by Sophia Gray
“Again,” she purred.
Once he began he couldn’t stop. A steady rhythm built between them; not quite slow, not quite rough but somehow it managed to be both. He ran one hand down her body until it wrapped around her knee, tugging it up until he opened her more. The subtle shift of their bodies had him pushing just a little deeper.
“More,” he growled.
“Is there more?” she teased back.
He made an animalistic sound and rolled her to her knees. His hands swept down her back and then to her hips, pushing her forward even as he pushed inside of her. She grabbed the back of the bed to hold herself still.
“Oh Finn, yes. More, give me more.”
“Say it again.”
She did, thrusting her hips back to add emphasis to the phrase. She didn’t want him to take his time anymore. She didn’t want gentle or teasing. She wanted him, all of him, and she wanted it now.
He maneuvered his body again until he had mounted her, like he couldn’t get enough of her beneath him. He put one hand on her shoulder and the other on her hip, and he started to pound into her body. His hips steadily became a blur, pushing into her depths, hard and reckless. She felt the bed creak beneath her hands where they gripped.
“Harder,” she demanded. “Finn, harder.”
He jerked her back from the bed, and she caught her arms against the pillow, pushing it beneath her body until her hips were cradled by the softness. He gripped one wrist, holding her right there. The shift had her body tightening around him, and he felt larger inside of her. They groaned in tandem.
“There,” she gasped. “Right there.”
His body became a relentless engine of pleasure as he hammered into her. “Cora,” he gasped. His thrusts took on that imperfect pulse of a man fast approaching his own peak.
“Not yet,” she hissed. “Not yet!”
He shoved deep into her, as if he could disappear inside of her. She thrust herself back against him, grinding her body against the ball of need that was building inside of her. He twitched, spasmed, and then came. Once, twice, three times he thrust, and then he filled her. The white-hot sensation of him pouring into her body drove her over the edge, and she joined him in mindless, blinding release.
They stayed there for a moment more, rooted together and breathing hard. When he began to pull back, his hand carefully guiding himself out of her, she almost mourned the loss. When he was free of her, he tumbled to his side, making the bed creak again.
“Good God, woman.”
“Oh, is that all, biker boy?”
He nipped hard enough at her shoulder that she poked at him. “I have never met a woman more ungrateful than you.”
“I’m plenty grateful, but you promised me hours and it’s…just after twelve fifteen.” She had just enough energy to tap the bedside clock beside her.
He took a deep breath and rolled over, pushing his limp shaft against her thigh. She laughed and squirmed away.
“I’ll give you all night…in about twenty minutes.”
“Promises, promises.”
Chapter 11
Finn
It was sometime early in the morning, or really late at night, and Finn wasn’t entirely sure which it was…or which he wanted it to be. The sun wasn’t quite out yet, but the first rays of it were beginning to turn the sky a softer shade of black in the very farthest reaches of the sky. He could see it through the window.
His entire body was one great big ache, and he didn’t think his legs were capable of doing anything but lying there and taking up space. The bed sheets were a mess around their bodies, and half of them had ended up on the floor at some point during the wild sexual Olympics. He wasn’t sure who got first place and who was walking home with the silver, but he was pretty sure everyone was a winner tonight.
It had been hours, and good God they had been perfect. Finn didn’t normally give into the notion of losing himself in a woman. Good beer, good friends, even a good fight. All of those things could keep a guy from getting overwhelmed. But Cora…well…she was nothing but overwhelming, and he loved it. The entire apartment complex could have been going up in smoke and he would still have been enjoying that wild woman in that bed.
He took a deep breath and swung his legs over the edge of the mattress, which seemed to have moved a few inches to the left. He felt the shift as she rolled over.
“You leaving?” She didn’t sound like she was pleading him to stay. They both knew she wouldn’t. Cora was willing to do a great many things, but she wouldn’t beg him for anything. Not even great sex.
No, he thought, it wasn’t just great sex. Great sex would have been forty minutes of craziness followed by a midnight meal and a cold beer. This was…something else. They hadn’t just pounded the daylights out of one another; they had talked, they had explored…It had been insane.
He shook his head, trying to get rid of those thoughts. He had things to do today, and if he kept thinking about the way she grabbed him and hauled him to her, he’d never get out of this room in one piece.
“Yeah,” he said, reaching for his jeans. “But I’ll be back tonight.”
She sat up and he turned to look at the way the fading moon shone on her pale skin. She didn’t drag the sheet up to hide her nudity. She rested in the middle of their sexual battleground, and he suddenly found himself thinking of nymphs. She looked like she was crafted out of magic with all that rich auburn hair in a tumble around that elegant face of hers and skin that glowed like silver-speckled porcelain.
“You cooking dinner again?”
“I was planning on it.”
She paused and then rolled over, tugging a small fold of bills out of her nightstand. Why she kept money there, he didn’t know. He also didn’t think he liked the idea of her tossing green at him after doing all the things they had just done. He narrowed his eyes at her. “What’s this for?”
“I don’t want you paying for all the food.”
“I don’t mind,” he said, looking down at the hundred-dollar bill that was looking up at him. Was that cheap or expensive for a whore? He didn’t know. He hadn’t really done much in the way of buying women. “I make good money.”
“Don’t do that,” she said flatly, pulling the blanket up over her breasts. It bothered him that she suddenly felt the need to cover up.
“Do what?”
Her eyes were like flecks of ice in a storm when she looked at him. There was magic there, too, though. “Don’t make this some stupid macho thing where you get bent out of shape because a woman offered to buy. I thought you weren’t like that.”
He didn’t think he was. He had no problems with a woman independently earning her share of the wealth. Hell, he was fine with a woman earning the most of it. His own mom had been a strong damn woman who did what she could to make ends meet. He tugged his jeans into place and sighed. “It’s not that,” he said, jerking a hand through his messed-up hair. “I just don’t want you thinking…that…you know…I can’t help out.”
She raised her brow at him. Her next words were winter cool. “Not only do you own an auto-repair place, you happen to be part of a lucrative organization that doesn’t always stay within the boundaries of the law. I’m well aware that you are fiscally capable.”
He frowned at her. There was something about the cool, flat way she used her words that had his hackles going up. “You just called me a criminal again.”
“I did. Does that bother you?”
He zipped his pants up and wondered where the hell his shirt had gone. “My mom always said it’s not really what you say, it’s how you are saying it. You say criminal the way other people say disease.”
She sighed and held up her hand. “I don’t like that aspect of you, Finn. I don’t like it at all. I’ve never made a secret of it, and one night together isn’t going to change my mind on the subject.”
“Do you know what we do?” he demanded, whirling on her.
“You break the law.”
�
��Yeah, but do you know what we do?”
She tugged the blanket closer. “Are you going to tell me?”
“Most of our money is made stealing cars and selling guns. We steal cars because that shit is insured, and it hurts no one but the insurance company to pay out for it. We sell guns because we believe in a person’s right to keep themselves safe. We don’t do drugs.”
“Hookers?” she asked pointedly.
“From time to time,” he admitted. “But it’s not like you think it is. Marcy, the Old Lady to our boss, runs that. She has a house she uses and she makes sure the girls, and guys if you really want to know, involved are safe, happy, and clean. She firmly believes there is nothing wrong with paying for a little love so long as the person who’s providing the service is all right doing it.”
She paused. “There are boy whores, too?”
He laughed. “Marcy is a good businesswoman, just like you. She provides anything and everything so long as everyone is of age and willing.”
He watched as she puzzled out her emotions. Finn was used to that response when he talked frankly about the business with people. He let her have her moment while he continued trying to set his hair straight. It wasn’t that he cared so much what it looked like, but it kept him from yanking away the blanket that she was still holding to herself like armor.
“Why not drugs?”
“Drugs make a whole town go sick, even if it’s just one person doing them. It’s not just someone smoking some weed. It’s a person injecting poison into their body, or snorting it up their nose. Yeah, I’m all about doing what you want with your own damn body or whatever, but the fact is that people throw themselves and their families away for a hit…People don’t do that with other things.”
“I don’t know that I agree with you on that part. A gun can hurt someone just as much as drugs.”
“Sure, but no one ever kept anyone safe injecting dirty shit between their toes.”
She pulled her knees to her chest in contemplation. He let her think about it. She was a smart woman, and she had more than proved she could think for her own damn self. He’d said his part.
“I’m not a bad person, Cora. And since we are being so honest…I am damn close to loving you.”
Her lips parted in an O of surprise. “I what?”
“Did you go suddenly deaf?”
“Well…no, I just…”
It wasn’t the reaction he wanted, but at least she didn’t sink underneath the covers and tell him to leave. The coldness of her eyes had thawed a little, too, so he went on. “Yeah, I’m pretty damn surprised by it too, but there you go. I like your snippy nature and take-no-bullshit attitude. I like that you give a damn about people so much that you have to unwind for hours after the end of the evening just to get to sleep. I like that you dropped everything to come take care of a brother you hadn’t seen in years. I like that you know exactly who and what you are. If that’s not a cocktail for a woman to love, I don’t know what is.”
She blinked rapidly, as if trying to keep tears he couldn’t see at bay. “I don’t…I didn’t—”
“Don’t respond. I didn’t say it so you would give me some kind of answer. I said it because it was true and because I thought you ought to know.”
He walked around the bed and put his hand on her cheek. It was soft as velvet under his callused palm. She didn’t lean into it like he secretly wished she would, but she didn’t pull away either. He’d take that. She wasn’t just any woman, willing to get lost in the romance of the moment. She was Cora, and she had her own shit to handle. He could see the tears now, glittering in the very corners of her eyes like wet diamonds. He wanted to believe those tears were from happiness, and maybe that’s why it took him a moment to see that she was mad.
“Damn it, Finn, why did you have to go and ruin it?”
Her words were so softly said that he didn’t understand their meaning at first. They could have meant “that was nice of you to say” or even “maybe I’m falling for you, too,” but they didn’t. The words were soft as satin and cut through him like a dagger.
“What? I didn’t ruin anything.”
“This was a great night,” she said, jerking away from his hand as the tears started to run down her face. “I’m sorry but it can’t happen again.”
“Why not?” he demanded, trying to keep the little punch of anger from showing.
She whipped her gaze on him, and it was filled with so much raw pain that he wanted to hug her. What had happened to cause this passionate woman so much pain? He wanted to know, to help, to alleviate some of it.
“Because it can’t, damn it. I get that you believe in what you do, and you’ll have to reconcile yourself with that. But I know better. I’ve seen what it can do to a person, to the people around you. This was…this was fun, but no. No more.”
He dragged his hands through his hair, ruining what little style he had given it. “Man, you are seriously one of the dumbest smart people that I have ever met.”
“I beg your pardon?”
He shook his head and reached back to work his hair into a braid. “You think you know everything. You think you have it all figured out. Well, here’s a great big surprise for you, Ms. Business. You don’t.”
“That makes no sense. I—”
“Stop,” he snapped. “Just fucking stop.”
Her eyes went cold and flat as ice cubes on a polar cap. “Don’t you dare tell me what to do.”
“We were both telling each other what to do just a little while ago, Cora.” He slammed a hand in the general direction of the bed. “Don’t pretend like we didn’t fully enjoy ourselves.”
“Sex doesn’t equal a relationship.” She crossed her arms and lifted her chin in cool defiance.
“If you think what happened here was just sex, you are fooling yourself. I’ve had sex before, Cora Anderson, and this wasn’t it.”
Fuck the shirt, he decided. She could keep it. Maybe she’d even like having it when she came back to her senses. He picked up his wallet from the ground and deliberately left the hundred-dollar bill on the stand next to her.
“Finn—”
He shook his head. He didn’t want to hear anything else from her right now. If she said anything else he couldn’t handle, he’d walk out and never look back. He didn’t want to do that. “I’m going to go. I have shit to do, and so do you. I’ll be back tonight.”
“Still?”
“Cora, I’m not just here for you.”
With that, he walked out of the room and out of the apartment.
Chapter 12
Cora
The living room was a mess, and so was Cora. It wasn’t the first time, just the most recent. She felt like she had stuck her foot in her mouth somehow, but she also felt like she had been right. It was a strange mix of emotions she couldn’t quite work out. Instead of working on that, she had put on her less attractive pajamas and started to clean. It began in her bedroom, fixing the mattress, the bed sheets. She’d tucked the money he’d been too damn proud to take back into her emergency stores and came out into the living room.
Maybe she should have gone to sleep. There was every chance that she would have woken up with the ability to really formulate a plan for handling the social fallout of sleeping with the wrong someone, but it seemed pointless. Oliver would be up in a little while, and she didn’t want him to see any remnants of her night of bad decisions.
Yes, she thought to herself, that’s exactly what it had been. A bad decision driven by stress and a mild interest in a physically attractive, but ultimately inappropriate, man. Nothing more. He wanted to call it more than sex. He was just being foolish. It hadn’t been anything special. Good sex didn’t need to have emotions attached to it. If he was so used to drunk college girls and uptight housewives that he couldn’t handle a woman who knew how to govern herself…well, that was all his fault. There was absolutely nothing she could do with any of that.
Cora was just beginning to calm down when
she spotted a tank top against the wall. The image of his body being revealed as that scrap of fabric swept up the line of gloriously tanned abs was vivid enough to bring a flush to her cheeks. What had she been thinking? She hadn’t, that was the problem. Her own clothes were a pile of useless fabric puddled on the floor. It was embarrassing to know she had let him do that when Oliver had been just down the hall.
“Stupid Cora,” she said to herself, picking everything up with more ferocity than was necessary.
The shirt smelled of him, that particular mix of Finn and the work he did. An enforcer, he had called himself. She knew what that was. They could fight. It was strange, he didn’t seem like that kind of man. Then again, she had never been a great judge when it came to bad boys.
