Calm & Storm (The Night Horde SoCal Book 6) Read online

  He supposed he’d expected something…brighter from his little hippie chick—

  Ronin stopped and ran a hand over his head. His little hippie chick? Already he’d fallen into old patterns, like the past twenty-five years had never happened, like she’d never sent that letter and disappeared while he was still in basic training at Fort Benning.

  He’d been thirty, on the old side for a grunt, but he’d nevertheless enlisted shortly after 9-11. He could still remember standing in the break room at the logging company, watching the first tower smoking, and then the second, and then the collapse, watching all of those people running and screaming and dying. Something inside him had shifted on that day.

  Although he’d known no one so far away as New York City or Washington, D.C., he’d felt the attack like a personal affront, and he could think of only one way to answer it.

  Rainy, his little hippie chick, had been incensed. They’d fought and fought, watching the case to attack Saddam play out on television. He’d believed what their leaders were saying. She had thought it all lies and misdirection.

  It turned out that she’d been mostly right, but he’d never regretted answering the call. Not even after the things he’d seen and done, not even after he’d come to doubt the mission itself. His instinct to enlist had come from a place of honor.

  When he’d come back from the recruitment center with information about enlisting, she’d thrown down the gauntlet. If he enlisted, she’d leave him. They’d been talking about getting married, and he was, she insisted, throwing all of that away on a corruption. She couldn’t love an ‘invader.’

  He’d talked her down from that. Made his case. Explained why he felt the way he did, how he needed to do something to answer that horror, something bigger than himself. He’d bought her a ring, making concrete a promise he’d already made. He’d convinced her to wait.

  Or so he’d thought. She’d waited until he was gone, alone, in the most miserable weeks of basic training, and then she’d left. Disappeared completely, like their six years together had never happened at all.

  Six years. She’d thrown six years away like that.

  He’d enlisted before the war had started, and he’d been one of the first men on the ground in Iraq. His father was killed on the job during his first tour, and he’d been denied bereavement leave. Injured by an IED during his second tour, he’d returned, with a purple heart and a broken one, to a home that no longer included a father or a fiancée. Or any life he’d known at all.

  His mother died a little more than a year after he’d come back. With nothing remaining of home, Eddie had left Myrtlevale and moved to Spokane. Soon, he was Ronin, and a patched member of an MC.

  That was the man Lorraine Milligan didn’t know.

  He tried the door to her restaurant. It was locked. Not knowing what else to do, he rapped his knuckles on the glass. How she’d hear that, he didn’t know; there was no one in the restaurant that he could see.

  Just as he was deciding that she’d changed her mind, and that that was for the best, she came out from the back, wearing a white coat over one of her long, busy skirts. Her hair was up, the ends messy at the back of her head.

  She was so beautiful. He wanted his hands full of that hair. He could remember the feel of its silk sliding through his fingers.

  Smiling, she came to the door and unlocked it. When she opened it, he stood there, his legs leaden.

  “You came,” she said, wonder in her voice. “You came.”

  He didn’t answer, but not out of choice. His throat felt tight and stony. He could only nod.

  She stepped out of his way, and he went in.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “You came!” Lorraine was stunned, really. She’d invited him, and he’d agreed, but days had passed since then, and she’d thought it unlikely he’d actually show.

  But here he was. Dressed much the same as he’d been at Tillie’s—jeans and engineer boots, a faded chambray shirt, this one plain rather than striped—he was gorgeous. His sleeves were cuffed back, showing his muscular forearms, clear of ink. A heavy silver chain looped around his left wrist. He hadn’t been wearing that before.

  He hadn’t spoken. Lorraine wondered whether he’d said even twenty words to her yet in their re-acquaintance. Well, maybe that was for the best. It was she who had the things to say.

  She stepped back and opened the door wide, and Ronin came into Mythic.

  They’d only been open a couple of months, and Lorraine still felt the fresh pride of a new accomplishment. She and Cameron had designed every aspect, striving for a balance between comfortable and elegant. They’d found and struck that balance, she thought. It was the kind of place you could go for a fancy night out, but it was also the kind of place that could become your ‘regular’ place. Exactly what she’d wanted.

  Business had been picking up in the past couple of weeks. Oscar Mendel had been impressed, and his word of mouth carried far. She was beginning to feel like this venture would succeed.

  The restaurant was closed on Mondays, but Lorraine always came in to prep for the coming week. She loved being here alone; the contrast between the usual bustle during open hours and the perfect quiet on Mondays gave her a special kind of calm. Usually, she didn’t turn on all the house lights, but she’d wanted to present a pretty picture, in case Ronin did show up.

  And here he was.

  As she closed the door, she caught sight of his bike. He’d ridden sport bikes and dirt bikes when she’d known him before, and he’d derided Harleys as being loud, slow, un-maneuverable, and undeservedly flashy. Parked outside Mythic, however, was an enormous Harley, one that seemed mostly chrome. Turning the lock, she smiled. She hoped that things would warm up between them enough that she might tease him about that.

  “Nice place,” he said when she turned back to him.

  “Thank you. It’s the realization of a dream—as you know.” She’d wanted to have her own restaurant since she was in high school, years before she’d even known him. “Come on. I’ve been in the kitchen, working on this week’s menu.” She held out her hand to him. When he didn’t take it, she waved it instead, ushering him to the back.

  Stopping at the bar, she turned back to him. “Can I get you a drink? Scotch?”

  He nodded, and she grabbed the Glenlivet off the shelf behind the bar, and a glass from a clean wash tray, and then nodded to indicate he should follow her on through the swinging door.

  In the kitchen, Lorraine set the glass down on a steel countertop and opened the bottle of scotch. As she started to pour, Ronin’s arms came around on either side of her, and he gripped the edge of the counter in his hands.

  He wasn’t touching her, but he was so close behind her that she could feel his breath move the fine hairs that had loosened at her nape. She froze, the bottle not quite tipped enough to pour.

  “Why am I here?” His voice was rough and low, barely more than breath.

  She bent her head and turned it just enough that from the corner of her eye she could see how very close he was. Intimidated and flustered, enrapt and electrified by his presence, by the heat and strength of his body emanating from him in waves, by the powerful memories of sense and mind rushing through her, she dropped her eyes to the counter—and saw his hands. Large and strong, darkened by sun, the knuckles scarred, the skin rough. The rings he wore were heavy but plain; the large turquoise stone was the most elaborate of them.

  God. What had she let loose by calling out his name in that catering tent?

  Without thinking, she laid her left hand over his and set the scotch down, unpoured. “I want to talk.”

  Her voice barely made it through her spasming throat. She was no fluttery young girl; she was a middle-aged woman. And yet right now, she was the eighteen-year-old girl going in with her new work friends to scope out the guys at the lumberjack bar. The girl who’d soon found herself pulled onto the lap of one of the hottest guys in Myrtlevale. He’d been a local star, known for his riding,
and for his fighting.

  He’d laughed that night when she’d told him her name, said it was too old and square for ‘such a pretty little hippie.’ He’d called her Rainy instead.

  “Why?” he asked now, in this present, and Lorraine had to stretch to remember what she’d said. Oh—that she wanted to talk.

  There was so much she had to say, so many things to tell him. But it was hard to think with him so close, with the power of his presence thickening the air around her. Things would have been so much different if he hadn’t chosen that stupid fucking war over the future they’d been planning.

  She still loved him. She’d known that, of course. For the past twenty-five years, she’d been thinking of him as—and, in wine-saturated moments with friends, calling him—her Great Lost Love. She’d loved Douglas, but that had never been anything like the same.

  Was this man standing behind her—Ronin—the same man she loved, though? She thought he was, but he wasn’t unchanged. Neither was she.

  She couldn’t possibly say anything remotely like that. So she came up with a different truth. “We have twenty-five years to catch up on. I want to know about your life. I want to tell you about mine. I want…” She stopped. What did she want? Two weeks ago, her thoughts of Eddie Drago, while intense, had been relatively rare, left to quiet moments or drunken ones.

  She’d been happy. She had set her life on its new track, and it was rolling smoothly forward. Now—she didn’t know. Just like that.

  “You want what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Turn around.”

  She did. He was so close—she had to lean back a little to see his face clearly. “I…want to talk.”

  “I don’t.” His eyes scanned back and forth, studying hers. Then he lifted his hand and slid it along the side of her face, pushing his fingers into her hair, tugging it loose from its clip. “Past is past.”

  That wasn’t true. A lot of the past was still the present, and they couldn’t go now where she could tell he wanted to go, not until the air was clear between them. They couldn’t.

  They shouldn’t, at least.

  “Ronin…” She should have pushed him back, but she didn’t want to lose the feel of his hand in her hair or the heat of his body so close.

  “Rainy,” he breathed, and with that beloved name in his beloved voice, there was not a word in the world she would have brought between them. Let the past and the future bide their time, she decided. Right now, her great lost love was found, and he was leaning in, holding her close, bringing his mouth to hers.

  She looped her arms around his neck, sliding her fingers under his collar. When his lips touched hers, she moaned and tightened her hold on him. He sighed heavily and then—then he simply consumed her. His hand twisted in the fallen coil of her hair, his arm became a steel band across her lower back, and his mouth pushed hard against hers, demanding everything she had to give. And she gave it to him.

  Kissing him was completely familiar and totally new. He’d been clean-shaven when he was younger; the scrape and rasp of his scruff of beard was new. But his lips, his tongue, the way they fit together, all of that was as it should have been, and she felt nearly sick with emotion.

  Too much emotion. All of Lorraine’s regrets for the choices she’d made so long ago rose up and converged at once in her chest. This did feel like a second chance, seeing Eddie—Ronin—again, knowing that he felt something still for her as well. A chance to make things right. To reclaim what they’d lost. But if they went down the path they were headed right now, before they talked—they could lose everything they’d just regained. If they had, in fact, regained it.

  She broke the kiss with a gasp. “Ronin…”

  He was breathless, too, and his grey eyes had gone stormy with desire. She knew the look, remembered it well.

  “I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to stop.” He brushed his fingers over her cheek. “Rainy. Still my little hippie chick.” He smiled.

  She knew that smile so very well.

  Without her permission, her fingers began unbuttoning his shirt. Thus encouraged, he plucked at her chef’s coat, seeming to miss that the buttons were off center, so she abandoned her work on his shirt and unbuttoned hers instead.

  As she opened her coat, exposing the little green sleeveless cotton sweater under it, she watched him finish unbuttoning his shirt, baring more beautiful, broad, muscular torso. The word HORDE was tattooed across his chest in runic letters.

  Shrugging out of her coat, her eyes still on his body as he opened the last button and his shirt fell open, she froze.

  “Eddie!”

  He caught her chin in his fingers and lifted her head up, forcing their eyes to meet. “Ronin. Roe is okay, too. Not Eddie.”

  His name was not her most pressing concern just then. “What happened?”

  “Shrapnel. I was lucky. The truck ahead of us rolled over an IED. There wasn’t much left of those men to send home.”

  She reached out and put her hand on his body, tracing her fingers over the scatter of dark scars that covered his left side and his belly. Some of the scars were long and wicked; others merely dots.

  That war had done this to him. That stupid fucking war. And she had left him alone with his pain, in his need.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  He caught her hand and pulled it from him. “Don’t say it again, Rainy. I don’t want those words.”

  “You’re so different. But still the same. It’s like I’m just meeting someone I’ve been missing all these years.”

  He didn’t respond, but his eyes seemed to glitter with focus.

  “What do you want, Roe?”

  As an answer, he grasped her around the waist and lifted her up. When he set her on the steel surface behind her, he knocked the open bottle of fifteen-year-old scotch over, but, with astonishing reflexes, he caught it before it fell and spilled.

  Then he gathered up her skirt and slid it up her thighs. Lorraine moaned and spread her legs, hooking her feet, still in her clogs, around his calves and pulling him closer. Then she leaned in, pushing the sides of his shirt open, and pressed her lips to his hard chest.

  His scent was exactly as she remembered it.

  He went still, and she could feel the depth of his breath as his chest swelled and receded against her lips. While his rough hands slid up her bare thighs, she trailed kisses up, over his collarbone, his throat, to his jaw.

  Then she hooked her hands into his waistband and opened his belt and jeans. When she got her hands around his long, hot, hard cock, he groaned and put his hand over hers, stopping her from pulling him free.

  She looked up and met his eyes again.

  “I’m cut. Do you want me to use a condom?”

  “Cut?” She didn’t understand.

  “Vasectomy.”

  Her heart clenched and cramped. “You never wanted children?”

  He smiled a quiet smile, one corner of his mouth barely lifting, and squeezed her hand, which was still holding his cock. “I wanted children with you, Rainy. Little redheaded babies, remember?”

  “With grey eyes.” She swallowed hard on a wayward sob, remembering their nighttime talks about their future. “Oh, Ronin…”

  “Don’t say it.” He kissed her, coming in quickly, as if he meant to shut her up. His hands went back to her skirt, lifting it high now—and then one hand was between her legs, rubbing against the silk of her underwear, and she tore her mouth from his again because she couldn’t breathe.

  She and Douglas had stopped having sex more than a year before they’d finally split, but after that, despite her friends’ laments that she’d taken herself out of circulation, Lorraine hadn’t been quite celibate. She’d been on some dates in the past couple of years, and some of those had gone well enough to become physical—and some of those had been enjoyable, even if they’d never gone further than a couple of dates. And yet, it felt right now like no one had touched her the way Ronin was touching her in years
.

  It felt like no one had touched her the way Ronin was touching her now since the last time Eddie had touched her like this.

  She squirmed and grunted and moaned, needing so much more from him. Finally, she pulled him free of his jeans and had him fully in her hands. She tightened her fists around him, making him grunt.

  “Condom?” he panted.

  “No. Just…please. Just you. Just us.”

  He nodded and dragged her ass to the edge of the counter. He pushed her underwear out of the way, and then, all at once, with a heave and a thrust that happened so quickly she could only cry out, he had sunk fully into her. Lifting her legs, she hooked them around his hips, crossing her ankles on his back. One of her clogs fell off and thumped to the floor.