by Selena Scott
“Oh, please. Don’t act like you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t.”
She narrowed her eyes at his sharp, honest tone.
“It’s true,” he insisted. “You treated me so… friendly. I thought you thought of me as your older brother or something.”
“That’s how it started. Then I went and realized how hot you are and I got a crush. But that’s over now.” She decisively sliced her hand through the air and Quill winced.
“I never pretended to be a hero.”
“No. You didn’t. And that’s my mistake for putting that on you.” She faced away from him again. “This all made a lot more sense when I thought you didn’t care about me at all. But now I’m back to not getting it.”
“What don’t you get?”
She whirled around and stalked toward him, fire in her eyes. She stopped when her shins edged against the side of the bed, an accusatory finger half an inch from his nose.
“You say you cared about me enough to break your training at the last second and come to protect me, right? Well then, what the fuck is all this?” She threw her arms out to indicate their room, their car, the entire journey. “I mean, I know I volunteered for this, but why the hell are you letting me turn myself in to the Director? You care about me so much that you stand in between me and a gun, yet here you are, half a week later, ferrying me straight to hell? In what world does that make any sense? That’s what I don’t understand about you.”
She was back to pointing that finger at him again and he batted it away, a burst of anger burning through him fast enough to singe away a bit of the synthetic fatigue weighing him down.
“You know what?” he gritted out. “If I’m so confusing to you then just quit trying to figure me out. Because, honestly, everything is a hell of a lot easier when you just accept that I am the villain. I never wanted to be the hero. And I’ve done enough villain-y shit in my life that simply having feelings for you is not gonna redeem me. Trust me on that one. You don’t have to understand why I do the things I do. None of it matters anyway.”
She was back in his face then, one knee on the bed and leaning toward him. “It matters to me.”
He gripped his hair in two hands and flopped backward onto the bed, growling in frustration. He didn’t want her hurt feelings to affect him so much. He wanted to just be aloof and separate and take care of what needed to be done. But she wouldn’t let it fucking go and now she was staring at him like he’d gone and sold her out all over again. “What do you want from me?”
“I want you to explain it to me, Quill. Because it doesn’t make sense. You’re willing to stand in front of a gun for me and now you’re letting me turn myself in to the Director. Just explain how those two things can live in the same heart and I’ll leave you alone, I swear. If you can explain it, I’ll let it rest.”
“You think I’m honestly just throwing you to the wolves?” he burst out, at his wit’s end. “You really think I’m going to let you march in there and just hand yourself over to him? Fuck, I know I don’t deserve your high esteem, but Jesus, no. I am not giving you a ride toward a life of medical experiments and a cage and in the end you turning into a weapon for the government. That is not what is happening here.”
“Then what the hell is happening?” she shouted, both knees on the bed now, her arms flung wide.
He looked at the ceiling instead of at her and spit the words into existence. “I’m going to bring you in front of the Director and show him how inadequate you are.”
She reeled back from him like he’d tossed a cold martini in her face. “What?”
“Obviously you’re not actually inadequate. But my plan was to make you look that way to the Director. Make it look like I’d exaggerated yours and your brothers’ skills. That way he’d leave you all alone. He’d be disappointed, of course, and it would probably be a rigorous few days of testing, but in the end, you and your brothers would be out from under him. And I thought that was all that mattered.”
A solid minute ticked past without her saying a damn thing. That sweat that had been pricking at him before was back, but this time for a different reason. Quill counted to ten and then chanced a glance at her.
She was staring at him, slightly shell-shocked, slightly bemused. She sat on her feet, her hands resting on her knees. And she just stared at him.
“What?” he couldn’t help but ask, unnerved.
“You…” she started and then stopped. She pushed her lips out and furrowed her brow, looking comically stymied.
He couldn’t help but laugh, his fingers finally loosening from their death grip on his hair. His arms fell to his sides. “What?” he urged her.
“I…” She crossed her arms and cocked her head to one side. Her mouth opened, then she seemed to think better of speaking and clapped it closed again.
Sitting up and resting his elbows on his knees, he laughed again at her befuddled expression.
“Dawn. What?”
But apparently she was done talking. Done trying to explain what was going through her mind.
He watched like a hawk as her arms uncrossed. His eyes followed the path of one of her hands as it touched the mattress. And then the other hand followed the same path. Her weight shifted so that she was on all fours now and Quill’s eyes moved to her face, which was now fully in his personal space.
Her breath breezed across his face and his own caught in his chest. Suddenly, she reared up and her palms hit his shoulders. He let himself be knocked onto his back and she came with him. She had a palm beside either of his ears and then she was bending down and pressing her mouth to his.
This was… unexpected.
For a moment, all Quill felt was shock. And then a lock of her hair fell from behind her ear and feathered across his cheek. The visceral thrill gave him an electric jolt through his whole body. He planted his feet flat on the mattress and suddenly both his palms were pressing down on her spine.
Her mouth opened against his and he made a sound. It was a guttural groan that might have tried to be a word but gave up halfway. She shifted her weight and freed up one of her hands. His blood started zinging through his veins when her fingers wove through the long patch of hair at the top of his head. She gave an experimental tug and it was almost as if it was connected to his hips on a string, because his ass came up off the bed, his pelvis pushing against air, trying to find friction.
Apparently encouraged, she swung a knee over his hips. She straddled him at the exact same second that her tongue swept into his mouth and it was too much at once. Quill felt like he’d been dying of thirst only to be bodily dropped into a vat of ice-cold juice. Every single molecule came alive.
He hissed when she dropped her weight and heat onto his hips.
The fatigue and adrenaline warred in his body. He felt heavy and dozy and amped up all at the same time. The taste of her mouth spiraled through his sleepy brain, making him feel hypnotized and drunk. He felt powerful and weak all at once.
It didn’t even occur to him to pause this and ask her what the hell she was doing. It didn’t occur to him to slow things down. He thought of no consequence. There was no yesterday. There was no tomorrow. There was only this very second. This tremulous moment, balancing on a beam of gauzy light. There were only the handfuls of Dawn’s warm, slender curves that Quill couldn’t stop testing.
She opened her mouth farther, bit at his lip, pulled away, and then dove back in. It was one long kiss made up of a hundred smaller kisses. His body trembled as she pulled away again and again, only to lean down and start up all over again. Each time he wondered if this was the moment that she’d come to her senses, but each time he found himself once again drowning in the slick, hot heaven of her mouth.
This was not how he’d have guessed that Dawn Wolf kissed. When he’d imagined kissing her in the past, he’d imagined tentative, wary kisses. He’d imagined having to coax responses out of her. He’d imagined that much the way their friendship had started, she’d
be shy for a long time, and eventually she’d open to him, rewarding his patience with her free spirit. But no. That was not what was happening.
Dawn was diving in, headfirst. One of her hands was draped loosely over his throat, the other was still tugging at his hair. When he pulled her closer against him, his hands heavy at her back, she made a sound that he immediately tucked into his brain as a keeper. He’d replay that sound in his head for the rest of his life, never tiring of it.
She pushed her hips down against his in a clumsy, almost innocent way and it highlighted something that he knew he was going to have to address very soon: the aggressively enthusiastic wood that was currently trying to tear the elastic on his boxer briefs. She had to feel it. There was no way she didn’t feel it. She was basically straddling a metal rod.
He badly wanted to roll them over, to use his weight to sink her into the mattress. He wanted the hot line of her neck under his lips. He wanted to press their clasped hands into the bed. He wanted to feel her arch into him, he wanted the push and pull of her. He wanted her bite, her scratch, her yield, her take.
But he didn’t dare move. He wasn’t entirely sure what had made her start kissing him and he wasn’t about to do anything that might make her stop.
“You’re closing your eyes so tight,” she said against his lips before taking his bottom lip between her teeth.
He groaned and forced his eyes open. And that was a stupid move because his heart stuttered at the sight of her dark eyes so close to his.
Her eyes had always been able to wreck him with just a glance.
She’d had a crush on him.
God, there was a different universe, maybe one where his family was still alive, where Quill wouldn’t have ruined everything. Where he could have asked her on a date. Where their first kiss could have been on a doorstep after a date.
He closed his eyes again; he needed some small layer of protection between Dawn and his raw heart. But with his eyes closed, all there was was sensation. The slick velvet of tongue, the silk of her lips, the tremble of her moan.
She collapsed downward, her face tucking into his neck, and he realized it was because he’d been hugging her so tightly to him that she’d folded under the weight of his arms. And as much as he wanted to keep kissing, it was this that he wanted more than anything. The right to hold her in his arms. Her breath bloomed over his collarbone, her weight pinned him to the earth. He could feel her heartbeat against his chest and he wondered if she could feel his.
Their pulses evened out as the light changed through the window. When she finally tilted her head up again to see him, all the frantic energy of their first kiss had dissipated. Now, when he lifted his head and she lowered hers, there was something much more dangerous in their kiss.
He kissed her with his eyes open this time, his mouth as soft as he could make it. Where she’d been frantic and moaning and pulling at him before, now she was simply melting. Where there’d been scrambling, desperate hands, now there was simply gripping, stroking. She stopped straddling him and instead, stretched out along his body, her legs tangling with his, using his body like a life raft.
Two sharp raps were administered to the door to their room and then it swung open. “Dawn, I thought you might want some dinner—oh. Well, I see he’s awake.”
Dawn and Quill rolled their lips away from one another, Dawn’s cheek resting against his as they looked at the intruder at their door.
It was an older man, roughly sixty-five years old, and not much more than 5’5”. He had dyed black hair, white at the roots, and large, brown glasses. He held a tray of food out in front of him.
For a moment, Quill thought that Dawn had burst into tears when a tremble started up against his chest. She buried her face in his neck, her hair momentarily blocking his vision, and that’s when he realized she’d been overcome with a case of the giggles.
The man at the door cleared his throat and that only made Dawn laugh harder.
“I’m Quill,” he said, awkwardly pushing up to a sit.
Dawn moved to slide off of him, but he held her fast.
“Jesus Christ,” he mumbled in Dawn’s ear. “Stay where you are.”
He had an Eiffel Tower boner right now and it was pretty much the last thing that Quill wanted this stranger to see.
This only made Dawn laugh harder.
The man’s lip twitched. “I’m Harvey. I’ll just leave this here. I’m assuming you’re staying another night?”
“Thank you, Harvey,” Dawn gasped through her laughter. “Yes, I think it would be best for us to stay one more night, until Quill gets his feet under him again.”
“Well, if you need anything, Denise and I will be in the living room. Or just call 0 on your phone.”
The door clicked shut behind him and then both Dawn and Quill were laughing.
“Quill!” Dawn said, her eyes lit like stars and her arms still clamped around his neck. “You’re laughing!”
Deep rolls of laughter echoed out of his chest and Quill shook his head at her, at himself, at the situation. “I guess I am. Nothing like the threat of an old man seeing your boner to make you laugh.”
That set her off again.
When they finally stopped laughing, they were completely cuddled together. Her forehead rested against his cheek as she sat in his lap and their arms were completely wrapped around one another. Neither of them shifted to look at the other. It seemed they were both content to just feel the weight and warmth of each other.
“Dawn—”
“That food smells good,” she said brightly, cutting him off. She slid off his lap and went to pick up the tray. “Wanna split it?”
“Dawn,” he tried again, his eyes intent on her face.
She took a deep breath and turned to him, the tray of food in her hands and her eyes cast down at the ground. “Yeah?”
“Do you really not know why I was closing my eyes so tight?”
Her eyes sprang up to his. Apparently this was not what she’d been expecting him to say. She shook her head and some of her hair fell in her face, the way it used to, back when he’d first met her, when she used to hide herself from the world.
He stood up on heavy legs and took the tray from her, setting it on the corner of the bed and then taking her hands in his.
On the bed, they’d been eye level, so their size difference hadn’t been quite so noticeable. Right now, though, Quill peered down at her from his height.
“You had a crush on me,” he whispered to her, unable to keep the words confined inside his heart.
She scowled, leaned up on her tiptoes, and administered a sharp nip to his lip. “So?”
“No one has ever had a crush on me before.”
Dawn scoffed. “I guarantee you someone has had a crush on you before.”
“No,” he argued. “No one has ever gotten to know me enough to have a crush on me.”
“Oh.” She pursed her lips. “That’s so sad.”
“It is what it is.”
She stepped back from him and gathered up the tray of food, inspecting their offerings for the night. “So, you really weren’t going to turn me in to the Director, huh?”
When she turned back to face him, her face was lined with an expression he had no idea how to interpret. It was something between humor and affection and surprise.
“Don’t get me wrong, Dawn. I’m not a good man. I was the one who alerted the Director to your existence in the first place. I was the one who set up the whole trap last week. I was the one—”
“But since I first got into your car. Since we first set out on this trip… you weren’t going to let me turn myself in?”
He cleared his throat. “No. I wasn’t going to let that happen.”
She took a deep breath and offered up the food to him.
“Let’s eat.”
She put the tray on the bed between them and sat down.
He glanced down at his boxer briefs, which barely covered much even before his engine
had been revved to within an inch of its life. “Here,” he muttered. “Let me put some pants on—mmf.”
“Just eat,” she ordered as she shut him up by stuffing half a slice of bread in his mouth. “It’ll make you feel better. I promise.”
The look on her face had him obediently chewing and swallowing as he settled onto the bed. The grogginess was receding but he still felt a strange, sluggish racing. An aftereffect of the tranquilizer. “I hate that you went through this. That I put you through this.”
“Yes, yes,” she said, waving her hand through the air. “We’ve already been over all that.”
He laughed gruffly as he finished the bread. “You’re ready to move on? I think most people would require me to apologize for, I don’t know, the next decade.”
“Well, I’m not most people.”
His eyes widened when she jammed a hot spoonful of soup in his mouth. “Ah. Shit, that’s hot.” He waved a second spoonful of soup away and eyed her across the tray of food. “Are you revenge-souping me right now?”
She smirked and let the spoon fall back to the tray. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
Falling back to the bed, her arms went up over her head and her hair fell over her eyes. She puffed it away with her breath.
“Being a human is confusing,” she complained.
“Because you hate me and don’t hate me at the same time?” he guessed.
She cocked a brow and glowered at him. “Eat your soup.”
He followed her directions partially because he didn’t want to incur any more of her wrath and also because his stomach was growling at him.
She watched him take a few spoonfuls before her eyes went back to the ceiling. “How is it,” she started, “that I could want to kick someone in the goodies and screw their brains out at the exact same time?”
“It’s called hate-fucking and to be honest, it can be pretty fun.”
“Hmm.” She pushed up on her elbows and studied him. “Hate-fucking.”
“Yup.” He saved half the soup for her and finished off another slice of bread before he pushed the tray her way. He deserved an Oscar for how cool he was playing this entire conversation.
