by Maisey Yates
She wanted him. He sure as hell wanted her. And he was going to have her.
He said a brief prayer of thanks, one he had a passing concern might be blasphemous, for the condom he’d put in his wallet, and for the fact that he had his wallet in his back pocket already. Because he didn’t want to haul her upstairs and hunt for protection. He didn’t want a bed. He didn’t want to wait. He wanted whatever surface they could find here, and he wanted it now.
“You need to invest in skirts,” he said, shifting them both so that she was lying back on the table and he was over her, between her parted thighs. “Think how much easier that would be.”
“We’re in the kitchen,” she said, her eyes round.
“Did I not get an order for varied locations? I thought I was contractually obligated.”
“It’s the daytime.”
“And I’ll get to see you.” He unsnapped her pants and tugged them down, moving himself out of the way when the position of his body started to impeded his progress. “Are you sore?” he asked.
“No. But you weren’t willing to take my word for it last night.”
“Apparently I’m selective about these things.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a condom, tearing the top off, freeing himself from his jeans and rolling it onto his length. “My chivalry just ran out.”
He put his hand between her legs and pushed a finger inside of her. She was slick, ready for him already. He added a second finger, just to be certain. The last thing he wanted was an outpouring of screaming and swearing again.
Well, actually, that would be fine, if it wasn’t pained screaming and swearing.
“Ready?”
“Yes, Quinn. Yes, please.”
That was almost too much for him. Enough to make him lose it then and there, before he ever got in. He gritted his teeth and pushed inside of her.
Dammit. She was so tight. So hot. He didn’t know how he was going to survive this. Somehow, in the few hours since they’d made love, he’d forgotten how it was. He’d forgotten just how intense it had been.
He’d forgotten that this little virgin had given him the best sex of his entire life. He’d thought he’d made that up. He’d thought, in the bright light of day, it couldn’t be possible. Because honestly, it had been awkward. And it had scared at least five years off of his life when she’d obviously been in so much pain. And the blood had scared off maybe three more.
So bearing all that in mind, he hadn’t really believed it was possible that she was the best he’d ever had.
But she was.
She arched beneath him and he realized his error in not taking her top off. He didn’t have access to her breasts. Those perfect pink breasts. But he didn’t want to struggle with her top right now either, because that would mean breaking his rhythm, and that, honestly, might kill him.
Slender legs wrapped around his hips, pulled him in harder. “Good?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, her voice a whimper. She hadn’t cussed at him. She hadn’t said “ow.”
He pushed deeper into her and she let out a short, sharp sound.
“Good,” she said, as if knowing what his next question would be. “So good.”
He increased his pace, watching Lark, her eyes closed tight, her head thrashing back and forth, her body arching into him, moving up to meet him with each thrust. The sight alone about did him in.
And then he felt a wave go through her body, her internal muscles tightening around his cock, stealing every chance he had at rational thought, stealing all of his control, and pushing him over the edge into the abyss.
He grunted, an actual grunt, like an animal, as his orgasm thundered through him like a stampede. He hadn’t been able to hold it back. Hadn’t been able to hold anything back because, for some reason, Lark Mitchell made him lose his mind.
As the haze faded, pleasure receding into the background, he had a concept of how much of an ass he looked like. Standing there at the table with his pants undone, inside a half-dressed woman, with his front door unlocked.
He looked like a man who hadn’t been able to wait. A man who had been half out of his mind. And that’s what he was.
Sobering. Like a bucket of ice water over the head.
He looked down at Lark, who was flushed, her lips deep pink, swollen. She looked dazed, which made him feel a little bit smug, but she also looked a little nervous, which made him feel like a terrible person. A defiler of innocents.
Damn that newly discovered conscience.
“Just a second,” he said, dashing for the half bath just off the kitchen to dispose of the condom before straightening his jeans and doing his belt back up. When he went back to Lark, she was dressing, tugging her pants on, doing a kind of one-legged hop as she did.
“Lark—”
There was a knock on the door that was closer to the punch of a battering ram than a polite request for entry.
“Lark,” he started again, and the battering ram slammed against his door again. “Just a second,” he called. “Stay here.”
She nodded, straightening her clothes and smoothing her hair with unsteady fingers. She still looked recently kissed, and thanks to the high color in her cheeks, pretty recently full-on tumbled, but he wasn’t going to tell her that.
He went to the door and jerked it open. “What?”
If the realization from a moment ago had been a bucket of ice water over the head, this was a block of ice thrown into his face. It wasn’t employees on his doorstep, or a religious faction with tracts. It was two very large, very suspicious-looking men that he happened to know were related to the woman he’d just defiled—that was the word he’d settled on earlier—on his kitchen table.
And in the split second it took him to register who they were, he could see the flash go off in Cade’s eyes. And suspicion turned to the desire to commit cold-blooded murder.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Cade growled, advancing on Quinn, not waiting to be invited in.
And that was all the time it took for the flashbulb to go off in Cole’s head. And then he had two men looking at him like they wanted to kill him.
“I live here,” Quinn said. “And I’m not sure what makes you think you’re the one with the right to just walk in.”
“You know good and well why,” Cade growled. Yes, the other man had a limp, but he also had a brother standing behind him who was just as big and just as angry. “You’re Longhorn?”
“What do you think, Sherlock?” he asked. If he was going to die, he wasn’t doing it meekly.
“Where is my sister?” Cade bit out.
Quinn hadn’t expected Cade to move so quickly, considering his limp, but it turned out he was pretty damn fast, and before Quinn could respond Cade had him by the back of the neck, ready to introduce his head to ground if Quinn made a wrong move.
Cade was lean—Quinn probably outweighed him by a good twenty pounds, thanks to muscle mass—but Cole was a house, and between the two of them? It was better to avoid bloodshed.
“I swear it, Quinn, I don’t care very much about my life at the moment, and that puts you in a damn dangerous place,” Cade said, his voice a low growl. “So if I were you, I’d start talking. Where. The hell. Is my sister?”
“She’s right here, asshole, what are you doing?” Lark came out of the kitchen just then. The damn woman was trying to get him killed.
Cade released his hold on him and looked at her, and Quinn could feel the other man thinking, putting all the pieces together.
Shit.
“What are you doing here?” Cade asked.
“I work here,” she said. “And obviously, you already figured that out, or you wouldn’t be here.”
“I hoped to God it wasn’t true,” Cade said. “You work for him?”
“Yes, for him,” she said, her voice tremb
ling, arms crossed beneath her breasts, chin thrust upward. “Looks like we’re both good at keeping secrets. Oops.”
Cole’s lip twisted up into a snarl. “You bratty little hypocrite,” he said. “You were keeping this from us? And you have the nerve to get all up on my ass for not telling you about dad?”
“Totally different. One only needed to affect my life and my choices; the other was something that concerned me, and was hurting someone else so you could protect me. It’s different.”
“How is it different?” Cole asked, advancing on her.
“I didn’t know I took a job with Quinn when I first signed. I didn’t know who Longhorn Properties was either. Surprise, it was him, but I’d signed the contract already.”
It was a nice stay of execution, the three of them going over fine details. Quinn wasn’t complaining. He wasn’t looking forward to what was going to happen when Cade’s very slow deductive reasoning skills took him to the obvious point of conclusion.
“And you didn’t think to ask me for help?”
“I didn’t need help. I had a job. So look at it from my perspective. Either I break the contract and I owe him money, or I work like I’m supposed to and he owes me money. And, I might add, if I owed him, it’s money I don’t have, so it would have been you paying him. I walked into an impossible situation and I did the best I could.”
Cade crossed his arms over his chest. “What the hell do you call the situation we’ve been in? Im-damn-possible. Sometimes you make a bad choice. And since you should know that, I expect better, more adult behavior than what you treated us to last night. Act like a baby and I’ll damn well continue to treat you like one.”
As Lark looked between him and her brother, Quinn called himself a villain a thousand times over. Because she looked so torn. So anguished. So angry. And it was his fault. If he’d never touched her, at least she would only be defensive over her position as his employee. Not over the fact that they’d had sex no more than ten minutes ago.
And then the attention was back on him.
“Where did you stay last night?” Cole asked, his voice suddenly turned to ice, the question directed at Lark, his eyes resting on Quinn.
Quinn looked at Lark and tried to send a quick, telepathic plea for her not to get too defiant. She didn’t get the message.
She looked at her brother directly, her eyes glittering. With rage. With tears. With determination. “Here.”
Quinn expected Cade to question her on what that meant, since they’d been standing there talking for the past few minutes. So the impact of Cade’s knuckles on his jaw was unexpected. Unexpected enough that he lost his balance and fell into the wall, the side of his head striking the corner of the doorway.
“Shit.” He held on to the side of his face and felt around inside his mouth with his tongue for missing teeth. Thankfully, there weren’t any, but he couldn’t see straight.
“Did you touch my sister?” Cade grabbed him by the shirt collar and slammed him against the wall. He was still too dazed to fight back. “You sick fucker. Did you touch my sister? It wasn’t enough for you to mess me up, but you had to . . . for what? Because you’re pissed that you got caught cheating?”
He wanted to be defensive. He wanted to get mad and defend . . . his honor? He didn’t have any. But hers, maybe. The thing was, that was what had happened. He’d been pissed and he’d plotted a way to get back at Cade, and even though that wasn’t why he’d slept with Lark in the end, the result was the same. He was still standing here, with Cade’s knuckle-print on his face, having divided their family.
And yeah, his head hurt like hell. But Lark was going to be hurt too. That was the part he couldn’t reconcile. The part that made his gut ache.
But it was Cade’s fault. In the end, it was Cade’s fault. And he’d be damned if he thought of it differently. To hell with standing here and taking punches. He wasn’t the one laying down false accusations. He wasn’t the one ruining a man’s life because of his own stupid grudge against someone for not being friendly enough.
Yeah, Cade was like everyone else. He’d looked at him, and he’d seen the bad blood.
“I didn’t do anything to you,” he ground out. “I wouldn’t waste my time trying to beat you by sabotaging you.”
“So show me who did it, Parker. Who on the circuit? Everyone else is my friend.”
“Or everyone else bothers to fake it and pretend they like you. It’s a competition. Grow up, dumbass, none of us were friends. I just didn’t play games.”
“You’re wrong about that. We are all friends. We just didn’t like you. Now I’m only going to ask you one more time before we kick the ever-loving shit out of you, what did you do to my sister?”
“Stop it,” Lark said. “I mean really, stop it. You insulting . . . horrible . . . go away.”
“Lark, did he hurt you?” Cole asked.
“Get out,” Lark said.
“Us?”
“Yes, you,” Lark said, directing her anger at her brothers. Just how he’d hoped.
No. This wasn’t the plan anymore.
Does it matter? It’s what’s happening.
“How could you do this?” Cade asked, the question directed at Lark. “How could you work for this bastard, come hide out with him just because you got mad at us? How the hell can you stand there and as me to get out? I sacrificed for you. I feel more like a parent than your brother and the whole time you were . . . shit, I don’t even want to know.”
“Did you ever stop and think maybe this isn’t about you, Cade?”
“How can it not be? You go around trying to tell us how smart you are, and I can only assume you’re either stupid, or you don’t know who this guy really is.”
Silence fell between them, thick with anger. Lark’s cheeks were pink, tears pooling in her eyes. Quinn didn’t know if she was going to dissolve or explode.
She didn’t do either.
“Sure I do,” Lark said, hands on her hips, her tone strangely calm. “I know exactly who he is. Quinn Parker, former rich boy, ex-con turned rodeo rider currently barred from the circuit. Occasional bouts of assholeishness followed by moments of shocking decency. Good with his hands.”
Damn. He was going to get killed. She was going to get him killed.
“Anything else you want to know?” Lark asked.
Cade looked like he was going to throw up. Or hit something. “Did he . . . did you?”
“Is that your business?” she asked.
“You did. You fucked him,” he spat, his voice laced with venom. “Even though you know what he did to me, you let him put his hands on you.”
And just like that, Quinn saw red. “Back off, Mitchell,” he growled. “If you want to be pissed at me, that’s fine, but you have no right to come in here and start yelling at her. You have no right to talk to her like that.”
“Where the hell do you get off telling me what I have the right to do, Parker? I’m her brother—who are you?”
And Quinn made the decision that, as days went, this was an okay one to die. “I’m her lover.”
Yeah. Shit. Getting your nose broken hurt. It wasn’t his first time getting his nose broken, but it had been a long time. The impact was so intense he saw stars, and very little else, because his eyes were watering like a son of a gun and his knees shook, giving out beneath him.
Back in his bar brawling days he’d done a lot better. And it had hurt less. Maybe because he was usually drunk when he got into those fights. Now he was eight years too sober to be taking hits to the face.
“Out!” Lark screamed.
He heard Lark shouting through his haze of unholy pain. Finally his vision started clearing, and he stood back up, wiping the blood off of his face with the back of his arm.
“Not without you.” Cole or Cade, he couldn’t hear the difference in the pain haze.
<
br /> “Are you going to pick me up and carry me out? Because I don’t think you can do that. I am an adult, you’re on Quinn’s property, and you just assaulted him. I will call the cops on you, Cade, I swear it. Please don’t make me.”
“Lark . . .” Cade said, his voice choked.
“I’m serious. I would rather keep it between you and me. But if you don’t get the hell out right now, I’m not afraid to escalate it.”
He looked up and saw Cade walk out. Cole stood for a while and looked at Lark, who had a tear tracking down her cheek.
“Door’s open if you want to come home,” Cole said. “But you have to come alone.”
Cole turned away and slammed the front door shut, and Lark’s hand was on his arm.
“Are you okay?”
“Broken nose,” Quinn said, suddenly a little bit embarrassed that he hadn’t put in a better showing for Lark. But the alternative had been punching her brother, and then she would have been mad at him and not them. “Not the first time. But I feel like I should be asking you if you’re okay.”
“I can’t believe he did that to you. I can’t . . . what were they doing coming here to defend my virtue?”
“You did have virtue.”
“They don’t know that.”
“Honey, I’m sure they did. How many dates have you been on recently?”
“You haven’t taken me on a date. You’ve taken me on a table though.”
“Yeah, well”—he wiped at the blood running down his face again—“I’m still imagining they had a fair idea. Which, whether you like it or not, makes you the innocent party and me the guilty one. Plus, I think Cade would cheerfully slit my throat in a dark alley regardless of my relationship with you, so this just gave him a really handy excuse to go on a hate rampage with my face.”
“Maybe you should get a tissue. Or a drop cloth. You’re sort of having your own personal plague of blood coming out your nose.”
He looked down at his arm and winced. “Yeah.”
“He’s an ass.” She brushed a tear from her cheek, her shoulders shaking.
