Sworn

by Maria Luis

I didn’t think so.

  Fingers brushing her hair back, I murmured, “Put your hands on the bed, sweetheart, and keep your ass in the air.”

  I’d seen the way she’d panted as she watched Benson move the girl on the stage into position, Avery’s hips circling as though she could feel him pounding into her from behind, her whimpers so clear-cut and seductive that even the asshole behind us had unzipped his pants and jerked off to Avery discovering what turned her on.

  But it wouldn’t be Benson’s cock that fit between her legs and made her bury her face in the sheets.

  No, it would be mine.

  Avery planted one foot on the soft carpet, and then pushed herself up to stand. With the gait of a queen, she strode to the four-poster bed and climbed up, her toes hooking over the edge of the mattress as she got into place.

  Her ass swaying in the air had my hand wrapped around my cock in an instant, squeezing tight, delaying the release I was so desperate to have.

  I stepped up to the bed.

  Slid my hands over the curve of her ass and down to the outside of her thighs.

  Bent down and slicked my tongue from her clit to her entrance.

  Did it again.

  And again.

  Until her moans were a litany of noises that she couldn’t control, even when she bit down on her knuckle and came with a deep moan that had my chest reverberating with a deep-seated groan.

  With one last swipe of my tongue, I straightened and positioned myself at her entrance. Put my hand to the small of her back, forcing her to arch a little more. Pushed inside, until I was balls-deep and there was no telling which one of us was louder.

  Her hands gripped the sheets as I pulled out and thrust back in, and mine did the same but to her ass. I’d leave marks tonight, red fingerprints that she’d never see unless she spent time looking at her backside in the mirror. The thought alone made me want to reach forward and do the same to her neck, wrapping my hand around there so that she couldn’t forget—even if she tried—who made her feel this way.

  “Lincoln,” she cried out as I plunged in deep, my hips churning, my stomach flexing with the effort to hold off and wait for her to find her pleasure first. “Lincoln,” came her husky voice again when I buried myself in her pussy, and then gave in to temptation and gently circled her neck with my hand. She hissed, twisting her head to the side, just in time for me to see her sink her top teeth into her bottom lip. “Oh, my God, you feel so good—you feel . . .”

  Back arching, she craned her neck as though trying to give me more room to play, and then sank her hips back on my cock, her pussy tightening. She was so wet, so tight, and I wasn’t going to outlast her.

  I gripped her hips, then wrapped one arm around her stomach like a band and hauled her up, backward, until it was only her knees that dug into the mattress as I stood behind her. Her nails carved half-moons into my forearms as she clung to me, her head falling back onto my chest as she let me take control.

  She felt amazing, almost too amazing. Each glide of my cock into her heat was like a vice around my lungs. It hurt to breathe, hurt to swallow, and every time I looked down to see her dress around her waist, her small, perfect breasts bouncing under her fabric, I halfway convinced myself that this wasn’t even reality.

  In real life, Avery didn’t grip my arms like I was her favorite person.

  In real life, she didn’t let me into her body—me, a former foster-stint kid with a track record that would make men on America’s Most Wanted piss themselves.

  “It feels so good,” real-life Avery whimpered, her nails biting into my arms, “you feel so, so good.”

  Praying that I didn’t blow my load too soon, I found her clit with my free hand and stroked her into a frenzy.

  Her hair caught on my lips.

  Her clammy back stuck to my chest.

  She orgasmed with a cry ripped straight from her soul, and I followed a second later, hips spasming as I grunted out her name and emptied inside her.

  In every way that mattered, it felt like the first orgasm I’d ever experienced.

  Avery did that to me.

  And you really think you’ll be the one to ruin her?

  I stared at her back, heard her deep chuckle as she arched an arm back to circle around the back of my head and bring me in for a kiss.

  No, I thought. I was pretty sure that, between the two of us, I was the one about to be ruined.

  24

  Avery

  I could be wrong, but I was pretty confident that my legs were still twitching from that last orgasm. Pulling air into my lungs was a difficult thing to maneuver with my face plastered against a pillow, and I twisted my head to the side and blew away a strand of hair from my mouth.

  “I can’t feel my toes.”

  Asher grinned one of his customary half-smiles. Leaning back from where he sat on the edge of the bed, he traced the neckline of my dress with a finger and dropped a kiss to my mouth. “Mind-blowing orgasms will do that to you.”

  My stupid heart warmed at his teasing tone, and I tried to play it cool. “I was actually talking about how my heels cut off circulation earlier. I still can’t feel my toes.”

  His smile firming, he twisted at the waist and ran a finger from the heel of my foot to the top of my big toe. My knee thrashed upward at the ticklish sensation and I nearly clipped him in the jaw—or I would have if he didn’t have quick enough reflexes to clamp a hand on my knee and stop the upward momentum.

  “Duly noted,” he murmured in a low voice, “Miss Washington has ticklish feet.”

  “Do you have ticklish feet?”

  The glance he gave me was all stone-faced, composed cop. “I’m not ticklish. Anywhere.”

  “Of course you’re not.” Rolling my eyes, I sat up in the bed and wedged the hem of my dress down to cover up the goods. When Asher had ripped off my underwear, I’d been knee-deep in the moment and loving the show of dominance. Being sans panties now, however, didn’t seem like such a bonus.

  Searching the room for some hope, I said, “If they’ve got condoms, toys, and who knows what else in here, they’ve got to have underwear, too, right? I’m talking unused underwear—some drawers with lingerie just like if you were shopping at Victoria’s Secret.”

  Asher pushed off the bed, jeans lifted to his lean hips. “Did they ever find out what secret Victoria had?”

  You were so into it, you didn’t even realize he still had pants on and that he didn’t even taken off his shirt. Funny now that I thought about it—I’d never seen his naked chest. Assuming that this wasn’t a two-off type of thing between us, we’d have to change that. I had a feeling he was gorgeous, all sinewy lines and tight muscles.

  Shaking my head to get it back on straight, I said, “Well, we for sure know that at least she had some underwear—of which I do not.”

  Blue eyes narrowing in my direction, Asher’s mouth turned up in what I could only call a smug smile. “You can pretend all you’d like that you didn’t enjoy every second of me ripping it off you, but I know the truth.”

  I stared at him, unblinking.

  That smug smile widened. “You were so wet when I touched you and no one can fake it that good.”

  The pillow was the closest object to me, and I hurled it at his rugged face.

  And because the damn man had the reflexes of a panther, he caught the throw pillow between his hands and tossed it right back, where it bounced off my forehead.

  “Romantic,” I muttered, even though I couldn’t fight back a round of laughter. I wasn’t the flower girl, or the chocolate girl, but Lincoln Asher had me pinned: I wanted to smile, I wanted to laugh, in a way that I hadn’t in years. He was good at making that happen. Even better at making me forget all about my vow to never kneel, to never give someone the power to hurt me.

  In this room, I’d given him that slice of control.

  And when he’d taken the offering, he’d stripped my defenses and made me hurt in an entirely new way that felt way too good t
o stop.

  My fingers brushed my neck, and when he caught my eye, I smiled.

  Perhaps the most honest smile I’d ever given a man.

  Ducking my head in slight embarrassment, I scored the floor, looking for where Asher had dropped my shoes. “I’m so glad that I came tonight,” I said, spotting them by the door. The rug was soft and springy beneath my feet as I crossed the room. “I was honestly a little nervous about how you’d react to seeing me.”

  And hearing me question your involvement with Banterelli and the others.

  Shoving the thought aside, I pressed my back to the door to balance myself as I shoved my toes into a stiletto.

  My toes were still numb.

  Either the amazing sex was responsible or I was right and the shoes had killed off my nerve endings.

  “You never mentioned how you knew I’d be here.”

  I searched out Asher’s face in the red glow of the room, confusion slowing my fingers as I fit the stiletto over the back of my heel. “I thought that . . .”

  “Thought that what?”

  Swallowing past the lump in my throat, I admitted, “I went to the station earlier today.” When he showed no outward reaction, I pressed on, foot back on the ground, standing ungainly with just one shoe on. “I needed to see you and since we never exchanged phone numbers or even email addresses”—I shrugged, then swallowed again—“well, I had to find you somehow.”

  Asher’s hands went to his hips, chin dipped as he stared at the carpet. “No one at the station knew I’d be here tonight.”

  Oh.

  As the implication of that sank in, I thought back to earlier in the day when Officer Templeton had shoved the crumpled note in my hand. I’d been so rattled after seeing my stepfather, I hadn’t even given a second thought as to why he’d know where Asher would be and what time to meet him there.

  After I’d left the station, I was a little ashamed to admit that I’d ridden on a high for the rest of the day. Picking out my heels, my dress, doing my hair.

  Like tonight was a date.

  The truth was decidedly less romantic: Asher hadn’t even known I was coming.

  The hurt came swiftly. Kicking me in the butt. Throwing a one-two-hook into my belly, like I’d been sucker-punched. Honestly, I shouldn’t have expected anything else. Sex or not, Asher and I weren’t an item, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with appreciating an orgasm and then going on my own merry way. I would not feel sorry for myself, and I refused to dip into the land of Pity’s R Us.

  Not happening.

  Although none of this could explain why Nat had seated me with him or why she’d gone all strange after hearing his name—

  “Who told you I would be here?”

  The vehemence in Asher’s tone stole another slice of my afterglow. And, yep, that made me angrier than learning that I’d been the only one prepping for a “date” tonight, no matter how ridiculous it sounded now. Fingers clenching at my sides, I answered, “Josiah Templeton. With an ‘h.’”

  “With an—” His fingers dove into his hair, tugging on the strands. It was the most worked up I’d ever seen him, aside from bedtime activities obviously, and when he began to pace the room, I didn’t even bother to look away.

  “It doesn’t make any sense.” With quick efficiency, he did up his jeans and fastened his belt. “Templeton wouldn’t know this place if it bit him on the ass, and it’s not like we ever had a discussion about . . .”

  Trailing off, he reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a fancy cell phone. Then, without any warning, he crouched down low, lifted the hem of his jeans, and removed a gun from an ankle holster.

  Holy. Shit.

  “Hold on,” I snapped, hands coming up in a T-shape. “You can’t just—I mean, you weren’t wearing that when we were . . .”

  Asher’s narrowed eyes homed in on my face. “I never take it off.”

  “So it’s okay for me to go walking around without underwear but not for you to be without your precious—”

  The rest of my sentence ended in a shriek that may or may not have come from me when he pulled the trigger and put a bullet through his phone.

  Like he was some sort of executioner or something.

  “Are you insane? Someone could have heard you!” My hands flew up, knocking a lamp over to my right. Trying to catch it before it crash-landed, while also only wearing one stiletto, wasn’t ideal, however, and the titanium stand went right through my fingers.

  “It’s called a silencer, sweetheart.” He pinned me with a wry arch of his brows. “I could have sworn you said you knew how to use a firearm.”

  Currently, my gun was stashed in my apartment in the cabinet above the fridge, along with the rest of my documents. And if I were to ever use it as something besides a paperweight, I wouldn’t demean the thing by shooting expensive-as-hell phones.

  “I do know how to use one,” I muttered defensively, and maybe, yes, a little curmudgeonly too. I wasn’t going to even touch on the sweetheart comment. Ducking down, I snapped up my other stiletto and bit back a curse when I slid my foot into it. “I just don’t understand why you’d opt to go shooting something that costs so much money.”

  “Because only one person knew I was coming tonight, and he has no connection to Josiah Templeton.”

  I wrestled my other shoe on, fighting the impulse to hurl it at his head and call it a day. “And, what?” Jeez, the pain. Why were stilettos such soul-sucking things anyway? “You think someone would actually bother to wiretap your phone? Only politicians and criminals bother to do anything like that, and you don’t fit under either category.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Re-holstering his gun on his ankle, Asher set his hand on my lower back. I hated how good it felt—how good he felt.

  I dug in my heels, refusing to take another step. “Asher—Lincoln,” I corrected when his blue eyes flared, “you didn’t answer my question.”

  “It wasn’t really a question.”

  “Just answer it anyway.”

  His shoulders lifted, a tick starting in his jaw. “What do you want me to say, Avery? I’m a crook.” He leaned in, eyes blazing with a frustration I hadn’t expected, his scars appearing even more dominant in the red cast of the room. “Newsflash, sweetheart, every damn cop in this city is a crook in some way.”

  It wasn’t a confession, but I jerked back as if I’d been stung anyway.

  Digging into my purse, I riffled through for the newspaper about Townsend and then shoved it at Asher’s chest.

  “Was this you?” The way the words escaped, I might as well have punctuated every one with a period. There was no room for him to evade the question, and when his Haint blue eyes darted down to stare at the front page with its massive photo of Tom Townsend, I saw all of the ghosts of his past brimming to life in his expression.

  Jaw tightening, he growled, “Don’t make me answer that.”

  The heel of my palm landed on his chest when he made a move to slide past me. Even in my heels, I was nowhere near as imposing as him, and yet his feet carried him no farther—like I had the ability to dictate his every move, just by touching him.

  I took a deep breath, stabilized my thoughts, and said it again: “Was. This. You?”

  His throat worked with a rough swallow. “You’re reaching for shit that isn’t true. Trying to stir up trouble.” He tore the newspaper out from under my hand and shoved it back into my purse. “I don’t know how it works with you tarot readers in the square, but I’m going to nip this rumor in the bud.”

  If he thought I was going to listen to his bullshit, then he had another thing coming to him. “Then you might want to look at this list, because the way I see it, a crook is when someone steals extra candy out of the jar. But this would make you a murd—”

  The jiggling of the doorknob snagged my attention, as did a male voice that sounded eerily familiar: “No tassel, huh, Asher? Looks like you got well and truly laid, just like the good old days.
”

  “We need to go.”

  I looked from the door to Asher and then back again. “I’m sorry, but where exactly . . . ?”

  “You got your taser on you?”

  “Yes?”

  “Great. Keep it close. We’re going out the back way.”

  25

  Lincoln

  I hadn’t done a window jump out of the Basement in twenty years, but there was no time like the present.

  When your choices came down to scaling a building or walking into a bullet, there was only one option: out the window we went.

  Unlatching the window, I slid the plaster sill up and thanked God that Nat hadn’t moved from the French Quarter into a nineteenth-century residence. No, Whiskey Bay could be found in an old cereal-making factory, and the windows were both tall and wide. I shoved it up, leveraging my shoulder beneath its weight so I could re-hinge the latch.

  Then I turned to Avery, my palm held out.

  “This is the ‘back way’?” she asked, and I didn’t miss the way her voice hitched on the word. She was nervous, and I understood that, but there was only one reason why Josiah Templeton would have teamed up with someone who wasn’t the NOPD, and that meant my ass was on the line.

  And because I’d been idiot enough to get caught almost-kissing her against the precinct, now my old boss believed that Avery meant something to me. Collateral, at its finest.

  I just wished I hadn’t been so blind tonight to see that it’d all been a setup.

  The craps table winnings being doled out an hour earlier.

  Zak Benson on Stage One, instead of seated at the gaming tables.

  Nat rushing me to sit with Avery, when she hated my guts with every fiber of her being . . . and had never, not once, lifted a finger to help me in my entire life.

  Laurel.

  The name sprung to mind, and I shoved it away. We had to go—now.

  I swung my arm around Avery’s waist, hauling her onto the windowsill. “Move your legs there,” I instructed, pointing to the fire stairwell just three feet beneath the ledge.