Cruz : A Dark MC Romance (A Dark and Dirty Sinners’ MC Book 5)

by Serena Akeroyd

  His jaw tensed, and I saw irritation flash behind his eyes before he hid it as the door to the back office opened and Indy walked out with her client. Her gaze connected with mine, just for a second, and sweet fuck—it was unguarded, and as a result, loaded with fire.

  She was pumped from her work, probably tired after a long day, and all that was written into her features, but she’d forgotten about me, so seeing me sitting here had stirred something up in her mind.

  Something I liked.

  Fire.

  I’d hoped for that, but hadn’t expected it.

  I moved over to the flash racks and started to leaf through her designs. She worked alone, so all of these were her pieces, and as she finished up with her last client and sent the creep home—much to his distress—I looked through her art, stopping at the phoenix I recognized from her arm.

  It was beautiful.

  Majestic, and regal, empowered and loaded with hope.

  Which was interesting as the first three, I’d say, described Indy, but not the last.

  Knowing what I did now, I understood more than she could say.

  Tattoos were a chance at rebirth, at redefining who and what we were. In my case, they covered up scars, as well as grounded me in a new reality where people wanted something from me and I embraced that rather than hope for more. In Indy’s, I could see that she wanted to forget the past, didn’t want to cover up her internal scars, more like sideswipe them and focus on the future.

  Which I found interesting.

  Me—so focused on the past, her—pinning so much hope on the future.

  The thought had me smiling because I wanted that for her. Genuinely, I did. Not because she was a victim or because she was Nyx’s baby sister, but because she deserved for tomorrow to be brighter than yesterday.

  “Thought you only wanted a touch up.”

  Her brusque comment told me her walls were back up. I’d had a brief glimpse into something she hadn’t meant to reveal, so I understood she needed to reconfigure things.

  It was a testament to how much I’d learned about the woman through her art, through the calming and delicately detailed mandalas to the charming black and white portraits that were hyperreal to her own ink, that I didn’t joke about wanting to touch her up.

  Indy wasn’t a clubwhore.

  She was more than that.

  Only a moron would fail to see that—which was the last thing anyone could describe me as.

  “You’re very talented,” was all I said, prompting her to clear her throat.

  The air was charged for a moment, and I wondered what she was wrestling with as she muttered ungraciously, “Thanks.”

  Her grouchy reply had me shooting her a smile, and when our eyes clashed, she bit her lip.

  Always a good sign.

  “Which ink do you want touching up?” she asked, her tone almost dogged.

  “The negative tattoo on my chest.”

  Her gaze dropped to my cut and the Henley I wore beneath it. I felt her stare like a laser, and wished it’d have the soft jersey fabric disintegrating into dust beneath the power of her glance.

  I got the feeling Indy was attracted to me, but rather than be comfortable with that, she was the exact opposite.

  Could her past have fucked her up that much?

  Nyx had never mentioned her having boyfriends, and I’d been wracking my brains over any conversation I’d had or overheard about her, and didn’t remember hearing about her having a partner or a lover. The only guy he complained about was her assistant, and they definitely weren’t together. Not with him giving her puppy eyes and her brushing him off and telling him to go home with a kindness that let me know she was aware he had feelings for her, and wasn’t interested.

  Even as I thought about that and wondered why she kept him around, I murmured, “Want me to take it off?”

  Her nostrils flared, eyes flashing with something I didn’t think she recognized in herself—lust—and she took a step back, even as she moved toward the back office. Then, freezing in place, she moved over to the desk instead, and pressed a button which had a bunch of blinds flowing down to hide the building’s interior from the outside world.

  So, she didn’t want me in her studio, her private workspace.

  Interesting.

  Taking that for a positive, I watched as she folded her arms against her chest then said, “It’s okay. I’m too tired to do it tonight, but I can check it out, see how much time I think it’d take, then I can give you a quote.”

  “Money’s inconsequential.”

  Her brows snapped up at that. “Aren’t you lucky?”

  “Not really. Don’t have many bills, and don’t have many vices. Apart from my ink.”

  She grunted, then wafted a hand that told me to move things along. Her bossiness amused me, enough that I obeyed when usually it’d get my back up. With care, I shrugged out of my cut and draped it over the flash rack I’d just been glancing through. Dragging the Henley over my head next, I heard a sharp inhalation that had me smirking into the folds of fabric.

  Apparently, Indiana liked what she saw.

  Fisting the material in my hand, I pointed to the tattoo in the middle of my torso, one that spanned around my side toward my back. She bit her lip—again—and mumbled, “You went to Lance Black, didn’t you? Only he could pull off that kind of negative ink.”

  “I did, just in time before the cancer got him.” I nodded. “Sad to lose a talent like that, even sadder when you think how young he was and how small his kids were.”

  She winced, nodding. “I didn’t know him that well, just of him.”

  “No?”

  “Rep only,” she confirmed. “I did my apprenticeship down in Louisiana. If I’d stayed in the City, we’d probably have crossed paths.” Indy tilted her head to the side, which had her hair drifting over her shoulder and falling like a cascade into the curve of her neck—a neck I really wanted to fucking bite. “My style and his don’t gel if you were interested in more ink.”

  “That’s not a concern. I don’t want more negative tattoos. I just want these touching up and, in the future, I’m ready for something different.”

  Her chin tipped up, and I watched her visibly steel herself as she moved over to me. I’d never seen a woman so confident be so suddenly ill-at-ease.

  If I was anyone else, i.e not a brother to Nyx, I’d think she was scared of me, or that I was behaving in a predatory manner. But I was a brother, and I wasn’t being predatory. If anything, I was working hard not to think about sex, because just being around her, with those goddamn blinds closed, thoughts of her on her knees cleaning, well, I was gonna get a boner.

  She was reacting like I was a tiger that had been baited though, and it made me glad that I knew of her past because I’d probably think she was just plain weird for her response to a guy, a potential client, taking off a shirt.

  Instead, I sensed that she liked me, and didn’t know how to handle that.

  I couldn’t be the first guy she’d been attracted to, though, could I?

  I mean, it was great for my ego to think otherwise, but ego meant bupkis. I preferred the whole truth, and I just couldn’t see a woman like her—

  What?

  A woman like her not having men chasing at her heels?

  Sure. But that didn’t mean she liked the men who were chasing her, did it?

  Because that was food for thought, I watched as she approached, then stopped a good four, impractical, feet away from me. It meant she had to tip forward to touch me, which she technically didn’t have to, but I wasn’t about to say no to having her hands on me. Did I look like a dumbass?

  I watched as her fingers swiped over my rib cage, like she couldn’t help herself, and though my chest was pretty nice, I wasn’t sure it was worthy of her turning to ice.

  Gooseflesh swirled into being over my skin at the gentle brush of her fingers, and I murmured, “Everything okay, Indy?”

  She blinked at me. “Why did yo
u put that blanket over me?”

  Because I hadn’t anticipated that question, I blinked back.

  “That night at Stone’s bunkhouse. You put a blanket over me. Why did you do that?”

  “You looked cold.”

  She gulped. “You came back. You checked on me. Why?”

  “Because you looked exhausted, and I saw your car was still there. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  Her bottom lip was sucked between her teeth again. “I must have been if I didn’t hear you walk in. I’m a light sleeper.”

  I shrugged. “I was careful not to disturb you.”

  “Why? Why didn’t you send me home?”

  Confused, I asked, “Would you have preferred that?”

  She didn’t answer, instead, rested her palm on the ink and murmured, “It’s beautiful.”

  “Thank you,” I told her, aware my voice was husky.

  “You’re beautiful.”

  I hadn’t expected that compliment. “Are men ever beautiful?”

  “Sure they are.” She peered up at me. “Why am I only just seeing you?”

  Before I could answer that, she was there, right in front of me, reaching up on tiptoe, her mouth connecting with mine, and even though I was pretty fucking sure she wasn’t ready for whatever this was, I was also pretty fucking sure that I wasn’t either.

  Still, a coward was the last thing I could be described as being, so I dove headfirst into the chaos this woman promised, hoping along the way that, even if it was for a short while or a long while, I brightened up her future some.

  Three

  Indy

  I’d seen beautiful men before. I’d even drawn them, had inked plenty.

  But it was like a veil was dragged from my eyes as I saw Cruz standing there, so confident, so self-aware, yet so un-cocky with it.

  He knew what he was, but he didn’t shove it in my face, and with guys this hot, I knew that was a rarity.

  There was knowing someone was cute, and then feeling it.

  Actually feeling it.

  It was only at that moment that I realized I’d spent three decades never feeling it.

  Was that possible?

  Sexual attraction was an enemy of mine. I saw someone hot, wanted to fuck them to fix my body into behaving normally, and of course, that never worked. But seeing Cruz effortlessly take off his shirt had the breath jerking from my lungs.

  Maybe it was the artist in me. Maybe that was it.

  Taking comfort in that reasoning, I’d moved closer to get a better look, and then I’d smelled him.

  Sweet fuck, what a scent. I couldn’t even describe what it was, had no real idea, but he just smelled clean and manly and warm. So fucking warm. Then I’d had to touch him. And I’d seen his visceral response, and knowing he was affected too, made this strange swirling sensation inside me seem normal.

  Because this was how arousal felt.

  This was what lust felt like.

  I wasn’t a coward, so rather than hide from it and deny myself, I wanted to explore it. Maybe Cruz would help me fix myself. If I could just have sex once where I liked it, maybe that would give me what I needed to feel normal. To feel like a regular woman, instead of one always chasing sex, trying to fit in, trying to force myself to feel things that everyone felt.

  So I kissed him.

  And he tasted better than I could have imagined. His taste reminded me of whisky—without the alcohol. Peaty and earthy, warm and musky. I could drown in his flavor, suffocate in it. I thrust my tongue against his, unsurprised when his met mine, but he didn’t drag me into him.

  Didn’t pull me into his arms.

  Didn’t he want me?

  The way his tongue was moving told me yes, but why didn’t he haul me closer?

  Unsure of myself, because that was what men usually did, I moved into him, sliding my arms around his firm waist, appreciating the hardened stack of muscles against my belly. My hands moved to his back, running up and down the strong ropes that bisected his spine into two halves, and still, he didn’t move to hold me.

  He was kissing me. Actively. If anything, he was leading the way now, my tongue no longer in his mouth, his in mine, and God, what he could do with that tongue was enough to have stars floating behind my eyes and doing a little dance. This was, I registered, the first kiss where I wasn’t pondering the mechanics of the act, where I wasn’t making an internal grocery list. Instead, I’d dived headfirst into this, like it was a pool and I was more than happy to do some synchronized swimming.

  My hands moved, going higher, up to the corded strength of his shoulders, before I tucked myself tighter into him, needing to feel him, needing him to be as close to me as physically possible. Wanting him. Actually. Fucking. Wanting. Him.

  Astonished and overwhelmed and turned the hell on, I felt the impossible.

  A burn in my core.

  Not like a UTI.

  Not like after sex.

  This came before. And it felt molten. It felt like I was molten.

  The sensation stole my breath from me, and I lifted my leg, hitching it onto his hip, uncaring if he thought I was being forward, uncaring if I was acting like a slut. I was chasing this feeling. Chasing this sensation that I’d never experienced before.

  Finally, he helped. He reached down and hauled me into him so that I was cupping his thighs and his hands were on my ass. He pulled back, and I whimpered, chasing his mouth, chasing his kiss, before he rumbled, “Where?”

  I blinked, utterly dazed, and the question took too damn long to figure out and I loathed the jarring sensation that came as I started to disconnect.

  “Upstairs.”

  He strode over to the side door marked ‘Private,’ which told me he knew I lived here, and I reached into my back pocket, the tiny zipper there that housed my key in the waistband of my yoga pants. He took it, unlocked the door, and peered around the corner. A light flashed on, further jarring me from the moment, and doubts began to creep in.

  That molten feeling wasn’t real, was it?

  The way his kiss had made me want to crawl into his skin, I’d been over-imagining it, surely?

  Then, we moved upstairs, slowly, slowly because his mouth was back on mine, but it was different now he was touching me. Different and I felt out-of-focus, uncertain like always, those distinct memories of being connected to him feeling as far away as France.

  Inside, I wanted to weep. My head warred with my body, trying to get me back into the zone, but I just—I just couldn’t do it.

  Fuck, what was wrong with me?

  Why was this so hard?

  His tongue drove into my mouth at the same time as his boner rubbed against my pussy. The heat had gone, died, but I let him carry on because I wasn’t a prick tease, and I wasn’t about to be accused of offering the goods only to take them away at the last hurdle. It was easier to give it than it was to have it taken from me, so I made a mental note about what I needed to do tomorrow, a check list of colors I needed to order in, all as he moved me into my apartment, and somehow guided us to the bed.

  I let him do it, let him kiss me and touch me. Feel me up. I let him undress me. Let him lay me on the bed. I just let him do it all.

  As I stared up at the ceiling, refusing to think about what might have been, studiously concentrating on the design I’d be drawing up tomorrow for a pop-in client, he moved into me.

  It didn’t hurt like it usually did, was my initial thought. I wasn’t bone dry like normal.

  Then, he started to move, and I zoned out once more. I’d just redecorated the studio, and I—

  He pulled out.

  Pulled off me.

  Stood up.

  Started to fasten his zipper.

  I gaped at him, leaning up on my elbows before I rasped, “What are you doing?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not a rapist.”

  I blinked at him. “Huh?” The words jerked me into sitting up, and I reached for the fly he’d just fastened and struggled with the
zipper. “Come back to bed,” I commanded.

  “You weren’t into it, Indy. It’s okay. It’s all good.”

  Stunned that he’d noticed, bewildered that he had, I just gaped at him. And as I did, I saw how fucking beautiful he was again.

  His hair rumpled now because I’d rumpled it. His face free from resentment and the bitterness men presumed to get when they weren’t getting their way in the sack. He was like…

  I released a shaky sigh, suddenly feeling that molten heat blanket me once more.

  It was weird, so weird, but I stopped reaching for his dick, and instead, moved over onto my knees and crawled to him. A grunt escaped him like I’d started sucking him off and I felt his eyes on every inch of me as I moved nearer. When I was close enough, I straightened up then pressed my naked torso against his, the denim rubbing against my lower half somehow grounding me rather than jarring me, and I reached for him. Kissing him once more, I moaned as his tongue thrust into my mouth.

  Why did this feel so good?

  It even felt good being naked.

  My nipples budded, furling into tight tips as they rasped against his chest, and I could feel that heat starting up. Even though my hands moved on his back, sliding over firm, warm skin, his stayed off me, and that had that heat flickering into live flames.

  I whimpered into his mouth, needing more of this, needing more of him but… why had it stopped before?

  Groaning as I writhed against him, feeling like I was going crazy with want even as I knew I didn't want him inside me, I felt the disconnect start again when his hands appeared on my waist. Only, they weren’t there long. He moved me into a similar position as earlier, but his tongue continued dancing with mine as he hauled me higher against him so that he was carrying me again.

  I expected to feel the hard thrust of his erection soon, but I didn’t. Instead, he turned us around, carefully lowered us so that he was on the bed and my knees were pinning him in place. Then, he tore his lips from mine and rasped, “Come on, Indy, give me some of that honey.”

  Disoriented, my mouth sore from our kisses, my brain mush from them too, I rumbled, “Huh?”

  He didn’t let me think, didn’t let me act, instead, he hauled me up so that I was riding his face.