Caught By the Convicts by Jessa Kane
Chapter 6
Ruger
The three ofus are standing across the street from an old house on the outskirts of town. Sunrise is still a couple of hours away, so the dilapidated one-story is lit by the moon. The porch is sagging in the center, the rain gutter hangs off the house, creaking every time it’s pushed by the wind. The lawn is overgrown and littered with wrappers and broken glass.
Wendy stands between me and Klay and it’s easy to feel the tension radiating off her. At first, I wasn’t sure why Klay insisted on us coming here, but I think I understand now. He wants Wendy to face her fear.
When I was younger, I had a fear of the water. My mother never took us swimming or to the beach growing up, so the water of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor was just this bottomless, murky, foreign thing. In the early days, when we used to pickpocket for cash, I refused to operate too close to the water, worried the black depth of it would suck me in. One night, Klay broke us into a swimming pool at a motel and taught me how to swim in that clipped, no-nonsense way of his. After that, my phobia was gone. He claimed he only taught me to swim so I could be a more effective pickpocket, but I think it was more than that. Klay fixes what’s broken inside of everyone else so he can ignore his own grief and anger, inflicted by his father.
That’s not to say he doesn’t want to help Wendy. He does—badly.
I’m watching Klay right now, the way he looks at her. It’s pure possessiveness and wonder and lust. It makes my blood pound hot. Makes me lick my lips to catch the flavor of her pussy, too. God, the way her delicate little muscles flexed when she came…I’ve never been more gratified in my life. To hear her sobs and know they were for me. I could remain on my knees using my tongue on her every day for eternity and never get tired of licking.
Klay’s hand lifts, his fingers threading through Wendy’s long, loose hair. He grips the strands slowly. “Easy, baby,” he murmurs against her ear.
She takes a deep inhale. In response to her shoulders relaxing, mine do the same. I’m attuned to our woman. Territorial. Worshipful. Klay and I have been loose ends walking around for years. Wendy arrived and braided the three of us together. Now we’re stronger. We’re no longer flapping in the wind without a purpose or care.
She’sour purpose.
I watch in total astonishment as her hand reaches for mine and we lock fingers. Now she’s bracketed by men, felons who are twice her size. Both of us zeroed in on her, aching to anticipate her needs. My hunger is rising to the surface again. I need her. I need them both. But I put a stranglehold on the lust and focus on the moment at hand. This is important. Klay has a plan for absolving Wendy of her fear and there will be no satisfaction until it’s done.
“Let’s go inside,” Klay says.
After a beat, Wendy nods and I don’t think, I just sweep her up into my arms, refusing to let her walk across that filthy front yard. My boots crunch in through the glass and debris on our way to the porch steps. We go up and stop in front of the door. Klay tests the handle and finds it locked, so he takes a step back and kicks the door in, splintering the wood around the hinges. My cock fills with blood at the show of strength, stiffening, and I can’t help but lower my mouth to Wendy’s, groaning into a kiss. She opens her soft lips for me, her fingernails rasping along my unshaven jaw—and I realize two important things.
One, I can’t ignore any longer than I’m attracted to Klay.
It’s like trying to ignore an erupting volcano. It’s not going away.
Two, the passion between the three of us is circular. Flowing both directions. When I hunger for one of them, I hunger for both. It’s never for one now—it’s always for two. Arriving in Wendy’s bedroom tonight, I was horny as sin for her. But as that feeling rose and took shape, it included them both, naturally. And the same thing is happening now. As I break the kiss reluctantly and carry her over the threshold into the abandoned house like the precious cargo she is, she reaches her other hand out for Klay and it satisfies my soul to watch their hands connect. There’s no jealousy. There’s only this sense of rightness between the three of us.
It’s right. It’s permanent.
She’s ours.
I settle Wendy onto her feet and resume my post on her right side. Each of her hands holds one of ours, a slight tremor passing through her. That little tremble causes us both a great deal of distress. Klay’s throat flexes with an anxious swallow and my temples pound, a knot forming beneath my Adam’s apple. This girl should never be anything but happy, goddammit, and this place is doing the opposite to her with its moldy smell and rotted floorboards.
We trail our mouths up her shoulders, along the slope of her neck, a touch meant to comfort—and it eventually works. She stops shaking.
“That was my room. Back that way.” She tips her chin toward a dark hallway leading from the kitchen where we’re standing toward the rear of the small house. “He would…leave me a loaf of bread and some water. Lock the door and leave…sometimes for two weeks. Longer. Once I managed to pick the lock and get out. It made him furious. Furious. Because it was all about control. That’s still what it’s about for him.”
Klay’s jaw looks ready to snap. Mine is much the same. God help this man if we ever come across him. I’ll strangle him with his entrails in her honor…
The thought is halfway through my mind when I spy a duffel bag in the corner of the kitchen. It’s black, blending in, but the metallic zipper winks at me from across the room. With a final kiss to Wendy’s shoulder, I disentangle myself and cross to the bag, hunkering down in front of it, noting it’s not covered in dust like everything else in the house. “He’s been here.”
Wendy stiffens.
Klay’s gaze flies to the back hallway. “Stay here,” he instructs her, disappearing into the black before I can stop him. He should have let me do the searching. My back teeth grind together, but I relax when he emerges safely a moment later. “Empty. But no doubt he’ll come back.” He studies Wendy and moment, then moves to the kitchen sink, opening the cabinet below. He crouches down, hesitating for a beat before reaching inside and bringing a bottle through the opening. In the near darkness, I can’t read the label, but when he pops off the top, I can’t the distinct scent of lighter fluid.
Slowly, Klay moves back in front of Wendy, putting it in her hand.
Then he cups her cheek and speaks to her in that hypnotic way of his, tone low and rich. Impossible to ignore and easy to get lost in. “You can’t get rid of the memories, Wendy, but you can replace them with something else. Something you controlled.” He slides a booklet of matches out of his back pocket, tossing them onto the kitchen table. “Don’t remember this place as your prison. Remember it as a pile of ash. Burn it all down.”
