Dex ARe (13 page)

“Had enough or are ya ready for another? Neither of you have more sense than you were born with. Rip each other’s throats out if ye like but do it outside.” Water dripped down Sly’s bloodied nose and he looked from me to Mo with wild eyes. He looked ridiculous. I raised a brow and wondered if I looked any better. Shrugging, I ran the back of my hand over my chin then offered a begrudging hand to Sly to help him up. He batted it away and tried to stand up. He slipped again in the water. He hung his head in surrender then shook his head, spraying droplets of water everywhere like the mongrel Mo had just called us. Then he clasped his hand in mine, giving me a solid grip, and I helped him to his feet. The rage I’d felt seemed to slough off like I’d opened a release valve. Sly’s posture seemed easier too when he let go of my hand.

“I kept her as safe as I could,” he said; his voice held no trace of the vitriol we’d thrown at each other just a few seconds before. “That girl has a calling and I wasn’t going to stand in the way of it. And that’s how it was. She’s home, she’s safe. And what she did mattered. It wasn’t for me to take that away from her. And it’s not for you either. If you don’t see that, you probably don’t even deserve her.”

My shoulders sank. He was right. I knew he was. Ava was Ava and maybe I was a fool to think that I could have stopped her myself if I’d been here to try. Still, his words stung and I had half a mind to take another swing at him to make it stop.

I jerked my head up to Mo, letting her
know she could holster her sprayer. She set her mouth in a hard line and pointed a finger in warning to Sly. A harrumph from the doorway let me know we had a bigger audience than I realized. Charlie leaned in the kitchen doorway chewing on a toothpick. He pushed himself away from the wall, wrapped an arm around
Mo and led her out of the kitchen.

“I suppose we both had that coming,” Sly said. “Glad to see your skills are still sharp.” He leaned his head back and pinched the bridge of his nose. Blood still trickled down his chin.

“Are you kidding me?” My head jerked toward the doorway again. Ava stood there, straight and tall, her blonde hair long and wild around her shoulders. She wore a black tank top and skin-tight jeans. Her feet were bare. I stirred again at the sight of her. She had her hands on her hips and the same fury in her eyes Mo had just leveled at us.

“Aggh!” Sly said. “Just reminiscing about old times, darlin’.”

Ava shook her head. She stomped across the kitchen floor and smacked Sly’s hand away from his nose. She put a hand on his forehead and angled his face further back.

“Sit down,” she ordered. Guiding him with her hand still on his head, she forced him onto one of the bar stools around the kitchen island.

“You!” She turned to me. “Get some ice out of that freezer.”

“Yes ma’am.” I gave her a mock salute. She wasn’t amused.

“For the moment, that’s Captain to you. Go!”

I did. I came back with
a bag of frozen peas. Ava had the blood cleaned off Sly’s face and was busy tapping his cheekbones with her fingertips. She’d found a red-and-white tackle box that apparently served as the club’s first aid kit. She snorted a couple of times but wouldn’t look at me. God, she was sexy as hell like this—in charge and pissed off at me. It took everything in me not to hoist her over my shoulder and haul her back up to bed, caveman style.

She turned, opened the tackle box and took out what looked like a tampon. Hell, it was a tampon. She snapped off the string and shoved it up Sly’s right nostril before he could protest. He groaned and I winced in sympathy.

“I don’t think it’s broken, but I could be wrong,” she said. “Again. Keep that up there and put this on it.” She handed him the bag of frozen peas. “Any chance I can get you to see Joleen in the E.R. today? She’s on at seven and can fast track you. I’d feel better if you had a doctor take a look at that.”

Sly shook his head. “Ava, you know better than anyone that’s not the first and probably not the last time I’m gonna get my nose busted. If it even is. I’ll suffer through the frozen peas but that’s it.”

She slapped him lightly on the shoulder and pointed toward me with her thumb.

“Next patient.” I slid onto the stool and put my hands on her hips, pulling her between my legs.

“No need to nose rape me, Ava,” I said.

She tried to pull away a little but I wasn’t having it.

“I see that,” she said. “Your jaw’s swollen but you’re talking. It’s not broken.” She put her hands on either side of my face and tapped her fingertips along my jaw like she’d done to Sly. He shot me a wink over Ava’s shoulder and went to the far corner of the room. He leaned against the wall with his hands crossed in front of him and that ridiculous tampon hanging out of his swollen nose.

“You want to fill me in on what that was all about?”

I shot a look to Sly. He shrugged. “Just, ah ... just our way of catching up, baby. Nothing to worry about.”

“Right,” she said. “My diagnosis is an acute case of testosterone poisoning.”

I wagged my eyebrows at her then winced; my face was starting to swell a little. I rubbed my sore jaw. “Ow. Well, baby. I think I might know the cure for that.”

She tried to keep the scowl on her face but the corners of her mouth lifted in a smile and her cheeks colored with a slow blush that started at the roots of her hair. I pulled her in close and planted a great smacking kiss on her lips. Fuck. That hurt too. I guess I’d just have to suffer through.

“Not now, lover boy,” she said. “I’m going to go home.”

“You’re off tonight, you told me.”

Ava stepped out of my arms and busied herself reorganizing Mo’s first aid kit. “I need to, Dex.” Her eyes darted to Sly. He got the hint. This was a conversation she didn’t want an audience for. She turned back to me.

“But I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? Maybe we can grab dinner before I go into work.”

I took a breath and braced myself for the reaction I suspected I was about to get.

“Baby, I think it’s better if you let me send one of the prospects over to get a bag for you or something. With what happened to the Franco kid, I’d feel a whole lot better if you were under the club roof at least for the next twenty-four hours or so.”

Ava froze. Her hand trembled slightly as she snapped the latch on the first aid kit. She turned to face me; the shadows had come back into her eyes and it was like a sledgehammer to my heart. We’d taken an important step toward each other last night. The look in her eyes told me she’d just taken two steps back.

I wanted to tell her it wasn’t what she thought. This was different. This time I wouldn’t let club business touch her or us ever again. But the truth was I couldn’t promise her that. I opened my mouth to tell her, but closed it when I realized I couldn’t say anything that wasn’t a lie.

She saw it on my face and something shifted in her posture. She went a little cold. She closed her eyes and sighed. When she opened them again, her walls were in place all over again and I knew it would be that much harder to get her back.

Chapter Thirteen

Ava

I knew when I climbed on to the back of Dex’s Harley, I was headed for trouble. I let my body and heart lead the way when I should have listened to my head. I was foolish enough to think that things would stay level for at least a little while. I’d been dead wrong. As Dex looked at me with that smoldering stare of his that made me weak in the knees, I steeled my back and stared straight back at him.

“Already?” I said. I opened the cupboard door and slid Mo’s first aid kit back on the shelf where she kept it. Dex’s eyes widened when I did it. It surprised him, I think, that I knew my way around the Wolf Den kitchen this well. Yes. Yes, I did. This wasn’t the first time I’d had to patch up torn flesh and broken noses for club members over the years. Luckily, it hadn’t been often lately. But whenever Sly needed someone tended to without a paper trail, I’d get a call.

“It’s probably nothing,” Dex said and it was about the worst thing he could say. Thirteen years ago I would have believed him. I
did
believe him back then. And he’d grossly miscalculated if not flat out lied to me more than once.

“Stop,” I said putting a hand up when he tried to put his arms out to embrace me. “At least do me the courtesy of not lying to my face within the first twenty-four hours of me being back here with you. Whatever happened to Franco, whoever did it either actually meant to kill him or didn’t care too much if he didn’t make it. Same thing, really.”

Dex leaned back against the bar and gave me a terse nod. Good. At least we’d cleared the hurdle of him sugarcoating things to try and protect me.

“And the timing of that, with you just coming back to town, that’s not a coincidence, is it?”

Dex shrugged. “That I don’t know for sure. That’s the honest truth, Ava. But it could be. But it’s going to get handled. I prom—”

I put my hand up again. “Stop that too. Don’t promise me. Don’t we both know better by now?”

Dex dropped his head. Then he lifted it and leveled a sheepish one-eyed stare at me. God. I couldn’t help that it made me want to go to him, let him bend me over that counter right then and there. I needed to get the hell out of here and fast if I planned to keep my wits about me where he was concerned. It had happened so fast. Just one look, the solid strength of his broad hand as he slid it to the small of my back and I was almost willing to forget everything that had happened and let him draw me back into this chaos.

Almost.

“Dex?” Sly poked his head back through the kitchen door. “Tiny and the prospects are ready to take off. I’m sorry to break things up for you, but you need to get going.”

Dex nodded and looked back at me. “Tell them I’ll be out in five minutes.”

Sly shut the door and left. I took a step back, meaning to stop him again but Dex would have none of it. He snaked his arms around me and drew me close. My skin tingled at his touch, heat flared in my core despite all the warning bells going off in my head. He kissed me on the forehead and drew me in until my cheek rested against his chest. He smelled so good.

“I’ll be gone for a couple of hours. Then I’m coming back here. Will you stay? Please?”

He held me away from him a little, willing me to look up at him. When I did, the longing in his eyes still broke my heart. This was a face he showed only to me. I put a gentle hand against his jaw where it swelled. He turned a little and kissed my palm; his eyes were warm, tender but held a hint of the dark lust he’d only just begun to sate.

“I’ll stay until you get back,” I said, feeling more than a little defeated. “But only until then.” I knew my heart would be better off if I left. But I had enough sense not to do anything foolhardy. On the off chance Franco’s attack
was
directly related to Dex, I was safer here in the Den than home alone. As much as it chaffed me to admit it.

He kissed me again. “We can talk more this afternoon.”

“Oh, you bet we will,” I said as Dex finally let me go and headed toward the door leading to the restaurant. He turned at the last second and backed out. The gleam in his eye told me he meant to do a hell of a lot more than talk. Again, my body betrayed me as I felt an answering heat start to pool between my legs at the thought of
just
how much more he wanted.

***

When Dex left, I headed out into the main bar. The Den wasn’t open for business this early but Charlie, Mo and a few of the guys were either finishing breakfast or the hair of the dog. I sat on a corner stool a few seats from Charlie and reached over the counter to grab a rocks glass then filled it with water from the beverage gun.

“You know not to pay those two no mind,” Charlie said as he sipped his coffee.

I raised a brow. I hadn’t asked, but yes, whatever I’d walked in on between Sly and Dex was something else that troubled me. I ran a finger around the rim of my glass then I folded my hands on the bar and rested my chin over my knuckles.

“I don’t know, Charlie, if this is the start of any kind of trend, I’m going to need to bring Mo more supplies.”

I was trying to make a joke, but Charlie’s expression stayed pensive. He ran his hands down the wiry curls of his beard. He let out a belch before he continued. “They love each other like brothers. Now they’re more or less the only family each of them has left.”

“I know that.”

Charlie nodded. Mo had come to stand behind him, placing her hands on his broad shoulders. The gesture wasn’t lost on me. She was backing up Charlie’s speech literally and figuratively.

“They’re like their fathers before them,” she added. “Except they’ve both inherited the best of those two as well. That being said, Samuel and Declan come from a very long line of Irish brawlers. It’s in their blood.”

From Mo, the word blood came out more like “bluid.”

“You saying they like to show their love in the form of fists to the face?”

Mo and Charlie laughed heartily at that but they were also both nodding. “True enough,” Charlie said.

“Are you sticking around, Ava?” Mo also had a way of cutting to the quick of things. It was both a question and an accusation. Dex was back. She’d taken on the den mother role where the club members were concerned. She’d protect her cubs at all costs.

“Dex thinks it’s a good idea if I cool my heels here until he gets back. At least until they get a handle on what’s going on with the Franco kid.”

Mo nodded but she’d fixed a laser-like stare on me. She knew I knew that wasn’t what she meant at all. Except she was asking a question I was in no way ready to answer yet. Plus, den mother or no, it wasn’t any of her damn business yet. The cool look I gave her back seemed to convey my point. She smiled, nodded, then walked back to the kitchen after a quick peck on Charlie’s cheek.

“It’s good to have you here,” Charlie said. “We’ve missed you, you know that? You kind of stopped coming around.”

I smiled and moved two stools over so I was right next to him. I put a hand on his shoulder. “I know.”

Charlie patted the hand that I rested on his shoulder and squeezed it. “But you better figure out right quick whether you plan it to be permanent or not.”