Better When He's Brave

by Jay Crownover

  “Well, turns out Jordan’s mom was at the shop a lot and it wasn’t because she had car problems. She was there because she was sleeping with Gus. I told her if she didn’t let me come to the Hill with her, if she didn’t give me a shot to get out of high school and into college so I could make something of myself, I would tell her husband everything. Gus being Gus agreed to help me if she didn’t bend.”

  “What did he do?” I barely breathed the words, fascinated by this other side of him.

  “There was a video. Gus wasn’t the shy type. She moved me into her mansion, got me into a fancy Hill private school, and let me stay there until I graduated. I blackmailed my way into a future, and I left my little brother behind to fend for himself while I did it. I wish I could tell you I did it all so I could go back and help Bax and my mom, so that I could take care of them, but I did it because I wanted to be more than a broke kid from the inner city. It wasn’t about the money; it was about the way people looked at me. With a uniform I got respect, and it didn’t matter if I was on the Hill or in the gutter of the Point. I mattered. It was in my first year on patrol that I realized I could actually make a difference. I could stop kids like Bax from getting sucked into the criminal underground. I could help young girls have something more than a corner to work on. I could make a difference and matter in a way that actually counted for something while being a better man and placing myself as far away from the legacy of Elias King as possible. I wanted the innocent, the people that still had a chance to make the right kind of choices, to have a shot. My reasons for being a cop didn’t start out anywhere near as altruistic and noble as most people think, and I have to live with that. That’s why I work so hard, why everyone out there in my city—good or bad—matters to me. Everyone has choices to make, Reeve, and they aren’t always going to be the right ones. Sometimes they’re the necessary ones. Just because you do bad things doesn’t automatically make you a bad person. There is a gray area there that I have a tendency to ignore because I don’t want to be reminded that I spent plenty of time there myself. That isn’t fair to you.”

  The car finally skidded to a stop in a shower of gravel and dust. The headlights illuminated the drop-off in front of us. The moon was high in the sky, forcing its way through smog and clouds to shine silver. It was the same color as Titus’s eyes when he was turned on, when he was buried deep inside of me.

  “I haven’t had my parents in my life for a long time, so I shouldn’t feel like I lost them. But I do.”

  “I felt that way when I locked Bax up. I knew he wouldn’t understand that I had to do my job, and when he got out, the first time I saw him he punched me in the face. He hated me.” He turned off the car and reached out a finger to twist a piece of my long hair around it.

  “Don’t let Roark win. Once everything is settled, go back to them and make them understand.”

  I turned to look at him. He was fierce in the shadowy light. He was what heroes were supposed to look like no matter the path he had taken to become one.

  “I don’t even know if I understand. At the time it felt like my only choice. Now I’m not so sure.” I leaned across the space separating us and brushed my knuckles across his still-bristly cheek. He was almost in full beard mode and it looked so good on him. “Lately the only thing I understand is you, Titus.”

  He lifted one of his dark eyebrows at me and asked, “What is it that you understand about me, Reeve?”

  “That you make everything better. You make me better, and I might never be good enough for you, but you make me feel like I can get close.”

  One of his hands slid down to my wrist and the next thing I knew he was guiding me over the console and the emergency brake so that I was straddled across him with my back to the steering wheel. I hadn’t been in a car like this with a boy since I was a teenager. I kind of liked it. More than kind of.

  “You make everything better too, Reeve, and there is no good enough because this with you is the best there has ever been.” And then his mouth was on mine and I didn’t get a chance to tell him we had left this behind and were now firmly venturing into more. Knowing that Titus was flawed, that he had made some questionable choices on his road to becoming the man he was today, made me love him even more. Where he was from was even uglier than where I was from, and that was beautiful to me. So was the way he was pulling on my clothes and kissing me along my throat.

  I pulled back a little and met those glowing metallic eyes. “I tame your beast all the time, Titus. I think after that scene with my parents you need to try and soothe mine. She can use some petting and some coddling.” I wanted to do to him what he did to me but in a different way. I wanted to manhandle him with softness, rough him up with tenderness, love him up until he was breathless and boneless under light touches and barely-there kisses. I wanted to kill him with kindness. We both had had so little of it in our lives we could get drunk on it and forget about the rest of the world for just a little bit.

  His eyebrows shot up to his hairline and he lifted both of his hands off of my skin.

  “Give her to me.”

  Once I did, he was going to have to keep her. My beast made of gentleness and compassion was made to fit perfectly against his beast made of hardness and fight.

  Chapter 14

  Titus

  I COULD COUNT THE number of people I had willingly talked about my father with on one hand, and I shared blood with two of them. I never talked about my parents, about where I had come from or how I had ended up where I was now. I didn’t like to think about it. Those memories made me feel like a fraud, like a fake, like a phony. It didn’t matter how dedicated to the law I was, how focused on helping others, or how much of myself I devoted to trying to make a difference in this godforsaken place. Underneath it all I was no different from Bax or Race. Hell, I was actually just as cold and just as manipulative as Nassir when it came right down to it. I hurt others to get what I wanted, and I did it without remorse, because the truth of the matter was I would do the exact same thing over again if that was the only way out I had.

  Reeve talked about the beast inside of me and she was right. The basic parts of who I was still had huge chunks of that angry kid with a killer for a dad and a drunk for a mom making me the man I was today. There was still a little boy that was hungry because there was never any food and scared because he had a little brother he was never going to be able to take care of properly. And while I tried to hide it, tried to keep it all locked away, the more time I spent on the streets, the more time I spent with this woman who understood the darkness and despair, the closer to the surface those angry memories climbed.

  She was sitting on top of me, one of her hands hard and insistent in my hair as she pulled me closer to her mouth. The other was yanking on the already loose knot of my tie and violently tugging at the buttons on my shirt. I never knew impatience could be such a turn-on.

  I didn’t touch her. This was her show. Her turn to take what she needed to take, and I would gladly give it over. Even though the front seat of the GTO didn’t offer enough room to do the kinds of things I would really like to do with her. She had thus far shown no fear, no stopping point, no edge of hesitation when we came together. That just made me want to push her more and more. It was an addictive element to sex I had never experienced with anyone else. Granted no one I had ever been to bed with matched me the way she did. No one took everything I had to give and then asked for more. I think she was the only human being that had ever seen the real me. He wasn’t very attractive in all his greedy, insatiable, and grasping glory, but she never once looked away.

  Just like she wasn’t looking away now as each of her hands grabbed one side of my shirt and pulled. Little plastic buttons pinged off every interior wall of the car and bounced off the glass. She wrestled the fabric out of the top of my pants and ran her hands over my stomach where my abs contracted as she switched and used the edge of her nails to lightly scratch the skin.

  “I love how strong you are.”
Her fingers climbed upward and tripped lightly over my chest and across my collarbone. I sucked in a breath as she used her index finger to scrape over the flat of my nipple, and wondered if this is what it felt like when I went after her. “You seem unbreakable.”

  I sat as still as stone as she switched her attentions to the other side. I could feel my blood getting thick and starting to pool below where she was sitting across my lap. The interior of the car felt like it was a million degrees and all I could see was the endless dark of her oddly colored eyes. She leaned forward and her hair slid like dark satin across the skin she had exposed.

  “Everyone has a breaking point.”

  I sounded gruff and really had to concentrate on getting the words out because she leaned forward and her lips hit right below my ear on my rough jaw. Her teeth started to nibble and her tongue lapped a long wet trail all the way up behind my ear where she breathed, “I would love to see you when you reach yours.”

  She curled a hand around the back of my neck and rubbed her cheek against mine. When I let my monster have at her, it took in giant mouthfuls, gobbled her up, and tried to burn as fast and as hot as the pleasure would allow. She wasn’t kidding when she said hers needed to be soothed. Every move she made was deliberate, erotic. We touched everywhere and somehow it was more intimate than all the times I had been inside of her over the last month. She brushed her chest against my own and I decided the playing field needed to level out a little, so I hooked my hands under her shirt and lifted it up off over her head. Her hair fell back down around us like a dark curtain and I grabbed her face so I could kiss her. She blinked at me with big eyes and smiled.

  “You are the only one that sees it, over and over again. You were the breaking point from the moment you walked in the door to tell me you helped Novak grab Dovie. I wanted to be disgusted, to hate you, but I didn’t. I thought you were beautiful and resilient. You seemed so misguided and lost, and even then I wanted to get you naked and fuck you on my desk.”

  Her face lowered to mine and our lips touched just a tiny bit. One of her hands skated down the center of my chest and landed on my belt buckle. I reciprocated by popping the clasp on the back of her bra and pulling it out of my way.

  “You should’ve tried. I would’ve let you.” The words danced across my lips and somewhere in the center of my chest an animal howled in delight. That was what was missing in my life. Someone that appreciated all the sacrifice, the hard choices I had made to become the man I was, but who could also appreciate the fucked-up kid I had been.

  I was still letting her set the pace, so as she sat there and breathed me in while she worked on my belt buckle I simply ran my hands up and down her ribs, across her back, and under the lush curves of her breasts. I wanted to roll each puckered tip between my fingers. I wanted to shove my tongue between her teeth. I wanted to grind my throbbing cock up into the heated center seated on top of it. I wanted anything I could get, but she was moving, touching, playing like we had all the time in the world, and it was torture.

  She got my belt open and had me lift up a little so that she could get my zipper down. In the confined space every movement felt amplified, felt erotic and overly sensitized. She put her hand in the opening she created and wrapped her hand around the shaft. She slid her grip up and down until I was ready to buck her off of me. I panted against her still lips where they rested against my own as we watched each other like predators deciding who the ultimate winner of the standoff was going to be. She glided her palm over the head of my cock and took the moisture that was pooling there with her as she continued to work me over.

  I felt my face heat up. I felt my breathing get labored and heavy. My eyelids drooped down a fraction and I squeezed my hands so hard around the curve of her waist that I wouldn’t have been surprised if I left marks behind.

  “Thought I was supposed to be calming your beast, Reeve. This feels like the opposite of that.” I was about to come in her hand and she was still mostly dressed and unkissed. “You’re supposed to be taking what you need.”

  She laughed a little against my mouth and finally gave me a soft little peck. “I am. I like you this way. You’re never soft, never gentle, but for me you are. That soothes something inside of me. I like being the one that can make you come to heel. The leash is always pulling, always tugging, but right now it’s not.” There was power in those words. By soothing her inner wild, my own had quieted down. The need to mark and mar was nowhere under her featherlight caress. It was different with her. It always was.

  “I’m gonna be really soft in like two minutes and then you’re gonna be shit out of luck if you want to use that for anything.”

  I pointed purposefully to the hard-on she was still working up and down. It looked angry and massive in her tiny fist. Her gaze drifted downward too and her dark eyes got wide. It was an incredibly sexy sight watching her watch what she was doing to me. I saw the tip of her tongue dart out to touch the center of her bottom lip and watched as her pulse fluttered as I jerked in her hand.

  Suddenly she grabbed hold of the tie that was still around my neck and pulled me to her for the kind of kiss I wanted. Teeth knocking, tongues tangling, breath mingling, air being stolen. Her naked breast rubbed wantonly against my chest and I took it as my cue to go ahead and start trying to help her get naked. There was no room and she had stupid long legs, so it probably looked like a ridiculous game of twister. It didn’t feel that way. Everywhere our skin touched was electric. Everywhere her mouth landed and sucked or licked, scorched. Everywhere my hands touched felt precious and irreplaceable.

  I got her pants out of the way and decided I wasn’t going to waste time with the underwear. They were just little scraps of lace anyway, so I pushed them to the side and pulled her down over the top of me. She didn’t have anywhere else to go with the steering wheel at her back, so she slid down on my cock and we both groaned as she stretched around me and let me all the way inside. There was none of the frantic tug and pull that we usually had when we had sex. This was different. This was more.

  She kept one hand fisted in my tie and the other one wrapped around my shoulder. I hand a hand under her ass helping her as she rode me up and down and the other I curled possessively around her breast. Every time I used my thumb to circle her nipple I felt it when she involuntarily clenched around me. I let her kiss me. Soft and sweet while we climbed higher and higher. The scrape of fabric combined with the smooth glide of her soft skin as she rose and fell was enough to have me cross-eyed and incoherent. Nothing in my life had ever felt so certain, so absolutely mine.

  When she whispered my name I whispered hers in return and let my head fall back on the leather seat of my car. The windows fogged up and it almost made me laugh at how cliché it was, how cliché she and I were. The cop and the sexy criminal with a heart of gold. It was laughable really, but that didn’t stop me from prying her clenched fingers off my tie and dragging them between us so that she could touch herself . . . and me.

  She moaned at the contact when her fingers found her needy little clit. I moaned when the back of them rubbed enticingly along every single ridge and rise in my dick as we moved together. Between her seductive buildup earlier and the double stimulation, neither one of us was bound to last much longer. All my muscles were vibrating and I could feel hers getting loose and warm around me. Her body quivered from the inside out, and when I moved her back just a fraction so I could get my teeth on her nipple, that was the end of it. I pushed her over the edge and she took me with her.

  We came on a sigh, eyes locked and hearts beating in time to each other. It was easier sex than we typically had, which was odd considering how much more was inside of it.

  She blew out a long breath and then moved the hand that was around my neck so that she could rub her fingers along my scruffy face. She was just staring at me and I was just staring at her in the quiet and in the dark. I don’t think I had ever known such a soft and peaceful moment with another human being. It was made even mor
e profound by the fact that we were still as closely connected as two people could be.

  She gave me a little half grin and went to move off my lap. The drag and pull of tender flesh against flesh as she moved had both of us freezing. No wonder everything felt better, felt like more, felt like forever. There was nothing between her and me literally or figuratively. I sighed and leaned forward so that my forehead hit her in the center of her chest.

  Her hands came up to brush through the hair at my temples. She stopped on the side with the white spot and traced it.

  “You know when I left WITSEC I didn’t take anything with me, right? That includes birth control.”

  I nodded. “I know.” We had been having enough sex lately that it hadn’t escaped my notice that latex was a necessary evil when we did it.

  “Ummm, okay. We can hit up a pharmacy or something. This isn’t a reason to freak out.” She sounded so calm, so okay with anything and everything I did to her that it hit me square in the gut and maybe in the heart, though I wasn’t ready to admit that yet. I ran my hands up and down her ribs some more and pulled back so I could look her in the eyes. They were swirling blue and black like midnight.

  “This just turned to more and we’ll deal with it accordingly. If you want to stop somewhere back in the city, we will, but if you don’t, I’m okay with that too.”

  She looked surprised and tentative at the same time. “Titus?”

  I sounded like a lunatic. We were so not right for each other and here I was trying to tie her to me forever.

  I pulled her to me in a hug and gave her one of those soft kisses she apparently liked. I lifted an eyebrow at her and lifted her up so I could set her back in her own seat so she could wiggle back into her clothes.

  “I already told you I will do what needs to be done. Always.”

  She still seemed a little lost, so she shook her head and started pulling her pants back up her legs.