The Road Back (The Unknowns Motorcycle Club Book 3) (8 page)

CHAPTER 13

FIVE WEEKS LATER

She’d lived alone for so long after Stephen had died that it felt surreal to have someone else in her house. Sure, Alex had stayed there for those few days before he came clean with the truth about Stephen, Marco, and the Unknowns… but he had been here with her for four weeks now. It was starting to feel more normal, but there was still an oddness to it that, if she was honest with herself, made her feel out of place.

This sensation hit her the strongest when they were getting ready for bed. It was more than sharing her home and her heart, but also her bed. They hadn’t made love since he had been discharged from the hospital. Most of that had been her decision, but there was also the fact that his knee had not yet fully healed.

She thought of that sense of displacement as they sat on the couch five weeks after he had been discharged. They had just finished watching a movie. Actually, she had watched Alex most of the time. He had told her, among many other things, that watching movies and having plain stay-in dates where most of the time was spent snuggling on the couch was foreign to him. He seemed to like it, though. If he had any regrets about leaving his life with the Unknowns behind, he was doing a fantastic job of hiding it.

But Amanda didn’t think he regretted anything. She could actually feel the peace coming off of him sometimes—a warmth that let her know that if she would have him, he’d stay here with her forever.

They got up from the couch, Alex hobbling a bit as it was only his second day off of the crutches. Before the crutches, there had been the wheelchair that he had continually cursed at. It was good to see him on his feet again, even if he was a bit shaky.

“How’s the knee?” she asked as they headed to the bedroom. It was only nine thirty, but they’d both been going to bed early. The extra time helped to compensate for the broken sleep that the nightmares caused her. In those nightmares, she would aim the gun at Marco and pull the trigger only to find that the gun was empty. Another nightmare had Marco coming into her home with Stephen behind him. Marco would assault her (in one nightmare going so far as to rape her) while Stephen watched in tears behind them.

When she woke up from those nightmares, she was
glad
that Alex was there. That sense of being displaced was nowhere to be found when she slid up beside him in bed and motioned for him to put his arms around her.

She knew that she loved him now and sensed that the feeling of oddness with having him in the house rested on everything they had been together. They had shared a trauma together and had experienced more violence in two days than most people experienced in a lifetime. With each day he was in the house, that sense of displacement faded, and she started to think that things might actually work out for them.

She got ready for bed and sat on the edge of the mattress as she watched Alex brush his teeth through the bathroom door. He favored his left side, trying to keep as much weight as possible off of his right knee. She knew that this injury had come from his attempt to save her, and it made her feel guilty and loved all at the same time.

She watched him until he had rinsed and started walking into the bedroom. He saw her looking at him and gave her an inquisitive look. “What?” He said.

“I was just thinking,” she said. “We haven’t really talked about what you want to do.”

“What do you mean?” He asked, removing his shirt and slipping into bed. He was wearing a pair of flannel pajama bottoms, and it was yet another thing that made her see him in new eyes. It was a sign of normalcy—a clue that he truly was done with the biker lifestyle.

“I mean… if you’re going to stay here with me or if you’re going to head out and start your life up.”

He thought about this for a moment and shrugged. “I was sort of hoping I could do both at once. I’d like to start my life over, but I’d like for you to be a part of it.”

She smiled and leaned over for a kiss. It was quick and sweet. The passion in his kisses was another indicator of his lifestyle change. She knew he loved her even though he had not yet come out and said it. She could tell in the way he kissed her and even the way he looked at her across the room.

“I’d like that, too,” she said. She slid over next to him and kissed his cheek. “But there’s one other question that we need to address first,” she said.

“Yeah? What’s that?”

She kissed him again, this time making it longer. When their tongues met, it was like electricity.

“If I climb on top of you, is your knee going to be able to handle it?”

Even before he answered her, her right hand was trailing down his chest. She gingerly traced her fingers along the scar at his stomach.

“I think it’ll be okay,” he said with a smile.

He then kissed her, and when his hand found her hips, she slowly climbed over to him, throwing one leg over him and straddling him. She leaned down and kissed him softly, her lips nearly nibbling at him. His hands slid along her body, cupping the side of her breast through her white tee shirt. When his hand trailed away, she recaptured it and placed it back where it was. He caressed it, running his thumb along the side and then around her nipple.

She sighed and then sat up on top of him. She removed her shirt slowly, loving the way it felt to know that he was looking admiringly at her body. She threw the shirt to the floor and then returned her mouth to his skin. She kissed his neck and chest, pausing just above the top of his stomach to look at the scar that was healing nicely, despite his having aggravated it while saving her from Marco. She ran her fingers along it and then kissed it intimately. He had almost bled to death from this wound, and he had done it for her.

She kissed it once more, and then her kisses went lower and her tongue began to skirt playfully along the skin above his navel. She did this enjoying the way he tensed up beneath her while her hands teasingly started to pull his pants down. Realizing that he couldn’t help with the task, she then trailed her kisses lower so she could fully remove his pants without him having to stretch his healing knee.

While she was down there, she couldn’t resist the urge that came naturally to her. She traced the outline of his manhood with her fingers and then took hold of it as she ran her tongue along the underside of it. When he shuddered at this, the lust that had connected them so deeply in the first place slammed through her. It made her feel more alive than she could ever remember—the irresistible
want
of someone that was so deep that every nerve and muscle in her body jumped. Taking this in and accepting it was for what it was, she then slowly put him in her mouth. She worked just as slowly and intimately there as she had done with his lips. She glanced up to him as she worked and saw him relaxing, giving his body over to her.

The lust that had first attracted her to him filled her then, and she wanted everything. At the same time, though, she also sensed the tenderness between them. It was such an odd emption to feel—pure unbridled lust and tender passion fighting for control—as she rolled her tongue around his thickness as he filled her mouth.

Afraid that she might accidentally hit his knee, she moved her body as she worked at him. She knelt at his side, freeing his legs. She felt his hand on her back, then on her rear. He grabbed her roughly there, knowing that she liked it. And then as she incorporated her hand into the task she remained at, he arched his back. His hand trailed down her ass and reached awkwardly between her legs. She spread for him slightly and sighed as he cupped her sex. He caressed her there, and electricity spiraled through her body. She sighed as he continued to caress her between the legs. As she gently rocked against his hand, he responded by barely slipping the tip of a finger in. She rocked back gently again, urging him on, but he drew the finger out, teasing her and caressing harder. She moaned, the sound somehow even sexier because it was blocked by having him in her mouth.

It wasn’t long before she sensed the tension in his body. He was seconds away from reaching his climax. Just as she was about to stop (while she didn’t mind giving
him
all the pleasure, she badly wanted him inside of her), he gently took her by the head and drew her away.

“Wait,” he said, clearly out of breath. He drew her up next to him and kissed her along the curve of her jaw. His hands found her breasts and caressed them in the same way he had just handled her sex.

“Wait?” she asked, pitching a bit of playful sadness into her voice. “Do I have to?”

And before he could respond in any way, she was climbing back on top of him. She made sure to stay away from his knee because if what she had in mind was going to happen, she wanted it to be pain-free for him. She wanted no distraction, just his full attention on her and their bodies lost in pleasure.

“Mmm,” was the only response he could give.

“I’d really rather not wait.”

“Okay then,” he said with a devilish smile, kissing her hard. She returned the kiss but then pushed herself playfully away, sitting up on top of him again, their hips meshed together.

She took his hard length in her hands and, lifting her hips a bit, and guided him into her. She sat down on his length slowly, still sitting upright. They both moaned as they joined, and his hands grew tighter around her hips. She arched her back and slid back slowly. She looked down to him as the first real pangs in intense pleasure hit her, and he began to move her hips slowly, helping guide her. She sat there for a moment, not moving. They simply looked at one another, and as their eyes locked, she rocked back gently, arching her back and settling down into him. He filled her completely, and she let out a gasp of pleasure. He gently took her by the hips again and started urging her to move, which she did eagerly.

They worked together, their eyes still locked. She saw vulnerability in his eyes as she rode him. He had never experienced passion and sex before. He had told her as much during his time in the wheelchair as they had reflected back on how they had met. But she saw him coming around to it now, looking at her with love as they were joined together. Something about this was sexier than anything else her eyes could take in. He was giving her a part of himself that he had just recently discovered meaning that she was the first to pry it out of him. While she liked the firmness and roughness of his edges (especially in the bedroom) there was something about that newly discovered side to him that enticed her more than anything else.

As her hips rocked and their speed increased, Alex tilted his hips up slightly, not enough to strain his knee, but just enough to give Amanda exactly what she needed. She came back against him, amazed that he had learned her body so well in their short time together. With his hips tilted, his member hit her in just the right spot, and she felt her orgasm building.

When it hit, she fell gently down on top of him and was delighted to see that he was getting his own as she finished hers. They held each other tightly as he came, his arms wrapped tightly around her back.

They lay quietly against one another for a moment before she pushed herself up on her elbows to look him in the eyes.

“Is your knee okay?” She asked.

“Right now it doesn’t even feel like I have knees,” he said lifting his face to kiss her on the shoulder. “But you know, just until we’re certain that my knee is going to hold up, I think you’d better stay on top.”

“I can live with that,” she said.

They held each other until they fell asleep. Amanda watched him go under first, smiling. She eventually nodded off as well and enjoyed a night of sleep free from nightmares.

CHAPTER 14

The first big change was telling Amanda that he loved her. After that, the next big change had come when he needed a vehicle. It had pained him a bit to do so, but he had purchased a small truck rather than a motorcycle. And then, of course, there was the biggest change of all: parking that truck in front of the same house on a daily basis.

Alex was surprised to find that these changes weren’t as hard to live with as he had originally thought. It had been three months since he had stormed into the building in the woods to find Marco O’Brien with a gun to Amanda’s head. He’d stayed at Amanda’s the entire time; the first huge step had come in calling the moving company and storage facility that was holding his belongings in Chicago. He paid to have them bring it all to Amanda’s house, and he had slowly settled in.

His knee wasn’t quite as bad, but he was pretty sure—as was his doctor—that he’d have a slight limp on that leg for the rest of his life. As far as he was concerned, that was a small price to pay for having been able to save Amanda.

Although, in the end, she had saved him. Marco would have likely done ungodly things to him if Amanda had not summoned the courage to pick up the gun. This was a thought that raced through his mind every time he started to feel heroic about how things had gone down.

Once they had gotten acclimated to living together and he had felt less like an invalid, Alex started to work towards figuring out what the rest of his life would look like. At twenty-nine, he was still on the starting line as far as he was concerned. After he had unpacked and he and Amanda had done their best to turn her one-person home into a two-person dwelling, Alex had sat down and tried to bring some sort of order to his life.

First, he channeled the funds from his four separate checking accounts into a single one. This netted him more than two hundred thousand dollars—an amount of money that Amanda had found ludicrously large. He thought about that for a while. Aside from rent, he’d never really had any bills, so to speak. He’d simply made his money in various illegal ways and let it sit and grow.

Now that he wasn’t a part of the Unknowns, he almost felt bad for having the money. So one day, while Amanda was out with a client for a meeting, Alex went into the city with his new checkbook in tow. He made two stops: one by the bank and one by the jewelry store.

He walked into the bank with a few envelopes he had taken from Amanda’s house. One of them was her mortgage payment. The other was a bill for her student loans. Forty minutes later, thanks to an efficient bank staff and their wire transfers, Amanda’s twenty-one thousand dollars in student loans were paid off and she owed nothing on her home. In the end, Alex still came out with more than eighty-five thousand dollars.

The jewelry store took another two grand out of that.

When he arrived back home (
home,
he thought…
how strange to actually have a home)
, Amanda was working behind her computer. He came up behind her and started lightly massaging her shoulders.

“Mmmm,” she said, relaxing and letting him work the knots out. “If you keep that up, I may have to take a bedroom break.”

“I wouldn’t fight you on that,” he said. “Your shoulders are tight. What’s going on? Stressed with work?”

“A bit. The last few months have been slower than I would have liked. And unlike you, I don’t have two hundred grand just sitting around.”

“And then there are bills, right?” he said, jokingly.

“Yes, pesky bills.”

He stopped massaging her shoulders and then took out the two slips of paper he had in his back pocket. He slid them over her shoulder and dropped them into her lap.

“What are these?” she said.

“The rewards of sleeping with someone that used to be into some illegal business.”

Amanda looked at each slip of paper and then turned her chair around to face her. She looked both astonished and slightly upset.

“Alex! No! I can’t let you do this!”

“Too late, lady. Paid for. Wrapped up and finalized.”

She looked to him, not quite sure how to react. Her look of astonishment eventually tuned into a smile. Within seconds, the smile was accompanied by tears. “I can’t believe you did this for me.”

He shrugged. “What else was I going to do with the money?”

She kissed him, meaning for it to be a simple kiss of gratitude. But within seconds, it became heated and intense. She broke the kiss and took him by the hand.

“What?” Alex asked as she led him away from the living room.

“Bedroom break,” she said. “Let’s see if that knee of yours is as healed as we’re thinking it is.”

He followed willingly and they both discovered, much to their pleasure, that his knee was doing just fine.

***

It was another week before Alex had the nerve to use the item he had gotten at the jewelry store. He kept it in his coat pocket as they went out to dinner. The excuse they were using for the dinner was that it was their four month anniversary, although they both knew it was off by a couple of days.

The coat was new, too. He had let Amanda take him shopping for some new clothes… clothes that he would need for his job interviews. The interviews had irritated him, and instead, he had started looked around town for garages for sale. He had his eye on two, both of which were easily within his price range. He’d shared a dream with Amanda—a dream of owning his own motorcycle customization shop—and now that he had started to get the wheels turning on it, he was more excited about it that anything else he could remember.

On that night, though, as he sat down across from her, the plans he had for his own shop were very far away from his mind. He barely made it through the appetizers; he was about to burst with excitement, and when the waiter came by to collect the empty appetizer plates, Alex realized that his palms were sweating.

“Amanda,” he said. “I want to thank you for putting up with me. You know… during my knee healing and all of the trouble before that. I brought some very bad mojo into your life and yet you still took me in when it was all said and done.”

“You’re not some stray dog that I took in,” Amanda said. “You helped me, too.”

He said nothing because he still failed to see how that was the case. All he had done was inadvertently bring her the man that had killed Stephen. Other than that, all the experience had done for her was plague her with nightmares.

“Well, what I’m saying,” he went on, “is that before I met you, I would have never even dreamed that I could own a business or live a straight life. You’ve given me the drive to do that. And you’ve done it with such love and patience.”

“That’s because I love you,” she said.

“I love you, too,” he said.

“Where’s all of this coming from? Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I just don’t know how to say what I want to say.” He paused here and then added, “I haven’t felt this safe and secure in forever. Ever since that nastiness with my father, I’ve basically been living on the run. Until now. Until you. And it feels nice. And I know it’s not just the situation. It’s the fact that it’s with you.”

“Are you
trying
to make me cry?” She asked.

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “It depends on how you handle the next question.”

“Which is?”

He brought the case out of his pocket and slid it across the table to her. As she looked at it and things started to click, Alex got up from his seat and took his left knee in front of her. He then opened up the case to reveal the ring inside.

“Would you marry me, Amanda?”

She clapped a hand to her mouth and waited only two seconds before she nodded her head vigorously.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Of course I am.”

“I’m… well, sort of a mess. You know that.”

“I’m a mess, too,” he said. “But the mess makes more sense with you.”

She smiled down to him and kissed him on the lips. “Yes,” she said when the kiss was broken. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”

They embraced warmly, and by the time Alex took the ring from the case and slid it onto her finger, several of the restaurant’s patrons were applauding them.

Beyond that, there was Amanda’s voice in his ear as she hugged him again, the ring on her finger. “I’m so happy right now,” she’d said through tears. “I didn’t think I’d get that again.”

“Same here,” he said.

In the years that came, Alex missed the freedom of being in the Unknowns, and he also missed the constant thrum of a bike beneath him. But as pleasant and familiar as the noise of a bike’s engine was to him, he’d live the rest of his life remembering the noise of those people clapping for him and the love they saw between him and Amanda more than anything else.