Insatiable Craving: 2 (Insatiable Nights)

by Rosalie Stanton

  “Well, I don’t remember what happened after that.” Ginny turned and grabbed a mug from the cabinet. “I’d told her I didn’t want to get involved with anyone and then she…”

  Something returned to her then, a memory too crazy to be an actual memory, but something nonetheless. Aria standing before her, looking concerned and hurt, and clutching that ugly amulet as though she wanted to crawl inside it. There was a green flash and then a voice from god-knows-where…a booming, threatening voice that—

  Ginny shook her head. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  Razor frowned at her. “What?”

  “I dunno. Some weird dream I must’ve had.” She thought on it a moment longer, then shook her head again. Whatever it was, ruminating over a dream wouldn’t get her anywhere. “Anyway, I don’t know how I got home that night. I came back to the club to talk to Aria and see if she’d seen anything.”

  He looked at her numbly, probably thinking exactly what any other normal person would think in listening to the story. The possibility she had briefly entertained but quickly dismissed.

  “I don’t drink when I go to these places,” she said. “A-and I don’t go to these places at all. The only place of any kind I’ve ever gone to was Electric Panther.”

  “And that—”

  “Was because of you.” Ginny looked away, mortified yet somewhat relieved to have that much in the open. If nothing else, pretending to be a disinterested observer seemed a little ridiculous now. She might as well be as forthcoming as possible. “Honestly, Razor, I’m not the most social person.”

  He favored her with a half-smile. “I’m not either.”

  Ginny couldn’t help herself—she snorted and rolled her eyes. “Yeah…”

  “I get how that’s not easy to understand, but it’s the truth. Until yesterday, I’d been celibate for almost five years.”

  She didn’t mean to, but she couldn’t help herself. “Bullshit.”

  Razor shrugged. “Believe me or not, it’s the truth. Aria’s the only person I really trust, and she—”

  “You aren’t screwing her?”

  If his words wouldn’t convince her, the look she earned solidified statement into fact. His brow furrowed, his nostrils flared and his lips curled in disgust. “Would you screw your brother?” he fired back.

  “I don’t have a brother.”

  “Well, if you did—”

  “Gross! No!”

  “Then there’s your answer.”

  “Aria’s your sister?”

  “She might as well be.” Razor shuddered and ran a hand through his deliciously bed-tussled hair. “Aria helped save my life once and I kinda doubt I’ll ever not owe her for that, but she is as far from my lover as is Ed O’Neill.”

  Ginny snickered. “Fair enough.”

  “So when I say what happened with you yesterday was a first for me, I really mean it.”

  She fell quiet, studying him for a long moment. It didn’t seem possible a man so larger-than-life could be reserved. For as much as she’d kept hidden away over the years, she hadn’t compensated for it by getting on a stage to bare her soul to a crowd of strangers.

  Then again, she’d heard of women who had. Perhaps not in the guise of rock bands, but in poetry readings, book clubs, recovery-and-support groups and so on. Women who came together to tell their stories, if only so they didn’t have to listen to the inner replay without someone there holding their hand. In the end, just how different was it singing about the past than talking about it? Razor’s songs had resonated with her for the themes of pain, guilt and loneliness—something she’d always ascribed to him simply being a powerful wordsmith.

  But maybe he followed the path of so many others. He introduced himself and told his story. If that was his story. She had no reason not to trust him, and though the reasons to trust him might not persuade just anyone, the fact that he’d been with her during some of her most frightening, intimate moments without making her feel trashy or slutty or anything other than safe meant something.

  After Travis, she’d never thought she’d feel safe again. Her brief time with Razor had given her back a piece of herself.

  Ginny shivered and looked up. “I believe you,” she said. The words felt heavy on her tongue.

  Though there was no way Razor could know what those words meant to her, or the gravity of her epiphany, or even appreciate how he’d helped patch her back together again, the look on his face indicated he did somehow.

  “What about you?” he asked.

  Her heart jumped. “What about me?”

  “How long has it been for you?”

  Ginny’s eyes narrowed and some of the warmth that had accompanied her epiphany faded. The words didn’t match the question. She knew what he was really asking.

  And while she knew talking about her experience with Travis was likely for the best—she hadn’t said the words aloud in over a year, and never to someone who didn’t hold a therapist’s license—she couldn’t bring herself to do it just yet.

  Letting someone see her inner scars was far more frightening than letting someone into her body. She didn’t want his pity or his anger. She didn’t want to become damaged goods in his eyes. She didn’t want to be charity either. She just wanted to enjoy the ride while it lasted.

  “A long time.” Ginny exhaled slowly. “I don’t want to talk about it just yet, if that’s okay.”

  Razor smiled and inclined his head. “Of course.” He looked at her a moment longer and came forward when she held up a cup of coffee. “Thanks.”

  “I brew it really hot.”

  He winked at her. “That’s how I like it.”

  The air fell silent, but not the type of silence that screamed. The sort of silence, rather, that eased and soothed, a learned silence between old friends who didn’t have to fill each measure of air with meaningless words. It was as nice as it was surreal.

  “I want this to be more than sex,” Razor said.

  She snorted. “Well, that did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “Killed the strain of non-awkward.”

  He arched a brow. “You want it to be just sex?”

  “I don’t know what I want, Razor. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”

  “Yeah, I got that,” he replied. “But it happened anyway. I wasn’t looking either, but I don’t want sex to define it.”

  Ginny looked away. “You don’t know me. I don’t know you. We know we like to have sex. Maybe we should leave it at that.”

  “I don’t want that.”

  She huffed. “We’ve been intimate exactly twenty-four hours. Most men would take it and run. No strings, so long and thanks for all the orgasms.”

  “And we’ve already established I’m not most men.” Razor edged another step forward, closing in on her. The space around her head grew thick and her heart started thundering. He was so close—too close. Her lungs filled to capacity and hot waves crashed over her body. She needed him to step back.

  “I don’t get it,” she said.

  “Neither do I, but I want to.” He came closer still, his overwhelming presence invading her space without bothering to ask permission. Ginny’s vision blurred. She felt she was choking on air.

  She’d let him inside her and not felt like this. Now that he was pushing for more—pushing against her…

  Ginny blinked hard, her feet carrying her a couple steps back. Her physical scars had lasted only so long—it was the mental ones that carried the most weight. Trusting someone with her body in comparison seemed easy. Her body was breakable, yes, but also fixable. The last time she’d allowed anyone deeper… Well, those were the marks she still bore.

  Why couldn’t Razor be like anyone else and be happy with just fucking? No one had bothered to get to know her in years. Not her customers at Trixie’s, not her coworkers and certainly not her boss. Despite however much the introduction of physical intimacy might have shaken her after such a long bout of abstinence, the prospect of
letting someone anywhere near the place where scars couldn’t heal was too damn terrifying for words.

  “I haven’t been close to anyone for a long time,” Ginny began, her throat tight.

  “I know. You’ve told me. And I’m telling you again, neither have I.”

  “How did you get that scar?” The question was random—a diversionary tactic at best—and she could tell from the look on his face that he knew it as well. It didn’t matter. Anything to keep the focus off her.

  Still, Razor didn’t call her on her cowardice. Instead, a smile flirted with his lips and he raised a hand to the angry stretch of skin on his face. “Pissed off an old girlfriend.”

  Ginny’s shoulders dropped. “Get serious. And she came at you with a machete?”

  “A broadsword.”

  “You must’ve really pissed her off.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  Ginny shrugged. “Try me.”

  Ginny didn’t want to talk about her problems. Fine. He got that. Her colorful choreography around any personal questions betrayed as much and did little to stifle the ball of anger that had manifested in his belly the second she shoved away from him this morning.

  Razor was raised with the firm understanding that no meant no—period. He entertained no delusions that just because he’d already been as physically close as a man could get to a woman he had a special all-access pass to sate his hunger with her whenever he felt like it. Fuck, they didn’t have a relationship—they barely had an understanding, and what little they did was strewn with ambiguity and mistrust.

  Still, nothing could convince him that what he’d heard this morning had been anything but the soft plea of a woman who had already been shown just how worthless her no meant to some man. Not only had she forgotten he was there, she’d thought he was someone else.

  Her evasiveness had only furthered his conviction.

  From the admittedly little he knew about Ginny, nothing screamed she was the sort of girl to check her heart at the table and tumble into bed with just anyone. Her own account of her sexual experience confirmed the fact, but did little to explain why she’d chosen and continued to choose him. And why she claimed she didn’t want anything else.

  The same reason he didn’t, only with very different motivators.

  Getting close to someone allowed them access to a piece of the self that was very hard to patch together after a betrayal. Aside from the guilt he’d suffered after Natalie’s death, it had taken him months to reconcile himself to the fact that the girl he’d known and thought he’d loved had been a stranger. Had been using him, stringing him along just so she could add his pelt to her trophy room. Why Natalie had selected this route rather than the more up-front ask-questions-later routine with which Razor had been brought up had never been answered, but she’d made herself perfectly clear the night she died.

  She’d fucked him so she could kill him. Maybe she’d done it to prove she could—that she was willing to do anything to eradicate the enemy she’d created in her head.

  Ginny might not have been betrayed in such a radical way by someone she trusted, but she had been betrayed.

  The understanding—the possibility of harm or injury—had rattled him enough that morning. Razor had no idea how long he’d stared at that wall before turning around. Every time he wanted to try, a new wave of rage had washed over his body, rendering him unable to move without the fear of losing the tentative grip he held on his wolf’s leash. That primal stirring Ginny’s mere acquaintance invoked had been introduced to a possessive, innate need to rip apart whoever had dared hurt her, no matter how many years had passed.

  She didn’t want to answer his questions about whatever had happened—fine. He wasn’t ready to confess his sins either. But this assumption that sex was all he wanted, all he should want based on some notion that all men were happy so long as their dicks got attention was more than just bullshit—it was downright offensive.

  If she wanted to dodge the issue, she was welcome to try.

  “My ex,” he said shortly, “was a wolf hunter.”

  Ginny frowned. “A wolf hunter?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay, strange, but I grew up in the Ozarks. Anything with four legs was fair game.” She shrugged. “I guess I could see that.”

  Razor shook his head. “Not that kind of wolf. She specialized in hunting weres.”

  “Weres? As in…werewolves?” She blinked at him for a few seconds, then snorted a laugh and rolled her eyes. “Okay, fine. I guess you don’t want to talk about it either.”

  “I am talking about it.”

  “Yeah. Your ex-girlfriend hunted werewolves and she gave you that scar because…” She looked at him a moment longer. “I guess I could see it. You do have those dark eyes. Look almost predatory.”

  “Thanks, but I was born with these.”

  “Not born a werewolf, then?”

  “No. I was turned. Back when I was a hunter.”

  “Oh, this is getting good!” Another strained laugh touched the air. “If she happened to be your long-lost sister too, I might be able to get the whole story published in my father’s magazine. Did you identify each other from identical family-crest tattoos?”

  Razor ignored her, instead focusing on the one point of interest she’d mentioned. “Your father?”

  “Oh yeah. Holland Higgins. He runs a local tabloid in Highfield, Missouri, that aches for this kind of bullshit.” Ginny crossed her arms, looking decidedly unimpressed with him at the moment. “So I opt not to bare my soul to you and you get me back by feeding me garbage.”

  “Who says it’s garbage?”

  “I do.”

  “And on what authority?”

  “On the authority of I’m not an idiot and werewolves don’t exist. Unless you’re crazy hot in the literal sense. And this makes Aria…lemme guess…a vampire slayer?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Aria couldn’t slay a spider, even though they scare the piss outta her.” He inhaled deeply, and just for the sake of seeing her reaction, made another advance toward the truth. “Aria’s a witch.”

  Ginny just stared at him. “A witch.”

  “And the amulet she keeps around her neck is the trapped essence of Draken, God of Thunder.”

  “I thought Thor was the God of Thunder.”

  “Same job, different religions. The world is a lot more complicated than you’d think.”

  For a moment he wasn’t sure if Ginny was going to scream at him, toss hot coffee in his face, burst into tears or drag him back to her bed. Perhaps that was enough truth for the day. Despite the fact she was visibly frustrated, none of her body language betrayed a desire to kick him out of her apartment, though she couldn’t if she tried. Now that he was here, he wasn’t going anywhere. Especially not until they came to an understanding.

  In the end, she surprised him. “You’re either the least funny person in the world or really fucked in the head.”

  “Is there a reason it can’t be both?”

  Ginny just stared at him, though he didn’t miss the way her lip twitched.

  Perhaps it was better to leave things where they were for the moment. If Razor got his way, Ginny would find out the truth soon enough. At least then she couldn’t claim he didn’t try to warn her. She officially knew—like it or not—as much about him as he’d ever told anyone who didn’t already have an ear to the ground.

  And if she wouldn’t talk about the thing he most wanted to know, and likewise wouldn’t discuss the possibility of more than just sex between them, he’d pursue any other line she fed him—knowing or otherwise.

  “Your father owns a tabloid, huh?”

  Ginny kept looking at him, her gaze probing as though to determine his seriousness. After a moment, she looked away again and nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s his legacy. Scaring the people of Highfield with stories of the boogeyman.”

  “I take it you’re a skeptic.”

  “If you’r
e asking whether or not I believe you’re a werewolf, I’m going to have to say no. I have too much respect for logic.”

  Razor nodded. “So not much chance of you taking over the family business, then.”

  “My father and I don’t speak, so I’d call my firm grasp on reality the last of the long list of reasons I would not be taking over the business.”

  “Why don’t you speak?”

  “You’re just rolling out the annoying questions today.”

  “It’s what I do best.”

  “I disagree.” She aimed a pointed look at his cock, which stirred under her scrutiny. Razor clamped his jaw and fought the urge to pour the rest of his coffee down his pants. The last thing he wanted right now was for her to distract him with her soft, feminine curves.

  He wanted her trust along with her body. He wanted her.

  Impossible as that was. From a face in the crowd to someone he knew he wanted to love. Someone he wanted to get close enough to love, if only because she’d given him back such a large piece of himself.

  Do you?

  Razor shook his head.

  You don’t know her.

  No, perhaps not…but he knew enough. He didn’t have to be anything other than attentive to glean she had intimacy issues. The fact he shared them should have made him more understanding, but all it did was urge him to tear her wall down.

  “No,” he snapped, harsher than he meant.

  Ginny’s head whipped up. “What?”

  “We’re not doing that.”

  “Doing what?”

  “You’re not distracting me. We agreed we needed to talk.”

  She shrugged. “By my count, we’ve done a lot of talking. Can’t we go back to fucking?”

  “No.” He reached around her and placed his mug on the cabinet. “I want more than that.”

  “I don’t have more to give.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t accept that.”

  Fire reared behind her gorgeous, vibrant eyes. “Like I give a shit! There’s the door, wolf-boy. I’m offering you my body—nothing else. You can fucking take it or leave it.”

  Oh, he wanted to take it. Right then there was nothing he’d like more than to seize her by the arms, throw her on the ground and lose himself inside that hot cunt of hers. But goddammit, he was made of tougher shit than that.