Beyond Shame

by Kit Rocha

  Laughter came easier than Noelle expected, and it wasn't because of the whiskey humming in her blood. She was as sober as she'd ever been, though maybe high on the feeling of belonging. "I'm not getting in the middle of that. I don't want Lex to stab me!"

  "That," Rachel declared, "would never happen. She has a real soft spot for you, one she doesn't even have for Dallas."

  "Because you're sweet," Nessa said. "And loyal. I've only given you about a hundred chances to dish all the dirty details about Dallas's bedroom and what he gets up to in it."

  Noelle flushed. "I don't—"

  "Nah," Nessa cut in. "It's okay. I should go easy on you because you're new, but I can't help myself. I'm a compulsive gossip. Ask Amira."

  The tiny brunette nodded. "It's true. She's horrible."

  At least they wouldn't be upset if she refused to betray Lex's trust. Noelle rubbed her hands over her thighs and shook her head. "It's not that I'm not used to gossip. That's all the women are allowed to do in Eden. I'm just not used to women talking about sex so openly. Or…well, at all, really."

  "No harm, no foul." Rachel straightened and rose, her eyes on the crowd. "I'm gonna go dance with Ace. I might actually let him touch me tonight."

  Nessa whooped her approval before slugging Rachel on the shoulder. "Make him work for it. Begging's good for him."

  Rachel turned and tilted her head. "You know it."

  Noelle watched her thread her way into the crowd as another fight started between two men who weren't O'Kanes. Ace was grinding between two blondes whose adoring expressions vanished when Ace abandoned them to wrap an arm around Rachel's waist.

  "Why doesn't Dallas let more women into the gang?" she asked Nessa and Amira as the two groupies sulked toward the cage. "They all seem willing enough."

  "Yeah, willing enough to get laid and paid," Amira said. "You think those two give a shit about Ace? I doubt they even know his name."

  Nessa nodded in sharp agreement. "You can tell the ones who care. Like Trix." She gestured to the bar, where a pretty redhead in jeans and a tightly cinched corset poured drinks for the people watching the fight. "She started by coming to the fights, but she got to know the guys and the girls. Got a job and made herself useful. I think if she wanted to go for ink, Dallas would consider it."

  Presumably it was a much rarer occurrence than Noelle had realized, which said a lot about her own easy acceptance—or maybe more about Lex's influence. Dallas had made it pretty damn clear he hadn't expected Noelle to be of any use at all, which left Lex as her savior.

  Lex...and Jasper. Noelle sought him out again and found him still deep in conversation with Maddox. "I guess there must be a lot of gossip about me, then. And how fast he let me in."

  Nessa actually turned a little pink. "Uh..."

  Amira slid her arm around Noelle. "I think you've already figured out what everyone's been saying, haven't you? Lex and Jasper wanted you here, and that's enough for Dallas."

  "Yeah, mostly that." Nessa slid to the couch and mirrored Amira's gesture. "We all love Jas, okay? And you make him happy. Growly and confused like a big dumb oaf, but that's just because he's a man. Men need to get used to being happy. Amira can tell you—no one did growly and confused like her big dumb oaf."

  She covered her face with her hands and laughed. "Flash was terrible. It was all this pushing and pulling, like he didn't know what the hell he wanted."

  A weight Noelle hadn't realized was there lifted, and she clutched at the words. "So that's normal? Wanting more and then less, or speeding up and slowing down? Lex told me I should just go for him, but I don't know what he wants."

  "In my experience? It's totally possible he doesn't know, either."

  That part was less reassuring. Noelle had to fight to keep a plaintive note out of her voice. "So what do I do?"

  "Whatever you can," Amira murmured sympathetically. "Whatever you want. That's all there is. It falls into place, or it doesn't."

  So, in the end, Lex was right. There were no guarantees, no easy ways. She could float through this, too, like she'd floated through life, floated through rebellion. Jasper might take her. If he didn't, someone else could. She could be kept, marked, trapped in all the ways Eden had made her.

  Maybe the secret was to make a choice.

  Leaning over, she pressed a kiss to Amira's cheek. "Thank you. I mean it."

  "Don't thank me," she demurred. "It's all you. Remember that."

  "Remember what?" a deep voice rumbled behind them. Flash bent down to kiss Amira before resting his hip against the arm of the couch. His hand fell to the back of her neck, a protective gesture he barely seemed aware of. "You girls up to no good, I hope?"

  "Hardly. Just some hot and heavy gossip." Amira wrapped her arm around his thigh, as absentminded and possessive as his hand on her neck.

  "A guy can dream." He dragged his fingers through her hair. "I've got a little bit before my fight's up, baby. Came to check on you."

  She rolled her eyes and swatted at his hand. "I'm the same as I was twenty minutes ago. I've been sitting on a couch, for Christ's sake."

  "That's our cue." Nessa hopped up and dragged Noelle after her. "He'll just get more and more annoying until we move so he can cuddle her."

  Flash's glare was so growly, so grumpy, that Noelle broke out laughing. That earned her a glower of her own, but Flash circled the couch to claim their spot, and it was impossible not to melt when he eased Amira into his lap and wrapped both arms around her. One of his hands dropped to the curve of her belly, and his surliness evaporated.

  Staying felt like intruding, so Noelle smiled. "I'm going to dance. I'll be back later."

  Amira didn't look up. "Bye."

  Nessa giggled and pulled Noelle out onto the floor. Rachel caught sight of them and tipped her head. "Over here."

  Ace swung his arms wide to pull the three of them into a laughing, hip-grinding tangle of limbs. "Who's the luckiest bastard in Sector Four? I got all the hot O'Kane girls to myself."

  "Not all of them." Rachel shifted closer, sliding one hand into his hair, and licked the corner of his mouth.

  For the first time since Noelle had met him, Ace seemed at a loss for words. The easy rhythm of his hips faltered, and she was close enough to hear his groan, low and hungry, the realest sound she'd ever caught slipping past his lips.

  Amazingly, with that one little touch, Rachel had damn near brought him to his knees.

  Lex was definitely right. Noelle had to make her choice and make her move.

  Soon.

  Dallas

  He'd been all of nine years old the day his mother had taught him the lesson that would define his life.

  Life on the farm had been hard. The world his mother had known had been dead for a decade, but she'd never curled in on herself like so many of the weak and the terrified. Nineteen years old when the lights went out, she'd given birth to him six months later and had held on to her little scrap of Texas at the point of a shotgun, more than willing to kill to defend her son and the people who relied on her wits and strength.

  She could be cold-blooded, his mother, but she didn't believe in waste. Rage could give a body the strength to survive in a world gone mad, but not if it was unleashed without care. So the afternoon she'd caught him in a hair-pulling brawl with a boy half again his size, she hadn't taken the other boy to task. No, she'd dragged Dallas to the nearest trough by the scruff of his neck, dunked him in the water until he sputtered, and hauled him to the barn to take out his fury on the woodpile.

  Get angry, she'd told him, on that afternoon and a dozen times after it. Get angry, and then make something out of it. Don't fight unless you have no choice, and even then you don't waste time. You end it quick.

  So he had. Every day of his adult life, it seemed, he'd gotten angry. And he'd turned that anger into a business, and then a gang, and then a whole fucking sector that he ruled over as absolutely as his mother had over her little ranch. She'd never held as many lives in her hands

as he did, but her advice still fit. It worked.

  Most of the time.

  She'd never known him as an adult. She'd never known Lex, a woman who could make him so damn furious it was amazing he hadn't taken over all the sectors by now. He'd watched her waltz out of the warehouse with two hulking cage fighters. Rubbing them in his face.

  You don't own me. She might as well have screamed it. And he couldn't so much as blink a fucking eye, because he didn't own her. Dallas fucking O'Kane couldn't be seen wanting something he couldn't have, because Dallas O'Kane could have anything he wanted.

  "Make something out of it," he grumbled, kicking open the door to the workshop. Salvaged lumber lined one wall in towering stacks, mismatched boards from demolished buildings. Someone had pounded out the nails and cut them into manageable pieces, all stacked, waiting to be burned with the O'Kane logo and turned into crates for packing bottles of moonshine.

  On the other side of the room, Bren was already bent over the wide worktable. Dallas supposed he should have expected that, too. "Bren."

  "Sir." He tucked a pencil behind one ear before looking up. "Ready to get to work?"

  "You bet." Dallas closed the door and strode to the table. "Might as well knock out enough crates for the next shipment, eh?"

  Bren made a wordless noise of agreement and reached for the measured stack of boards. He fired up the band saw, its whir even louder than the jumble of thoughts racing around in Dallas's brain.

  Not that it kept the damn things from racing. Sometimes Bren's silence was a blessing, but right now Dallas would take any distraction from the image of Lex dragging her new playthings out of the warehouse.

  He couldn't give her the satisfaction of knowing she'd gotten to him, or she'd do it all the damn time. And that thought had him driving the first nail into wood hard enough to split the board. "Fuck."

  Bren shut down the saw and tossed the last of the cut pieces of wood onto the table. "Question."

  Thank God. "Yeah?"

  "If it bothers you, why let it go on?"

  If Bren found the situation perplexing enough to bring it up, shit really had gotten out of control. If it had been anyone else, Dallas would have brushed it off, but Bren was closer to him than anyone but Jasper—and Jasper wouldn't have had to ask the question. He already understood the answer on a gut level.

  Bren needed to learn it. "If I start treating women like Wilson Trent does, what the fuck hope do they have with the rest of you?"

  "No, I mean—" Bren barked out a laugh, more self-deprecation than humor. "I guess there really aren't many ways to handle it."

  "For you, there might be. For me..." Dallas shrugged and reached for a new board. "It's not always good to be king."

  "I see." Bren busied himself with fitting four cut pieces together to form the bottom of a crate.

  Sometimes it was hard to tell if the man was biting his tongue or had moved on. "If you've got something to say..."

  Bren smiled faintly. "Is that my position? Court jester? I get to safely say whatever the hell I want because someone has to speak truth to the king?"

  "Trusted lieutenant," Dallas corrected softly. "You and Jas both. He won't let me get too hard, and you can't let me get too stupid."

  The man braced both fists on the table and stared down at its cluttered surface. "Never known you to be scared of anything, that's all."

  He could sidestep the words easily by claiming he wasn't scared of Lex, and it was true. Lex herself didn't frighten him. The thought of how quickly she could come to hate him, though... "Not scared. Cautious."

  "Caution is smart. Admirable."

  "Could you sound a little less convinced?"

  "Probably not, though I could try."

  Dallas sighed and drove a nail into the side of the crate. "You're a lousy jester. All of the truth, none of the jokes."

  Bren shrugged. "I have no sense of humor—isn't that what everyone says?"

  Everyone except Jas, who never failed to comment on Bren's twisted idea of what was funny. Dallas had always thought it was a lot simpler. "You haven't had much to laugh about of late."

  "No one has, right?" Bren reached out and plucked the hammer from Dallas's hand. "I tried to collar Lex once. Did she ever tell you?"

  Dallas's fist clenched around empty air, and Bren was too clever by half. Not that Dallas would have swung a hammer at one of his own men—probably—but the impulse alone was enough to give him pause. "No, she never mentioned it."

  "I'm not surprised."

  Dallas fought to keep his voice even. "So. You tried."

  "I was still new," Bren explained with a shrug. "I didn't know yet."

  A leading sort of statement. Its own trap, the kind meant to make him ask, Know what? As if the answer wasn't hanging in the air—everyone thought Lex was as good as his, and Dallas didn't bother to correct them. Neither did she, God bless her.

  Most of the time, anyway.

  With the thought of Lex's two suitors threatening to rear its head again, Dallas forced the conversation in a new direction. "How's the girl doing? Six? She getting her head around trusting us yet?"

  "Nah." Bren held out the hammer. "It's a little soon for that, I think. She's still half convinced we're going for the long con. Maximum mental anguish."

  Dallas raised an eyebrow. "Is that what Trent did to her?"

  "Yeah. Maybe the worst thing he did."

  It was sophisticated for someone like Trent, a vicious game that required patience and an ability to lie that Dallas had assumed was beyond the bastard. Or maybe it had never been a lie for him—maybe he'd just been that fucking childish. A kid who cherished his favorite toy until he got bored, then shattered it so no one else could play with it.

  There was probably a lesson in there, an intensely personal one that Dallas didn't want to ponder too closely. "She must trust you, at least a little."

  "Getting there." Bren flipped the crate over and laid strips of wood across the bottom.

  Dallas abandoned the pretense of building and moved to the far wall, where Bren had already stoked the fire they kept banked in the massive hearth. Maddox had spent a year perfecting an electric heating element for the O'Kane branding irons, but Dallas preferred the old-fashioned way. The electricity they leached from Eden's power grid was far more reliable now than it had been in earlier years, but there were still failures and blackouts. Work had to go on, even when the lights were out.

  He selected the two largest irons and set them into the flames. "Let me know when you think it's safe to loosen the girl's leash. I'm not ready to give her free run of the place, but she doesn't need to stay locked up all the time."

  Bren hammered the last nail into place. "I'll let you know when I think you can turn her over to Lex."

  He couldn't hold back his snort. "I don't think Lex is looking for another playmate. She's pretty well enamored of Noelle."

  Bren pulled up short and eyed Dallas with a shake of his head, then returned to the task at hand with an unintelligible mutter. This time, Dallas didn't feel like poking for an answer he didn't want to hear. He knew what it would be.

  Turn her over to Lex.

  Like Lex was his damned queen. Like she wasn't off screwing a couple of street brawlers just to remind him that he could own her allegiance, but he could never own her body. The harder he closed his hands around her, the more she'd slip away...and the thought of losing her for good made him want to wrap her in chains.

  Maybe he should. He could use the excuse of Trent to slap that collar around her throat and show her how good it would be.

  If she'd take it. If it would be enough.

  No, no use pretending, even to himself. It would never be enough. Not a collar, not a mark. He wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than all of her—mind, body and soul—and Lex would never give up that much control. They'd destroy each other. He'd destroy her, and that was the one thing he couldn't bear. Better to take what he could get and leave them both whole.

  Mostly.

  Chapter Sixteen

  In Noelle's imagination, her seduction of Jasper had started differently.

  For one thing, in her imagination she'd had time to prepare. To take a bath, to pick the perfect outfit. The perfect underwear. The perfect jewelry, all wonderfully illicit, turning her on before she even reached his door.

  Her fantasy hadn't included a sick waitress, a club full of rowdy drunks, and Dallas deciding they would damn well stay open until the idiots stopped throwing around fistfuls of money. By the time the bouncer rolled the last one out the door, Noelle was frazzled, a little disheveled, and caught in some jittery place between exhausted and so hyped up she could barely sit still.

  She almost decided to forgo the entire thing in favor of a quiet hour unwinding in Lex's tub and a night of sleep. But as she found herself in the long hallway that led to Jasper's rooms, then at his door, the truth was stark and undeniable.

  He was how she wanted to unwind, even if it meant nothing more than the chance to kiss him before she went to bed without him. So when his door swung open in response to her knock she did exactly that, ignoring all of her careful plans in favor of rising up on her toes to seal her lips to his.

  He lifted her in his arms, his mouth still on hers as the door slammed shut behind her. His tongue traced her lips, then eased between them, a lazy exploration he didn't end until her back hit the wall. "Long night?"

  "Endless." Amazing how promptly her aching feet recovered once they were hovering three inches above the ground. She wrapped a leg around his and smiled. "Dallas wouldn't close the doors until he'd emptied everyone's pockets. But the drunker they got, the better they tipped."

  "That's a good thing, right?"

  Noelle dug in her pocket and pulled out the thick wad of tightly rolled bills. She'd counted each one before adding it to the stack, stunned by how quickly they added up, and how freeing it was to realize they were hers. "As long as you promise to take me to the market soon. I promised Dallas I'd wait for you."

  "He's coming down like that on everyone, not just you." Jasper stuffed her money back in her pocket and started for the bathroom. "We're all on restriction, for obvious reasons."

  -->