by Kira Graham
Of course, I’m a little afraid of Jack Sweet, too. The man would cut us all up and blow the world to bits for his babies. He sort of reminds me of that Chrisley guy from TV. He’s refined and strangely sweet, but he’s a psycho for his kids.
“So she wasn’t a baby?” I ask, as interested as hell because I didn’t think that anyone but the parents knew this shit.
“She was three. Born to a couple of tweaker losers who cared more about their next fix than their little girl,” he snarls, his face set so firmly that I hear his jaw crunch over the sound of the machine.
“Would you stop so that we can talk?” I grumble, smiling when he curses and goes still, his hands clenched around the hold bars hard enough that his knuckles are white.
“I don’t know if I can tell this story without doing something, or I’m likely to hit something,” he hisses, smiling when I grin and nod over to the small ring in the corner of the state-of-the-art gym. “Fair enough. So I’ll pound the shit outta you. Okay.”
I’m a little annoyed that he seems so excited about the prospect, and that he doesn’t think that I can hold my own, but I keep my mouth shut and suck down some water while the idiot gets off his machine and pops a squat in front of me, close enough that his voice reaches me but won’t carry if little Miss Tee should creep up on us.
“Tee was three when Constance, Hope, and Honey saw her. I don’t know all of the details, but from what Grange dug up on all the family members, I know enough. I read the police reports—”
“There were police reports?” I bark, a sick feeling filling me.
“A lot of them, actually. Tee’s parents weren’t all that smart, and some of their neighbors didn’t take too kindly to them and their behavior. Anyway, I read through the file, and Christ, man, it was not pretty. Tee was about three when the Sweet women saw her with her mother, outside the mall. From what Honey wrote in her statement, that child was skinny, filthy, and so covered in bruises that she ‘almost’ attacked the mother on the spot. I’m thinking, though, that that statement is as much bullshit as the one that the hospital gave, seeing as how the chick’s injuries were consistent with what Heath would call a coin-sock beatdown,” he laughs, snorting when I blink.
“Honey hit her?”
“Honey is famous for carrying an old sock around in her purse, filled with rolls of coins. You make of it what you will. Anyway, from the medical records we managed to hack, Tee was abused. Starved. Neglected,” he says darkly, the muscle in his jaw ticking again. “This is where things get a little spotty, but we can pretty much fill in what happened. Hope practically grabbed that child up and ran, while Honey was giving her the beatdown, and by the time the sheriff arrived, it took three deputies to get Honey off her. While that was happening, Tee was, shall we say, claimed, and from that moment on, she was a Sweet. I don’t know what Jack did—hell, I don’t want to know what kind of connections that slick fucker has—but that girl never left her new home, despite the state wanting to bring up charges against the women, and despite the fact that Hope had basically kidnapped Tee. So now, as far as the government and everyone else is concerned, Nefertiti Sweet has been with the Sweets since she was a newborn, and those parents of hers…well, I know the mom died of a drug overdose when Tee was about seven. The father just disappeared, which I’m thinking was all Jack, after he saw the state of that little girl. Shit, she didn’t even have a proper name,” he mutters, his head dropping down as if the images in his head are too much to bear.
I can’t say shit, and not because I don’t have things to say, to shout in rage, but because my throat is so thick that it literally hurts to breathe. I don’t know much about kids, my only experience with the race of little monsters being with Alex’s and Chilli’s little terrors, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t love them. They’re helpless in this world, innocent little things that need protection and love…
“What”—I stop to clear my throat—“do you mean?”
“I mean that her birth certificate had the name Kid Sloan on it, as if those useless assholes couldn’t even be bothered to give her a name. I’d have killed them with my bare hands if I’d been there the day those women found her outside the mall, starved, dirty, and collecting change so that her junkie mother could get a hit,” he snarls, his eyes flashing until he visibly takes a deep breath to calm himself. “So, yeah, that’s my reasoning with Tee. She wasn’t a baby, and sometimes I think that her need to please her family stems from her past, even if she doesn’t remember it.”
“Thank Christ,” I mutter, swallowing around my sorrow so that I don’t pull a pussy move and cry outright.
“She told me once that she met her parents.”
“Dude, this is the Sweets we’re talking about. Do you really think that someone like Jack, who seems to have claimed all those girls as his own, would let some shrink screw up one of his kids? The minute a therapist suggested to Tee that she meet her birth parents, that man went on a tear. Honey told me that he had to have a whole room in their house re-plastered after that episode, but with Tee wanting to meet them, just to put it behind her, what do you think little Jack did?”
“I think he hired people,” I rasp, a grin tugging at my lips, because that’s just the sort of thing that that maniac would actually do.
“He didn’t,” I hear, and whip my head around to see Tee leaning against the gym door, her arms folded across her chest so that the oversized white tee she’s wearing rides up on her supple thighs.
From here, I can see her slight belly, and fuck me if that doesn’t turn me on like hell. Christ.
“Tee—”
“He recruited two CIA agents who owed him a favor. Not that I knew it back then, not the way I had my head shoved up my ass. But later, when I saw those same people following Cleo, and then again when we went to Cancun on spring break, I started to have an inkling. Rosetta—she’s always been all kinds of crazy and resourceful. I think that that year, she was putting the screws to a judge that she’d caught cheating on his wife with his daughter’s best friend. He checked into things for us and gave us the answers,” she says, smiling affectionately.
“You knew?”
“That my birth parents were toast? No. And I also didn’t know that I was three when they adopted me, so thanks for that, Nate. But the parental meeting?” she asks, scoffing good-naturedly. “Dude, Jack was a madman for two weeks, and then one day, he strides in all smiles and says that he’s found them. I may not be all that smart, but it never did sit well with me that two decent people would just give up their kid.”
No, it wouldn’t. But none of that matters now, because as I watch her grin at a glaring Nate, who’s cursing at being snuck up on and whining about never living it down, I realize…I don’t think I know this woman at all.
But I want to.
Chapter Fourteen
Tee
“Stop it!” I hiss, my irritation rising swiftly when Ares starts to slather on enough sunscreen over me that I feel like I’m caked in gunk.
“You’ll get burned, and while I love your little cinnamon splotches, I don’t want you burning. The last time you fell asleep in the sun, you got burnt to a crisp.”
Technically, I didn’t so much fall asleep at Jack’s pool party as pass out, but since Mr. Judgmental here doesn’t need to know that, I snort and endure his over-the-top sunscreen session while I check out Nate in the pool, where he’s doing laps.
The man is as hot as hell, and every time he reaches the end of the pool and does that flip-over-and-kick thing, I get to see the V of his abs and the fact that he’s not an underwear-while-swimming kind of guy. Color me thrilled that I have something to look at while Ares clucks around me like a mother hen.
“Do not say the words ‘cinnamon splotches’ to me ever again. Not unless you want to wake up with one of your balls missing,” I hiss at him, trying to distract myself because I’m out here in a bikini with a baby bump that just sprouted out overnight.
I have heartburn,
too, plus my stomach isn’t liking anything but saltines and soda water, and if I get any freaking hornier, my vag is gonna detach, slide down my leg, and violate Ares. Why is he so hot? I ask myself, sucking on my teeth when he pulls back from dousing me in sunscreen, only to grin when he meets my eyes.
The man is an enigma, and one that I refuse to figure out, because I’m thinking that he wants me to, just so that he can reel me in and then spring some kind of trap on me.
“Babe, you already have both my balls,” he laughs, his amusement doing awful things to my libido.
“Go away. I don’t know what this new flirting thing with you is, but I don’t like it,” I growl, grinding my jaw when he chuckles and parks himself beside me on the lounger, resting his head on his hand as he lies sideways to face me.
“Aw, come on. I’m trying here,” he grumbles, yelping when he tries to touch my stomach, and I slap at his hand. “Let me touch it.”
“No.”
“Please? It looks so cute and juicy, babe. Just let me touch it a little. I swear I won’t go any further,” he pleads, his smile going wide when Nate snorts and comes over to float at the side of the pool.
“You sound like every horny teenage boy from here to the border, loser. Let me just see it, baby,” he mocks in a high-pitched voice, his face crinkling as he busts a gut. “I won’t put it all the way in, babe. I just want to feel you.”
Giggling, because I’ve personally heard that exact one before—and from more than one man-boy, to be honest—I tip my head back and take in the sun’s warmth. It’s as hot as the devil’s taint out here today, and I’m loving it, because I woke up this morning experiencing icy flashes that left me shivering uncontrollably—until a hot flush would sweep in and make me feel like the devil was inside me. And just sitting here in the sun is relaxing, a state of bliss that I didn’t think that I would find until Ares informed Nate and me that we’re all staying here for a few weeks to vacay and figure things out.
Of course, Adonis and every other security guy got their panties in a bunch, but Ares went to bat for me in an uncharacteristic show of support that got me so worked up that I hid in the bathroom for thirty minutes while I cried.
Something’s gotta give with this pregnancy shit, let me tell ya. Yesterday, I sniveled like a high school cheerleader on the rag, and all because the fool baked me a cake. See? He’s flirting with me! And I’m not too proud to admit that it’s working. I actually have to stop myself from humping him. All the time.
“I just wanna stroke my hand over it once,” Ares whines, making me snort and roll my eyes behind my sunglasses.
We haven’t really talked about the pregnancy thing, to be honest, and for that, I’m grateful. I don’t want to think about it until I have to go in for the testing next week, and for his part, I think he’s trying to back off so that I don’t have a meltdown. Not that I will, because as the days have passed, I’ve started to regain some of myself a little. I’ve only had a few slip-ups, though I don’t think that I will ever live down the day that I walked down the stairs with Ares, heard a pop, and dove behind him, holding him in front of me to take whatever it was that I thought was coming for me. Turns out that Nate was popping popcorn, so yeah, they had a pretty good laugh about that, and then Ares forced me into the gym and, like a drill instructor, forced me to “work out” with Nate.
I now know how to shatter someone’s throat with a punch, how to break a person’s collarbone, and, my personal favorite, how to hurt a guy so badly that if I use enough force, his balls will split.
“Please?” Ares whines, bringing me out of my easy doze and up off the lounger.
I can’t let him touch me; I just can’t. It’s hard enough looking at him, and with the way my hormones are rioting, I’m almost certain that I’d be on that dick so fast that his balls would explode.
“I said no! Now stop whining and go swim, you big man-baby,” I grouch, stomping into the house because if I don’t get away from him, I’m going to attack him.
Storming into the laundry room, for God alone knows what reason, because I am so not doing laundry if Ares is here to do it, I gasp and hiss when I feel a hand land on my shoulder to whip me around and press me against the washer.
“Let’s see if I can’t convince you.”
Ares
She’s driving me crazy. The sight of that baby bump is driving me crazy. Hell, my own thoughts are driving me crazy, and that’s exactly why, when she tries to brush me off, I storm after her and slam the door to the laundry room, my body desperate for something that I know I shouldn’t be doing.
I want her right now—I need her—and, by God, I will have her, I think, as I ignore her struggles, push her bikini bottoms down, and fall to my knees. My first taste of her, as I latch on to her sex, has my eyes rolling back in bliss, and by the time I feel Tee’s hands digging into my hair and pulling me close so that she can ride my face, I’m so hard that I feel like I’m going to explode.
We shouldn’t be doing this. Sex only complicates things, but dammit, I don’t care anymore. Things have been complicated ever since I laid hands on this woman, and from where I’m standing, there’s no way out of it now.
I want her, and I’m going to have her, and, what’s more, I’m going to fucking keep her, and I dare her to say otherwise. Sucking on her leaking slit, I reach up to thrum her clit as I free my dick from my shorts and stroke the pounding flesh.
Tee groans, her leg coming up to wrap around my shoulder as I suck and lick her so hard that I feel her clit go tight beneath my tongue seconds before she snaps forward and comes so hard that I feel her nectar gush out onto my chin.
Not wasting any time, now that she’s loose and sated, I rear to my feet, lift her onto the washer, and sink home, nearly coming when her tight, wet flesh snaps around my cock.
Holy fuuuck.
“Ahhhh.”
She practically screams the word and claws at my back when I push in deeply, going in until I feel the very depths of her sucking around me, pulling me in.
“Ares!”
The sound of my name falling from her lips is a shot of lust to my already possessive side, and I find myself moving before I can think, stroking into her deeply and gently, but so thoroughly that she throws her head back and presses her hips forward.
“That’s it, Tee. That’s my good darlin’. Take me in deep so I can fill you up,” I croon, my own voice rough and deep as I press her back onto the washer and use her hips to pull her closer.
She sighs, the sound enough to make me thicken even more, and coos when I caress a hand over her stomach, taking in the hard, swollen ball before I latch my hands over her breasts and strum her nipples. I was already past hard when she twitched her cheeky ass in here, and now I’m fighting my own orgasm as I work her over, loving the way she looks as her breasts jiggle beneath my hands, and her wet sex sucks at me.
Like this, we’re one, free, as together as it’s possible to get, and as I fight my own needs and push her closer to the edge, I vow that we’re going to have this forever, and so much more.
“Come, Tee,” I groan, leaving one breast to dip into her folds and rub at her clit, doing her hard and fast so that I feel her sex ripple, tense, and then squeeze around me, her orgasm leaving her in a scream as I give in and let my own release take me, my come shooting out so hard that I feel the hot splashes hit her walls and press back, the warm fluid seeping out and coating us both.
The climax lasts longer than it ever has before, and by the time I’m spent and feel my dick softening inside her still rippling depths, I understand something so elemental that I feel fear slice into me.
Nefertiti and I, we’re a thing. We’re together, and no matter what happens, or what she’s done, I don’t ever want that to change. I want her for more than just sex, although the sex is awesome, I think with a smirk, as I watch her blink and stretch, her eyes still dazed from my loving.
She’s mine. I think she always has been, and, as her man, it’s up t
o me to be more than just the voice of reason. Tee’s always going to be slightly bad, slightly wicked, and all kinds of defiant, but instead of curbing that inner fire the way that I’ve always thought I needed to, it’s up to me to make sure that it always blazes brightly, and that she’s always protected while she shines.
“What the hell are you looking at, bozo?” she asks, her voice a husky purr that makes me smile as I lean down and kiss her, because I need to.
“You, Angry Girl. Always you.”
********************************************************************
“Yes!”
I hiss the word between clenched teeth and almost explode when heat engulfs me and stars burst behind my eyelids. It feels so good that I groan out another hissed curse and throw my head back to absorb the pleasure.
“Christ, do you need a moment alone?” Grange barks, flipping my eyes open with his teasing while the rest of me basks in the feel of the hot water jets against my agonized muscles.
“Go away,” I mutter, sinking more deeply to allow the water to work through me and relieve the strain I feel, certain that if I don’t, things are just going to start giving in.
“No can do, buckaroo. I promised Tee that I’d ride your ass because, as she puts it, ‘I’ve got business to take care of, and he’s a clinger.’ Are you a clinger, Hart?” he taunts, his laughter ringing out when I flip him off and stay just where I am, neck-deep in the hot tub.
It’s my one luxury, and the only reason that I finished up at the gym tonight without going to Tee’s. We’ve been back in town for two days now, and one of those nights saw me sitting outside her apartment door because she refused to let me in.
