Checkmate With Bishop: A Hellions MC Novel (38 page)

So the bus must’ve hit the passenger side of the SUV, taking out the mom, mangling his boy but leaving the people on the driver’s side relatively unhurt. 

Motherfucker!

Which just about summed up how both he and Dory felt as they waited for news, whittling away the hours by one or another of them pacing, both wrapped in their own misery.  “It’s been three hours, Stan.  Why hasn’t the doctor come talked with us?”

“They’re probably still busy, babe.”  It was only a guess and only given in the hopes that it would help calm her.  But Bishop had to admit that the waiting was starting to get to him too.  “Stell said three to four hours at the minimum.”

He saw his ex-wife nod before she went back to her pacing and the quiet between them reappeared for a time.

“I went to Casper for a wedding,” he heard her say, her voice sounding smaller than it normally did.  “I didn’t tell you or J.R. because I knew he’d want to come with me which would screw up our schedule.”  Her eyes came to his.  “There isn’t anyone else, Stan.”

He found himself swallowing at what she admitted, doing it openly and freely, without him yammering at her in a fit of jealousy.  So he decided to do the same.  “I don’t know who told you what, but I haven’t been with anyone else since you rolled into town, mama.”

“So when Carmi said you and…that you and that Sissy girl were disappearing from the clubhouse…”

Bishop immediately cut her off, standing and stepping to where she stood with her arms around her own waist as if to keep all her emotions in.  “Fucking Carmi?  Shit, I should’ve known.  That bitch has been trying to fuck her way into the council for the last year or so.”  He shook his head in the negative and continued on.  “I’ve been helping Serena with some of her coding since she’s taking some IT courses at the Uni, but I never took her to bed.” 

With as much care and tenderness as possible, Bishop pulled Dory to him, using one hand on her back while the other one cupped her face, drawing her gaze up to his.  “I only want you, Dory.”

She stared at him, her eyes moving over his face as if to gauge his sincerity, to find the truth in his words.   After a time, and to Bishop it felt like a long, long time, she finally murmured, “I only want you too, Stan.”

Sliding his hand to the back of her head, he pulled her into her spot, the space between his neck and shoulder that she’d once claimed was hers.  Resting his cheek on the top of her head, he closed his eyes.  “So when all this shit is behind us, when J.R. is well and back to being the smart-ass he normally is…”

“Like father, like son,” she interrupted.

“Like hell!” he shot back before resuming his original thought.  “When we’re fucking done with this bit of doing, would you marry me again?”

“Would I be marrying Stan Bastian or the Hellion biker, Bishop?” Christ, but she was a pain in his ass.  But with her question, he could see he had a lot to own up to, a lot that he needed to apologize for and explain.  Things that had to do with a young Hellion recruit and the nubile bride that he’d unthinkingly pushed to the side when she’d needed him most.

“Sit down, babe.” His voice was gentle as he pulled away, his eyes immediately going to hers.  “I’ve think it’s time we get a few things clear, dig?”

And even though their kid was still in surgery, even though they’d both been screaming in each other’s face just hours before, Dory gifted Bishop with a smile so sweet it turned his legs to jelly.

Christ, how he loved her! 

Thirteen years after he’d watched her drive out of his life, she was still the only woman for him.  The only one that knew him better than anyone besides Trey, who wouldn’t take any of his shit and yet still managed to keep him on his toes because he could never predict how she’d react in any given moment.

The only woman Bishop wanted of the ‘forever’ variety.

Epilogue

(Three years later)

I was awakened by a light tickle on the skin behind my ear.  A delicate prickle that seemed to be slightly moist as it moved downward, inching its way to the sensitive skin of where my neck met my shoulder.

“Morning, mama,” a deep, sleepy voice growled even as I felt a large, warm hand reach around my waist, slide up my ribcage in order to capture my breast, a thumb zeroing in on my nipple. 

I wiggled my butt in reply, not yet wanting to open my eyes but to simply enjoy the sexy sensations while still half asleep before I had to begin my day.  A day that we’d been planning for weeks and was bound to be more than busy.

At my involuntary squirm, I became aware of another feeling.  One along the lines of soft velvet over steel insinuating itself on the skin that was exposed by my twisted nightgown that had, as usual, moved up around my waist while I’d slumbered.

“Love your sleepy smell, Dore,” he murmured against the back of my neck, the warmth of his breath only adding to the heat he was building with only the smallest of moves.  Actions that were growing more focused as I shifted towards wakefulness. “Christ, you’re sexy.”

You’d have thought I would’ve been used to it by then, that Stan’s initiation of morning sex would’ve just been part and parcel of my morning routine.  But it wasn’t and I hoped I never took it for granted.  Not after thirteen years of missing it.  In gratitude, I squirmed again and did a lazy turn over onto my stomach as I stretched my hands to the headboard.

“Oh yeah,” he breathed, following my movement as he pressed against my back and placed his thighs between mine.  “Up on your knees a bit more, babe.  Yeah.  Fuck!  That’s it, give me that beautiful ass…”

With my face still pressed into the pillow but with my eyes still closed, I caught myself smiling.  His nasty talk while in the throes of desire still thrilled me and I, for one, counted is as part of our foreplay although with a teenager in the house, we tried really hard to keep our bed doings quiet.  At least when J.R. was around.  But it was difficult since our first marriage had educated us on each other’s bodies and our second had only perfected that knowledge.

He slid his long, firm member along the length of my slit, catching and rubbing himself on my clit before pulling back.  A move that not only had me grinding myself back against him but moaning in frustration at his teasing play.  And true to form, Stan performed that same action again, only pausing to caress my pleasure point with his helmet.  “My wife likes that, doesn’t she?”

In answer, I reached between my legs and captured his dick in my palm, aiming him towards where my body demanded he be.  With a chuckle, he allowed me to guide him to my opening and without delay I felt him ease himself inside slowly, gliding as he filled me.  And as he pushed in further, he let go a long, low,
deep
growl that held the edges of satisfaction in its tone.  “But this is
my
favorite, babe.  The best fucking feeling in the world.”

I couldn’t disagree but I needed him to move, to work his magic in me as only he knew how to do.  It wasn’t only the back and forth, the entry and then the not quite exiting of his flesh in mine that created the miasma of sensations but the angle of it as he rubbed over my g-spot as his hips slewed.   And as ever when we were in that position, Stan slid a hand down and around in order to engage my clit in our fun.

“Harder, honey!” I whispered on a voice that was rough from both what I was feeling and from being my first words of the day.   He went further up on his knees, dragging me with him by a hand on each of my hipbones.  And with the slight change in position as well as him driving into me with more power, my body began sprinting towards goal, finding me mindless with the sparks of pleasure that were consuming me one cell at a time.  As I crested, everything within me stilled in order to better experience that brief hesitation, that micro-second of being suspended before the euphoria of my bliss imploded from within, shattering me into tiny pieces that glittered behind my eyelids.  A delight so complete, so gratifying that I couldn’t do anything but bite my pillow in order not to scream its beauty to the heavens.

Stan hit his only a couple of strokes later, stiffening before releasing another low, deep growl as I felt him plant himself deep, pulsating against the walls of my sex that held him in their depths.  He released the grip he had on my hips and curled himself over my back, holding most of his weight on his elbows that he’d planted into the mattress next to my shoulders.  “The best, babe,” he murmured thickly into my neck.  “Sex with you has always been the absolute fucking best.”

I raised my head and turned my neck so I could share the first kiss of the day with my husband, as well as to avoid speaking.  Because sex with Stan, while usually great, had gone a little off-track for a while back in the six months that we’d tried to make a baby.  Six long months where joining with my beautiful man had become a duty instead of a pleasure.  Where the thermometer ruled whether or not we could take to our marriage bed in order to expand our little family of three.

But it wasn’t to be. 

When I’d gone to the doctor to see if there was a problem, he’d called both me and Stan into his office to carefully explain the risks of both carrying and then delivering a peri-menopausal baby.   When pressed, the doctor had said that yes, there were drugs that could be used for both fertility and during gestation, but then he listed the side-effects.  A long, long list of things that could happen, could go wrong and ended his speech with the disclaimer that there were still no guarantees of success.

Stan and I had sat in his truck at the medical center for a good thirty minutes afterward, him just holding me as I cried, rubbing my back and reminding me we already had one good kid, a great one, which was more than a lot of people had. 

But I don’t think my husband had understood the full of it, not really.  The doctor hadn’t just told us we should stop trying, but he had in essence said I was too old to carry another child.  That my body had already begun its countdown towards menopause and I was closer to an old lady than a young ripe woman.  So my tears were not only because we couldn’t have another baby but were also to mourn my youth.   And to the thirteen years we’d lost by being apart.

Not even a couple of weeks later, Stan had announced he was getting a vasectomy citing that he wanted me off the pill.  It seemed my husband had done a bit of research on his own and discovered that even birth-control pills wrecked havoc with a woman’s ‘aging’ system.  Something he wasn’t willing for me to ‘mess’ with as he called it.  I simply called him a bastard without bothering to explain.

So after recuperating approximately four days into what was supposed to have been a week-long ban on sex, we went back at it like bunnies, again finding the joy in our coupling.  One that hadn’t lessened in the years since.

“So what time do you want me to bring J.R. to the compound?” Stan asked, sliding out of my body and to the side, fluffing the blankets and rearranging them over us as he moved.

I sighed and turned to sit up, twisting from the waist in order to glance at him.  “The plan has changed again.  As far as I know, Rinse is picking him up.  I told him to get J.R. there by eleven-thirty.”

Stan frowned and rubbed a hand over his head before using it to run down the length of his braid.  We’d had more than a few discussions about me cutting it.  He wanted it shorter, closer to the style he sported back in the day.  But I fought against such a travesty by just giving him a flat-out ‘no’, unwilling to let him know how sexy I found it when he let me slip the band off the end and allowed it to fall around us as he took me.  Stan didn’t know that I’d discovered I was the only woman who had the pleasure of seeing it unbound, who’d felt its silken length on her breasts and thighs.  A fact that only added to my excitement when it happened.  “I know it’s his party, mama, but I’m getting pretty fucking tired of him calling the shots for the damn thing.”

I couldn’t help my grin.  J.R. at sixteen was now as tall as his father, a fact that thrilled our son to no end.  But I’d seen the way the two of them had been going toe-to-toe more often as J.R. started exerting his independence, trying to wrest the reins of his life from me and his dad as all teenagers did.  I didn’t know if it was because Stan came into J.R.’s boyhood so late or if it was because my husband kept close those he considered most dear, but he didn’t care for our kid’s insistence on autonomy.  Not at all.

“He’s just a year younger than you were when we met,” I reminded him, coming to my feet and heading towards the bathroom.  “From what I remember, you pretty much didn’t like being told what to do at that age either.”

Glancing at Stan, I saw him glaring at the ceiling before I closed the bathroom door.  “Still doesn’t fucking make it right!” I heard him say on a shout said loud enough to for me and probably our neighbors to hear.  I rolled my eyes as I took care of business and tried to keep my sigh to myself.

It was gonna be a long day.

*.*.*.*.*

I parked in the big Hellion parking lot, idly noting the cars and bikes that were already in attendance.  When we’d first planned on giving J.R. a party for his sixteenth birthday, Stan and I talked about keeping it small.  Just a few of J.R.’s closest friends and their girls as we bar-b-qued on the deck just off the kitchen that the club had given us as a first re-anniversary gift.

But that guest list had grown substantially.  To the point there was no way our place would hold all the families that wanted to participate in our boy’s celebration.  So we’d had no choice but to hold it at the Hellion compound, which was not only large enough for all the guests but had enough parking for everyone as well.

A venue I would never,
ever
have even considered when Stan and I first remarried.

But I’d softened considerably towards the club after carefully seeing how very much the Hellions had changed in the years I’d been away.   Sure, they were still big, bad-ass bikers that lived their lives by their own code, had their own way of handling things that were sometimes well and away outside the lines of polite society.  But Trey ruled with an iron hand, keeping much of the club business within the lines of the law and the members under his rule in check.