by Luis, Maria
His hips buck forward.
His fingers shove me down, making me take even more.
I choke on his length, eyes watering, eagerness rising as I shift on my knees.
It’s a power move on his part. But of the two of us, I’m the one wielding the torch. I love it. Love the way he silently begs for me, with his thrusting hips and deep, guttural groans. Love the way his fingers flex in my hair, as though he’s desperate to maintain control but can’t help letting go to the sensation of me working him over.
Saxon may be the king of his emotions everywhere else in his life, but in this moment, with my lips moving down his length, then back up, over and over again, he’s lost to the chaos. He’s lost in me.
Giving him one last twist at his base, I pull back, canting my head for a picture of total innocence. “Tell me, Saxon . . . are you feeling scared?”
His lips firm, a promise of retribution manifesting when he fists my hair and growls, “Face the wall.”
I raise my brows, egging him on. “Shall I drop trou? Or would you prefer to do the honors?”
A dark cloud washes over him. “If you were anyone else—”
“But I’m not.” I stand, already shoving the denim and my knickers to my thighs, then farther down to my knees and ankles, before kicking them away. I keep my boots on. “I’m me and you’re you.”
“And that means what?” he bites out. “Good and evil?”
“No, fire and ice.” I smooth a hand over my belly, delighting in the way he tracks the pass of my fingers like a predator does with its prey. His damp shirt clings to his torso, doing a piss-poor job of hiding the twitch of his pectoral muscles when I inch my fingers down my body, tantalizing him with the promise of what lies between my legs. “I breathe, you inhale, and we both go up in flames.”
Leaning forward, I take a tentative step toward him. Hand to his strong chest, my fingers graze the corded muscles of his shoulder.
Do it, Isla, take the risk.
He watches me with hooded, wary eyes. Danger lurks in those green-yellow depths, but I take the plunge anyway, testing him with a brush of my thumb over his mouth.
His hand claps around my wrist, yanking me away. “Don’t.”
Steadily, I meet his gaze. “Steal a kiss from me.”
He stares at my mouth. Looks at it as if he can picture the kiss now—my lips pliant beneath his, absorbing every thrust of his tongue, every nip of his teeth. Saxon’s kiss would be just as savage as the man himself. Give it to me, please, I want to beg. But then the moment is gone, utterly obliterated, as he whips me around so that I’m facing the wall. I reach out to the brick to steady myself, only for his palm to land on my spine and lower me, then lower me even more.
The horizontal position exposes me completely. Legs spread wide, I feel the chill in the air along my wet folds, then hear the telltale sound of a foiled wrapper ripping open.
Oh, God, this is happening. Really happening.
Me, Saxon Priest, sex.
Sex in an old mobile shop. Sex on the run from the police. Sex with the man who would despise me if he learned that I’m the one who killed the king, then allowed the blame to sit on his shoulders.
The head of Saxon’s thick cock grazes my core, and my pulse leaps with anticipation. “Last chance to walk away.”
There’s no walking away, not when I’m already feeling the stirrings of a new addiction. “Ruin me—take me—”
He does, on a single, hard stroke that has my fingers raking the wall and my head falling forward with a startled cry. My palm screams in pain from the knife wound and my core aches from stretching for a man like Saxon Priest and my heart . . . my heart flourishes.
Calloused fingers stake their claim down my spine before framing my hips in a bruising grip. He holds me like I might run away at any second. He slams into me, over and over again, with the ferocity of a man who’s been starved of the sun for years and has only just stepped under its warmth again.
I’m unraveling.
Desire floods my system and I moan, turning my head to bite down on my arm.
“No,” Saxon grunts harshly, his fingers sinking into my hair and dragging my head back, “let me hear you.”
I can’t deny him.
Another cry falls from my mouth as his fingers tangle with my hair, keeping my spine arched and my head thrown back.
Cold. Callous. But so damn good.
This—this is what I was missing with Stephen. No matter what suggestions I gave to my ex, he never delivered. Or maybe I’m looking at it all wrong. Maybe it’s less that he didn’t deliver and more that my body simply was unwilling to respond, as though it’s always known that someone better, someone more life-altering, waited just around the corner.
Someone like Saxon.
He fucks me as I predicted—with tightly leashed control that demands my body and soul obey him—but with an edge that I never could have anticipated. He churns his hips, moving into me faster, deeper, dredging up sensations I’ve never felt in my entire life. He folds himself over my back, the dampness from his shirt passing a chill through to my body, before tucking his hand around my waist so that he can reach down and flick my clit in time with his strokes.
My heart rate hammers in my temple, tunneling my vision, until all there is, is us, this moment, the fact that I’ve let Saxon Priest inside me, and I never want him to leave.
“Harder,” I whisper, panting, “I want everything.”
He pinches my clit, ripping a cry from my throat. “Begging already, Miss Quinn?”
“Yes. Yes”—the flat of his finger circles me, then retreats, dancing over my clit in barely-there caresses that drive me wild and turn my cries into strangled moans—“Saxon. Saxon, oh my God, I’m going to come. Please. Don’t stop. Please.”
Thrusting harder, he dips his finger along my folds, gathering more of my wetness, before returning to my clit. He rubs, applying more delicious pressure, and my knees threaten to give out beneath me. Another second of this . . . I can’t. I’m going to crumble where I stand. I’m going to burst apart at the seams. He fucks me and I . . . I plead, shamelessly, for more of his cock, for more of the rippling heat sweeping over me like I’ve been thrown in a furnace and left to burn alive.
His mouth grazes the space between my shoulder blades. “Tell me what you are, Isla.”
Right now? He wants to have this talk right now? I’m on the verge of the most epic orgasm of my life and he wants to argue, and I want to come, and hell, knowing him, he’ll probably be the sadistic arsehole that he is and stop if I don’t answer quickly enough.
I hate that I know him as well as that.
Reaching down, I graze my hand over his to ensure he keeps stroking me. I feel his dark chuckle against my back, before I answer: “Ruthless. Broken.” A small pause that tugs at my conscience. “A killer.”
And then he bites my shoulder—I bite back, he’d promised—and growls only three words: “No, a warrior.”
My lungs squeeze and my clit throbs and his next thrust hits the exact spot that I need to instantly shatter. I come, shouting his name and squeezing so tightly around his length that he orgasms a beat later.
He’s silent when he comes.
No groaning. No frantic words slipping off his tongue.
But I feel his shattered breathing against the nape of my neck, rustling my hair, and I feel his cock pulse inside me, and for Saxon Priest, a man who allegedly has no heart, I know he’s given me something today that no other person has ever had from him—a fractured piece of his soul, battered and bruised, but a piece that’s no less beautiful had it been shiny and new.
22
Saxon
“Ring me when you get to her flat,” I say into the receiver, my gaze trained on the woman staring out the window, her fingers listlessly braiding the heavy strands of her hair. “As soon as night falls, I’ll bring Isla.”
On the other end of the line, Guy curses. “Christ, Saxon. This is a problem.”
<
br /> I hear everything that he isn’t saying: Isla Quinn is the problem.
It’s not anything I haven’t thought myself since fucking her an hour ago, despite the fact that we both vowed that this would never happen.
As if sensing my stare, she turns ever so slightly, glancing over at me with big blue eyes and a small, worried smile playing at her lips. Fuck. I wish she’d fly at me, arms raised to beat me down for taking advantage of her. I took her like an animal, up against the wall, still fully clothed while she’d been completely bare. Her anger I could handle, even the inevitable disgust at having let me touch her, but that hesitant quirk of her lips is like crossing the River Styx, knowing that paradise will always be forever out of reach.
I’ll remember the shape of her lips for the rest of my life. A sharp Cupid’s bow up top, a plump lower lip that trembles when she’s on the verge of orgasm.
The first pair to ever wrap around my cock and suck me deep into a warm, wet mouth.
The first pair to ever ask me to steal a kiss.
A kiss that you couldn’t deliver.
“I know,” I mutter to Guy, threading my fingers through my hair and nearly ripping out the strands. Gripping the mobile, I twist away, seeking a reprieve from the lust hammering my body and demanding that I strip Isla naked all over again. “Don’t you think that I know that?”
“Right now, I’m not sure that you know anything.”
He’s probably right.
Everything that I am is solely focused on the blonde warrior who killed a man today, in order to save herself, then got down on her knees to offer me the likes of salvation to which I’ve never known.
Stop thinking about her.
Unlikely, especially since I have her heady scent still filling my nose. It’s on my skin, my clothes. Even now, I can smell her off my fingers from when I circled her clit and made her scream. Like some possessive caveman marked by lust, I’m tempted to never wash myself clean again.
“We’ll talk it over when I get us out of here tonight.”
Guy blows out a frustrated sigh that rattles in my ears. “Whatever you think that you’re doing, be done with it, you hear me? Damien’s got news for us—about Alfie Barker—and then we have to figure out the mess that is your bloody face all over the goddamn internet. You’ve fucked us, Saxon. Absolutely and completely fucked us.”
Scrubbing a hand over my jaw, I clench my teeth tight. “Ring me as soon as you have Peter and Josie.”
Hanging up the phone, I toss it on the rickety table that sits in the center of the room. Unlike the ground floor, it’s not so dirty up here. Musty, yes, with furniture that had its heyday in the seventies and a rug that’s torn and discolored, but not necessarily unclean. It’s one of Holyrood’s many hideouts within the City.
The fact that I brought Isla here is another problem all on its own.
“What did he say?” Isla’s voice drags my gaze away from the table to where she’s standing, a finished braid now falling over one shoulder. The hairstyle makes her look younger, innocent, especially with her face scrubbed free of makeup. After today’s events, it’s safe to say that Isla Quinn wouldn’t know innocence if it bit her in the ass.
Ruin me . . . take me . . .
At the memory of her begging for more, my cock twitches in my trousers and I drop my hands to the table. “He’s heading over to grab them now.”
Grasping the back of a chair, Isla falls into it, raw relief sweeping through her expression. “Oh, thank God. I wasn’t sure if . . . Of course, I’d hoped—”
“My brother might be an ass, but he would never leave two kids to fend for themselves.”
She bobs her head, nodding quickly. “Like I said, I hoped. But your brother and I, we didn’t exactly get off on the right foot.”
It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell her that she and Guy will never be on the right foot. It’s simply not possible. Despite what happened today, we Priests fit solidly under the loyalist umbrella while Isla . . .
I drag my hands over my face. Christ, this is a mess.
Hesitant as I am to bring Isla and her siblings to another one of Holyrood’s hideouts, this one a terrace house in Camden, I don’t see another option rearing its head. Staying in Stepney, so close to Queen Mary, won’t work. Returning to The Bell & Hand, any time in the near future, might as well be the kiss of death. It’ll be the first place the police visit, and it’ll be up to Guy to hold down the fort.
All this time, I’ve managed to walk the tightrope between opening the door to anti-loyalists while still maintaining my position within London’s social landscape. It was Damien who had to hide at the Palace, for fear of someone catching him—not me. Ten fucking years of running the pub, and now this.
Granted, once Damien has the chance to comb through the Met’s databases and strip us of any charges, it might be a different story. But even then, how would I explain to Isla that suddenly we’re free to do as we please?
You can’t.
Pinching the bridge of my nose, I draw in a breath. “According to Guy, my face is already all over the news. A possible suspect—not confirmed.”
Isla’s lips settle in a firm line. “And mine?”
“Not yet. Either the survivor didn’t get a good look at you or—”
“Professor Coney had photographs of me.”
My head snaps back. “What?”
“Photographs.” She splays her hands wide, gesturing at her thighs. “He dumped them in my lap right before he tried to strangle me—”
“He did what,” I bark, low, furious, firing away from the table to stalk toward her. “Explain.”
“What else is there to explain?” She motions to her neck, and my gut lurches with barely subdued rage. “He tried to kill me and I . . . I killed him instead.” She swallows visibly, then briefly closes her eyes. “What matters is that he knew who I was, Saxon. And I knew him.”
Coming to stand before her, I drop to my haunches. Tempted as I am to lay a hand on her leg, I keep my fingers locked on my knee. Fucking her once is not a green light to go for a second round. And, considering how epically dysfunctional our relationship already is, taking her again would prove to be the very definition of insanity.
Find the calm. Find the ice. Find yourself.
“How?” I demand, my voice emerging with all the softness of granite.
With only the cast of natural light from the narrow window to illuminate her face, Isla’s blue eyes appear darker, a turbulent gray, like the skies that drenched us this morning. “That first day when I came to apply for a position, I ran into a man on the front steps. I thought nothing of it. There are thousands of people that you cross paths with, in a single lifetime, that never mean a thing.”
“But?”
“But I saw him again the next day, when you asked to meet.” She leans forward in her chair, propping her elbows on her thighs and clasping her hands together, careful of the clean cloth that I wound around her injured hand when we came upstairs. “Déjà vu, Saxon. The same man, the same feeling that I had when I walked in the pub after sidestepping around him. Ian Coney didn’t just stop by The Bell & Hand—he was actively staking it out.”
“Fuck.”
Her thumbs crisscross restlessly over each other. “I don’t know how many others like him are out there, just waiting until they can make their move on you. I don’t think . . . I don’t think Professor Coney is an isolated instance, though. You and your brothers are notorious among anti-loyalists. And since you run the pub yourselves, everyone knows where you are at nearly any given time of the day.”
Isla isn’t wrong.
It’s something we actively considered when we agreed to open The Bell & Hand ten years ago. At the time, it seemed like a brilliant idea. We needed a front that gave anti-loyalists a reason to trust us with their secrets. But in building that repertoire, we simultaneously alienated the group of people who should have trusted us implicitly, if only they knew the truth.
Bloody tan
gled webs and all that shit.
Feeling my throat tighten, I ask, “You mentioned pictures. What were they of?”
“The ones of just you, or the few that included the two of us?”
The fact that the bastard managed to sneak not only pictures of myself but ones of Isla . . . If Ian Coney weren’t a dead man already, then I’d deliver him straight to the grave. “The latter,” I edge out, curbing my anger.
Isla licks her lips, immediately drawing my attention there.
She wanted a kiss and I . . . panicked, full force. Even if I’d gone for it, I wouldn’t know what to do. It’s a zone I’ve never been welcome to, a paradise that’s remained forever out of reach. And, beyond the practicality of it all, anything more than a quick peck might have allowed her to feel just how misshapen my upper lip is.
Just how ruined I am.
Pushing up to my full height, I retreat to the table and rest my ass against it.
Blinking at me, like she’s confused as to why I abandoned her side so quickly, Isla runs her uninjured palm over her thigh. “The first one was simple enough, just a snapshot of us talking.”
“And the second?”
“The second one is”—grimacing, she sinks her teeth into her bottom lip—“the second one is damning, not so much for us as it is for Father Bootham. Coney caught us going inside the church, Saxon. Being completely honest here: I don’t know how safe it would be for him if we kept seeking him out for information. I don’t even want to think about how many others have caught on already.”
Dammit.
I drop my head back to stare up at the ceiling.
For years, I’ve bided my time, knowing that all the lies we’ve spewed were bound to catch up to us at some point . . . while simultaneously hoping that they never would. The other Holyrood agents have it easier, and we’ve purposely kept it that way. Men like Hamish and Jude—the public would never recognize them if they were spotted on the street because they keep a low profile.
