Page 20 of Deadly Aloha
She must have realized I wasn’t moving, so she whacked her hands against my shoulders in retaliation. But it did not sway me. I was not budging until she understood. “You have no say in my life anymore, Aloiki!”
My back stiffened, and despite the fact that my cock was mostly deflated, I rolled my hips against hers. Masculine triumph roared inside me as I felt the moist mixture of our bodily fluids around my dick. “That’s where you’re wrong, Lu. I’m theonlyperson who gets a say. And I will lock you in my basement before Ieverlet you endanger your life for someone else’s.”
A noise from behind us drew our attention, and the bubble burst. As if realizing we had an audience, and recalling just where we were, Lu let out a loud groan. I had my back to the yard, so I couldn’t tell who was here specifically, but she could. Her head rolled back against the wall, still cushioned by my hand. I could tell she wasn’t embarrassed, though. More than likely, just frustrated.
I felt someone approach us at my back, and in my peripheral vision, saw Tangaloa standing a few feet away. “We cleared the building. The only Bloody Scorpions to get away were the ones with the heroin.”
I nodded once, my eyes never leaving Lu.
“Lu,” Tangaloa said with a nod.
Her jaw ticked. “Tangaloa. Why am I not surprised to see you here?”
“Because you’re usually the smart one of the three of us.”
Her anger rose up again, but this time it pissed me off because it wasn’t directed at me. I jerked her head towards mine, making her look only at me.
Her scowl deepened. “Will you put me down? I can’t talk to you like this.”
I assumed she meant with me still inside her, not our location or audience. “This,” I punched my hips, “is the only way we’ll talk from this moment on, with me so far deep inside you that there is no end, no beginning.”
Under the glow of the streetlamp, I saw it. Her eyes lightened ever so slightly. She liked that. Shewantedme.
But then she started pushing on my shoulders again. Harder, and with enough force that I feared she’d hurt herself if I didn’t step back. Fuck, I hated leaving the warmth of her body. It was like a visceral reaction. My chest twisted, and I knew that feeling wouldn’t go away until I was inside her again.
I stepped out of my ridiculous jeans. I was a bit grateful they were my only pair. It meant Tangaloa couldn’t shove me back into any more. I’d set them on fire first.
Crossing my arms over my chest, I stared at Lu. She was trying to braid her long hair, like that would change her situation in any way. But I knew what it was. She was stalling, trying to gather her thoughts. She used to do it a lot towards the end of our relationship, and I knew a different type of fight wascoming. One that wouldn’t end with us fucking where we stood. Be it home, our bedroom, the bunkhouse, a restaurant, a friend’s house, the movies… No, those fights were the beginning of our end. Where we would both walk off so angry that we couldn’t be in the same room together.
I’d ignored a lot of my father’s lessons since his disappearance. But one I was only just now understanding the wisdom of was his advice to never go to bed angry. If the problem couldn’t be solved before bedtime, then put it aside. Take the time to reaffirm your love for your partner, and then revisit the topic at a later date. Anger in a relationship was like an open wound, if left to fester, it could be deadly.
I would not allow that to happen a second time.
“What was your plan here, Lu? What exactly were you expecting to happen besides getting yourself kidnapped, raped, and murdered?”
At my words, she let her braid fall without tying off the end. I had no idea where the woman pulled hairbands out of, but she always seemed to have an endless supply of them. Even buck-ass naked in the middle of a storage yard. “I was not?—”
“Don’t you dare!” I roared, pointing a finger at her. “You have no idea what you were serving yourself up for or to!”
“And neither do you!” she yelled back. Pointing at the ocean behind us, she said, “And you just killed my best lead! Now I have no idea where they took Nishi because you killed him!” Tears welled up in her eyes, and she quickly wiped them away. “If she dies, I will never forgive you for this.”
My heart cracked at the sight of her tears. I was an asshole, that was a well-known fact, but there was one thing in this world that turned me into a pile of mush—and that was Lu’s tears of sadness. I would doanything, killanyone, to keep from ever seeing that expression on her beautiful face.
I reached for her, my touch gentle this time. But before I could touch her cheek, she swatted my hand away like I was nothing more than an annoying insect.
“Don’t touch me,” she snapped, shaking her head. “I can’t look at you right now. I need to…” More tears started to fall, the cracks in my chest widening into fissures. “I need to get out of here. I have to figure out what to do. I have to…” She let out a noise of frustration. “I can’t look at you,” she repeated, pushing past me.
I turned, and for the first time saw our audience. They were all there, Tangaloa, Kanoa, Virgil, Hiro, the twins, Rory, Aftermath, and Red. From the expressions on their faces, they’d seeneverything. Red couldn’t even look me in the eyes, his face flaming now more than it had when we were in the back of Yooko’s truck.
Lu skidded to a stop a few feet from me. She was glancing down at herself and then around, and it wasn’t until she spotted her shredded panties that she cursed. Then her eyes glanced up. I knew what she was seeing, a whole lot of shirtless men she knew and two men she didn’t wearing shirts.
I had never minded others seeing Lu’s body. In fact, there was a part of me that loved when other men saw her. Because they could see, but they couldn’t touch withoutmypermission. And that was a rare honor. Lu had never been shy about her body. We’d fucked with an audience before, this was nothing new to us. Yet she seemed flustered, out of sorts. In her defense, we’d never fucked around a massacre of dead or dying men before either.
I walked up behind her, putting a gentle hand on the small of her back, but she purposefully turned her face away from me. I was pissed at the action, and would have made her look at me, if not for the streaks of tears still flowing down her cheeks. I knew then that overpowering her with dominance was not what sheneeded right then, and that fucking sucked. Like sand between my asscheeks, the knowledge that she needed space from me chafed.
I looked to Red and Aftermath. “One of you, give her your shirt.” I truly didn’t care which.
Red tried to reach for the hem, but he was so flustered that he couldn’t seem to figure out how to lift it up over his head. Aftermath ended up pulling his shirt off in a swift, single motion, and then walked up to Lu to hand it to her.
