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

  Ronin simply held her close, leaning his head against hers, and was still. Only their breaths made sound, only their heaving chests moved.

  Time seemed to pause as they did. Lorraine was afraid to move, afraid to break the moment and discover it was fantasy. This felt right. After so long, this still felt right.

  Then, ending their timeless stillness, Ronin’s hands moved from her hips, under her sweater, lifting it up her sides. She relaxed her arms and let him pull the knitted cotton up, over her head, and away. Then she reached back and unhooked her bra and rid herself of that, too.

  He was thick and hard inside her; she could feel him pulse with even her slightest movement, and yet he seemed in no hurry at all. When she dropped her arms again over his shoulders, he put his hands around them and pushed them to her sides. Then, staring intently, his brow furrowed, he set his hands on her chest, above her breasts, and spread them wide. Slowly, in tandem, he slid them across, over her shoulders and down her arms, his gaze shifting back and forth. When his hands reached her wrists, he closed his fingers around them and then slid back up, so slowly, as if he were trying to make his callused palms remember the feel of her skin.

  When his hands reached her chest again, he finally moved down and covered her breasts. Her nipples had been hard and aching for his touch since before she’d taken off her coat, and she couldn’t help but moan and bend backward, pushing them into his palms.

  She knew that she looked different from the way he would remember. She wasn’t well endowed, but gravity had had its way a bit nonetheless. And she’d nursed Cameron for two years. As a young woman, she’d been a pert, large A—she’d called them A-pluses and thought her wit charming. Now, at nearly fifty, she was a less pert, small B. B-minuses.

  Ronin seemed transfixed, whatever their size. He stared and held her, with the same seemingly limitless patience he’d found as soon as he was seated inside her. She didn’t share his patience. The intensity of her need for him had tightened her nipples to sharp, almost painful points, and she put her hands over his and squeezed. She needed him to move. She wanted to feel their bodies moving together, traveling the same road, headed to the same place.

  He pushed her backwards, forcing her to lie on the steel countertop. With his hands on her breasts and his eyes searing into hers, he finally began to rock his hips. Slowly. So very slowly, he pulled out and then pushed back in. Then again, with a control perfect and infuriating.

  Lorraine closed her eyes and arched her back, swinging and twisting her hips, trying to move him more, to make him need more, faster. His hands moved on her, his fingers took hold of her nipples and squeezed and pulled, and she cried out and flexed her legs around him, throwing her arms over her head. “Ronin, please!”

  This control of his was new and unfamiliar. They had been wild in their youth, loud and athletic and sweaty. As much as this buildup of tension and need excited her, she felt wistful, too. She wanted him to lose control in her. She wanted his need to consume him as it had in the past, the way her need was ready to consume her now.

  She pushed his restraining hands away and sat up, bringing their bodies tightly together. Holding his head in her hands, she kissed him, hard, her tongue seeking and finding his, twisting and writhing with it. She pulled back a little and bit down on his lip, and then she moved for them, driving her hips against his.

  He grunted harshly, and then his hand was in her hair, yanking her head back. He stared at her, and she at him.

  “Please,” she whispered. “Just let go. I want to feel you let go with me.”

  Ronin hooked his arms under her legs and pulled, canting her hips upward, deepening his seat inside her. When she gasped and nodded, trying to encourage him, he flexed backward, pulling out. Then, at last, he thrust with force and speed, hard and deep, a bestial groan grating from his throat as their bodies slammed together. That groan was his most eloquent utterance since they’d met again.

  “Yes! God!” she cried. This was what she remembered. She twisted her arms around his neck, holding him as close as she could get him, and sought his kiss again.

  He stepped back from the counter, holding her fully in his arms, and rocked his hips, pounding with growing force again and again and again until Lorraine felt the beautiful flare and reach of her body, what she’d always thought of as a flowering, that meant the onset, the onslaught, of her climax. She sped up her own gyrations, working with him to make every connection between them as deep as it could be.

  Even muffled by their joined mouths, her moans filled the room and seemed to bounce off every hard, bright surface. The release she’d been striving for arrived almost unexpectedly, and she threw her head back with a wrenching cry.

  While she was still tense and twitching, caught in the jaws of her own ecstasy, Ronin went utterly, rigidly still. She opened her eyes; his were closed, and the muscles in his neck and jaw were red and raised in taut cords.

  Finally, they both relaxed, so quickly that Ronin took an unsteady sidestep and then set her back on the countertop. Still inside her, he dropped his head to her shoulder with a sigh so heavy it seemed sad.

  She put her hands on his head, stroking her palms over the short, soft, scruff of his hair. “Roe?”

  He sighed again. Without lifting his head, he muttered, “This is not what I meant to do when I came here tonight.”

  Lorraine stilled her hands. Her heart seemed to stop, too. She’d been feeling a tinge of hopefulness, like there was so much connection still between them that they would be able to overcome the past, even the past that still suffused the present. But those words didn’t sound hopeful.

  “What did you mean to do?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Ronin didn’t know what he’d meant to do. Just see her, he supposed. Hear what she had to say.

  What he hadn’t meant to do was take her on the cold steel of her restaurant kitchen, with most of their clothes still on.

  Seeing her tonight, intending to see her, anticipating it, had uncovered the past he’d buried, not just his love for her but the feeling of that love—the desire of it, the life of it.

  The reason he’d fucked her, though, was simple and ridiculous: she’d turned away from him, leading him back here to her kitchen, and he’d seen the fine, short hairs at the nape of her elegant neck, those too fragile to be caught up in her messy, clipped coil, the way the gossamer strands had curled at her ear, against her porcelain skin, and the funky beaded earring dangling from her lobe—he’d seen that and been racked with more need than he could manage. Simple and silly as that.

  Ronin wasn’t one to prevaricate, and he wasn’t one to speak empty words. Without a way to explain what he’d meant, he didn’t answer Rainy’s question at all.

  Rainy. He hadn’t wanted to call her that; there was power in names, and he’d sensed the power of a turning point if he’d picked up the habit of his own name for her. As far as he knew, she’d been Rainy to no one but him.

  He’d been right, too. As soon as he’d said that name out loud, the reserve he’d felt had shattered. He’d said it to shatter his reserve, to let loose his need.

  Pressing a gentle kiss to her mouth, he rocked his hips back and slid out of her. Then he put himself back into his jeans and closed up. Rainy pushed her skirt over her legs, looking self-conscious.

  He picked her bra and sweater up from the floor and handed them to her. As she slid the bra up her arms, slender and freckled—she was still so beautiful to him—she asked, “Are you sorry?”

  “For what we just did? No.”

  Neither said more as she pulled her sweater on and he buttoned his shirt. She hopped off the counter and collected her hippie shoes, sliding freckled feet into them. As he closed the last button, she came to him and cupped her hands over his. She wore wide, etched silver rings, one on each middle finger, each almost the length of the finger it encircled, and silver bracelets on both wrists. Pearly white polish covered her short nails.

  “We need to talk,
Ronin. We really do. Before we go any further, wherever we’re headed.”

  Not liking the sound of that at all, Ronin took a deep breath and prepared himself to withstand any pain he could imagine she might be ready to deal him. “Okay. Talk.”

  She took his hands and led him to a small white table in the corner of the room, with four metal chairs arranged around it.

  For all the warm, rustic glow of the dining area of the restaurant, this kitchen was ultramodern, white and gleaming. On the steel countertop that ran through the center of the room, and which she’d just hopped down from, were heaped fresh fruits and vegetables and other market foods. Shelved above that island were jars and bottles that he assumed contained spices and other cooking ingredients.

  Ronin wondered if all that food on the counter was meant to be their dinner.

  As Rainy sat him at that table, he also wondered if it mattered. He didn’t like her expression—she seemed miles away from the closeness they’d just shared. So he breathed and girded himself. He kept his focus and didn’t entertain conjecture. Whatever she had to say, he would be calm.

  Before she sat down, she went back to the island and picked up a tablet and brought it over with her. She sat across from him and tapped the screen a few times. Ronin watched, keeping his mind clear. Waiting.

  “I’ve been trying to think of the right way to tell you this, but there is no right way. Not anymore. I screwed that up a long time ago. So I’m just going to tell you. But first, I’m going to tell you this. I still love you. Ronin or Eddie, it doesn’t matter. I love you. I have all these years. I knew that before we saw each other again. I’ve always known it. What that means—I don’t know. It depends on how you feel, I think. But I wanted you to know.”

  Though the idea that she still loved him plucked at his heart, he said nothing. He waited.

  She tapped the tablet again and brought up a photograph. He was looking at it upside-down, but he could see that it was a close-up shot, like a selfie, of Rainy with another man. A young man.

  Turning the tablet around, she pushed it toward him. “That’s me with my son, Cameron. He’s twenty-four years old.”

  Ronin studied the picture. It was recent; Rainy, smiling happily, beautifully, looked exactly the same, even the same earrings. The man arm-in-arm with her—her son—was several inches taller. He had his mother’s hair and freckles. She’d had her redheaded baby. With someone else. That hurt; no point in denying it.

  He looked more closely.

  Her son had grey eyes. A heavy brow and a strong jaw. A nose with a hook at the bridge.

  Not unlike his own Slavic features.

  Then the last thing she’d said sank in: her son was twenty-four years old.

  Ronin brought his eyes up and fixed them on the woman sitting across from him. “No.”

  “I’m so s—”

  “Don’t.”

  She swallowed back that fucking useless word, and Ronin tried to breathe and keep his mind clear. Tried. Didn’t succeed.

  He had a son. He’d missed his son’s whole life. She’d stolen that from him.

  “I want to ask you to listen. I can’t explain, nothing can explain away what I did, but I can tell you what I was thinking. It was all wrong and stupid, I know. But I can try to—”

  “No.” He cut her off again. “Does he know?”

  “He knows that the man who raised him isn’t his biological father. He still has some memories of it being just the two of us, so he never thought Douglas was his father. He knows I love his father. And…” She paused and swallowed, and when she spoke again, her voice shook. “And he knows you don’t—didn’t—know about him. I never let him think you’d abandoned him. I was as honest as I could be with him.”

  “What does he call…” He couldn’t make either the words ‘your ex-husband’ or the name ‘Douglas’ come out of his mouth. He’d been jealous of the man before; now he felt something much darker. For that man and for this woman, as well. “What does he call the man who raised him?”

  He saw her take a deep breath, like she needed strength to answer, so he knew what she’d say before she said it. “Dad.”

  Ronin stood up.

  “Ronin, please,” Lorraine whispered.

  He ignored her and left.

  ~oOo~

  The only thing Ronin could do was ride.

  Nothing else, he knew, would burn off the bitterness in his head and chest. He would ride until he could make himself quiet again, and then he would turn his mind inward and think.

  He rode northward, onto Mulholland Drive and into the Hollywood Hills, up into the canyons, turning off in Laurel Canyon and taking every twisty, convoluted lane he could find. He took hairpin after hairpin, hill after hill, at speed, forcing his bike nearly into a pretzel, leaning so far into some of the turns that his knee could have touched down.

  A Harley wasn’t a bike for this kind of riding, but he rode only Harleys for personal use, and he could make any bike do almost anything he wanted. On this night, what he wanted was to ride wild. He needed it.

  For hours, he roared through the hills and canyons, circumventing cars when he had to, pushing himself and his bike to the limit, but the roar in his head wouldn’t quiet. He hadn’t felt anger this deep and consuming in years. Twenty-five years, to be precise. Not since the last time he’d felt the sting of Lorraine Milligan’s betrayal.

  She’d borne their child, their son, and kept him from him. For his entire childhood. His son was a man he’d never met.

  Ronin opened the throttle and rocketed into a one-eighty turn. Coming out of it, he hit gravel that had scattered onto the road from the scant shoulder. The tires skidded and slid out, and he laid the bike down.

  As a stunt rider, he knew how to drop a bike, and even as distracted as he was, he felt it the second he’d lost it. He let go, pulled his legs clear, and let it slide off without him.

  Then he sat on the asphalt and rested his arms on his knees. He just sat there, on the road, ten feet from his downed bike. The air in the canyons always smelled richly of earth and eucalyptus.

  A car came around the turn, at a cautious speed, and rocked to an abrupt halt. Its headlights cast Ronin in a blinding halogen glare, but still he sat where he was.

  The driver’s door opened, and the driver stood. “You okay, dude? Jesus—you hurt?” He sounded like a young man, but Ronin couldn’t tell; the lights obscured him almost completely.

  Physically unharmed, Ronin stood and brushed off his jeans. “I’m good.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “It’s cool. You need help with your bike?”

  It wasn’t a bad enough drop to do more than scuff up the paint and chrome, Ronin knew. “Nah.” He walked over and grabbed the handlebars. Then he squatted low and used his legs to get the Breakout back on its tires. “Thanks. I’m good.”

  He mounted and fired the engine up. Satisfied, the driver got back in his car, and Ronin waved a thanks and rode on.

  The drop, and the exchange with a concerned stranger, broke into Ronin’s fury and allowed a slim slant of perspective to shine through. He didn’t hold onto anger. Anger was a cancer. Nothing positive came from holding anger or from acting on it; he’d learned that long ago.

  He would ride on, clear his head, and then he would think. That had been his rough plan anyway. Now, though, he could sense that there was a distance he could ride that would clear his head, and he wouldn’t need to get all the way to the Arctic Circle to do it. He headed out of the hills, toward the Pacific Coast Highway. If he was going to find a place that wasn’t his own back yard to sit and contemplate, the coast was where he’d find it.

  ~oOo~

  By the time he got to Point Mugu, Ronin thought he was ready to sit and be quiet, to trust his mind to do its work. He pulled off near the beach and then walked down to the water. The tide was high and the sea was rough, crashing against the rocks in a show of elemental power. Around all that sturm und
drang, though, the beach was quiet; it was late, and even the campers in the park campground had settled in for the night.

  Ronin climbed up on a likely rock, far enough from the surf that only sea spray could reach him, and made himself comfortable. Though his incident in the canyon hadn’t been bad, he was a little sore; he’d said goodbye to fifty a few years earlier, and his body didn’t slough off its aches and pains the way it once had. He’d been sore for days after that jump-drop combination stunt on the day he’d seen Lorraine again for the first time.

  Lorraine. Rainy. His only love. The mother of his child.

  And the perpetrator of the worst betrayals and losses of his life. Even to this day. She’d told him she thought that their meeting again must have been destined. Destined for what? Pain? Heartbreak he’d put away decades ago? To feel a loss he hadn’t even known he’d suffered?