And she ran off with a minor league baseball player who called her ‘bitch’ and treated her like hell. She needed excitement. She needed danger.” She snorted. “She would love that I’m here with you.”

              “Hey now. I don’t call you names.”

              “No, you’re a perfect English gentleman,” she agreed, and laughed at his frown.

              Then sobered. “She’s married to some kind of nine-to-fiver now. They have kids. She sends me Christmas and birthday cards sometimes.” She shrugged. “Dad never got over it. And I’m afraid he wasn’t ever much of a dad afterward.” Another shrug. “That’s all there is to tell, really. I buried myself in this place. I didn’t have friendships or long-term relationships because I was so dedicated to the horses. And now…”