Charged (Saints of Denver #2)

by Jay Crownover

  I used my knee and the leverage I had on her to urge her to spread her legs farther apart so that I could get at all the secret and hidden places that beckoned to me. She complied with a little sigh and arched into my touch. She kept giving me everything I wanted without question, without asking for anything in return, and that kind of openness and generosity went to my head and to my dick faster than any practiced seduction ever had.

  She was warm and wet. She was slick and slippery as my fingers moved over her and through her. She whimpered every time the pads of my fingers grazed her excited clit and she moaned breathy little sounds every time my fingers pumped in and out of her drenched channel. Her eyes drifted closed as she clutched at me, as she lifted back up on the tips of her toes to get closer. She was chasing after the sensations I was creating and it was beautiful to watch.

  She ripped her mouth away from the endless plundering of mine, tossing her head back so hard that it hit the door behind her with a thud. I leaned forward so that my forehead was resting on the arm that was still bent over her head, and told myself I could do this. I could get tangled up, wound up in her wild, and go back to my own carefully constructed simulation of a life lived well with the best of everything including very little warmth.

  It was a lie.

  She felt like life. The way she moved on my thrusting fingers, the way her hands pulled at me, the way her body trickled pleasure and gushed satisfaction, uninhibited and unashamed.

  She was real.

  She was genuine.

  She was truth.

  She was all the things I hadn’t been in a very long time, and I couldn’t get enough of it. I wanted to wring all of it from her body, where I had it pinned and held captive by my own. She said my name on a strangled breath as I used my thumb to press down on her clit. The little nub pulsed under my touch and her entire body seemed like it was going to levitate off the ground.

  Her eyelids fluttered as she wrenched her eyes open and her tongue danced out to slick across her kiss-plumped lower lip. The wild was there in her eyes as she dared me to keep going, to push her over the edge. The sweet was there, in the way she moved forward to press her lips to the pulse that was hammering at the side of my throat.

  She was so close. I could feel her body softening, loosening up around my fingers. I circled her clit with hard strokes of my thumb and pushed off the door so I could put my other hand on the side of her face, holding her still while I kissed her and ate up every single part of her coming apart for me. It was the most decadent and delicious thing that had ever crossed my tongue. She tasted like she felt, turned on and ready to explode.

  After she broke and quaked in delicate spasms all across my hand, we panted softly into one another as she fell back down to her normal height. She looked up at me with a million different questions I had no answers to shining out of her eyes and let her hands fall from my shoulders to my waist.

  She stiffened when her fingertips landed on the hard metal of the gun I had forgotten I hooked there when I rushed out of my loft. I trailed my wet fingers over the curve of her belly and curled them around her ribs. The weapon added even more questions to her bewildered and startled gaze.

  “You have a gun.” The bottom of my leather jacket had kept the firearm covered up so her surprise at the deadly discovery was justifiable.

  I stepped away from her and reached for the flap on her overalls that I had loosened moments ago. I rubbed the pad of my thumb over the flushed arch of her cheek and shifted so that her hands were no longer near the weapon or near me.

  “I have a few. I got used to having one on hand when I was in the service. Your good buddy Google told you all about it, remember?”

  She huffed out a breath and crossed her arms over her chest. She was still propped up against the door and I took an inordinate amount of pleasure in thinking that she needed the stability that the door provided because I had done an excellent job of making her knees weak.

  “Google told me you were in the Army, not that you were going to show up at my house in the middle of the night, armed and riding a motorcycle. Google apparently doesn’t know any of the good shit. You’re full of surprises, aren’t you, Counselor?”

  I grunted and lifted my hands to push back my hair, which was hopelessly tangled, unkempt from sleep, being shoved in my helmet, and her demanding hands.

  “I learned how to load and fire a shotgun before I learned my ABCs. I learned how to hunt about two minutes after I took my first steps. When you said you might be in trouble, my instinct was to grab a weapon on my way out of the loft. The motorcycle spends most of the year in storage, but lately it’s been calling to me.” I lifted my eyebrows at her. “Something has been hounding me to remember what it’s like to let go and be uncivilized occasionally.”

  She snorted and finally pushed away from the door. My ego practically howled in satisfaction when I noticed she was indeed a little bit wobbly.

  “That rocket is as far from uncivilized as any one machine can get. And you are as far from uncivilized as any one man can get, so the idea of you as a toddler in diapers with a shotgun in your hand is pretty hard to imagine.” She touched her fingers to her mouth and put a hand flat on her chest. “Exactly who are you, Quaid Jackson?”

  I snorted. “Nobody. I’m nobody.” And that had been the problem I struggled with all along. That was why I set out to be somebody. Why I had left everything I knew behind and created something that looked so perfect, so desirable, from the outside. I never wanted to be nobody again, but with her I also didn’t want to be the slick and scheming lawyer, the guy that knew every move I made with her was leading nowhere. I forced myself to grin at her. “Who exactly are you, Avett Walker?”

  She laughed and threw her hands out at her sides. “I’m exactly who you think I am—Daddy’s girl, college dropout, broke and unemployed, a liar and a petty criminal. I’m the girl that can’t make the right choice, even when it’s the only choice, and I’m the girl that will fall for the wrong guy every single time. There is nothing surprising about who I am, Quaid, so don’t try and spin some kind of pretty tale about the woman you had your hands all over. I’m just me. There is no heart of gold or tender soul hidden here. What you see is what you get, and when you’re ready for my story, you’ll realize that who I am is someone that deserves every single mess I’ve managed to make along the way.”

  That was why I couldn’t stay away from her or keep her off of my mind. Her authenticity was addicting and so fucking invigorating after decades spent not only living in the lie that was my current life, but also the lie that was my previous life, and the major charade that was my marriage.

  I smirked at her and lifted my hand to my mouth—the hand that had played with her, touched her, stroked her, the hand that had coaxed a sharp and piercing orgasm out of her. I licked the side of my thumb and watched the way the action made her eyes bulge huge in her face.

  “I like what I see when it comes to you, Avett. I also like what I get and what you give.” She made a strangled noise low in her throat and lifted a hand to hold the slender column, like she could prevent the noise from escaping. “And I do want your story, if you want to give it to me. Tell me why you’re rushing after the wrong kinds of things, time and time again, when the right kinds of things would die for a shot at getting a taste of all that wild and sweet you have inside of you.” By things, I meant men, but she was smart enough to figure that out on her own.

  She moved away from me and reached up to put her hand over her mouth. Her eyes darted away from my propping gaze and it took her a few minutes before she spoke. When the words came, they lacked her typical fire and sass. They sounded strained and forced as she shifted her weight nervously from bare foot to bare foot.

  “I was always kind of stubborn and crazy. The more someone told me not to do something, the more I absolutely wanted to do it.” She started to pace in front of me as the ragged words escaped her. “When I was little, my folks called me a handful and other grown
-ups called me a brat. When I got into my teens, that morphed into me being a bad influence and a troublemaker. I didn’t have a lot of friends because I had a wild reputation that I definitely earned, so a lot of girls my age didn’t like me and a lot of parents didn’t want me to corrupt their kids. I was a party girl, the girl that was always down for a good time, whatever that entailed, and I never cared what anyone thought of me because it was always fun … until it wasn’t.” She shot me a look, but when I didn’t interrupt or offer any kind of comment, she kept going.

  “I did have one friend, this very sweet girl named Autumn, that moved here from Kansas her freshman year. She was quiet, kind of shy, and had a hard time fitting in. Denver was like a major metropolis to her and she was really a small-town girl at heart. I can’t remember how we ended up hanging out, but once we did, we clicked instantly and were inseparable all throughout most of high school.”

  It all sounded pretty typical to me. I mean, my childhood had been anything but basic, anything but normal, so I wasn’t an expert by any means, but what she was telling me sounded pretty much like every teenage girl’s trials and tribulations of growing up and growing into themselves. I didn’t want to stem the flow of words pouring out of her so I kept my mouth shut as she continued to give me her story.

  “I liked to party, and I liked boys. I liked to act older than I was, and had no problem taking the risks that went along with that. Because Autumn was a good friend, and because I was her only friend, she often found herself in situations and surrounded by people she was really uncomfortable with. She didn’t want to tell me no because she was afraid I was going to ditch her if she didn’t participate. I think she was afraid I would find a new best friend to spend time with if she wasn’t right by my side. I was selfish. I was thoughtless. I never once asked her if she was okay with what was going on when we went out and partied. I assumed that because she showed up, she understood the unspoken rules and regulations the way I did.”

  I cocked my head at her and considered her thoughtfully for a long moment. “Do you even understand the rules and regulations now, Avett?” It seemed like a fair question, considering how we had met.

  She gurgled out something that may have been a laugh but sounded more like she was choking. She shook her head from side to side and put her hands up on her pale cheeks. “Oh, I understand, but I never seemed to get that breaking the rules might affect someone else and leave me completely unscathed.” She made a fist and thumped it against her chest. “I’m the only one that should be hurt when I decide to do something risky and wrong, but it never works that way. Never.”

  I reached out and put my hands on her shoulders to still her frantic movements and locked my gaze on hers. “So your friend got hurt because she followed you into the lion’s den, unprotected, unprepared, and something bad happened to her?” I cocked a knowing eyebrow. “And you feel guilty about what happened, so you’ve been punishing yourself by making shitty choices ever since.”

  She gulped audibly and lifted her hands so that she could curl her fingers around my wrists. I wondered if she felt my pulse kick when she softly told me, “She didn’t get hurt. It wasn’t just bad—it was the worst thing that could happen to someone. She died. I killed her.”

  I had heard a lot of confessions and a lot of denials in my career, but none of them tugged at my heart and kicked me in the gut like this one did.

  “What are you talking about, Avett?” My words were sharper than they needed to be, but I wasn’t prepared for that kind of confession out of her.

  She squeezed her eyes shut and I watched as her lower lip started to tremble, making her words shaky and hard to follow, but I was good at tearstained admissions, so I had no trouble following along.

  “We were at a party, a party in a part of town we had no business being in. I went because some college guy asked me to go and because my mom grounded me for the weekend for failing a test. It was a total ‘screw you’ and what I thought was normal teenaged rebellion. It was definitely on par with my typical activities on the weekend, but it quickly turned into something else. That night turned into my story, a story I can barely get through because it should be Autumn’s story. I feel so guilty that I’m around to tell it and she’s not.”

  She opened her eyes and I could see the horror and tragedy of whatever happened that night clear as day reflected in the glassy sheen covering her turbulent gaze. There was a different storm raging inside of her, and this kind was destructive and hurtful.

  “I told her not to take a drink from anyone. I told her not to be alone with anyone, that we needed to stick together. I told her that these guys were older, that she needed to be careful, and keep her wits about her because no one even knew where we were. I thought that was enough. I thought I was taking care of her. It wasn’t enough. Not even close.” She barked out a sharp laugh and let her head fall forward like she was hanging from a broken marionette string. Unable to resist the urge, I pulled her into my chest and silently urged her to get the rest of the story out, to let that storm howl and rage until it passed.

  “She started smoking pot as soon as we got in the door. She was high, had too much to drink, and before I knew it she had disappeared somewhere in the house with a couple of the guys at the party. Her drink was drugged and when I finally found her, she was naked, passed out, and there was no doubt that she had been raped. I wanted to call the police and an ambulance. I needed help, but the guy that invited me to the party took my phone and told me there was no way I was going to narc on his friends. I was so mad and I was terrified for Autumn. She was out of it, but I knew when she woke up, she was going to be in a bad way. She wasn’t a party girl, she wasn’t like me.” Avett hiccupped on a strangled little sob and I felt her hands fist into the sides of my T-shirt as she started to shake. “I took a swing at the guy, never once thinking that he would swing back. He clobbered me. I remember being stunned at how badly it hurt, and I can still summon up how it tasted when my own blood was filling my mouth. I’d never been hit before, and even with the way I liked to go balls to the wall, I’d never felt unsafe until that moment. I couldn’t protect my friend, and I couldn’t protect myself.”

  I tightened my hold on her, imagining what kind of animal could possibly attack her when she was so small and vulnerable. It made me feel all kinds of defensive and territorial.

  “The guy told me to keep my mouth shut or I would end up just like Autumn and then he hit me again. At some point, Autumn started to come around and puked all over the room they had her in. She was disoriented, scared, and getting sick every few minutes. I thought she was going to die right then and there.”

  She took a shuddering breath and tilted her head back so she could look at me. “She begged me to get her out of there, to take her home. I tried to tell her that we needed to go to the police, that we had to have a doctor look her over, but she kept crying and telling me that after everything she had done for me, I had to do this for her. She wanted to go home, so against my better judgment I helped her up and out of the house, and took her home. The only reason the guy that took my phone let us go was because it was obvious how scared she was. He knew she wasn’t going to talk and he knew I had a pretty terrible reputation, so if I tried to cause trouble it would get shut down pretty easily.”

  Her next words were bit out and full of so much self-loathing and disgust that I had no problem figuring out why this young woman thought she deserved the worst the world had to offer her. “I did nothing. My best friend, my only real friend, was violated, drugged, taken advantage of at a party I made her go to, and I did nothing to make that right.”

  She pulled away from me and started pacing in a tight pattern again. “I bugged her for a few days to report the attack, but she kept shutting me down. I told her she needed to talk to someone, to tell her parents what happened at the very least. She pretended to listen, pretended like everything was okay, but she started to drift away. She wouldn’t take my calls. She wouldn’t look at me in t
he hallway. She wouldn’t sit next to me in the classes we shared. She acted like I didn’t exist anymore and what was even scarier is she acted like she didn’t exist anymore. She was so withdrawn and remote it was like she wasn’t even there. I knew we had no business being at that party and I had no business leaving her to fend for herself once we were there. I knew it wasn’t her scene. What happened to her was my fault because she wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t been there, if I hadn’t been so hell-bent on doing whatever the fuck I wanted to do, so I figured the best thing I could do was let her hate me. It was pretty easy to do, since I was busy hating myself. I was miserable and I figured she had to feel a million times worse because after a few weeks I heard a rumor that she was pregnant.”

  She put a hand to her chest and bent over at the waist like she was having trouble breathing. She shifted so that her hands were on her knees and she was looking at the floor between her feet.

  “I confronted her, asked her about the baby, and when she admitted that she was a couple months along, I told her that she had to tell her parents what had happened. I knew she couldn’t go through a pregnancy alone and she had completely shut me out. She told me she didn’t plan on keeping the baby, that no one was ever going to know what she had been through. She never once said it was my fault, but I knew. I knew, deep down, that it should’ve been me. I should’ve been the one going through what she was going through. I was the one that liked to party. I was the one that liked boys that were no good. I was the one that should be suffering and that should have no future, not her.” She sucked in a wheezing breath and righted herself.

  I could see the fact that Avett believed the punishment she had assigned herself for a crime she didn’t commit was justified, that she honestly believed her story started and ended with what happened to her friend and her inability to do anything about it the night it happened and the carnage afterwards. That was a heavy burden for any soul to bear and was definitely too much weight for a young and wild soul to stand up under.