Dignity (The Breaking Point Book 2)

by Jay Crownover

  Then there was his dirty mouth. A shocking surprise, one that made my pussy clench and my nerves shiver in pure delight. A man who could talk about code and processing speeds in his sleep shouldn’t be able to make me come with nothing more than his words, but then again, nothing about Stark was what I expected.

  “You look so good on my cock, Noe.” Deep and raspy, the words pricked at my skin and had my eyes popping open to look at him.

  His broad back was propped up against the headboard. His gray-blue eyes were heavy lidded and intent on where we were joined. His skin had a red flush to it and his dark eyebrows were lowered in a V over the top of his nose. His glasses were long gone, landing somewhere on the floor after the first bout of fucking. He looked less severe without them, a little younger, and more approachable. It turned me on that the only time I’d seen him without them, the only time I got those pretty eyes uncovered, was when he was inside of me or had his face between my legs. It was like a secret version of him that only I got to experience, and that did something to my insides I was too afraid to examine.

  One of his hands was cupping my breast. His thumb was rolling lazy circles around my tender nipple. I had marks all over my collar bone from his voracious mouth and I was surprised the touch felt good rather than stung considering the amount of time those stiff little peaks had spent in his mouth. My entire body felt like it was hovering on the edge of too much sensation. If I tipped a little either way, I was going to explode with too much pleasure or too much pain. It was one of the most erotic, most intense feelings I’d ever experienced.

  His other hand was between my legs where I was riding him at a steady, slow pace. It took some work to get my body ready to accommodate his. For one, I’d never been with anyone who was as big as Stark on any level. I liked to maintain control, to be in charge, to feel like I was the one taking what I needed and not the other way around. That was impossible with him. There was too much of him, everywhere, to pretend like I was in charge. He blocked out the rest of the world when he was on top of me, he became the only thing I could see. The only thing I could feel. The only thing I could think about.

  He was careful, deliberate. He moved with purpose and finesse. He was thoughtful with my body and the way he took it over, but he was determined. He was the guy who was going to make it work, no matter what it took. And, boy, did he make it work . . . several times. Now, it was my turn, and I didn’t care that my insides twinged with a sharp mix of pleasure and pain each time I sank back down on that unbending shaft between his tattooed thighs. It was like I was being opened up, split wide, and revealed to him in a whole new way. There wasn’t a single place inside of me he wasn’t touching, and for someone who was used to being mostly empty and hollow, it was slightly overwhelming being this full, this complete.

  I had my hands on his solid shoulders and was rocking into him with each lift and drop. The pressure he had on my clit was featherlight, taunting, and teasing. He knew I was hovering on the edge of something terrifying and I knew he would catch me either way I fell.

  I arched my eyebrows at him and shot a look down where that swollen, slick flesh was slipping in and out of my welcoming body. We looked pretty together, all his illustrated, colorful skin spread out under my pale golden thighs.

  “Your cock looks good inside of me.” And in my mouth, and clutched in my hands, and when he had it in his fist pumping it up and down while he watched me get myself off. It just looked good . . . period.

  “Feels good inside of you, too. Every time I do something you like, you tighten like a vise. It’s better than my own hand has ever been. And when you come,” his eyes darkened so the blue was almost crowded out by the gray. “It feels like silk and honey. One of these days you’ll lick yourself off my fingers and you can see that you taste just as good as you feel.”

  I swore as his words and my body did exactly what he wanted them to do. My muscles clamped down on him and fluttered around his rigid shaft. He grunted in approval and the next time I lifted up, his fingers dove in and attacked my oversensitive clit. He gave the little nub a tug that had my eyes rolling into the back of my head as his mouth hit mine with a force that stole my breath. His tongue tapped mine and his teeth scraped over the inside of my bottom lip. It made me mewl against him. I sighed when his hand left my breast and skated down over my ribs to land on the curve of my hip. He pressed me down and guided me back up, grinding our pelvises together in a way that made me moan into his mouth.

  He was apparently done with slow and steady. The pace he set was far more frantic and frenzied than the one I’d been torturing us both with. His cock speared up into me, hitting so deep that I didn’t even know anything existed before him. The pleasure made my body lock and caused any semblance of control I might have had to spiral unnoticed out of my hands. His mouth stayed on mine, sometimes kissing, sometimes doing nothing more than catching the noises I made as I bounced wantonly on top of him.

  “Noe.” My name whispered out between his lips and I felt those thick, massive thighs I was straddling tense up.

  “Yes.” I whispered the word out and watched him catch it with his tongue.

  “Noe.” He said it again more insistent and warning. He never came first, never let go until I was a wilted, boneless mess beneath him. He was close, also hovering on the edge and he was desperate to have me drag us both over in free fall.

  He pulled on that tender, sensitive spot between my legs again and I ground down on his cock determined to send him over first.

  “So fucking wet.” He bit the words out and I knew without looking that he was staring at the moisture that was slicked across my inner thighs and all around the base of his cock. It made the way he was taking me, thrusting into me below, audible and distinct. I’d never been one for messy sex, but with him, I didn’t really have a choice in the matter.

  Since he had taken over most of the heavy lifting, I let go of his shoulder with one hand and arched my back. His eyes watched me closely as I slid a hand between his spread legs and tickled the inside of his knee. His eyebrows lifted so high they almost touched his hairline, but they snapped back down and a groan rumbled out of his chest the second my fingers touched the heavy sac pulled up tight between his legs. His whole body shuddered and his legs shifted restlessly underneath me. All it took was a gentle stroke, the brush of my fingers over that sensitive, thin skin and he lost it.

  He barked my name and clamped his hands down on my waist to hold me still as he emptied himself inside of me. The warm rush of his pleasure, and the pulse of his heavy cock as it kicked inside of me, was enough to drag me over the edge with him. I folded over on top of him and panted into the side of his neck as my body shook with an orgasm that stole all my thought and energy. I smoothed a hand over that mechanical heart on his chest and listened as he breathed heavily into the crown of my head. He was always alert, always intense, and seemingly distracted by whatever complicated mess he had tangled up in his head. Right now, he appeared to be completely at ease. Relaxed and sated in a way he never was.

  One of his hands moved up and cupped my cheek. His thumb brushed over the high arch of my bone.

  It was quiet except for the sound of our breathing. I couldn’t even hear the silent wheels in his head turning like they always seemed to be. I enjoyed that he didn’t feel the need to fill the space up with sound and questions neither one of us were ready to answer. Just like I appreciated he hadn’t hounded me to spill everything I was working through after I spent an afternoon with those girls getting them to talk. I was stuck in the past, remembering when I was one of them and needed someone to help me but didn’t have anyone. He didn’t try to drag me back to the present, didn’t offer useless platitudes and promises. He let me know he was there, that he wasn’t running, even though I wasn’t any kind of picnic to be around, and that did more for me than he would know. No one had ever simply been there for me before.

  “Need to clean up.” We were both covered in sex and sweat, and while that
was fun during, afterward it lost its appeal pretty damn quick. He grunted his agreement and let me go so I could climb off of him. We both let out a little gasp when our bodies separated and I had to grab the side of the bed when I went to stand because my legs felt like wet noodles and my thighs were jelly.

  I wasn’t going to be able to sit down or walk right, and by the smirk on Stark’s face, he had no sympathy for my current condition.

  I flipped him off and made my way to the bathroom. I heard him rustling around in the other room and decided I needed to take a hot shower to get some feeling back in my lower extremities. When the water was running over me, chasing off the bubbles from the body wash I had slathered all over me, I noticed I had marks from him all over my body. Ones I hadn’t noticed him leaving. Marks I’d been too caught up in him and how he made me feel to protest.

  Fingerprints in tiny blue bruises on the outside of my breasts and across my hips. Red marks from either his stubble or his teeth on the inside of my thighs. White half-moons in my palm where I had dug my fingers in so hard, I broke the skin. Pink lines along the inside of my thighs where his diamonds had dug into my skin. Even if I couldn’t still feel him between my legs and deep within my body, there would be no forgetting him because he’d left his signature all over my skin. I got to him. I made him react and I wore the proof of his humanity all over my skin. There was something addictive and alluring about that.

  We both lost control, yet kept each other in check in our own way simply by being together, both physically and emotionally in the moment.

  I was finishing drying off and wrapping myself up in a towel when the bathroom door opened and Stark walked in with my laptop in his hands. He’d found his glasses somewhere and had donned a pair of white boxer briefs. He looked like he should be selling expensive sports drinks or designer underwear, not tapping on a computer and frowning at whatever he was seeing on the screen.

  “Your email pinged when you were in the shower. I wouldn’t have paid any attention to it but it seems to be in some kind of code and I . . .” he trailed off and gave me a sheepish look.

  “And you couldn’t resist trying to figure it out.” I shook my head. The man was incorrigible. His brain never stopped.

  I took the laptop from him and almost dropped it when I saw it was sent from Lisbeth Salander. I shifted my eyes up to Stark who was watching me with open curiosity. “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. She’s one of the most famous fictional hackers in all of modern culture. This has to be from someone who knows who I am.”

  I clicked to open the email hoping to God it wasn’t a virus or a Trojan Horse that would attach spyware to my computer. I would have to run a scan just to be sure, but I needed to see who was reaching out to me in such a cagey fashion.

  The body of the email was nothing but a series of numbers in sets of two. Rows of them that went on and on. It wasn’t signed and when Stark went and got his own laptop to trace the IP address, neither one of us was surprised when it traced back to a proxy server that bounced the signal around a thousand times making it untraceable. He took the computer from me so I could get dressed and told me to meet him in the kitchen. Now, I could see those wheels in his head turning and practically hear the gears grinding as he poked at the keyboard and ran his eyes over the numbers. It was obviously a code of some kind, but I was at a loss as to what the key was.

  When I made it to the kitchen, he had both his computer and my computer open next to each other and his was running some kind of program. There were thousands of numbers flashing across the screen, blinking as they rolled by.

  “What are you doing?” I propped myself up on a stool next to him and watched as he tapped his fingers on the counter. He should look ridiculous, a giant beast of a man covered in ink and heavy muscles, standing in nothing more than his underwear and glasses holding a computer. He didn’t. He looked smart and sexy. He looked completely comfortable in his decorated skin. There was nothing cold about Snowden Stark at the moment. I could feel heat radiating off every inch of his naked skin and it made me lean in closer.

  “Running an algorithm that traces any instances of those numbers located together anywhere. It’ll place them in addresses, phone numbers, location coordinates, and if anything hits, it’ll tell us.”

  I shot him a look out of the corner of my eye. Yeah, I was definitely back to being impressed.

  “How long will that take?”

  He shrugged and frowned at the screen. “Depends on if it hits on anything. Did you say the sender is a character from a book?”

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  His eyes narrowed and a muscle ticked in his jaw as he cut a look to me. “What if it’s a book cipher? The numbers could be chapters or page numbers. The second number could be the word on the page you need to decipher the message.”

  I blinked and looked at the numbers. It was simple but complicated at the same time. “You think?”

  “Only one way to find out.” He picked up his cell and opened his Kindle app. After a few minutes, wherein he bought the book and downloaded it, he told me to read off the numbers and then rattled off words that corresponded with the numbers. We figured out quickly that it alternated between chapter number and page number depending on how big the number was, but the second number in the row was always the word we were looking for. I watched his lips move as he silently counted the spaces out on the page and marveled at how quickly he had put it all together. I liked to think I would have figured it out on my own, but could begrudgingly admit I wouldn’t have seen the connection as quickly as he did.

  When he was done dictating, I gaped wordlessly at the message in front of me.

  She found a hacker the same way she found me when she wanted out of the Point. The girl was fearless when she wanted something. She wasn’t scared of the dark or the monsters that hid inside of it. The guy she found coded the message for her and figured out a way to send it to me so that it couldn’t be traced.

  Julia Grace had seen the stories about her stepfather on the news. She knew the girls from the streets, the ones from the kind of homes that had driven them into Goddard’s clutches in the first place, weren’t going to talk. She knew no one would believe them, but they would believe her. She wanted to tell her story. She wanted to press charges. She wanted to see the man rot behind bars. She wanted to come back home, but she needed to know that she would be safe. That someone could protect her until Goddard stood trial.

  “If she comes back, I can put Nassir or the cop on it. Either one of them would go out of their way to see that man go down, and both have a soft spot for girls on the run.” I felt his presence steady and strong behind me.

  “If she presses charges, our plans get derailed. He needs to be alive, both physically and digitally, in order to stand trial, Stark.” The idea of letting go of my revenge, my payback, was a hard pill to swallow.

  “He does, but we already took his money and he doesn’t have a friend left in the community. He’s not going to be able to afford any kind of defense. And chances are once he’s in lock up, he won’t last very long, so that life insurance policy will go to Julia anyway. Cons don’t like child molesters. They like them even less when they spent most of their tenure being tough on crime. Who knows how many of them are there because of Goddard? This is for the best, Noe. Julia needs this. She wants to tell her story because she knows people will listen. She wants to speak for all those girls who can’t.”

  I knew he was right, this was what was supposed to happen, but then I remembered the dirty cop touching me and Goddard watching me with those cold eyes as I was tied to a chair. He was going to kill me and had no remorse about it. He treated me like I was disposable. I curled my hands into fists on the counter and lowered my head so he couldn’t see the conflict in my eyes.

  “Make sure your people can keep her safe and I’ll reach out to her.” I figured she would be checking the email address she’d reached out to me with. I would send her an email and see if she responded. Afte
r everything that had happened, it felt so anticlimactic and easy. A little girl was going to take him down with nothing more than her appearance and a few words. I was back to wondering if I was nearly as in control as I told myself I was.

  Stark ran his hand down the length of my spine and gave my ass a little tap. He told me he was going to make a few calls and left me stewing in my own thoughts.

  Once Goddard was locked up, once he went down, I had no reason to hang around Snowden Stark anymore. I wouldn’t need him and he would have no use for me. I was going to have to get back to my life, back to being unfettered and free to jump from place to place. Suddenly, the idea of not being weighed down, not being pinned by something heavy, wasn’t as appealing as it always had been before.

  Even when things were easy, they were still incredibly hard. I guess it was a good thing I was used to sleeping on the ground because I was going to be back there before I knew it.

  Stark

  She was young . . . so young.

  She was also small, except for her baby bump. It was hard to look at. She was hard to look at, but luckily Nassir’s knock-out wife was great with skittish young women who had everything on the line. She was leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of us when it came to assuring the frightened teenager that nothing would happen to her. She soothed her, calmed her, and generally made the girl believe that she was making the right choice. Keelyn Gates cut her imposing, quiet husband a look, practically demanding that he make sure her words to Julia Grace were true. In the end, it was decided that Nassir was the better bet to keep the teenager safe after she filed a formal complaint with Titus against her stepfather. The cop told us that the police department was in disarray with the sudden loss of not only the assistant commissioner, but also several beat cops and a couple of higher ranking officers who had all been on Goddard’s payroll. Titus was currently running the station and trying to do the job of twenty men. He grudgingly admitted that the girl was better off under Nassir’s protection. His name carried more weight than a police badge; no one could deny it.