Hard Justice (The Alpha Antihero Series Book 2)

by Sybil Bartel

  The mosquitoes hitting my flesh before the heat of the humidity, I picked up the ax she had brought to the cabin as part of her supplies, and I wielded it.

  “So that’s it?” The cabin door banged open behind me. “I don’t get to ask for you to kiss me or anythin’ else I want and you get to storm off like a spoiled brat?”

  I swung the ax.

  Metal met pine.

  Splinters flew.

  Raising her voice, she spat anger at me. “I’m talkin’ to you.”

  Yanking the ax from the wood, saying nothing, I swung again.

  “Fine! Don’t talk to me. Do your stupid, stupid silent, dumbass treatment. I don’t need you anyway. I never did!”

  I swung the ax into the wood, let go of the handle and spun. “What is wrong with the way I take you?” I roared.

  “Take me?” Her voice pitching high, she looked at me as if I were the insane one. “We’re back to that load of crap again? Take me, make me, break me.” Rattling off the words in quick succession, she threw her hands up. “I give up. You ain’t never gonna talk normal or be normal, so forget it. All you do is run in the woods, swing that ax and grow your muscles when you’re not fuckin’ me. And, yes, I said fuckin’, because that’s what you do.” Her eyes welled. “But forget it. Forget I said a damn thing.” She stormed back into the cabin.

  Chest heaving, anger hotter than the air, I stood there.

  My cock was covered with the cream of her cunt, and my jeans were sticking to my sex. I wanted to release inside her tightness as much as I wanted to pin her down and withhold satisfaction from her.

  Unaccustomed to females talking back, despising the pressure in my chest every time she was upset, I pressed for a solution that did not entail holding her down and fucking her, but I thought of none.

  Because the more I contemplated restraining her, the more my cock throbbed for release.

  I did not want to kiss her.

  I did not want to hear her sing.

  I did not want her breasts provocatively swaying in my face like she was asking for more attention than I was giving her.

  I wanted to fuck her hard.

  She was mine.

  I had earned rights to her.

  I could do as I pleased.

  Breath short, fists clenched, I strode to the cabin, took the one step up and threw the door open.

  With her back to me as she tended the hot plate, she jumped, but she did not turn around. “Close the damn door. All this in and out is doin’ nothin’ but givin’ those damn mosquitoes a free-for-all.”

  I did not move.

  “I said, shut the door.” She turned. Cooking utensil in hand, eyes wet from tears, anger contorted her face. “You want us to die from West Nile vi—”

  I slammed the door shut. “Turn off the burner.”

  “Take your attitude somewhere else. I’m makin’ breakfast.” She turned her back on me.

  Grabbing her wrist with one hand, I reached around her with the other and turned the camp stove off for the second time. “Do you want my hands on you?” Jaw tight, I ground the question out.

  She did not answer.

  I raised my voice. “Do you?”

  “Screw you.”

  “Do. You. Want. My. Hands. On. You?”

  “Yes!”

  I gripped the back of her neck, spun her and pushed her down to the table. Holding her there with one hand on her nape, the other still gripping her wrist, I leaned over her back. “Do you want to be kissed?” I kicked her legs apart. “Or do you want to be fucked?” Because she was not getting both. Not now.

  Breathing hard, her mouth open, she did not speak.

  I shoved her tight shirt up and slapped her bare ass. “Answer me!”

  Jerking from shock, she dropped the cooking utensil and gripped the edge of the table with her free hand. “So this is the real you? This is the real Tarquin Scott? You like to get all rough on a woman?” Words meant to inflame flew from her mouth. “Is that want you did at that sick compound of yours?”

  “Answer my question,” I growled, my anger ratcheting.

  She defied me. “No.”

  I slapped her ass again. “ANSWER.”

  “Figure it out!”

  Releasing her wrist, I stood to my full height and yanked my jeans down. Chest heaving, expecting her to fight, wondering if she would kick me, I waited.

  But she did not get up.

  She did not make a move to leave.

  She gripped the other side of the table.

  Taking her action as consent, I kicked her legs wider and stroked myself. Then my gaze caught an open container on the shelf.

  Still holding her down, I reached over and dug two fingers through the cooking lard.

  I brought them to her anus. “Last chance,” I warned.

  Her mouth gasped, her voice hitched, but her cunt dripped. “Screw you, Tarquin Scott.”

  I shoved a finger into her ass.

  “Ahhh.” Her body jerked, and she strained against my hold on her neck. “What the hell are you doin’?”

  I worked the grease in then shoved a second finger inside. “Give me an answer.”

  “Wait!” Her hands fisted, and she pounded them on the table. “Wait.”

  She had defied me, so I defied her. “No.” I stroked deep into her ass and repeated my question. “Fucked or kissed? Make a decision or tell me to stop,” I demanded.

  Her breath hitched, and she let out a half moan, half growl, but she did not tell me to stop. “I asked…,” she panted. “What. Are you doin’?”

  The grease warm, my fingers eased in and out even though she clenched at my invasion. “Fucking you or kissing you. Decide,” I ordered.

  Saying nothing, she made little more than a sound that was half grunt, half groan.

  “NOW.”

  “Kissin’,” she ground out. “Kissing.”

  I dropped to one knee and latched onto her clit as I drove my greased fingers deep.

  Slamming her cunt into my face, her back arched, and she came off the table. The cry of a desperate animal ripped from her lungs, and she fucked my face.

  I fucked her ass with my fingers.

  The hole of her cunt started to pulse around nothing.

  I pushed her back down to the table.

  She shoved her needy cunt against my tongue.

  I probed her twice then abruptly stood and withdrew my fingers. “I am taking your ass.”

  On the verge of coming, she begged. “Oh God, oh God, please.” On tiptoe, her ass in the air, she gripped the table for leverage and pushed against my thighs.

  I shoved the head of my cock into her.

  Her cry filled the cabin, my eyes rolled back in my head, then my cock had a mind of its own.

  No control, I thrust into her anus to the hilt.

  “Oh shit!” she cried through a groan. “I’m comin’.”

  Tight.

  Hot.

  Greased.

  Fuck.

  Pounding into her, my hips pumped three times, and I was releasing.

  Coming.

  Roaring.

  No control.

  Filling her forbidden entrance.

  Sullying her.

  Ruining her.

  Breaking.

  I jerked out and shoved into her cunt.

  “AHHHH, Tarquin!”

  The last of my seed pumped into her pulsing cunt, but I didn’t stop.

  Hands gripping her waist, hips thrusting, cock raw, I fucked her.

  And fucked her.

  And fucked her.

  Her anus leaked the act of my defilement.

  Her thighs banged against the table with my every thrust.

  Her cunt started to constrict again.

  My head spinning, my mind shamed, our bodies dripping sweat—I drove forward.

  Faster, deeper.

  With the sound of sex permeating every corner of the cabin, my balls drew tight.

  Jerking out and spinning her, I l
ifted her to the table and shoved her legs up. Her back hit the hard surface, she spread her thighs wide, and I drove back into her.

  Then I fucked her harder.

  Unmerciful, uncontrolled, my strength slapping against her softness, I fucked her hard.

  Her body reacted.

  Nipples peaked, mouth open, groans coming out of her unlike any I had ever heard from a female, her cunt gripped tight with the first spasm of her release.

  I slammed my mouth over hers.

  My cock fucking her cunt with skill, I came deep inside her pussy as my mouth took hers with no finesse.

  His mouth crushed mine with the force of a hurricane, and he came inside me.

  He came inside me everywhere.

  I could feel it.

  Sliding out of my body from every…. Oh Jesus.

  Holding on to him for dear life, I shivered.

  Sweet Lord of mercy.

  His tongue, the devil between his legs—God forgive me, I was a dirty, dirty woman, but praise Jesus and all that was holy, because that felt amazing.

  I shivered again, and he yanked out of me like I was on fire.

  Holding himself over me, his forehead hit my shoulder and his chest rose and fell like he’d just run clear from Mama’s house.

  “I don’t know what you did to me,” I admitted, “but I done broke.” Maybe permanently. How was I supposed to come back from that? Now his cock going where the sun don’t shine was all I was gonna be thinking about. That and regular sex. Because Tarquin Scott had turned me into a hussy.

  Shoving off me without making eye contact, he reached for his jeans. “I did not break you.” His tone rough, he turned his back on me.

  Pushing up, I frowned. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complainin’.”

  “You were,” he accused, reaching for a T-shirt.

  I looked between my legs. He was coming out of me from every dang hole. “That’s because you wouldn’t kiss me.” Shit, sex was messy. “Hand me a washcloth.” So much for not sullying the dining table. “How many times did you come anyways?”

  Spinning on me, he got in my face. Then he threw the last words I was expecting at me. “I do not like to kiss.”

  Just like that, it was all back. Every word of our fight earlier, my hurt feelings and a whole mess of others I didn’t understand. Like a damn faucet with a leak problem, my eyes welled. “What’s that supposed to mean?” He didn’t like me?

  “I am not repeating myself.” Giving me his back again, he snatched a washcloth from the shelf he’d made with his bare hands and tossed it at me.

  Hurt mixed with indignation, and my attitude took a front seat. “I didn’t ask you to repeat yourself. I asked what in the heck you meant. Maybe you should try explainin’ yourself for once.” All the residual good feelings from sex gone, I wiped myself and fought stupid tears. “Because you sure suck at that.”

  “I do not like kissing!” he roared.

  Half naked, vulnerable and hurt, I jerked at his outburst, but then I yelled right back. “Well, I don’t like you yellin’ at me!”

  Face furious, he stared.

  Tears spilling, I looked away. “Fine, whatever, I don’t like kissin’ you anyway. Go kiss someone else then, you stupid jerk.” I shoved off the table and cursed the small cabin. Nowhere to go, I yanked my top down and gave him my bare-ass backside. Tears sliding down my face in earnest, I picked up the spatula and shoved cold hash around the pan.

  “Stupid jerk?” he asked, low and controlled.

  Fighting to keep my voice even, I forced words out. “If the shoe fits.”

  “Turn,” he demanded.

  “No.” I couldn’t help it, a sob escaped. Then, because I wasn’t humiliated enough, his baby-making soldiers dripped out of my behind. “Go away.”

  “Turn around.”

  “Leave.” I drove the spatula across the pan like a woman possessed.

  Sex, musk, bar soap, I smelled him as his body heat surrounded my back, but he didn’t touch me. For three whole heartbeats, I felt him there.

  Then his voice, quiet and low, touched my ear. “Are you with child?”

  I burst into tears.

  In a move that was as unexpected as the turn my life took two months ago, he put his arms around me.

  But Tarquin Scott did not comfort.

  He screwed like his life depended on it. He ate without comment. He could fasten, make, whittle, fix or mend anything. He didn’t speak unless what he had to say was important. And he never cuddled. Ever. He only held me at night, because if he didn’t, one of us would fall off the wooden bed frame he’d made the first week we’d been out here. He would lock his arm around me, lay his head back, then tell me to go to sleep.

  And that was it.

  For a few minutes every night, after he’d made love to me, or screwed me, depending on his mood, his arm would stay locked tight around me.

  It was my favorite part of every day, and I cherished it.

  I cherished it more than the weekly visits Daddy would make to our house right after he moved me and Mama in.

  I’d waited all week to see Daddy. He was my ounce of sanity in the days when Mama was coming off the drugs and wasn’t good for nothing except crying and soiling her sheets and begging me to call Daddy so she could get high.

  Daddy would come once a week during those awful months, and his smile was always accompanied with reassurances that Mama was fine, that we’d be fine, that everything would settle in, and Lord have mercy, I waited for that man to show up more than I waited for the sun to rise.

  I’d never needed anybody as much as I needed Daddy back in those days.

  I never even liked to need anybody.

  I was Stone Hawkins’s daughter, and even as a young girl, I knew what that meant. I had to be tough and strong and hold my own and never let ’em see me sweat. Weakness was a two-headed snake, and I was having none of that.

  But I let weakness in when I was eight and I waited for Daddy every dang week just so I could get a hug.

  And that’s what every night out in the cabin in the middle of the Glades felt like.

  I was waiting for my hug.

  From a man who was a thousand times harder to read than my own daddy. A man who’d said he’d marry me. But also told me he didn’t want to kiss me. And who was now holding me tight, with his arms locked around me like he cared about the very feelings he was in part to blame for putting there.

  God help me, I didn’t know if I could do this.

  Which only made me cry harder.

  But Tarquin Scott didn’t say one word about my tears.

  No shushing, no soothing, not even a word of scolding, he just stood behind me after asking if I was carrying his child like that was something you asked a woman every dang day of her life.

  “You can’t just ask me that,” I cried, sniffling like a baby. “You don’t pick a fight and say you don’t wanna kiss a woman one moment, then the very next moment hug her and ask if she’s knocked up.”

  “I am not hugging you. I am behind you. I asked the question before I put my arms around you and more than one moment had passed.”

  “Sweet Jesus, give me patience.” I pushed his arms away, and he let me. Turing to face him, I swiped at my face. “A hug’s a hug, no matter how you give it. And that last part is semantics.” A mess of crying tears, I was still proud of myself for using that last word that’d been one of my vocabulary words from the online high school courses I’d taken. “The point is, you don’t have no right to comfort me when I’m cryin’ after the mean things you said to me.”

  His expression carefully blank, his arms at his sides, it was his eyes that gave him away. One twitched, and I knew he was fighting for patience with me same as I was struggling to have it for him. And Lord have mercy, of all things, if that didn’t make me go soft on him.

  “Don’t look at me like that.” I pointed at him. “I’m not lettin’ you off the hook.”

  “I am not giving you a look.”


  “No, you’re not.”

  Ever so slightly, his jaw ticked as his throat moved with a swallow.

  “See!” I pointed again. “That, right there. I saw it. Pretend to be calm all you want, I know what you’re thinkin’, and trust me, the feelin’ is mutual.”

  “You have no idea what I am thinking.”

  His damn formal way of speech. “You know, you can use a dang contraction every once in a while. It wouldn’t kill you.”

  “I do not know what a contraction is, and I do not care.”

  “You know darn well what one is, Mr. I Don’t Combine Words. If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times, but you choose not to listen. What’s the point of sayin’ you’ll never go back to River Ranch if you ain’t left it in the first place?”

  “Do not throw veiled insults at me.”

  “Ha! There was nothing veiled about that.”

  Color flushed his cheeks. “Are you or are you not with child?” In an unprecedented show of emotion, his hand gestured behind him at the shelf he’d fastened that held all our supplies. “You have not asked me for your monthlies.”

  “I….” Wait. “What?” Asked him? “What in the hell did you expect me to ask you?” If I could use one of my own damn tampons?

  His eyebrows drew together. “You know exactly what I am referring to.”

  I crossed my arms, not sure I wanted to know where this conversation was going, because I could feel it coming. And that feeling was nothing good. In fact, it had fucked-up written all over it, and I’d bet my last can of fruit cocktail it had the markings of that sick cult he came from. “No, I most assuredly do not.”

  His penetrating gaze took me in and sized me up like he was looking for a lie. Then he spoke. “You have not asked me to put your monthlies in for you.”

  “Put… my….” No. “You mean…?” No. He couldn’t. Absolutely not.

  He said nothing.

  “Oh dear God in heaven,” I whispered.

  He remained silent.

  I had to know. I didn’t want to, but this… this level of seven ways from Sunday messed up, I couldn’t let it go unchecked. Swallowing down disgust and a jealousy I wanted no part of, I asked. “Did the men on the compound…. Did you…?” I cleared my throat and rushed through the words. “Did y’all put tampons in women when they had their periods?”