DON’T HURT MY BABY

by Zoey Parker

  When he’d asked Tess if her ‘no’ meant anything, passion and need had flared in her eyes. She’d cried when he first slammed into her, but by his second thrust, she was gushing wet around his cock. He’d never felt anything like it. He’d never been ready again so fast.

  He couldn’t afford this level of distraction. He needed to be focused on what happened next. He took his cock in hand and stroked, hard and fast and vicious, his grip almost impossibly tight. The moisture from his tip was just enough to keep his hand from actually rasping over his flesh, and he felt release just over the horizon. This was how it was for him, for years. Rough, fast orgasms, just enough to make sure his libido didn’t interfere with what he needed to do. It felt familiar. Comfortable. And nothing like enough.

  She was naked there, under the water. He could go to her, go into the shower, push her up against the wall and have her. As much as he wanted. She wouldn’t say no to him. He knew that. When he’d said that he expected her to pay him for his protecting her, she hadn’t so much as flinched. Perhaps her body was a currency she was accustomed to using. Maybe she even enjoyed it.

  It would be good, he was quite sure, using her that mercilessly. But he couldn’t get used to her. He couldn’t afford to get used to her. He needed to maintain his distance. Be the killer that Silk Road and others like him expected. He needed to be a cold machine, focused on the task in front of him. She was not the task. She was sweet and sexy and plump and exactly what he wanted, and she was not the task.

  But when he came, rough and hard and grunting, it was thinking of how her cunt had squeezed his cock when she came. He spurted hard and thick, catching the release in an old T-shirt to minimize cleanup. The drop of energy was always incredible and was part of why he so rarely indulged himself in this if it wasn’t actively distracting him from the things he needed to do. He let himself sag for just a moment as his cock pulsed out the last drops of cum, and then shook himself, pulling back his awareness from the beauty in the next room. He changed his clothes, shaking out the kinks in his muscles, and started to think harder about what Silk Road had told him. He was focused enough on his thought process that the water shutting off in the bathroom pinged his brain, but was quickly filed away as unimportant, and didn’t distract him.

  When she walked into the room, buck naked and her hair wrapped in a towel, however, he had to clench the muscles in his pelvis to keep his cock from filling all over again. He was like a teenager, and it was ridiculous. He would not tolerate this.

  “How much did you understand of that conversation?” he asked. He let the sharpness he felt about the curves of her body come out in his tone.

  She raised an eyebrow at him – Christ that made him want to slap her tits until she cried, until she said she was sorry for failing to respect him – and then stretched languidly. She was, at the bare minimum, aware of how good she looked doing that, and enjoying his responses. Bitch. There was a movie in his head about making her pay for that latter with the snap of his belt across her plump ass. God, she’d look good striped like that.

  Focus, Milo, for fuck’s sake.

  She shook her head. “My Spanish isn’t very good.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “That’s not an answer.”

  “Sorry.” She sat down on the bed, stretched her legs out and leaned on the headboard. “Did you have any clothes for me or am I just laying around naked, ready to be used whenever you want me?”

  There was something under the bold language, something that made him think there was more bravado and nervousness there than he would have assumed from the way she displayed herself. Interesting. She’d certainly been bold enough before. But then, maybe there was something else going on.

  “I asked you a question,” he said, standing and looming over the bed. “Answer it like a good girl, and I’ll think about answering yours. Mouth off to me again, and we’ll see if you were just pretending to like being forced into things.”

  She shifted on the bed, her face a constructed mask of sexual prowess, but now that he was looking, he thought he could see some of the edges.

  “So sorry, sir,” she said, and the subtle emphasis she placed on the honorific made it nearly impossible to control his dick. But she didn’t mean it, not like a girl should when she put that kind of word in her mouth. He slapped her left tit almost idly. The way her breath hissed in at the sharp clap of the sound made him think she didn’t mind in the least.

  “The next time you speak,” he said, keeping his voice carefully level, “you had best answer my question. If anything comes out of your mouth other than an answer to my question, you’ll get five more just like that. Do you understand?”

  She opened her mouth to speak, thought better of it, and nodded.

  “Good. Now. Tell me how much of that conversation you understood.”

  There was something softer in her expression. God. She was good at the play, good at enjoying it. It’d been so long since he’d had someone at his fingertips who enjoyed this so much and he was not thinking about that. He needed to not think about that.

  “Not much. A few words here and there. It was hard to not pick up some from Toro, but I’m nothing like fluent.”

  “What words did you understand?”

  “Drugs. Money. Murder. You know, the usual.” She shifted, clearly weighing something in her mind. Another girl, he might have prompted her with another slap, but he suspected that Tess wasn’t the sort that would take kindly to that. She would want to earn her slaps by being a good girl, not get them because she was a naughty one. “I know you were talking to Silk Road.”

  That sentence jarred Milo out of the Dom mindset he was so easily slipping into, despite not having used that persona in years.

  “Say that again,” he snarled out. Part of him desperately hoped she’d said something else, anything else.

  “You were talking to Silk Road,” she said, softer this time. “I caught that much. Toro said the name often enough, usually paired with a string of swears. I know he thought of Silk Road as his main competition in the drug trade around here.” She was quiet for another minute, and he waited some more. He could be patient with her. She wanted to tell him everything; it was adorable and delicious all at once. “And I can put a few things together.”

  “Like what?”

  “You’re a hired gun. That’s obvious. Toro got away from you, and you were being yelled at by Silk Road. I think Silk Road hired you to take out Toro and is pissed that you haven’t done the job yet. And I think that was him on the phone, telling you to get it done.”

  She watched him cautiously, but he thought there was a little bit of pride in her eyes. How often had she been asked what she thought of a situation, and how long had she been dismissed as a bit of tits and ass to pass around the office with the added bonus that she didn’t bitch about taking it? How many tidbits of information had she stored inside that brain? How much could she be worth to Silk Road? Maybe, if he couldn’t catch up with Toro, he could trade her…

  No. No, he was a murderer and an assassin, but he didn’t treat women like bargaining chips. Well, except for when he did because it was the only way to get out of a room alive. He never did except for then. He managed not to laugh.

  Tess was watching him from her spot on the bed. She wasn’t cuffed anymore, but she was just as neatly pinned in place. He tried to keep his mental notice of her impassive, but there was something about the way she sat, about the way she kept her chin lifted just so, the way she kept her eyes just north of his, just barely avoiding his gaze. A different sort of man wouldn’t have noticed; he had trained himself to notice these little details.

  “If you want to leave, get out,” he said, surprising himself. “I won’t help you, but you can get out of here, you can go wherever you want. Away from here. You’ll want to get away from anywhere you think Toro might be, but that’s on you. And if you ever breathe so much as a word about my name, my face, anything, I will hunt you down, and I will make you wish that you
were dead, and it won’t be sexy and fun. It will be brutal, and at the end of it, you will be maimed. Do you understand me?”

  “I can’t very well leave naked,” she said, but there was something in her eyes he didn’t entirely understand. Something less than interest and more than fear.

  He pointed at the closet. “There’s a spare pair of jeans and a T-shirt in there. They’ll be snug on you.” He let his eyes shift down to take in her heavy breasts again. “But you’ll be less naked.”

  “And what happens if I stay?”

  Something inside him that he’d thought was dead for years gave a little twitch. He choked it down and locked it away. For the millionth time today, he reminded himself that attachments weren’t something he could afford.

  “Turns out I have some pent-up aggression to churn out. I need to release some of it so that I can go out and get some research done and start figuring out where the hell your boyfriend went to ground. I’ll buy you some clothes that will actually fit while I’m out. You’ll stay here with me. This is the only chance you get to go, because after this, I have to go dark, and I can bring you with me into that, but I need to trust that you’ll do as I say. There are no second chances.”

  He saw her chew it over, which he respected. When someone was presented with that kind of choice, it was good that they thought it through, came up with the right choice, the decision that they could live with. Because that was the hell of it, from her perspective. There wasn’t a right answer. There was just the answer she could live with.

  “I’ll stay,” she said after a few heartbeats of internal contemplation. “If you want to keep me.”

  He managed to keep the snarl internal; at this moment, he wasn’t sure she would interpret it correctly.

  “You understand what you’re asking for? You’ve seen the edges of how I like to play. Your ‘no’ won’t matter. If you tell me to stop, I’ll take it under advisement. You will be mine to use in any way I want. That’s what you want?”

  This time, her answer came fast almost panting. “Yes.”

  He didn’t say another word. He’d been ready to thread his belt through its loops when she’d come out of the bathroom; now it lay in his hands. He folded it in half; the leather was stiffer than he’d have liked, but he’d been wearing the belt a while. It would do. It would do just fine. He snapped it once, twice, three times, watching the effect on her eyes and her breathing. She watched his hands and the leather with a hunger that he liked just fine.

  “I want you to cry for me,” he said as he raised the belt.

  She inhaled as it went up, and when it came down hard on her breasts, she let out a gush of air in a low, steady moan, her hips shifting under her.

  “Be still,” he snapped, and she went motionless, her eyes wide and focused on him. “Sit on your hands.” They went under her ass, palms down so she couldn’t sneak her fingers in to stroke her cunt. Someone had trained her well. It couldn’t have been Toro. That fucking limp-dicked clown couldn’t have gotten a girl to behave if he’d had chains in his hands.

  The belt came down again, and she stayed still this time, within reason. She hissed again, though, her gaze going soft as she slid farther down into the space where the lines between pleasure and pain blurred and lightened. He went again, feeling his cock stiffening now, and growing harder every time she cried out under the leather crack.

  It took a dozen strokes of the belt before tears were running down her cheeks. She still sat on her hands, although they were curled into fists now. Her breathing was ragged, and her eyes were unfocused. She was out of practice at taking this, he thought, but she wanted it, craved it. What a good girl. How long had she been without a master, without someone to properly train her?

  He bit back that thought as hard as he could. This was a game, a way to keep from losing his mind while he laid low and poked leads and didn’t do any of the things that helped him stay sane. This was not him keeping her. He couldn’t afford to keep her.

  No matter how good she tasted when he pushed her thighs apart and bit her sodden clit, making her gush on his face as she writhed through waves of pleasure that deepened farther and farther.

  No matter how good she felt when he slammed into her, so wet this time that there was almost no resistance, and she came around him again, crying out and clawing at his back as she screamed.

  When he dressed, afterward, ready to go out and start the work he needed to do, she grinned at him sleepily. “Not going to chain me up again?”

  He fought the smile that wanted to spread across his mouth. “Not unless you’re very, very good.”

  Chapter Nine

  Milo relaxed – as much as he ever relaxed – at the small round table that graced the corner of the hotel room. The thing wobbled, and the chair he sat in made his ass hurt after about fifteen minutes, but it was what he had. His weapon was laid out on the table, disassembled for cleaning. He hadn’t fired it since the day he’d gone after Toro and taken Tess as his own, which made it even more necessary to clean. A man’s weapon was what kept him alive; you took care of it, or you ended up dead. Hell, sometimes you took care of it, and you still ended up dead. No need to take extra chances.

  Tess was sleeping on the bed, her pretty face relaxed in sleep. She had a tendency to sprawl when she was alone in the queen-size bed, snoring softly. Last night, he’d told her to put on makeup, heavy eyeliner, and bright red lipstick, just so he could wreck it as he fucked her. She’d cleaned up a little before they fell asleep, but she still had faded makeup around her eyes, and a brightness to her lips that was more than just her natural beauty.

  And that little thought was exactly the problem that had kept him from sleeping last night, even though he’d fucked her so hard he’d thought he was going to be shooting nothing but sand by the end. She’d fallen asleep hard when he was finally done with her, after she’d come several times, clawing at his forearms and screaming into her pillow. And then, in her sleep, she’d turned towards him, curling up into a little ball that was tucked up against his chest. Before he’d thought about it, he’d pressed a light kiss against her hair, loving the soft, herbal scent that rose from her locks even though he hadn’t bothered buying anything more than the hotel shampoo.

  Then he’d recoiled up and out of bed. He’d watched her reach out for the source of heat – for him – and when her questing hands didn’t find it, she’d pulled his pillow in tight against her chest with a sleepy little grumble that reminded him of a kitten.

  He’d been fully aware of what was happening, and he’d forced himself to ignore it. When she called him ‘Daddy’, when she begged him to handcuff her to the bed again while they fucked, when she’d fallen so easily into the sort of 24/7 kinky play that made him groan and get hard, even now with his weapon in his hand, he’d told himself that it was all just a way to pass the time until he figured out the next move he was going to make. He’d told himself that all he had to do was figure out where Toro was, and then he’d leave her behind, moving on to the next job, and the one after that, and the one after that. This was his life, and even if it was chosen for him, that did not mean he could just walk away from it. He wouldn’t last a handful of days if he tried to step away from the life. And what would he do? Traveling the world as a top-tier assassin didn’t give a person much in the way of life skills.

  His life did not allow for a woman. For softness. For someone who curled up into him and then made sleepy, irritated sounds when he got out of bed. And even though Tess wasn’t a woman who was soft when anyone else could see, she was so very pretty.

  Part of him wondered if she might make his life easier. A pretty woman could get access to spaces that rugged men who struggled to hide the chill in their eyes could not. With her on his arm, accessing the places that many of his targets hovered would be easier. And if she wasn’t going to make his life easier, he needed to kill her and move on. Killing her sounded harsher, the longer he knew her, which was a perfect example of why spending time ge
tting to know a target was an amateur move. Murderers in TV shows and movies might be able to slaughter someone without knowing anything about them, but that wasn’t how most people he’d known operated. They killed from a distance, content to let poison or a long-range bullet or anything else take the hit for them. They didn’t need that up close and personal moment of watching the light fade out of the target’s eyes. Bunch of romantic bullshit.

  He finished reassembling his weapon, checking the chamber and making sure it was unloaded, just like always. He set it down and went back to the woman asleep in his bed. What the hell was he going to do?

  Silk Road had called once a week since the first failed attempt on Toro’s life. The drug lord was getting more and more annoyed at the lack of results from Milo. It didn’t help that Milo hadn’t been able to produce even a general idea of where the target had gone. This was not a thing that happened to him – that Toro had gotten away the first time, and Milo couldn’t track him down now. If Milo’s masters in France had been aware of his poor performance, they would have slit his throat and left him to die alone. This was totally unacceptable.