by Aubrey Dark
YOURS
A Dark Bad Boy Romance Novel
By
Aubrey Dark
Copyright © 2015 Aubrey Dark
All rights reserved.
First Edition: July 2015
ISBN: TBD
Prologue
“I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.”
- Pablo Neruda
Jessica
I’m still dreaming, in that half-asleep moment before dawn, when I feel his hand curl between my legs.
It’s dark.
It’s always dark when he comes for me.
My eyes open slightly as his hand presses between my thighs, the coil inside of me going tight already, making me moan softly with desire. I blink, my eyelashes fluttering against my cheeks, but it’s not light outside yet. The sky is a deep, deep gray, the stars turning invisible one by one.
His other hand wraps around my throat. His grip is tight and controlled. Very controlled. That’s one thing I’ve never seen him do—lose control.
“There are two ways to get rid of a shadow, Jessica.”
His voice comes through to me as a low murmur. His voice invades my dreams, drives out the demons. His strong fingers grip my thighs as I twist under him, forcing them apart. I try to move, but my wrists are bound above my head. The rope is cold and tight against my skin.
I open my mouth to cry out, and his lips press down against mine. He seals in my moan as his fingers push into the place where I am already slick. When he breaks apart from the kiss, I can only gasp his name.
“Vale…”
“The first way is you light a candle. Light hundreds of candles. Put them on the floor, on the shelves, all around you. Light up the whole room with a thousand different pinpoints of light. Your shadow will disappear, right? The brightness swallows it all up.”
There is no moon, and the last stars in the sky are too far away, too dim to be candles. I try to move, but my wrists are bound above my head. Is this a dream? I have been dreaming this dream for my whole life, maybe.
His mouth is on my neck, and his hand strokes me where I am now dripping wet with desire. If I had panties on, they would be soaked, but I am naked, completely naked. The stars are fading into the fabric of the sky. He moves down, farther, farther.
“Vale—”
He pins my hips with his strong hands, and his tongue sinks into me. He thrusts me from one dream into another, with no time to wake. Then he releases me, and I arch up in agony, needing to be satisfied.
“Two ways to get rid of a shadow,” he says again, and now the sky is pale and thin and all the stars have disappeared, but the rope is still around my wrists and I am still aching for his touch.
“The second way is easy,” he says, and the coil inside me winds tighter. When he speaks, his breath sends shivers across my sensitive skin, shivers that deepen and resonate until my whole body is vibrating for him.
“Vale.” My voice is ragged, gasping with desire. His hand comes down and caresses my body slowly, possessively.
How? How do I get rid of this shadow? But he answers me before I can speak again.
“All you have to do… is close your eyes.”
Chapter One
Vale
“I don’t know,” Dan said.
This is the best job, I’m telling you. Tell him, Vale.”
I leaned over the checkerboard table in the old Hollywood diner and clasped my hands together in front of my brunch plate. Dan squirmed in his seat, like he thought I was going to stab him with my fork. Of course, I wasn’t. I would never get blood on a perfectly-cooked omelet.
“It is absolutely the best job,” I said. “You get to do what you like, when you like. You control everything.”
“But… but you have to kill people,” he said, whispering the last two words.
Rien laughed. I leaned over my plate toward Dan, pointing in the air with my fork for emphasis. He followed the tines with rapt attention.
“Dan, you get to kill them. They’re the bad guys.”
Dan rubbed his lips, looking doubtful. Our waitress came by to fill up our coffee cups, and we all clammed up. I eased myself back in my chair.
“Thanks, darling,” Rien said to the waitress. “Could I have another stack of pancakes? I’d hate for all this whipped cream to go to waste.”
“For you, honey, anything,” she said, smiling back at him as she poured his coffee. All of us watched her swishing hips as she walked away from our table, waiting for her to be gone so that we could speak openly again.
She thought we worked for the government. And in a way, we kinda did. The CIA sent their targets to me, and I sent them to Rien to cut up into little bitty pieces. Sometimes, if the targets didn’t go for the “federal witness” trap the CIA laid for them, I handled them with a gun. But that was messier.
Rien didn’t like messy; he was a clean surgeon. Neither did Dan—he was some forensic tech guy who worked for the local cops. Rien must have had something on him, or I don’t think Dan would ever have helped us out. He was too scared for that. He hated blood, and dead bodies, and killing in general.
But he loved our stories.
“Alright,” I said, “You’ll never beat this one. I was hired to kill this guy in Thailand, right? Feds gave me three hundred thousand dollars for the job.”
“Who was the target?” Rien asked.
“Some drug lord who got off scot-free after tattling on his associates,” I said, chewing a bite slowly. Mmmm. Ham and green peppers. You can’t beat a good Denver omelet.
“Why did they want to kill him?”
“This guy… well, this guy was stupid. Sloppy as hell, breaking the borders whenever he wants to fly out to Amsterdam for a joint, hiring underage hookers, gambling with the local chao pho.”
“What’s that?” Dan asked.
I took another bite of omelet and chewed as I explained.
“That’s like the mafia.”
“Mafia?”
“The Thai mafia. He’s betting around in mob circles, spreading cash around for cockfights, dogfights, whatever.”
“Basically doing all kinds of things you’re not supposed to do if you’re in the witness protection program,” Rien interjected.
“Exactly. So he has this whorehouse he likes to go to, and he always calls ahead to reserve the same ladyboy whore.”
“Chicks with dicks?” Dan’s eyes were huge. “Oh, man, what a country.”
“What, you think we don’t got that in America?” I asked, raising my eyebrow.
“Ladyboys? No way.”
“Hell yeah, ladyboys. Thai ladyboys, Mexican horsefuckers, Chinese masseuse blowshops. We got everything in America. We’re the melting pot of kinky stuff,” I said.
“We don’t have the crazy shit they have in Japan,” Rien said, shaking his head. He swiped his finger through the top of the bowl of whipped cream and licked it off suggestively.
“That’s different, man. Japan is, like, the fucking cutting edge of sexual kink technology. They have artificially cultivated watermelons that grow in a plastic mold shaped like an anus. They’re cloning half-rabbits, half-women to make real life playboys.”
“Are you for real?” Dan asked.
“I don’t know, I heard it.”
“What, you want to move to Japan?” Rien teased the younger man.
“No!”
“Fuck a watermelon asshole, maybe?”
“No!”
I turned back to Dan and waved my fork to get his attention back to my story.
“Anyway, so this ladyboy, I’m trying to offer her a bribe to make things go easy. She doesn’t speak English too good.”
“Neither do you, huh, Vale?” Rien grinned.
&n
bsp; “Fuck off,” I said. “So I’m trying to tell her what I’m gonna do, you know.”
“You’re telling her you’re gonna kill the guy?” Dan asked.
“Yeah. I don’t want her to freak out when I bust in the room and cut this guy’s throat. I’m doing all kinds of, you know, hand gestures, like we’re playing charades. Finger across my throat, making dead guy noises, you know.”
“Ugh, you had to cut his throat?” Dan looked a bit green.
The waitress came by and slid a plate of pancakes off onto the table on her way to the back of the diner. Rien licked his lips and poured syrup on top.
“You’re such a goddamn pussy, Dan. You could never be a killer,” I said.
“Not if I’m gonna have to cut anyone’s throat, I couldn’t!” Dan said, rubbing his neck.
“My girlfriend cut a guy’s throat once,” Rien said.
“Your girlfriend has bigger balls than Dan,” I said.
Dan frowned in confusion at Rien.
“Is your girlfriend a ladyboy?”
“Swear to God, Dan, I’ll cut your throat right now,” Rien warned. He lifted his butter knife in a threatening gesture.
Dan swallowed and turned back to me to hear the rest of the story.
“Anyway,” I said, “So I finish gesturing to this whore, and it seems like she gets it. I hand her a hundred bucks in baht, and I make a shushing gesture.”
I put my finger to my lips in case Dan didn’t get it.
“Like, shhh don’t tell anyone. And she repeats it, nodding the whole time. So I think we’re good.”
I paused for dramatic effect.
“Did you fuck her?” Dan blurted out.
“Wh—What? Fuck her? What does that have to do with the goddamn story, anyway? And no, I didn’t fuck her. Jesus, Dan. She’s a goddamn ladyboy.”
“I thought that was the point of the story,” Dan said.
“Stop interrupting and we’ll get there. So I wait in the back until the mark arrives, and then I give him five minutes more to take off his pants and get busy. Five minutes, and then I come bursting through the door, my knife in the air, ready to slice this guy open. And what do I see?”
Dan shook his head.
“What?”
“The guy is lying on the bed, dead as roadkill. His leg is still gushing blood from the femoral artery.”
Dan’s jaw dropped halfway down his face. I didn’t think he’d eaten a single bite of his brunch. Oh well, his loss. I continued my story.
“The ladyboy comes out of the bathroom. She’s totally naked, dick flopping around in front of her, blood on her tits. She’s drying the knife off. I stare at the body, then up at her, then back at the body. She smiles and winks, and puts her finger to her lips. ‘Shhh,’ she says.”
I look at the two men sitting across the table from me and wait for their reaction.
“Shhh,” I repeat. “Can you fucking believe it?”
“Holy shit.” Dan looked like he was going to throw up.
“Talk about government inefficiencies. They’re talking to the wrong vendors.” Rien said. He forked a bite of pancake into his mouth.
I dropped my fork onto my plate.
“That’s what you took away from the story, Rien? Government waste?”
“Well, they overpaid you by like, two hundred ninety nine thousand—”
“You boys can’t appreciate a good hitman story when you hear one.”
“Ugh, cut in the leg,” Dan said, rubbing his thigh.
“Want to hear the story about how Vale put a gun to my head?” Rien asked.
“Wh—are you for real?”
I laughed.
“That was your own damn fault, Rien, and you know it.”
“Why do you even hang out with this guy?” Dan asked Rien.
“Do you know what it’s like to kill a man?” Rien asked, his eyes narrow.
“No.”
“Well, there you go. It’s hard to find a kindred spirit when you’re a killer.” He popped the last of the pancake into his mouth.
“Hey now,” I said, lifting a hand. “I am not your goddamn kindred spirit.”
“Yeah? Tell Dan here about what happened to your last girlfriend.”
Jen. I did not want to think about her right now. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. My cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out.
“Shit.” It was headquarters. They only called this number when they needed something done urgently. I sighed.
“I gotta get this,” I said. I stood up from the table and pushed my chair in.
“Wait,” Dan said. “What happened to your last girlfriend?”
I leaned forward and stole a strawberry from Rien’s plate. I looked sideways at Dan with the most menacing glare I could.
“I killed her,” I whispered.
Dan’s face went pale.
I put the phone to my ear. Behind me, I could hear Dan asking Rien if I was telling the truth.
“I need you at the Los Angeles airport,” the voice said. “A man will be waiting outside the first terminal. Follow him.”
“When?”
“Right now.”
“Right now? I’m at brunch. And I have a barber’s appointment—”
“Right now. This one’s important.”
The voice hung up and I looked at my watch. It wasn’t even eleven o’clock. I turned back to the table.
“Gotta go,” I said to Rien. “Big boys have an assignment.”
“Now? You haven’t even started your pancakes,” Rien said.
“Can’t. Orders are orders. You want them?” I slid the plate over to Rien, who looked way too fit to be demolishing three short stacks of pancakes.
“This is your idea of control?” Dan asked, incredulous. “This is doing what you like, when you like? You just wait for the call to go—” his voice dropped to a hush, “—to go kill people!”
“Sure. I like to follow orders,” I said.
“I like to kill people,” Rien said. “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life, am I right?”
“I am so not cut out for this,” Dan said.
“Fine. More bodies for us, huh, Rien?” I slapped them both on the shoulders. Rien grinned.
“You two are fucking psycho,” Dan said, shaking his head. “Fucking psycho.”
Chapter Two
Jessica
“Guys? Hey guys? We missed the downtown exit.”
I pressed my face to the window. The metal and glass dome of the San Diego library disappeared behind the other buildings as we sped down the freeway.
“Hey, Mimi. Guys!”
“Do you think she knows yet?” Mimi asked, ignoring me. She winked at April in the rearview mirror.
“Knows what?” I asked, totally confused. I turned around in the passenger’s seat of Mimi’s SUV. “What don’t I know?”
“Oh, Jessica,” April said, reaching forward and patting my shoulder. Next to her, her boyfriend James chuckled.
“Are you serious? Hey! What are you doing? We were supposed to be going to the library.”
Mimi raised her head and let out a cackle.
“Our evil plan is working!” she cried.
“Oh man, Jessica, I thought you knew,” April said, shaking her head.
“Knew what?” I asked.
“Ha, she even brought her Kindle!” Mimi said, poking me in the side. “Jessica, did anyone ever tell you that the dictionary has your name next to the word gullible?”
“What? I was going to check out some ebooks. What’s going on?” Panic began to bubble up in my chest. “Wait. Are you not dropping me off at the library?”
Mimi shook her head gleefully.
“Jessica, remember when we told you about having fun and taking a break from studying?”
My heart sank. They didn’t mean— No. They couldn’t. Mimi and April had been talking about taking a trip to Mexico for weeks now. I’d pleaded out of the adventure, but now… Now…
; “No,” I said.
“Yes.”
“No way.”
“Yes way!” James chimed in from the back.
“You’re kidnapping me?!” I cried out. Mimi and April burst out into laughter. “Are you for real? You guys? Seriously? You are not for real.”
“We are totally for real,” Mimi said. She raised both her hands in the air. “Tijuana or bust!”
My heart beat fast. The library dome was already far behind us, and I had a sinking feeling Mimi was serious.
“Mimi,” I said slowly. “No. You cannot take me to Mexico.”
“Give me one reason why not,” she said.
“I have to study!” I had three big exams coming up, and I’d planned on using this week to catch up on the material.
“That is the worst reason ever. It’s spring break, Jessica! You gotta do some wild and crazy things when you’re still in college. Get out. Lose control. Have fun.”
“Ughhhh.” I slumped back in my seat. “I don’t want to have fun.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Right now? I want to read books.”
“No! Sheesh, Jessica, you’re such a priss!”
Mimi grabbed my Kindle off of my lap and tossed it into the back seat.
“Hey! Give it back!”
“No way, braniac,” Mimi said.
I spun in my seat, but James was already picking up the ereader.
“Kidnapped by the Rogue Prince? Is this what girls like?”
“Give it back!” I squealed.
“Oh my gosh, are you for real?” April said, grabbing the Kindle away from her boyfriend and scrolling through my reading list. My face turned steaming hot.
“April, don’t!”
“You have romance novels on that thing?!” Mimi laughed. I groaned in embarrassment as April kept reading aloud.
“A Pirate’s Captive. Taken by the Bad Boy. I can’t believe you read that kind of stuff!”
I would have leapt back into the back seat if we hadn’t been driving on the highway. As it was, I buried my face in my hands. My roommates were never going to let me live this down.
“So that’s what Jessica fantasizes about, huh?” James said. He poked me from the back seat. “Hey, if you’re into bad boys, I have a friend—”
