“You’re so mean,” she says with a smile, turning her attention back to the mirror.
I cross our new bedroom to my closet and pull on my shirt, buttoning it neatly before sliding on my jacket. “Tie? No tie?”
“Tie,” she calls out. “Let’s pretend we’re civilized tonight.”
Overrated, but maybe I’ll use it to tie her up when we get home.
We’re going to a restaurant with her friends from work—she’s now a full-time junior employment counselor at the agency she did her internship at—as well as my partners, and her younger sister and brother.
Her older sister has moved to Los Angeles, but they’re slowly rebuilding a relationship of sorts. I’m not sure Hailey and Taylor will ever be close, but everything is different now.
Almost normal. It’s weird and kind of wonderful.
“What are you thinking about?” Hailey asks as she hands me her necklace. She’s wearing a dress now, black silk, and my diamonds flash on her left hand. The necklace is a hand-crafted twisted metal piece she bought at Eastern Market a few weeks earlier for twenty bucks. That’s Hailey in a nutshell.
“How lucky I am that I have no will-power when it comes to resisting you.” I kiss her cheek, and offer her my arm.
When we get to the restaurant, we run into her friend Tegan at the entrance. There’s some squealing and ooohing and ahing over outfits, then we head inside, where everyone else is gathered. Everyone except one of my co-workers.
Once I’ve shaken hands and accepted congratulations from Hailey’s friends, I find Jason and Wilson at the bar. “Where’s Ellie?”
Jason’s clenching his jaw so hard I think he might crack a tooth. Wilson’s the one who finally answers. “She quit. Left a resignation letter on her chair at the end of the day today.”
“What?” Well, shit. That puts a damper on things. “Any clue why? Can we get her back?”
Wilson opens his mouth, but Jason interjects before our hacker can say anything else. “Leave it alone.”
“But I don’t want to get a new receptionist if we can woo her back. Is it money? When was the last time we gave her a raise?”
“That would just make it worse,” Jason mutters, shoving his hand through his hair. His top button is undone and his eyes are a bit wide.
“Are you drunk?” I don’t mind, as long as he doesn’t make a scene, but Jason rarely drinks, and never to excess.
He pins his gaze darkly on me for a minute before reaching for his glass again. He raises it in the air. “Only a little bit, my friend. We’re celebrating.”
I exchange a look with Wilson, but there’s a limit to how much digging I’m going to do at my engagement party. “As long as we do it safely.”
He gives me a look as if to say, yes Dad. The role reversal isn’t lost on either of us.
Tag joins us next, and we have a more genuine toast to my future bride, but even as we all sit for dinner, I can’t shake that look on Jason’s face. I know that look. I’ve worn it before.
Things for Jason are going to get worse before they get better.
— —
One week later, Tag and I are standing together just off the dais at the Washington Club. He’s going to give a keynote address to a monthly luncheon put on by the Chamber of Commerce. A pretty regular event, but Tag’s no public speaker. Jason was supposed to do it, but he’s such a fucking curmudgeon again, he can’t do it—when he flew to Dallas for work, we all let out a sigh of relief.
I should do it, I’m more comfortable up there, but I just don’t want to anymore. I shrug at Tag as he stands in front of me. He looks older. We all do, I’m sure. “It’s a good speech.”
“You should know. You wrote it. You sure you don’t want to deliver it?”
I nod. “Never been more sure of anything in my life.”
He gets it. Maybe if things had gone differently with Kendra, he’d be doing the same thing.
I pat him on the shoulder. “This was never the life for me. We probably should have seen that from the beginning.”
I’m not quitting. I’m just stepping back—into the shadows. Most of the time I’ll be looking for clients. Sometimes I’ll draw on my old skills, and strike when I’m needed. I’ll do it anonymously, and I’ll do it for good.
The rest of the time, I’ll be Hailey’s.
I'm no longer a gladiator. I’m not sure what I am, yet, but my battles aren’t for public consumption.
Tag makes his way to the podium and I slowly walk to the back of the room, listening to the words I know by heart. I look at the faces of Washington’s business people, watching them react. And when Tag pauses before delivering the last line, I stop watching them and I zero in on him.
His shoulders are square, his head is tall, and he looks determined as fuck. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. We’re all in on this.
He looks around the room, then finds me and nods. His voice rings loud and clear, hopefully striking fear in the hearts of our former clients. “The Horus Group is no longer for hire by the wealthiest and most powerful. We're no longer in the business of making excuses. We're here to make things right.”
THE END
(keep reading for two bonus epilogues in the postscript — and at the end of that, there are some clues about future Horus Group books)
HATE F*@K
Cole and Hailey
the postscript
—in the middle of the night—
Hailey
His palm drifts under my t-shirt, light strokes on my belly the signal he wants me to wake up. I will, but I’m warm under the duvet and sleep feels too good to shake off completely. This is part of the game, anyway, so I wiggle back against him, letting him play, but ignoring his shifting movements to get me on my back. I know that if I roll over, my hand will wrap around his cock, and that would nice, but instead we’ll do this and it will be even better. He chuckles in my ear and I bite back a smile.
“Are you awake?”
It’s more fun if I don’t answer. It doesn’t matter, because we both get off on the fact that he’s touching me, stroking me with fingers that don’t care if I’m awake or not as long as I’m getting wet. Sometimes I’m able to stay still until after he thrusts into me, and I pretend to be confused and scared, but it’s hard to stay passive that long. Hard to keep my hands off him. My mouth.
He pulls me tight against him, settling me in the crook of his body, his cock long and hard against my panties. I wore pajama pants to bed—he must have taken them off before I woke up. I want to wiggle again, I love the feel of him flexing between my ass cheeks, but that’s not tonight’s game, so I hold still, hoping for that twitch to happen on its own. When it does, I almost gasp out loud from how much it turns me on, that simple wordless communication of want. Of need.
His hand cups my left breast, his thumb grazing my nipple and I feel myself swell in response. I know my pussy lips have parted, a sliver of space created for my swollen clit. If his fingers move south, he’ll feel the moisture even before parting my pink folds, and I’m sure he knows that, but he’s only just started with my nipples. I know he won’t finger me until I give in, until I’m wet and panting, begging to be fucked, desperate for penetration.
He drags his thumbnail around my areola, leaving a trail of goosebumps in its wake. I can’t help but shiver and his low, deep laugh reminds me that while I’m slowly being spun out of my mind, he’s still fully in control. The next swipe of his thumb is softer, fleshy pad down, directly on my erect nipple this time. Almost a flick, but slower, up and down. From below the nipple, pausing at maximum stretch of my aching peak, over the top and then back down with another pause, the flat of his thumb pressing my nipple as if it was my clit and I can feel it so acutely between my legs it might as well be. He reaches across my chest with his ring finger, his thumb never ceasing its ministrations, to tweak my right nipple in a matching pattern. I groan under my breath.
“You must be so wet for me. You can’t help it.”<
br />
I nod. My eyes are still closed, but I’m about to start rocking back against his cock, I know it. My body is aching for more all over. I give in to the urge and press my ass into his lap, my neck into his mouth, my breasts into his hands, my pussy into...and as if he knows that I’ve run out of points of contact, he rolls me onto my stomach, his left hand still in constant motion against my tits. With his other hand, he jerks my hips into the air, or where the air would be if he wasn’t pressed flat on top of me. He arches his back to make room and slips behind me to press his erection solidly between my legs.
“I’m going to take you like this tonight.”
I don’t know if he means my pussy, my ass, or both, and I don’t care, I just want him inside me. I grind back against him and he slides his hand out from beneath my body. I’m so wound up I don’t care, the sensation of my heavy breasts moving against the fabric of my shirt and the bed beneath me enough to keep me spinning. He pushes my shirt up my back, then slides his palms down my spine, to my panties, and with a hook of his thumbs, he takes those over my hips and down to my knees. Sometimes he leaves them there, binding my legs together, but tonight he encourages me to kick them loose. He drags his hands back up to my ass, his thumbs brushing my pussy between my legs before tracing up my crack to rest just above the pink pucker of my anus. I twitch, wondering if one of his thumbs will return there now or if I’ll have to wait.
“You want something in your ass, beautiful?”
I nod, my face buried in my pillow. He circles my anus twice, then pauses. I feel a cold squirt of lube next, just a bit, not enough to get messy, and I know that this is just a tease. He eases the tip of a finger, maybe his thumb, into my dark hole, and I focus on the muscles that control that sphincter. I push back against him, knowing that will actually pull his finger in further. He pumps in and out, slow at first, then faster, and I rock up to meet his hand, eager for the invasion.
“That’s so fucking hot,” he grunts, and I know he means it both literally and aesthetically. “Love that you open for me, baby.”
And I was. As if to prove the point, he slowly pulled out, then pressed again at my opening, this time with two firm pads. Oh god, yes. The muscles fluttered, welcoming the touch, and this time the invasion was smooth and quick.
It steals my breath and shuts down my brain. Sometimes I can’t believe he hadn’t done this before me, but I love that it’s our secret pleasure. That neither of us have had this primal connection with anyone else.
Sometimes he lets me play with his ass when I’m sucking his cock, and I love it, but we don’t do that in the middle of the night. When he wakes me up like this, I’m his to fuck and suck and lick, to come in or on, and I get off on it in a way I never would when I’m fully awake. Of course, I am awake now, totally, but I woke up in this altered state of arousal and it makes me a different person, frees the baser part of myself to submit without thinking too much about it. Without limits or concern. The truth is that it isn’t what we do that’s different at night, but how we do it.
When we have sex in the evening, or morning or afternoon when given the opportunity, there’s a lot more talking. What we like, what we don’t like, how we feel about each other. At night, it’s reduced to the purest form of communication. His action, my reaction. When he wakes me and takes me, it’s with a unique confidence that I will like it, and that pleases us both.
That’s the thing about depravity. Once your mind is open to it, it’s not so depraved after all. It’s just delicious.
His cock knocks up against my pussy, like a silk wrapped homing missile, and I reach for it blindly between my legs. I gasp as my fingers slip effortlessly into my folds. I’m so fucking wet it might be embarrassing if it wasn’t so hot. I moan into the pillow and rock against his length.
“Yeah, baby, I feel it. You’re so ready for me. Dripping for me.” He eases his thumb out of my ass and I whimper at the loss. “God yes, you want to get fucked, don’t you?”
I nod again and arch my back, presenting both options to him.
He chuckles and shifts behind me, and I’m about to beg, or try to impale myself on his cock, when I feel him press into me, placing himself just inside my pussy at first, then the inexorable cleaving that makes me cry out. “Ohmigod,” I breath, as he sinks fully into my warmth. “Oh, god. Fuck me, please.”
He flexes inside me, his cock nudging at my cervix, and I can just imagine it kissing his head, asking ever so nicely for a warm bath of sperm. I arch my back, folding my hips as much as possible, until my clit rubs against the bottom of his cock. I wiggle back and forth until his palm slaps down on the side of my ass.
“Stop moving. You don’t need to come right away.”
I cry out, because yes, I think I do. “Please,” I whisper.
Please put your finger back in my ass. Please pinch my clit until I buck against you like a rodeo horse. Please make me come so hard I pass out and can’t remember where you finished. I promise I won’t care.
“Stop thinking about what you want.” He folds himself forward over my back, his breath drifting over my shoulder and along the crest of my ear as he rocks his cock in and out of me slowly. “Say it, or hold still and let me give it to you.”
I whimper and bite my lip. I want him to give it to me.
“Good girl.”
The praise fills me up and gives me strength. I can be patient. He’ll make it worth my while.
He pulls himself off my back in a single smooth action. I can see in my mind’s eye his abdominal muscles contracting, the only indication that it would take him any effort to move so fluidly. With the same balance of strength and care, he shifts my body up, lifting my hips up into the cradle of his pelvis. My knees are off the bed, but he’s holding me securely with his large, rough hands and his cock is rubbing a spot inside me that drifts me into an altered headspace where he could twist me into a pretzel and I wouldn’t care. As he can sense that I’m lost in bliss, he holds me there, fucking me just hard enough to ride over that spot, using his words to twist my mind up and over the final crest toward my first orgasm.
I know it’s coming, and I know it’s just the first, because he’s not in any hurry to join me. He loves coming in my pussy, and he loves doing it at the same time as my walls clench hard around him. He swears his come spills right into my womb that way, and if he says something like that when it happens, it makes me so fucking hot I could go again right away. And sometimes we do.
But other nights, he holds off, wanting to see how many times he can make me fall apart before he loses himself. Those nights, he might come on me, marking me, white ropes of him shining on me in the dark. Or he might, on rare occasion, come in my ass, but usually he he pulls out and spills on my back, liking how I shudder at the loss of him.
He likes everything about fucking me, and I love that.
I love him.
I always have, but now that we have this, this no-holds barred connection, this honesty, I love him more than I ever thought possible. And I don’t think I could ever find the words to tell him how much this means to me, so I show him instead. I give him my body. I give him my trust.
“Your pussy is so tight, baby. I could do this all night, rocking in and out of you. Do you feel how hard you make me? Do you feel that cock, filling you up? You do that. You turn me on that much. I love fucking you. I love rolling you over and having my fucking way with you while you’re still sleeping. And you’re such a good girl, you spread your legs for me even while you’re sleeping, don’t you?”
And that’s what does it. That’s what rips me apart, knowing there’s never a time I’d say no to him, because he needs me as much as I need him. I seize up hard around him, and he slows his rocking, not stopping, but gentling enough to give me a chance to recover before he’s going to ramp us both up again.
“You get so sloppy after you come, baby. It’s hot.” I wish I’d known that. I wasted ten years after puberty being embarrassed about the awesomeness between my legs
. Of course, if I’d slutted it up before, then I wouldn’t have discovered this with him. And I love that he’s the only person who’s ever known this side of me. The only one who’s met my inner hedonist. In some ways, he didn’t just meet her. He made her.
I shiver, and he pulls out. “No...” I moan, and he chuckles.
“Hold still, I just need to get something.”
I shift, trying to see what he’s doing through the darkness, and I heard the air part a split second before his palm connected sharply with my ass.
“Hold. Still.”
I know better than to shift again. If I do, I won’t get another spanking, I’ll get put away wet and needy. He rarely spanks for fun, and never if I try to manipulate it. He’s right, of course. It wouldn’t make my pulse jump if he gave in. Wouldn’t make my pussy drip with excitement, or my skin itch with need.
He’s back. He places something at the far side of the bed, then he’s over me again, and his hands at my sides, gently shifting me. Turning me over.
“I fucking love fucking you, baby,” he whispers.
I smile, and he lowers his face to cover mine, his lips gentle but demanding, his tongue right there, teasing, then right here, inside me, and it’s hard to tell where he ends and I begin.
The kiss reignites our need, and I feel his cock stiffen between us. I reach for him, but he stills my hands and pulls them up above my head, pinning them together with one of his large palms.
His eyes are dark and heavy, boring into me as he knees his way between my thighs and thrusts hard, his cock somehow finding its sure way to my core. “Just getting wet, baby.”
Fuck. He’s going to take my ass like this. Oh, fuck. We’ve tried this facing each other only once before, and while the idea turned me on like nothing else, the sensation was overwhelming and he didn’t get more than the tip of his cock into my tight rear hole.
Hate F*@k: The Complete Story Page 27
