I stopped to rid myself of my pants and shoes before stepping into the steamy hot room with only one thing on my mind.
Helping Wink wash her back.
However, the moment my eyes lit on Wink’s body, submerged in my bathtub with bubbles covering most of her body, I froze.
Her breasts were playing peek-a-boo with the top of the water, and with every move she made, they would bob on top of the water, and my eyes couldn’t help but be drawn to the movement.
“Bring it here,” she ordered the moment she realized I was in the room with her.
I walked forward, not bothering to shield my raging hard on from her eyes, and stopped beside the tub.
“Here,” I said, holding out the washcloth.
This close I could make out various body parts. A knee, the ‘v’ of her pussy.
Before I could take note of each and every body part I could see, she stood up and lifted her leg up on the lip of the tub.
“Get in,” she ordered.
I blinked. “Why?”
She smiled at me, and then pointed at the water where she’d been sitting earlier.
Soap bubbles slid down her beautiful body, and I had to check the urge to grab her and force her to bend over the edge of the tub.
Instead, I questioned why I had bothered to wear underwear today. I pushed my briefs down my legs, and let them drop to my feet.
My cock bounced free of its confines, smacking against my belly, as Wink’s eyes automatically went to it.
She licked her lips and I nearly groaned.
Hold it together, I said to myself.
“Why would you need to do a thing like that?” Wink asked, sugary sweet.
I grimaced, forgetting for a minute or two that she could hear my thoughts now if she desired to.
Placing one foot into the water, I hissed and pulled it back, water slinging everywhere.
“What?” she asked worriedly.
“Goddamn that’s hot as fuck,” I said, reaching my hand into the water to see if it really was as hot as my foot told me it was.
And I realized that my foot hadn’t been mistaken. It was hot.
Hotter than hell.
“Why do you have it so hot?” I asked her, trying to sink my foot inside again.
“This is just how hot I like it,” she replied. “Don’t be a wiener. Get in.”
I did, but by the time the water was up to my neck, I was nearly hyperventilating.
“I hope you never wanted kids,” I teased through clenched teeth.
Her eyes filled with mirth.
“I want six,” she informed me.
My mouth dropped open.
“You’re shitting me, right?” I asked hopefully.
She shook her head. “No. I really do. I want six. Three boys and three girls.”
My eyes were as wide as saucers, I was sure. “Why in the hell would you want that?”
She grinned. “It’s a well-rounded number. I always wanted more siblings growing up, and I want my kids to have someone they can count on, always.”
My heart literally melted, and my horror-stricken eyes slowly filled with understanding.
“I got a vasectomy when I was seventeen,” I told her. “It was stupid, and I lied on my paperwork telling them I was twenty-one.”
“Why?” she whispered, turning to face me, her back on the opposite wall of the tub.
“Because it seemed like the thing to do at the time,” I replied, not having a good answer to offer her.
“That’s sad.” She looked at me with haunted eyes. “But, if your life was anything like mine, I could see why you’d want to do something like that.”
I shrugged.
“It wasn’t so bad once I was seventeen. When I was sixteen and younger, though…well, let’s just say that life could’ve been better,” I said, picking her foot up and bringing it over into my lap.
Wink’s feet flexed, and her soft little toes grazed the top of my dick.
“I was nearly raped when I was four by my mother’s boyfriend,” Wink broke the silence.
My hand on her foot tightened nearly to the point of causing her pain, and she pulled the appendage away from me, sticking it back under the bubbles.
“When I was seven, I was taken away from my mother and placed in a state funded foster home,” she continued. “When I was nine, I ran away from there because my foster father liked the money he got for taking in foster kids, but didn’t like using that money to take care of them. My best friend, Shane, and I ran away and didn’t come back. We lived on the streets until we were ten when we were caught by cops and returned to the foster system. This time, luckily, not to that same home.”
When I stayed silent, she continued without needing to be prompted.
“It was the best thing that could have happened for me and Shane. We were placed in a home that was located about twenty miles outside of Dallas. There, we learned to ride horses, take care of ourselves and just be kids,” she said the last part so softly that I almost didn’t hear her.
“You sound like you got lucky there at the end,” I observed.
Her eyes tilted up to me, and she smiled. “That’s where I met my other best friend, Mattie.”
I smiled.
I knew all of this. Not the running on the streets part for an entire year at the age of nine, but the fact that, from the age of ten on, she grew up in a foster home where she was loved and appreciated. What she didn’t know, though, was that I’ve known of her for a very long time. Way longer than her employ with me.
“Mattie, Shane, and I were like three peas in a pod. We spent all of our waking hours together, and grew up to be very similar. Shane works with metal, just like me. Although, he’s a lot better at it than I am.” She smiled. “Mattie is a photographer, but where I specialize in portraits, she is a newspaper photographer. She works for the Dallas Times.”
I knew that, too.
I knew everything there was to know about Wink.
I’d watched her sculpt her metal sculptures before we were an ‘us.’ For hours, I’d look through the small window of her studio and watch as sweat dripped down her chest, arms, and neck.
The sculptures that she’d created were beautiful, but they were nothing compared to the woman creating them.
Wink’s eyes narrowed.
“You don’t look surprised by any of this,” she observed.
She was a smart cookie.
Even with me shielding my thoughts from hers, she knew when I wasn’t being open with her.
“Mattie,” I hesitated. “Mattie’s my sister.”
Her mouth dropped open.
“She’s your what?” she asked, sitting up so fast that water sloshed over the tub’s edge.
The outrage on her face was so comical that I nearly laughed.
Nearly.
Because the outrage was real.
For her friend and my sister, not for me.
“You’re…you…You’re,” she sputtered. “You’re an asshole!”
“What?” I asked, catching her before she could surge out of the bathtub and stomp away angrily. “Why?”
I found that I quite liked where she was, her breasts up high above the bubbles, on her knees, in front of me.
Her chest heaving wasn’t a bad thing, either. Her nipples played peek-a-boo with the bubbles, going in and out, over and over again.
My cock, which had been cooperating until now, started to stiffen at the look of pure outrage on Wink’s face.
I stifled a smile and reached for her, pulling her into my arms.
“Your sister thought you hated her,” she whispered. “How am I supposed to choose between you?”
I smiled at her.
“You don’t have to choose. I won’t make you,” I promised her.
“I will, unless you’re willing to meet her,” she replied. “I won’t give her up unless you force me to.”
“I’m not ready,” I told her.
“It’s been twenty years,” Wink said gently. “You need to get over whatever bullshit you think you have going on, and put her out of her misery.”
I let go of Wink, but she stayed in my arms and stared at me, her bright eyes boring into mine with such understanding now that it was unsettling.
When I tried to push her away she pulled her legs up and linked them around my waist, locking herself in place so I couldn’t stand up and leave unless I took her with me or forcibly pushed her off. Something that I wouldn’t do, and she knew it.
“I’m not a good person,” I said. “I’ve never been a good person. The one and only good deed I ever did was make sure that she was okay. That she wouldn’t suffer like I had.”
She smiled at me sadly.
“Mattie knows that,” she whispered, pressing her lips against mine. “She knows that you only want to protect her. Apparently, you made a lasting impression the last time she saw you.”
“And what did I do?” I asked, hoping she didn’t know.
“You killed the man who offered to help you raise her and then tried to force himself on her. Then you got her placed with someone who you trusted to ensure that whatever threat you perceived that was still out there couldn’t touch her. Paid for her private school, and then for her college education. You send her money once a month, and still refuse to see her, even though the danger that was there is gone.” Wink stroked my beard as she spoke, her eyes filled with barely contained pain. “Why do you do this to yourself and her?”
All my hopes were dashed when I realized that not only did she know most of it, she knew all of it.
“Because the threat that I’ve been hiding her from is still here. And now you’re involved in it with me,” I explained. “It’s even more dangerous now than it has been.”
“Blythe and Brooklyn told me that the threats to their lives were eliminated.”
I shook my head.
“There’s a whole organization of purists. We cut off the head, but it’s the type of organization that, when you kill one, two more pop up in its place willing to do the job.” I shook my head. “Seriously, that’s why I stayed away from you as long as I did. This isn’t a safe place. Not for the dragon riders; especially not for their mates.”
“There hasn’t been a damn thing that’s happened in the time we’ve mated,” she countered, angry now.
I pushed her off my lap during her moment of anger, and stood up.
My dick came to a stop directly in front of her mouth, but neither one of us took advantage of it, both of us too mad to consider that at the moment.
I stepped out onto the thick white mat and reached for a towel that hung on the back of the bathroom door while I spoke angrily.
“I don’t really know how to tell you anything about what’s going on,” I said. “I can feel it, though. In my bones. So fucking deep that, sometimes it’s like an ache that never goes away. Then shit like today happens, and I am sure.”
“Shit like today?” she asked, standing now, too.
I nodded.
“Yeah,” I said. “Dead carcasses left at the borders to our sanctuary.”
“Why would you think that’s bad?” she asked at my back. “Maybe it’s just an accident. A product of nature.”
I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “They’re testing us.”
“What?” she asked as she followed me out into my room. “How?”
“When something’s forced across the border, which is protected by Nikolai with a ward, then whatever it is that crossed dies,” I explained.
Her eyes widened.
“I crossed that border!” she said. “And I’m fine.”
I nodded. “Each of Keifer’s men gave a blood oath to him the moment we swore fealty to him. That blood oath extends to our mates.”
She breathed a sigh of relief.
“A little warning would’ve been nice,” she muttered darkly.
I grabbed a pair of underwear from the top of my chest of drawers, only for them to be ripped from my hands the moment I raised my foot up to step into them.
Wink pushed me from behind, and I went to one knee in the bed, her weight taking me down.
She landed on my back, and I tried to buck her off me.
“Get off,” I said harshly.
“No,” she said, tightening her legs around my hips and sitting down until her bare pussy was sitting snug against my ass.
I sighed and decided to lay there, waiting to see what she’d do or say.
She didn’t disappoint.
“I want you to say hello to your sister. She deserves it,” she informed me haughtily.
I sighed.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I lied.
“We’ll get there,” she promised.
I snorted.
“No, we won’t,” I promised right back.
She dug her fingernails into my back, and I flinched.
“Get off me before I make you get off,” I said through clenched teeth.
She snickered. “You wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t I?” I challenged her.
She leaned forward and her breasts rubbed against my exposed shoulder blades, making my earlier erection stiffen once again.
Dammit.
Ruled by my cock.
“I touched the headboard a few minutes ago, while I was undressing for the bath,” she purred into my ear. “You want to know what I saw when I did that?”
“What?” I asked her.
I knew what she saw.
It didn’t take much to guess, anyway.
“You’re not even going to try to guess?” she asked hopefully.
I shook my head.
“No,” I muttered into the blankets.
She scored her nails down my back again, and a moan slipped from my lips.
“You’re a very muscular man,” she observed as she rubbed her hands up and down my back, her muscles stopping to knead certain muscles of my back before she moved on to the next ones.
I moaned into my comforter, the sound so tortured that the wench on my back laughed.
“Hush,” I growled.
She ignored me and leaned forward, her lips right next to my ear.
“Your arms have muscles in them that I’ve never seen before,” she whispered. “The next time you stroke your cock in this bed, I want to watch.”
Chapter 12
Smonday: The moment that a Sunday starts feeling like a Monday.
-Fact of Life
Ian
“You want to watch now?” I asked her. “’Cause I’m about to come whether you want me to or not.”
She giggled.
“Oh, yeah. I want to watch you stroke that cock now,” she whispered, desire practically dripping from her voice. “Do you know what I did in the bath while I waited for you to come back?”
I didn’t need to know.
The moment my back hit the coolness of the tub, the scene had replayed in my mind, blasting into the forefront of my brain like it’d always been there.
“Fuck me,” I said, rolling over and dislodging her from my body.
She laughed as her back hit the bed, but it quickly died when she saw the state my cock was in.
“Do it,” she ordered.
I gritted my teeth and grasped my cock in one work-roughened fist.
Her eyes widened when I started to stroke the length of my cock, pulling in rough tugs that would’ve looked downright painful to anyone else.
Me, though? Well, I liked it rough.
The rougher the better.
Something she was just now realizing.
My other hand moved down to my balls, and I started to tug, gently at first until before long I was working them just like I was my cock.
My eyes had closed, but the moment I heard Wink moan, my eyes shot open.
I found her only inc
hes away from my cock, her hot mouth so close that I should’ve felt the heat from her breath on the tip of my dick.
Her tongue shot out the moment our eyes made contact, and the hot tip of her tongue met the small drop of pre-come that was pebbled at the slit of my cock.
“Fuck,” I hissed.
“You taste good,” she whispered silkily.
“Take more into your mouth,” I ordered.
She shook her head and went up to her knees, then started to shuffle down the bed to where my head was resting on two pillows.
She yanked them both out from under my head, and I fell flat on the bed next to her knees, my eyes fully taking in her state.
“You want me?” I asked her.
“I want your mouth.”
“Where?” I persisted.
“On me.” She widened her legs, letting me see the wetness between her legs.
It was so copious that it slickened her thighs.
“Come ride my beard then, baby.” I continued to work my cock, slower now than I had been doing it before.
She smiled at me timidly, her bravado fading.
“Now,” I ordered. “Use my beard like your own personal saddle.”
Her eyes widened, and I winked.
“Come on, I don’t bite.”
She slowly moved until she straddled my face between her thighs, her knees digging into the bed by my ears.
Her pussy hovered over my face, inches away.
I didn’t move, though, instead letting her come to me.
And come to me she did.
One second her pussy was too far away for me to reach, even with my stiffened tongue, and the next she was practically smothering me with her cunt.
“Fuck,” I muttered, but the syllable was lost in the lips of her sex.
Tongue darting out, I started to lick her clean, dipping it in and out of her sex to taste her like a fine wine.
My nose hit her clit, and her back bowed off the bed like I’d struck her with a live wire.
“Oh, God,” she whispered frantically. “I’ve been holding off for you.”
I knew that, too.
I’d watched her bring herself to the brink of orgasming not once, not twice, but four times.
“Give me your fingers,” she pleaded.
Oh, My Dragon Page 9
