by Julie Kriss
His skin was perfect. Perfect. Taut and warm, the muscles moving mysteriously beneath, the happy trail on his stomach surprisingly soft. I felt all of this when I pushed his shirt up the minute we came through the door of the house in Diablo.
He was already kissing me by then. He pulled out the few pins I’d managed to put in my hair and wound his hands through it, his mouth hot and familiar on mine. We stumbled upstairs, tearing at each other in the dark like two people starving. His tie was gone. My shoes were kicked off, somewhere behind us. I pushed his jacket from his hard shoulders and worked on his buttons as I bit his lip. In the bedroom, he threw me on my back on the bed and knelt between my knees, pushing up the hem of my little black dress and hooking his fingers into my panties. “Spread your legs,” he said, throwing the panties away.
I did. He was in glorious disarray now, his shirt pulled out and half unbuttoned, his hair deliciously mussed. He looked down at me with such hot adoration I felt my pulse throb hard in my pussy. He ran his warm hands over the insides of my thighs, then raised his gaze and nodded toward my breasts. “Show me these, too.”
Squirming, I unzipped the side zipper on my dress, unhooked my bra, and slid the straps of the dress down my shoulders, showing him everything.
“Very nice,” he said, leaning down and taking a hard nipple in his mouth. I lost all sense of decorum, as I always did as soon as he touched me. I moaned out a breath and wound my hands in his hair.
He finished with one nipple and worked the other. The fabric of his shirt brushed my bare skin. My dress was hiked both up and down, wrenched in the middle and probably halfway wrecked. I looked like a woman who shamelessly wanted to be fucked. I arched my back and knew that was exactly what I was.
He let my nipple go and pressed his face into my neck, the fabric of his pants touching my inner thighs. “I’ve been going out of my fucking mind,” he growled into my skin. “I want to punish you. I want to lick your hot little pussy until you beg me to come. But I won’t let you. I’ll come down your throat instead. And then I’ll eat you out again.”
I moaned and slid my hand down between us, cupping his cock. It was thick and hard through his pants. I worked at the button. “No,” I protested. “Fuck me.”
“You want that?” he said, letting me work his pants open, letting me push them down along with his boxer briefs. “You want my cock?”
He wanted to hear it. I wanted to say it. “I want your cock,” I breathed against his skin. “I want it so much. I’ll beg you for it. Devon, I’m going crazy.”
He lifted his head and kissed me, his tongue slow and demanding, and he lowered a hand between my legs. “My girl shouldn’t be going crazy,” he said, his fingers parting me, rubbing me while my hips pulsed up into him. “My girl should know that if she wants to come, she needs to come to me. All she has to do is ask.”
His fingers slid inside me, and I thrilled to it, to the words my girl. “I know,” I said.
He was moving in and out of me, his fingers working me, his thumb brushing my clit, winding me tighter and tighter. “No more running,” he said. “This is where you belong. This is who touches you, your skin, your mouth, your sexy little cunt. Only me.”
He was everything in that moment, everything I could see and smell and feel, and he was so focused on me it made me fly. I would burn down the world for you. “Yes,” I told him, squirming with how hard I wanted to come. “Only you.”
He pulled his fingers out of me, his hand away from me, and I let out a little cry of frustration. “Good,” he said. He pushed his pants further down his hips, then pushed both of my hands over my head, pinning them with one hand while he braced himself on the other. “Now I’m going to ruin your fucking dress.”
He shoved into me and I cried out. It felt so fucking good. I squirmed but his hand held my wrists over my head, so I lifted my knees to grip him instead, my feet digging into his legs. “Harder,” I said.
He pulled out and slammed into me again, the ends of his belt hitting my thighs, his cock shoving hard into me. Then he did it again. He swallowed my moans of pleasure with his perfect mouth. “That’s it,” he said. “Take it hard.”
“More,” I panted. “More.” It would never be enough. Not with Devon. He turned me wild, pulled me out of my skin. I wanted him so deep inside me I could feel nothing but him. “Make it hurt.”
He moved to get a better position and pounded into me, his hand digging into my wrists, his hips banging the insides of my thighs. I could feel the fabric of both our clothes between us, and the feeling was exciting, that we wanted to fuck so bad we could barely undress. I felt myself twisting beneath him, heard myself saying some kind of nonsense. He let go of my wrists and lowered his hand between us instead, his fingers digging into my inner thigh, splaying me open as he fucked me. I arched up off the bed. I was so close.
He sucked in a breath and ran his thumb over my clit and I exploded, the pleasure pulsing through me so hard I could only make a strangled sound as I pushed up over and over, taking him deeper. That’s it, that’s fucking good, I heard him say against my skin, and then I felt him come, the way it pulsed over his big body the way it had mine, the way it made his arms flex and his breath catch and his cock press deep, pulsing inside me. Every inch of him, every part of him, was mine in that moment. I had never felt so sexy and so deeply possessive in my life.
We were out of breath. He slid off me a little so he wasn’t crushing me, but his body still curled around mine, pressing it gently. He was still wearing his shirt, halfway buttoned. My dress was still scrunched around my waist. Neither of us made a move to do anything about it.
“Stay,” he said after a minute, tracing his fingertips over my bare collarbones. “Don’t leave.”
“I won’t,” I said.
“You know what I mean,” he said.
I did. He wanted me here permanently. There was nowhere else I wanted to be. I rolled over and pressed my face into his shoulder, inhaling his smell through his shirt. “I promise,” I said. “I love you.”
He went very, very still. It took him a long time to answer. “No one has ever told me that before,” he said finally, his voice strangely quiet.
“Well, someone is telling you now.” I rolled back and looked up at his face, which was criss-crossed with conflicting emotions. Uncertainty. A sort of banked male fear. It wasn’t easy for a man as walled off as Devon to change all at once.
I decided to deliberately lighten the mood. “Anytime,” I prompted him. “I’m waiting over here.”
“Fuck.” He blew out a breath. “I’m sorry. This is new territory.”
“Mm hmm.” I traced my finger along his lower lip. “You can shut down drug dealers, but you can’t say it?”
“Pretty much.” He leaned down and kissed me, then pulled back. “Don’t forget I can also fuck you into oblivion.”
“Believe me, I have not forgotten that.”
He kissed me again, softly, and touched his forehead to mine. “You are the only one for me,” he said. “You always have been. I love you.”
I had been joking a minute ago, but all of that fled. Those words from his mouth floored me. This suddenly seemed very, very big. Life-changing big.
And I wasn’t afraid of it.
I reached up and undid the last buttons of his shirt, pushing it off his shoulders. “Thank you,” I said. “Now prove it.”
Thirty-One
Devon
The air was getting cold, but Olivia didn’t seem to care. She was standing on the edge of the newly built back deck, her arms crossed over her chest, her back to me. She seemed to be looking out past the edge of Diablo to the mountains.
I picked up a blanket from the sofa and stepped out onto the deck, the wood chilling my bare feet. I had jeans and a long-sleeved shirt on, but the damp still went straight to my skin. I watched the wind play with her hair as I approached.
I put the blanket over her shoulders. She hugged it to herself, then leaned back into m
e, trying to get warm. I put my arms around her from behind and dropped a kiss to the side of her neck. My woman. “What are you looking at?” I asked her.
“It’s so beautiful,” she said. “I don’t want to go inside yet.”
It was Sunday, her day off, but she’d still been working all day. Not for her job, but making art. She had claimed one of the spare bedrooms as an art room and filled it with her works in progress. Working on her own art on the weekends made her happy. I could smell the tang of paint on her hands. “I just got a call from the investigator I hired,” I said. “About Cavan.”
“Oh?” She twisted and glanced up at me. “What is it?”
“He was living in Arizona two years ago.”
“That’s all?” she asked. “What was he doing there?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. Cavan has stayed off the radar somehow. It’s frustrating.”
Olivia was quiet. “You’ll find him,” she said.
“Yeah, I will.” I didn’t know what I would find when I did. He didn’t have a prison record, and we hadn’t found a death certificate—that was pretty much all I knew. “He might have left the country,” I said. “But he was alive two years ago. That’s more than I knew yesterday.”
“You’ll find him,” she said again.
She shivered, and I held her tighter. We created our own warmth between us. Behind us, the lights from the house were warm yellow against the darkening sky.
“So,” I said to her. “What’s next?”
She reached an arm from under the blanket and pressed her hand against the back of my neck while she watched the sun set behind the mountains. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I have the feeling that whatever it is, it’s going to be wonderful.”
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Dirty Sweet Wild
Chapter One
Max
I woke up on the strangest day of my life with a hell of a hangover. I don’t usually drink—I got out of the habit when I was on the meds—but for some reason I’d tied one on the night before. Whiskey. Consumed while sitting home alone on my sofa. Just another Monday night in Max Reilly’s rundown apartment, in the chilly fog of San Francisco.
My head fucking hurt. I didn’t have a shift today, at least. I worked construction for cash under the table, usually across the bridge in Oakland. You’d think I wouldn’t be prime material for a construction worker—my leg sees to that—but you’d be wrong. I had no problem getting on crews. Today was a day off, though, and I rolled out of bed, cursing Last Night Max’s idiocy, put on my leg, and made my way into the kitchen, wearing only boxer shorts.
Coffee and toast didn’t help much, so I cleared out the rest of my hangover by going to the gym. The rain had cleared out and I could see the dark clouds rolling off over the bay as I drove the short distance through the south end of the city to Sporty’s, the gym which was practically my second home. It was cheap, and a hole in the wall, and it smelled like unwashed balls and dirty socks, but no one asked me questions there. I’d never seen a woman there, ever—a woman would have to be nuts to go to Sporty’s—and the guys were all as silent and surly as me. It was the kind of place where you could lift weights at three o’clock in the morning on the nights you couldn’t sleep, and you wouldn’t be the only one there.
By the time I finished at the gym, the whiskey had mostly sweated its way out of my system, and my head was only throbbing at the temples. I put down the weight I’d been lifting and lay on the weight bench for a minute, staring at the water stains on the ceiling.
This was my life: my shitty apartment, my gym, my shifts in the dirt on construction sites. Drinking alone at night and trying to pay off my medical bills and my dead father’s debts. I liked it this way—no complications, no women, no one bothering me. All I’d wanted since the day I got home from Afghanistan was to be left alone. So, yeah, this was my life.
Except it wasn’t.
I had five million fucking dollars in my bank account.
Damn Devon Wilder, my best friend. He’d inherited big time from the grandfather he’d never known, and the next thing we knew, the friend I’d grown up dirty on the streets of LA with was a billionaire. He’d also met a woman he was flat out crazy about and would probably marry, if I knew him at all. And because he was Devon, and because he knew I was drowning in the debts I owed, he’d wiped all of them away with one big deposit into my bank account.
It was the best, most generous thing anyone I knew had ever done. It changed everything. I owed him my life.
I felt like I was falling.
I made myself take a breath as sweat broke out on the back of my neck. My chest felt tight. Shit, shit. Keep it together, Reilly. I closed my eyes as the world spun and my stomach clenched. This wasn’t the aftereffects of the whiskey. No sir, this was pure, one hundred per cent crazy-as-fuck Max Reilly and his shitty brain.
I waited. I took breaths. I pictured a path in the woods, crisp air, fall leaves. I went to that place and stayed there for a while. Then, when the attack had passed, I got up and went home.
It was nuts to have a panic attack over what most people would see as a dream come true. But it was the change that my messed-up psyche couldn’t handle. My entire life, such as it was, had been upended with one bank deposit, dumped out like laundry tossed on the floor. I had no idea what the hell to do. It made my thoughts scramble when I tried to think about it, because I’d already been through a lot of crazy shit in my life. So I kept doing the same old things to make myself feel sane—and sometimes, when I wanted to stop thinking, I apparently drank whiskey like an idiot.
I showered for nearly thirty minutes, holding the handle I’d installed in the shower stall, letting the hot water run off my body. My spine felt tight and weird, and my leg ached. I put on jeans and an old t-shirt and my leg again, then I made a sandwich in my kitchen and forced it down into my screwed-up stomach. The anxiety had receded, but it had left me clammy and shaky, like I’d just had the flu. So I did the thing that usually worked for me—I grabbed a book from my bookshelf and sat down to read.
My bookshelf was overflowing, one of the biggest things in my tiny apartment. I liked to cruise used bookstores—there were a few left in San Francisco—and add to my collection, the stranger the better. I hadn’t always been a reader; I’d grown up running wild on the streets, my mother barely home, my father usually drunk. It was only after I’d enlisted that I really discovered how reading made everything bearable. Long plane rides. Endless nights deployed. Long, dead stretches of time in the desert. And, later, the time I’d done in hospital after hospital, the time stuck in waiting rooms and in bed recovering from surgeries. I may be crazy as fuck, but I could guarantee I’d be even crazier if I hadn’t found the outlet of reading.
The book I had now was The Call of the Wild, a yellowed old copy with a screwy green cover that didn’t even have a wolf on it, even though the book was about wolves. It had cost me two bucks, and it was very fucking good. I absently massaged my leg and sat on the sofa, letting the book take me away.
I was so engrossed that I almost didn’t answer the knock at my door.
The first thing I thought was to ignore it. Who the hell knocks on a guy’s door at three o’clock in the afternoon? No one good. Someone selling something—no thanks. Nosy neighbor, wanting to bitch about something—no thanks. Cops—no thanks. The landlord—no thanks. I didn’t owe any back rent, thanks to Devon Wilder.
But the knock came again, and I put the book down. Now I was distracted. I stood up and limped across the room, reluctantly opening the door.
Holy shit.
It was a woman. Not just any woman—a fucking gorgeous woman. She had light blond hair, and blue eyes in a sweetly heart-shape
d face that also featured a soft, sexy mouth. She had makeup on—dark eyelids, dark lashes, lip gloss. She had perfect skin and elegant hoop earrings that brushed against her flawless neck. She was smiling at me, but her mouth naturally had a fuck-you attitude to it, an I-don’t-give-a-shit twist that made you think of sex. Just like that. One look at her face, and you thought about fucking. Fucking her. Fucking anybody at all.
I dropped my gaze. She was posed deliberately, her weight on one hip, her long legs displayed. She had a handbag over her shoulder and a coat on. A trench coat-type thing, belted at the waist. It only went to mid-thigh, and beneath it was nothing but miles and miles of bare leg, as if she wasn’t wearing a single thing underneath it, finishing in heels that were inches high.
“Daniel Parker?” she asked.
I was dumbfounded, so completely shocked that a single word tripped out of my mouth. “What?”
She brushed past me and walked into my apartment, and I realized that she’d taken the word as agreement. I turned and stared at her as she put her bag down on a side table like she owned the place, and then she dug through it. She pulled out a little square and put an iPhone on it, fiddled with a button.
“This is from Andrew,” she said. “Happy birthday!”
The music started. Pulsing, sexy music. The blonde stepped forward, and her hands went to the belt of her trench coat.
And that was when I realized she was going to strip.
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