Her taste is sweet and her lips are smooth fire. I penetrate her with my tongue before suckling her clitoris until her knees begin to clench around my ears. I glance up. Her eyes are closed and her mouth is open and her hands are clutching the back of the seat and the steering wheel. She whispers my name in a curse and a single tear drips from the corner of her eye as I slow.
“Don’t,” she says, and I obey willingly. I’m a glutton for her.
I pin her legs apart and take her for everything she has, then I take more. Her back is arched up off of the seat and her fingers are pressed against the window. She shakes and then screams. Spanish words fly from her lips in an incoherent stream, but I do hear her say my name half a dozen times and when she’s finished, lying limp on the seat before me at her most vulnerable, my halfie turns to stone.
I open the glove compartment box and push aside my gun, finding a condom. I slip it on, letting the used one fall to the floor unceremoniously. I sit on the seat and pull her body onto mine facing me. Her arms are weak but I hold her steady and when she kisses me, I know that she knows what I want.
She slides onto me, moaning as she does. Plumeria’s full, perfect lips caress my cheek, my neck, my ear. I grip her thighs in my hands, cupping her ass in my palms and squeezing so hard I know I’ll leave bruises. A true sadist, she works me like a torturer, teasing me and taunting me until I have to beg for it and I do beg. In low growls, with my hand yanking hard on her hair, I beg her to let me finish inside of her. She speeds up, twisting and arching and when I come, the world devolves to darkness while my head grows light.
I don’t know how long we’re in the cab of my truck exactly, but when I surface I can’t move. I’ve been asleep but the sun poses no threat to the horizon. The sounds from tonight’s earlier fight are dead and the night is pitch black on the outside of the windows. They’re entirely fogged over. I could be in another town, in another city, in another world. And I wouldn’t give a fuck. She’s lying on my chest, wedged between me and the back of the bench chair. My knees are crushed against the passenger’s side door and her legs are tangled with my legs.
Glancing down, I see her eyes are closed. Her breath is light and even and her hair fans across her back like a blanket, reaching her perfect ass. I reach down and squeeze it, thinking mine. The word blankets me and I put up no resistance. Not after what passed between us and I don’t just mean the sex.
There was a moment, as I lowered her back down onto the bench after tasting the sweetness of her sex for the third time in which we kissed. The smell of condoms, my dick and balls, and her pussy and ass was on each of our mouths – hell, the whole cab smelled like little else – and she looked at me and I looked at her and in the silence between us we both took the first step towards that most dangerous of words.
Is this what love feels like? If so, I understand why people kill and die for it.
“Shit,” she moans, sounding hoarse and for a moment I panic that I spoke those three little words out loud. Then she says, “Damn I’m sorry.”
Her voice makes me smile and I hold her still as she begins to move. “You aren’t heavy and I’m sure as hell not about to go anywhere.”
“Maybe you’re not, but I need to.” She sits up and coughs into her fist. Pain flashes across her face as she clutches her right ribs, fingers sliding over her full breast and titillating that hardened little nipple. Christ, even after everything, I want her again. Forever. Fuck. I want to take her home.
“You okay?” I ask. My voice is genuine and I hope that she hears that. I took more than she had to offer me this night.
She shakes her head and though she moves slowly, she’s reaching for her clothes. I want to burn them. “I thought I was hurting before.”
I sit up, though my head spins and my arms and legs and stomach are sore. A euphoria blows through me, but I can feel it dwindle more and more with each garment she puts on. She reaches for her sports bra but, looking at it groans and snatches up my shirt instead. “Would you mind if I borrowed this?”
“It’s yours.”
“I promise I’ll give it back. You can pick it up from Ollie next time you see him.”
“It doesn’t have buttons anymore.”
Pulling her arms through the sleeves, she smoothes her hand down the front of my shirt and blinks brightly. “Oh. You’re right.”
“So where are you going that’s so urgent in the middle of the night?”
She shrugs. “I should just get going.”
“Why don’t you stay? Let’s get a hotel in town. Stay all day tomorrow, maybe Sunday too.” I touch her shoulder and she closes her eyes in no reaction that I can interpret, but something is off. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just can’t stay. I need to…to go.” Her voice masks a very real emotion lodged somewhere in her throat.
I frown as chill from the night air seeps in through the windows to contaminate the warmth we created. Goosebumps break out on my forearms. “Can I have your number at least?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she says immediately and I chuckle under my breath at the irony of all my traditional tactics used so effortlessly against me.
I lean in towards her, but when I go to kiss her cheek she throws open the passenger’s side door and stumbles out into the breeze. It wraps around her and she shudders. I shudder. I hold her gaze steady and watch her from the lit cab, looking so fragile in the darkness. Plumeria. I want to shield her.
In a slow, near patronizing tone, I tell her a truth I’ve never told any woman. “I want you to stay.”
Her lower lip trembles and a very real fear transforms her face and I remember the way she’d called out for me in the field, not far from where we are now. I’d turned and seen her falling and she had looked at me needing me to save her from herself. Plumeria doesn’t call for me now. Instead, Mer turns and runs. Her car starts a few seconds later and I barely manage to button my jeans in time to follow her.
At the end of a long, woodland road, she sets her blinker to turn right, away from my house and away from the city. I wonder if she really does live this far out, or if she’s just doing whatever she has to, to get away from me. A sudden exhaustion passes through me like a ghost and I decide to make it easy for her. I pull up beside her car, setting my blinker to left and reach across the cab to roll down the passenger’s side window. After a pause, she rolls hers down too.
“I know I don’t know shit about you, except that you’re powerful and smart and beautiful and a fucking dick.” I lick my lips. Fuck it. “But I think I’m falling in love with you. Just thought you should know.” I give her a second – or rather, I give me a second of hope but I refuse to wait for anything that I know won’t happen – then I roll up my window. I pull onto the road and drive back to my own house on autopilot.
I feel like I just made a quick trip from heaven to hell and now I’m back on earth. To make shit worse, Dixon’s waiting for me when I open the door. “You’re out of line,” he says, standing from the living room couch the moment he sees me. “And all for Mer? What is she to you? Your brothers come first. Have you forgotten that – or have you forgotten that I’m your fucking brother too?”
In the darkness his face appears as a shadow against an even blacker shadow. I remember the first time I met him, in Marguerite’s house. She’d brought him in and told me and Clifton to be nice. She’d fed him pancakes for dinner and he’d glared at her like he’d been poisoned, but less than a month later, he got me a job washing dishes at Cactus Bar. Now we own it. “Answer me,” he roars when I say nothing.
I pause before breaking past him, arms down at my sides, fight gone from my bones. I remember the way he’d looked at those pancakes and imagine that my face mirrors his as it looked then. Some combination of fear, skepticism, betrayal. “It’s done.”
“What’s done?”
“Plumeria and I. I fucked her and left her. She got what she wanted.”
&nbs
p; Dixon follows me broodingly all the way to my bedroom door. “Don’t you mean, you got what you wanted?” He’s smarter than I am. He’s always been smarter than me.
“Good night brother.” I close the door.
Mer
My body is seconds short of complete and total collapse by the time I make it back to the ramshackle, two story house I share with Mario and our padre on the outskirts of town. The lights on the main floor are on when I pull up, which doesn’t surprise me. Padre’s probably passed out drunk on the living room couch. Mario’s probably in his room fucking one of the strippers from Camelot or jacking off – depending on how much cash he still has from the last fight he won. That was a while back.
I hold my shirt closed with one hand and shove the key into the lock. My brain is fried, soul shattered even though my thighs and hip flexors are sore in all the right places. He couldn’t have said to me what I thought I heard. Nobody’s ever told me anything like that in my life. Nobody but mi madre, and she died so long ago the words are only half remembered. My mind probably filled in the rest with hope and delusion. But Knox, the man they call Knuckles, falling in…nah. I refuse to think it.
He could have no reason to say what I thought he did. No reason besides the endorphins shooting through his system. But if he did. If he had. I shake my head as I push open the door. I’d kill for him to tell me that he lo… Everything on my mind and in my heart dies like a bird hitting a glass window and then the ground below it. Thump thump. Then it’s done. DOA. No more reason to ever think or dream about love.
The couches have been pushed against either wall and a single recliner faces me at the far end of the space, positioned right in front of the fireplace. In it, sits Loredo. Spade is sprawled across the couch to the right, some sort of black duffel bag on the ground in front of him. He kicks it beneath the couch and stands when he sees me. I don’t breathe, but instead let the door swing shut at my back. I drop the bag I’m carrying.
Mi padre and Mario – the two tragic bits of family I have left – had left – are lying on their sides in the center of the room, blood seeping from wounds to their temples. They’ve been dead for hours and judging by the abrasions covering Mario’s face and arms, and the fact that one of his legs looks very broken, he didn’t go down without a fight. Spade has pale pink all over his arms – blood he wiped off but didn’t wash – as well as a cut on his face. Other than that he looks unharmed.
“Plumeria,” Loredo whispers in his own whispery sort of Spanish, “how have you been?”
I take a few steps forward and cross my arms over my chest. I shrug. “Same as ever, tio. I see padre finally got what was coming to him.”
“You don’t seem upset.”
The funny thing is that I’m not. The initial upward spike of my heart rate has subsided once more to a dull thump. “Was only a matter of time.” I glance at Mario’s corpse – not the first family member I’ve lose to padre’s vices – and a small pinprick of pain lights up my chest. Then nothing. I glance again to Loredo.
The only evidence of Loredo’s age is his sleek silver hair. Otherwise, he looks young, face cut narrow like a hawk’s. Black eyes peer out above a long, thin beak. He might have been attractive once if it weren’t for his mouth. It’s too big for his face, making him look like he’s in a constant state of laughter. There’s something repulsive about it. About him.
He rubs his palm off on his straight black pants and says gently, “Your brother had a critical disadvantage in his fight against Spade, who was evidently not the first man to beat up on him in recent weeks,” he says, switching to English, “I imagine that if you were to try to fight Spade in your condition you’d see a similar fate, having been injured even more recently.”
“Probably,” I say with a shrug, looking Spade over. There’s no denying it. Even in my best form I could never beat Spade and that isn’t something I say lightly. I don’t know anyone who could. Spade is built like a goddamn eighteen wheeler, every inch of him solid bulk. He’s six foot six with hands like baseball mitts and he’s trained in about every style of fighting there is. “I was in the ring tonight.”
“Looks like that wasn’t the only work out you got. Who was the lucky lover?”
I’m distracted from Loredo’s iniquitous face by Spade, who shoots towards me so fast I stumble over my feet and slam against the closed door behind me. He grabs the collar of my shirt and rips down, pulling the whole shirt free with little resistance.
“Mother fucker.” The back of his hand meets my already injured cheek and a heat sears my wrists as I use my arms to break my fall. I groan as Spade drops to his knee beside me. “Who fucked you?” He whispers to my cheek in that stilted, Russian brogue. His body shakes with a rage I hadn’t anticipated and I grin, knowing he won’t be able to control it. It’ll be lights out for me in ten…nine…eight…
“Oh it was a whole truck load of guys. At least seven. College kids. I decided to celebrate after kicking one of their friend’s ass and they thought they’d teach me a lesson. Overall I’d have to say it worked out well for everybody…”
He drives his fist into my ribs – the bruised ones – and the breath flees from me entirely. My fingernails catch in the slats between the faded hard wood as I swallow a breath, then his fist comes for me again. He continues this controlled and systematic torture for a few minutes before I hear Loredo calling Spade’s name distantly, through a fog.
“Spade, give me a moment to speak to my niece, won’t you?” Reluctantly, Spade lets up. He uses his foot to roll me onto my back. My breasts fall to either side while pain and fire splinter across my sternum, consuming my rib cage and working down my spine, one vertebrae at a time.
“Plumeria, can you hear me?” I lift a hand and give him a thumbs up. He laughs quietly. “Such an impressive woman, and in so many ways.” I hear shuffling and when I next blink, Loredo is crouching to my left, watching Spade from across my body. He looks to me. “Tell me the man’s name.” The answer is fuck off, but curiosity compels me to ask why he even wants it. To this, he responds, “Your father did not pay his debt.”
“He paid his debt with his life.” I cough, spasms shooting through my stomach like knives.
“I thought so as well, until Spade made me a rather interesting proposition. You see, I am still out the forty three large your padre owed me, so I figured murdering the last of my brother’s pathetic brood would be enough to help me find peace with the money I have lost. But then Spade offered to reimburse me for the total – in full – in exchange for your life. A generous offer until I remembered your dear sweet padre mentioning something about a band of brothers coming to your rescue last you were at the bar. I began to wonder if there wasn’t someone who might be willing to pay more. They own a great deal of property, these brothers, and if you made half the impression on them you made on my colleague here, then I’m sure the payment will be well worth the wait.” His gaze glances down the length of my body, but there is no lecherous intent. Just a passive evaluation of the assets. “Well worth it. So tell me now which one of them stuck his little cock into you and we can all be on our way.”
I spit in his face. Spade’s fist knocks into my stomach and everything goes blue.
“Doesn’t matter. When you don’t answer your phone, he’ll eventually come by wondering what happened to you.”
I grin, suddenly elated that I hadn’t given in to that desire to give him my number or leave him with any promises that I’d call.
“Something about that amuses you?” Loredo frowns.
I shake my head stiffly. “He won’t come.” Better this way. I can survive a life of torture knowing that he’s safely removed from this fucked little universe. I’ll never see him again. I was dead the moment I stepped through the door.
“Then you’ll be Spade’s problem soon enough. I’ll give the man ten days to come retrieve you. Spade, call Luis and tell him to bring my things. Together, you two can pack up the bodies.
Looks like I’ll be staying a while in this shit hole.”
Spade nods, but his gaze doesn’t leave my face and his hands twitch towards me. It’s Loredo however, who speaks. “Spade, why don’t you take her upstairs and get her cleaned up? She’ll want to look her best when her lover shows. And Spade.” Loredo reaches out and grabs Spade’s forearm as he grabs me by the back of the neck. “I don’t want you fucking her until her father’s debt has been settled.” Spade growls. “She may not be a virgin but I let you at her, you’ll lower her purchase price. That said, you are free to do whatever else you’d like with her. She’ll be under your care until then.”
Care. Price. Debt. Words that mean very different things for ordinary people. I know the real reason Loredo doesn’t want Spade to fuck me is because he might not want to keep me after he’s had me and Loredo isn’t sure that my ‘lover’ will show. He won’t. He may know where I live, but he doesn’t know my number and left rejected less than an hour ago. I hang like a rag doll in Spade’s arms as he drags me up the stairs, through my bedroom and into my bathroom.
He undresses us both, pushes me into the shower and follows me in, closing the shower door behind him. His hunger oozes out of him like some sickly perfume. I can smell it, like chicory and chewing tobacco, as he approaches. He shoves me forward roughly so that my tits are crushed against the cold wall. My breath fogs the white tiles until he turns the hot water on and lets its stream run over me. He washes me, gripping my tits and sliding his fingers into me aggressively while his other hand works his monstrous cock. The kind to bloody a girl even when moving gently, and Spade is anything but gentle.
The Hunting Town (Brothers Book 1) Page 6
