After the Fall: The Fallen Men, #4

by Darling, Giana

  You see, it never did any good to say “no” to a biker when he wanted you. They always found a way to sway your opinion in the end.

  King nipped my earlobe, then trailed love bites down my neck until he reached that delicate junction of my neck and shoulder, and then he bit into me and held on with his teeth as his fingers skated down the placket of my underwear and swept underneath. I moaned despite myself as two long fingers sank inside me and curled, pressing against my tight walls, making me ache and wriggle in his intractable hold.

  “King,” I breathed, half plea and protest.

  “You want me to stop, babe? ’Cause I can feel you rippling around my fingers and soaking my palm. I don’t think you care that anyone’s in the store. I know my dirty girl likes the thrill of getting found out.”

  I panted, too focused on the way his thumb began to strum my clit to protest, especially because what he said was true. It was exhilarating to think that someone might stumble upon us, me pressed between the books and King’s body like a drying flower, his big hand palming my pussy, making obscene wet noises as he played with me and I moaned for him. I loved the idea of people knowing how quickly I dissolved for him, like water to a sugar cube gone sweet and wet at his touch.

  “You want people to see how beautiful you are when I make you come for me,” King practically purred, his voice a raspy texture that abraded my skin wonderfully.

  “I want you to see it,” I told him, bucking back my hips, desperate enough to demand what I wanted, consequences be damned. “But I won’t come unless you’re inside me, so I guess now, the decision is yours.”

  King pressed his smile into my neck and then pulled away to drag my jeans down my legs, leaving them circled around my calves while he did the same to his own. His big palms framed my hips and tipped them so my ass jutted back.

  “Love this ass.” He dragged his rough fingers over the cheek and gave it a short, sharp slap that made me gasp and press my face into the books so I wouldn’t be heard. “Hold on to the shelves, Cress, I’m gonna take you there hard and fast.”

  A moment later, the hot crest of his cock was at my entrance.

  “Brace,” he warned on a growl that made a violent shudder roll down my spine.

  And then he gave me every inch in one smooth, brutal glide that compressed everything in my body toward the apex of my sex. I couldn’t focus on the way my sweating hands slipped over the shelves as I grappled for purchase to push back against his every thrust, or how the heels of my leather booties slipped against the glossy wood floors. Everything I was centered between my legs, and the gorgeous feel of King’s cock sliding thick and unyielding as a blunt-edged weapon in and out of my clasping folds.

  The wet sound of our joining made my ears burn, but I loved it, just as I loved the dirty words King said in that raspy, breathless voice as he took me.

  I loved it even more when he wrapped my hair around his fist once, twice until it was tightly wound and my head was craned backwards, and then he used it to tip me into his hot, waiting mouth. My groan rumbled through our kiss and echoed back to me over his tongue.

  “Like a fuckin’ vise around me. Love this tight pussy, love this sweet, hot mouth,” King praised before sealing his lips over mine once more.

  It was the praise that did me in. After a lifetime of feeling deeply ashamed of my libido and the sinful, rough fantasies I harboured in the dark, it was the pleasure of King bringing them into the light, into fruition, as if they were some gift for him to unearth, that broke open my pleasure.

  “God, King,” I gasped as my sex clamped down over him and my womb cramped with the force of my orgasm.

  I could feel it wrack through me, shaking every thought out of my head, every iota of shame from the fabric of my being. And when he grunted, planting his cock so deep inside me I could feel him at the entrance of my womb, and he came, it felt fitting in a way that was hard to explain.

  Because that was what King did for me. He sucked the poison out of me with his lips, his teeth, and his tongue. He made sure whatever bad thoughts or feelings I secretly concealed were eradicated and replaced by the sheer immensity of his vivacious, laughing love.

  I rolled my forehead over the books so that I could watch as he stepped away from me and used a clean, folded bandana from his back pocket to gently wipe his cum away from between my legs.

  This was almost my favourite part, the cherished routine of post-coital lovers. How he cleaned me, always, unless he wanted me to sleep with his cum inside me, and how the first kiss after sex was this achingly tender punctuation mark to end our intimacy.

  I hummed into that kiss as he leaned forward to offer it to me after righting my jeans and then held him close so I could turn and wrap my arms around his neck. He smelled so good, like man and sweat and the faint salty musk of me that I took a moment to breathe it in.

  “I love you, you know?” I whispered to him. “Sometimes it terrifies me how much I love you and how deeply happy we are.”

  His hands came up to wrap over my wrists as I held his face. “No fear, Queenie. There’s nothin’ we got coming that we can’t handle together.”

  “That’s sweet.”

  “Fuck sweet, babe. It’s the motherfuckin’ truth.” He lowered his forehead to mine so that those incredible, pale as the dawn sky blue eyes were all I could see. “Told you once, and I meant it. I’d tear the fuckin’ world apart if it wronged you.”

  “Same.” And in a way, I already had. I’d torn the small, comfortable world I’d lived in to pieces in order to be with King in his all-consuming world of loose morals, intense loyalty, and rough rituals.

  “Good.”

  For a moment, we just stood there breathing each other’s breath. I wrapped one of his curls around my finger just because I could and relished in our closeness.

  “Can’t believe I fucked ya up against the religious texts,” King finally said.

  “What?” I pulled back and whipped around to see the poorly arranged books in the case.

  They were, in fact, religious texts.

  “We are so going to hell.” I groaned and thumped my hand against my forehead.

  The sound of King’s deep belly laugh prompted me to spin around again so I could watch him tip that glorious mane of blond waves and curls back, corded throat exposed, face tipped to the sky as he offered his humour to the heavens.

  Before he was even done laughing, he looped a long arm around my waist and tugged me into him so that I could feel it vibrate through me.

  When he was finished, he looked down at me again, tears of mirth caught in his thick lashes and a lopsided grin in his cheek.

  “Hate to break it to you, babe, but I’m thinkin’ that ship sailed when you agreed to fuck your student.”

  “King!” I shouted as I shoved at him.

  “No denyin’ it.”

  “Well…no, but still,” I said primly. “You didn’t have to say it.”

  “Love sayin’ it. Love that you came over to the dark side for me. Says a lot about my powers of corruption.”

  “It says a lot about my lack of control and your overinflated ego,” I corrected.

  “Potato, po-tah-to,” he said with another low laugh. “Point is, you’re mine.”

  I sighed as if the idea didn’t delight me. “If I write it on my body, will you stop saying it so much?”

  He brightened. “No, but like the idea of that. We’ll go see Nova at Street Ink and get you a nice little tatt right here.” He hooked a finger under my jeans and brushed at the skin near my hip.

  A shiver rushed through me before I could curb it.

  “It can be your present to me,” King went on as he used that finger to pull me forward and around the corner to the back lounge where a few leather chairs were set up for reading.

  “Present?”

  “Happy four-year anniversary, babe,” he said with a wink before taking me by the shoulders and swivelling me to face one of the chairs.

  In it lay a
box filled with a fluffy blue blanket and in the folds of that blanket lay an even fluffier tuft of grey.

  “I forgot?” I gasped, momentarily distracted from the box of fluff. “Oh my gosh, King, I’m the worst girlfriend ever.”

  He laughed, hands in his pockets as he rocked back onto the heels of his motorcycle boots as he did when he was uncharacteristically shy. “Nah, you got lots goin’ on here at the moment. Honestly, considered not even bringing it up, but then I did that run down to Vancouver the other day and saw this guy…and I knew he was yours the second I saw him at the SPCA. Can’t have a real literary bookshop without one.”

  King moved forward to kneel by the chair and burrowed his hands in the blanket to reveal an absolutely tiny like ball of fur.

  It was grey with darker striations rippling out from between its big yellow eyes like waves in a pond. The moment it wrapped a little white paw around King’s wrist and looked up at him to meow this little, rusty mewl, I was a goner.

  “Oh.” My hands flew to my cheeks to bracket my smiling mouth. “Oh my gosh, King. You got us a cat.”

  “Half cat, half shadow,” he grumbled good-naturedly as it meowed at him again and rubbed its little cheek over his knuckles. “Cries for me whenever I leave him alone and followed me around the house this mornin’ like my shadow.”

  I bent over to put my nose near his face so he could sniff it delicately and then uncurl a paw to place it on my cheek and kind of pat at me gently.

  My eyes were shining when I turned them up to look at King through my lashes. “Shadow seems like a good name then.”

  “Welcome to the Garro clan, little Shadow,” I told the cat. “It’s the best freaking family there is.”

  Cressida

  * * *

  I peered at Ares as we waited at the one traffic light leading out of town on Main Street, trying to discern from his usual quiet state how he was feeling after school that day. He was an absolutely beautiful boy, rich brown eyes thickly lashed, a generous mouth, strong jaw, and this tangle of fabulous black hair that spiralled into thick curls and waves. But his beauty didn’t seem to have much bearing on his fellow nine-year-old schoolmates. Instead, they noticed the thickness of his Spanish accent and the unusual, adult-like reserve of his personality. At first, they’d peppered him with questions; where was he from, who were his parents, did he like living with the infamous Garro family? But when he never answered, their curiosity calcified into bitterness, and the bullying began in earnest.

  He didn’t like to talk about it with us. We knew because Loulou and I had gone in for numerous student/teacher conferences at the elementary school, and his teachers had expressed their concern, but Ares wouldn’t speak about it. Once, he returned home with a black eye, and I thought the entire brotherhood of The Fallen would roll into the elementary school parking lot and take out who’d ever hurt one of their own.

  But Ares had stopped Zeus with a hand on his arm, looking up at him with those beautiful brown eyes that were more soulful than most men thrice his age. “Don’t worry, Z. They’re the ones who will regret it in the end.”

  It was so unspeakably wise and sad at the same time. What life had Ares lived before we found him squatting in Zeus’s Whistler cabin last Christmas that bullying was so very trivial?

  None of us forced him to speak about his life before because most of us knew what it was like to have another life. We respected it even if it made us uneasy to give that much psychological freedom to a child.

  “You’re quiet,” I noted finally because he’d yet to say a word since I’d picked him up at school.

  He rolled his head against the seat to shoot me a look that said “aren’t I always?”

  “Especially quiet,” I corrected. “If something was bothering you, I hope you’d tell me.”

  His silence continued for a few minutes as he stared at me and mulled over whatever dark things lurked in the deepest caves of his mind. I hummed along to the song on the radio while I waited, taking note of the police car that pulled onto the road behind us.

  “What am I to you?”

  “Excuse me?” I asked, distracted by the cop car that was quickly gaining on us.

  “What am I to you?”

  I glanced at him sidelong to determine where he was coming from but found only blank canvas in his expression. “Well, you’re my family. Why are you asking?”

  He hesitated, gaze dropping to his hands where long, thin scars marred the olive skin. We all wondered about them, but after I tried asking once, no one did again.

  “What do I call you, then? And Zeus and Loulou and H.R. and King? What are you to me?”

  “Family,” I repeated firmly because I was starting to understand the problem. “If anyone asks about where you come from and who you belong to, that’s what you tell them. You’re Ares Garro. That’s what it says on all your official documents, isn’t it? And that’s what we know to be true.”

  “But no one is like…my papá or mamá?”

  “No…” I paused, trying to give him something concrete because I knew that was what he wanted and what others would accept. “If you want a mother and father, I guess Zeus and Lou could be considered your parents because you live with them most of the time. But King and I love you, and you live with us just as sometimes you stay with Lila and the Booth family or with Bat and his boys…I think you’re rather lucky actually, Ares. We’d all fight to be the ones you consider parents, although I hope it doesn’t have to come to that. The best thing about being a part of The Fallen is that labels no longer matter. Everything is boiled down to love and family. You get that from an entire club filled with men and women with massive hearts. I know it’s not a simple answer to your question, but I hope it’s enough.”

  Ares looked away from me quickly, but not before I could see the relief and hope shine in his eyes. A moment later, his hand reached across the console to tug on a lock of my hair in quiet thanks. “It’s more than I ever had before.”

  “Same,” I assured him. “It can be overwhelming at first, but you’ll get used to it.”

  A loud bleep startled me before the flash of red and blue lights drew my gaze to the police car that was suddenly tailgating me.

  I indicated to pull over to the shoulder, trying to keep calm even though my heart was in my throat.

  “Be calm, okay?” I told Ares, whose eyes were wide with panic. “Everything’s okay. Stay in the car and be quiet unless I tell you otherwise. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  But I knew it wasn’t.

  I hadn’t been speeding or doing anything else unlawful, and as the cop car pulled to a stop behind me and Office McDougal stepped out of the car, I knew things were not going to go smoothly. His partner stayed in the car. I couldn’t tell who it was at the distance, but he fidgeted nervously, as if he wasn’t sure about what his partner intended to do.

  McDougal was a short, squat man, as if God had pinched him at the head and feet, so his proportions were horribly off. He wore a constant sneer around town as if everything about Entrance personally offended him. As a man from much more conservative Alberta, I was sure it did.

  He stalked slowly toward my open window, his strut timed perfectly as if some invisible spaghetti Western soundtrack played in his head.

  “Good afternoon, Miz Irons,” he drawled as he stopped in front of me and squared his hips to the window. He didn’t lean down, so I was forced to make eye contact with his groin and holstered weapons. It was a power move and a pathetic one at that.

  “Good afternoon, Officer,” I greeted sunnily. “Is there something amiss with my car?”

  I knew there wasn’t. My pimped out, pale pink Honda Civic was personally serviced by King at Hephaestus Auto every six months and drove better than a Honda had any right to.

  “Might be,” he prevaricated, finally deigning to lean down, bracing an arm on my window ledge so that I was forced to back up farther into the car to get some personal space.

  His eyes wandered down my bod
y, noting with some surprise that I wasn’t decked out in biker bitch finery. Instead, I was wearing black jeans and a lace and silk blouse that showed only a shadow at the top of my breasts. He scowled at them as if offended I wasn’t showing more skin.

  “What brings you out to this ritzy neck of our woods?” he asked suspiciously.

  I ground my teeth. Back Bay Road was prime real estate in Entrance, a long ribbon of asphalt decorated with sweeping acreages and million-dollar homes. I’d bought Shamble Wood Cottage for a steal years ago because it had been a dilapidated dump, but I supposed Officer McDougal didn’t know that.

  “I live out this way.” My smile forced my lips apart uncomfortably like a dental retractor.

  “Hmph. With that felon? The Garro kid.”

  I watched as he spit on my front tire and tried not to give in to the urge to throttle him.

  “King isn’t a felon, but, yes, I live with him there.”

  “Seems to me a woman like you shouldn’t be shacking up with a sort such as him,” he noted as his beady eyes once against lingered over my breasts. “If I were you, I’d get out while I could.”

  “Oh? Do you know something I don’t, Officer?” I asked politely even though his breath reeked of onions, and he was leaning too close.

  “Know a lot of things you don’t, Miz Irons. Just a friendly warning to you.”

  “Thank you, but it’s unnecessary. Is that all?”

  McDougal narrowed his eyes. “No, I don’t imagine it is. Why don’t you get out of the car for me?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I damn well told you to,” he snarled, moving back so he could wrench my door open and pull me out roughly by the arm.

  I craned my head back to make eye contact with Ares who sat petrified in the passenger seat, trying to relay with my eyes that everything was going to be okay.

  McDougal hauled me clear of the car and then used the arm he held as a lever to push my front up against the side of my vehicle. His booted feet kicked my legs apart and his other hand planted in my low back to pin me to the hot metal.