But there was nothing I could do about it now.
The cackling of my seemingly elated grandmother coming from up the stairs told me that. And the low rumble of Gage’s voice that hit me right between the legs.
Yes, the biker I’d fucked last night after he’d finished killing a man was now making my eighty-year-old grandmother laugh at eight in the morning.
I was not a person to use this term in the sense of the word, but I was fucked.
And I had no choice but to go lumbering up the stairs like I was the eighty-year-old in the equation.
The sight upon entering my kitchen stopped me in my tracks. I literally slammed into the air like I’d hit an invisible wall.
Because Gage was in my kitchen, pouring coffee—I always had some on hand for Amy these days—for my grandmother, who was sitting on a barstool with her back to me.
That in itself wasn’t exactly an earth-shattering thing.
It was Gage.
In my kitchen.
Doing something as domestic as pouring coffee. After turning up on my doorstep hours before covered in someone else’s blood. After he’d fucked me on the very floor I was standing on right then.
Now he was in my kitchen, making coffee, making my grandmother laugh.
Oh, and he was shirtless.
Shirtless.
It was impressive last night. Feeling the ridges of his abs, raking my nails down them—my stomach dipped with the faint red scabs on his midsection serving as evidence of it—feasting my eyes on them in the dim light. I hadn’t exactly been in a position to study them correctly since I’d been half insane with desire the entire night. And I’d been rushing this morning.
But now, with the sunlight of the early morning streaming in, illuminating every ridge, every inch of his exposed and ink skin, I didn’t quite know what to do with myself.
Actually I did know what to do with myself. My fingers itched to hold a paintbrush, charcoal, a freaking Magic Marker, anything so I could reproduce this moment a thousand times over.
He was art.
There was no other way to describe him.
Not beautiful.
No, he was too hard for that. Not in a way that described his sculpted muscles, but in the way pain had etched itself into his skin.
The scars decorating his arms were so ugly that they had a rhythm to them. A flow that turned them hauntingly beautiful on his sculpted arms. Something so hard to look at it caused me pain. A kind of pain I would be loath to live without.
A pain that would become an addiction.
Yes, he was art.
Of the most brutal and horrible kind.
The greatest art was always created with the greatest and deepest kind of pain, after all.
His eyes met mine in a way that told me he’d known I was there for far longer than the seconds he held my gaze. Though those seconds could’ve been lifetimes. Not full of that strange awkwardness that came with the morning after. When everything was strange and impersonal—in my past experience, anyway—and the fact that you had been intimate the night before only created more distance in the morning.
No, there was none of that distance, though I might’ve craved it because of the intensity passing between us. One that scared me more than anything ever had in my life.
“Will,” he said, his voice low and husky.
I jerked in response. My entire body actually spasmed with the muscle memory of that rough voice in my ear while he pounded into me.
He saw it, my reaction, seemed to sense the erotic direction my mind had gone, because his eyes darkened and his jaw hardened.
“Babe, come here,” he demanded with a tone so dripping with sex it should’ve been illegal. Especially with my freaking grandmother sitting between us.
That should’ve given me pause, her presence. Should’ve made me hold onto common logic and appropriate behavior and seat myself beside her, be pleasant, civilized, and with the island between Gage and me. A physical barrier.
But there was no pause after his command.
I moved immediately, my body responding to his order the exact same way it had last night, without hesitation. I was rounding the island before my mind could catch up with me, and I stuttered in my step just before I made it to Gage, intending on stopping short of the muscled, scarred and shirtless Adonis in my freaking kitchen.
Of course he wasn’t going to let that happen, his eyes narrowing, moving so his hands circled my hip and yanked me into his side, his mouth coming down on mine.
I stiffened when his intention became clear. Yes, my grandmother was pretty worldly and easygoing, but I wasn’t about to kiss a shirtless man she’d just met right in front of her. Plus, I hadn’t brushed my teeth.
But the second his mouth hit mine, everything in me melted. I forgot my grandmother’s presence. Forgot the possibility of morning breath. Forgot the freaking world.