Staying felt like intruding, so Noelle smiled. “I’m going to dance. I’ll be back later.”
Amira didn’t look up. “Bye.”
Nessa giggled and pulled Noelle out onto the floor. Rachel caught sight of them and tipped her head. “Over here.”
Ace swung his arms wide to pull the three of them into a laughing, hip-grinding tangle of limbs. “Who’s the luckiest bastard in Sector Four? I got all the hot O’Kane girls to myself.”
“Not all of them.” Rachel shifted closer, sliding one hand into his hair, and licked the corner of his mouth.
For the first time since Noelle had met him, Ace seemed at a loss for words. The easy rhythm of his hips faltered, and she was close enough to hear his groan, low and hungry, the realest sound she’d ever caught slipping past his lips.
Amazingly, with that one little touch, Rachel had damn near brought him to his knees.
Lex was definitely right. Noelle had to make her choice and make her move.
Soon.
Dallas
He’d been all of nine years old the day his mother had taught him the lesson that would define his life.
Life on the farm had been hard. The world his mother had known had been dead for a decade, but she’d never curled in on herself like so many of the weak and the terrified. Nineteen years old when the lights went out, she’d given birth to him six months later and had held on to her little scrap of Texas at the point of a shotgun, more than willing to kill to defend her son and the people who relied on her wits and strength.
She could be cold-blooded, his mother, but she didn’t believe in waste. Rage could give a body the strength to survive in a world gone mad, but not if it was unleashed without care. So the afternoon she’d caught him in a hair-pulling brawl with a boy half again his size, she hadn’t taken the other boy to task. No, she’d dragged Dallas to the nearest trough by the scruff of his neck, dunked him in the water until he sputtered, and hauled him to the barn to take out his fury on the woodpile.
Get angry, she’d told him, on that afternoon and a dozen times after it. Get angry, and then make something out of it. Don’t fight unless you have no choice, and even then you don’t waste time. You end it quick.
So he had. Every day of his adult life, it seemed, he’d gotten angry. And he’d turned that anger into a business, and then a gang, and then a whole fucking sector that he ruled over as absolutely as his mother had over her little ranch. She’d never held as many lives in her hands as he did, but her advice still fit. It worked.
Most of the time.
She’d never known him as an adult. She’d never known Lex, a woman who could make him so damn furious it was amazing he hadn’t taken over all the sectors by now. He’d watched her waltz out of the warehouse with two hulking cage fighters. Rubbing them in his face.
You don’t own me. She might as well have screamed it. And he couldn’t so much as blink a fucking eye, because he didn’t own her. Dallas fucking O’Kane couldn’t be seen wanting something he couldn’t have, because Dallas O’Kane could have anything he wanted.
“Make something out of it,” he grumbled, kicking open the door to the workshop. Salvaged lumber lined one wall in towering stacks, mismatched boards from demolished buildings. Someone had pounded out the nails and cut them into manageable pieces, all stacked, waiting to be burned with the O’Kane logo and turned into crates for packing bottles of moonshine.
On the other side of the room, Bren was already bent over the wide worktable. Dallas supposed he should have expected that, too. “Bren.”
“Sir.” He tucked a pencil behind one ear before looking up. “Ready to get to work?”
“You bet.” Dallas closed the door and strode to the table. “Might as well knock out enough crates for the next shipment, eh?”
Bren made a wordless noise of agreement and reached for the measured stack of boards. He fired up the band saw, its whir even louder than the jumble of thoughts racing around in Dallas’s brain.
Not that it kept the damn things from racing. Sometimes Bren’s silence was a blessing, but right now Dallas would take any distraction from the image of Lex dragging her new playthings out of the warehouse.
He couldn’t give her the satisfaction of knowing she’d gotten to him, or she’d do it all the damn time. And that thought had him driving the first nail into wood hard enough to split the board. “Fuck.”
Bren shut down the saw and tossed the last of the cut pieces of wood onto the table. “Question.”
Thank God. “Yeah?”
“If it bothers you, why let it go on?”
If Bren found the situation perplexing enough to bring it up, shit really had gotten out of control. If it had been anyone else, Dallas would have brushed it off, but Bren was closer to him than anyone but Jasper—and Jasper wouldn’t have had to ask the question. He already understood the answer on a gut level.
Bren needed to learn it. “If I start treating women like Wilson Trent does, what the fuck hope do they have with the rest of you?”
“No, I mean—” Bren barked out a laugh, more self-deprecation than humor. “I guess there really aren’t many ways to handle it.”
“For you, there might be. For me...” Dallas shrugged and reached for a new board. “It’s not always good to be king.”
“I see.” Bren busied himself with fitting four cut pieces together to form the bottom of a crate.
Sometimes it was hard to tell if the man was biting his tongue or had moved on. “If you’ve got something to say...”
Bren smiled faintly. “Is that my position? Court jester? I get to safely say whatever the hell I want because someone has to speak truth to the king?”
“Trusted lieutenant,” Dallas corrected softly. “You and Jas both. He won’t let me get too hard, and you can’t let me get too stupid.”
The man braced both fists on the table and stared down at its cluttered surface. “Never known you to be scared of anything, that’s all.”
He could sidestep the words easily by claiming he wasn’t scared of Lex, and it was true. Lex herself didn’t frighten him. The thought of how quickly she could come to hate him, though... “Not scared. Cautious.”
“Caution is smart. Admirable.”
“Could you sound a little less convinced?”
“Probably not, though I could try.”
Dallas sighed and drove a nail into the side of the crate. “You’re a lousy jester. All of the truth, none of the jokes.”
Bren shrugged. “I have no sense of humor—isn’t that what everyone says?”
Everyone except Jas, who never failed to comment on Bren’s twisted idea of what was funny. Dallas had always thought it was a lot simpler. “You haven’t had much to laugh about of late.”
“No one has, right?” Bren reached out and plucked the hammer from Dallas’s hand. “I tried to collar Lex once. Did she ever tell you?”
Dallas’s fist clenched around empty air, and Bren was too clever by half. Not that Dallas would have swung a hammer at one of his own men—probably—but the impulse alone was enough to give him pause. “No, she never mentioned it.”
“I’m not surprised.”
Dallas fought to keep his voice even. “So. You tried.”
“I was still new,” Bren explained with a shrug. “I didn’t know yet.”
A leading sort of statement. Its own trap, the kind meant to make him ask, Know what? As if the answer wasn’t hanging in the air—everyone thought Lex was as good as his, and Dallas didn’t bother to correct them. Neither did she, God bless her.
Most of the time, anyway.
With the thought of Lex’s two suitors threatening to rear its head again, Dallas forced the conversation in a new direction. “How’s the girl doing? Six? She getting her head around trusting us yet?”
“Nah.” Bren held out the hammer. “It’s a little soon for that, I think. She’s still half convinced we’re going for the long con. Maximum mental anguish.”
Dallas ra
ised an eyebrow. “Is that what Trent did to her?”
“Yeah. Maybe the worst thing he did.”
It was sophisticated for someone like Trent, a vicious game that required patience and an ability to lie that Dallas had assumed was beyond the bastard. Or maybe it had never been a lie for him—maybe he’d just been that fucking childish. A kid who cherished his favorite toy until he got bored, then shattered it so no one else could play with it.
There was probably a lesson in there, an intensely personal one that Dallas didn’t want to ponder too closely. “She must trust you, at least a little.”
“Getting there.” Bren flipped the crate over and laid strips of wood across the bottom.
Dallas abandoned the pretense of building and moved to the far wall, where Bren had already stoked the fire they kept banked in the massive hearth. Maddox had spent a year perfecting an electric heating element for the O’Kane branding irons, but Dallas preferred the old-fashioned way. The electricity they leached from Eden’s power grid was far more reliable now than it had been in earlier years, but there were still failures and blackouts. Work had to go on, even when the lights were out.
He selected the two largest irons and set them into the flames. “Let me know when you think it’s safe to loosen the girl’s leash. I’m not ready to give her free run of the place, but she doesn’t need to stay locked up all the time.”
Bren hammered the last nail into place. “I’ll let you know when I think you can turn her over to Lex.”
He couldn’t hold back his snort. “I don’t think Lex is looking for another playmate. She’s pretty well enamored of Noelle.”
Bren pulled up short and eyed Dallas with a shake of his head, then returned to the task at hand with an unintelligible mutter. This time, Dallas didn’t feel like poking for an answer he didn’t want to hear. He knew what it would be.
Turn her over to Lex.
Like Lex was his damned queen. Like she wasn’t off screwing a couple of street brawlers just to remind him that he could own her allegiance, but he could never own her body. The harder he closed his hands around her, the more she’d slip away...and the thought of losing her for good made him want to wrap her in chains.
Maybe he should. He could use the excuse of Trent to slap that collar around her throat and show her how good it would be.
If she’d take it. If it would be enough.
No, no use pretending, even to himself. It would never be enough. Not a collar, not a mark. He wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than all of her—mind, body and soul—and Lex would never give up that much control. They’d destroy each other. He’d destroy her, and that was the one thing he couldn’t bear. Better to take what he could get and leave them both whole.
Mostly.
Chapter Sixteen
In Noelle’s imagination, her seduction of Jasper had started differently.
For one thing, in her imagination she’d had time to prepare. To take a bath, to pick the perfect outfit. The perfect underwear. The perfect jewelry, all wonderfully illicit, turning her on before she even reached his door.
Her fantasy hadn’t included a sick waitress, a club full of rowdy drunks, and Dallas deciding they would damn well stay open until the idiots stopped throwing around fistfuls of money. By the time the bouncer rolled the last one out the door, Noelle was frazzled, a little disheveled, and caught in some jittery place between exhausted and so hyped up she could barely sit still.
She almost decided to forgo the entire thing in favor of a quiet hour unwinding in Lex’s tub and a night of sleep. But as she found herself in the long hallway that led to Jasper’s rooms, then at his door, the truth was stark and undeniable.
He was how she wanted to unwind, even if it meant nothing more than the chance to kiss him before she went to bed without him. So when his door swung open in response to her knock she did exactly that, ignoring all of her careful plans in favor of rising up on her toes to seal her lips to his.
He lifted her in his arms, his mouth still on hers as the door slammed shut behind her. His tongue traced her lips, then eased between them, a lazy exploration he didn’t end until her back hit the wall. “Long night?”
“Endless.” Amazing how promptly her aching feet recovered once they were hovering three inches above the ground. She wrapped a leg around his and smiled. “Dallas wouldn’t close the doors until he’d emptied everyone’s pockets. But the drunker they got, the better they tipped.”
“That’s a good thing, right?”
Noelle dug in her pocket and pulled out the thick wad of tightly rolled bills. She’d counted each one before adding it to the stack, stunned by how quickly they added up, and how freeing it was to realize they were hers. “As long as you promise to take me to the market soon. I promised Dallas I’d wait for you.”
“He’s coming down like that on everyone, not just you.” Jasper stuffed her money back in her pocket and started for the bathroom. “We’re all on restriction, for obvious reasons.”
“I know. Lex is in a mood about it.” Which was the politest way to describe her temper. Everyone had tiptoed around her today—except for Dallas. He’d acted like nothing was wrong, and that had only pissed Lex off worse.
Jasper set Noelle down and cut on the shower. “Dallas has his asshole moments, but this isn’t about some sexist bullshit. I think there’s something else going on with them.”
Noelle couldn’t argue with that, but she didn’t want to discuss it, either. Lex’s pain was too real—too raw—to make gossiping about it anything other than cruel. “Are we taking a shower?” she asked instead, watching as he fiddled with the knobs. Sex against the tiles would be delicious, she imagined, hard and slippery and quick, no time for the slow torment Jasper loved so much.
He made a noncommittal noise and stripped his shirt over his head before turning his attention to the hooks on her corset. Each gave way with a soft click, her breasts spilling free as he unhooked the final fastening and let the structured leather slide to the floor.
God, she loved the way he looked at her. He traced the very tips of his fingers across her shoulders and down the slopes of her breasts, stopping just shy of her nipples. “Want me in there with you?”
“Yes.” She arched her back, pressing up into his touch as she reached for his belt. “You’re all I want tonight. Just...you. Wherever, however.”
“However?” His hands dropped to her ass, and he dragged her closer.
The movement left her hands pinned between their bodies, her fingers crushed against the solid heat of his abdomen. His skin was so close to her mouth that she couldn’t stop herself from kissing him, parting her lips against his shoulder before stealing a taste.
She had to be honest. She had to say yes, before he even asked the question. “Maybe fucking, if you want.”
“Mm-hmm.” He released her and backed away. “Clothes, Noelle. Take them off.”
She started with her cutoff shorts, dragging the zipper open before wiggling the denim off her hips with enough gyrating to make Lex proud, though with a fraction of the other woman’s grace.
At least Jasper didn’t laugh at her.
She had to bend down to unfasten her shoes, presenting Jasper with an unobstructed view of her ass covered only by her favorite ruffled panties. That part of the fantasy matched her imagination, and she peeked up at him as she worked at the second buckle. “Should I take yours off next?”
He shook his head and unbuckled his belt. “Get under the water.”
His voice held an implacable edge. It was an order, for all the easiness of the words, and she slipped out of her underwear and obeyed.
He stood at the open shower door and watched her as he took off his pants. “I like the way the water drips off of you. The way your skin looks when it’s wet.”
Noelle shivered under his gaze, though the water was so hot steam drifted up around her. “I like the way you watch me. It makes me wetter.”
The shower stall seemed roomy—unti
l Jasper stepped into it. He loomed over her, pressing her against the tile. “How wet?”
Words froze in her throat because it was hard to breathe with him stealing all the air from the tiny space. She wanted him so much that she started to reach for him, then hesitated and lifted her arms above her head instead. “You could touch me and find out.”
His erect cock nudged her hip as he closed the scant space between them and rested one arm against the tile. He slid his other hand down, over the crest of one breast and farther. To her upper thighs. “Open.”
She inched her legs apart without looking away from him. “That word makes me wetter, too. It used to be such an innocent word, but now...”
Jasper arched an eyebrow but didn’t move his hand. “Now that you know all the delicious ways you can be opened?”
“No,” she whispered, spreading her legs wider. “Now that I know all the ways I can open for you.”
“You don’t know them all.” His fingers slipped over her folds, parting them, wet from the water and her arousal. “Not yet. But you will.”
This was heaven and hell in one. The slow glide of his fingers working against her, sparking pleasure from the touch and kindling a deeper anticipation. Her nipples tightened into aching points, and she dropped one hand to soothe that need, stroking herself with a sigh. “I’ll do anything with you.”
He moved fast, jerking her hand back over her head. “Leave them there.”
Her pulse pounded in her ears, and she stretched her arms up until her hands brushed the shower fixture. She curled her fingers around it as her rasping breaths echoed in the shower stall.
She couldn’t move, but she could speak. It was good practice for the next time Dallas decided to hold her release hostage to her willingness to say obscene things. “My nipples ache. I want you to touch them.”
Jasper ran his hand down her body again, avoiding the tips of her breasts. “I’ll get around to it.”
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