Asa (Marked Men #6) (11 page)

“You’re torturing me, Asa.” Her voice was husky and impatient.

I laughed against her smooth skin because I was playing with her. I was taking my time with her, which is something I never did when it came to sex. Normally it was about instant gratification and scratching a persistent itch. With her, it was about watching her, gauging her reaction, getting her to respond in all the best ways possible. I think the part of me I tried so hard to keep leashed was loose when I got naked with her, and subconsciously, I was trying to ruin her for whoever it was that might come after me.

Without warning, I let my fingers sink inside of her heat and used my thumb to stroke her clit. It had her entire body lifting off the bed; she gasped my name and her other leg automatically lifted to my other shoulder as she arched hard into my touch. She twisted the fabric in her hands, writhing out of control as I stroked in and out of her, my gaze locked on the flurry of emotions racing across her face. A pink flush had worked up into her cheeks and she couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore. She was biting on her bottom lip as she ground her hips into my fingers, and I was sure that I had never felt more powerful, more purposeful, in my life. It was like my only reason for being was to bring this spectacular woman pleasure, and that was perfectly fine with me.

I felt her thighs start to quake where they were caging my head. I saw her toned tummy tighten and I knew that I could make her come with just my hands, but that wasn’t returning the favor I owed her.

I pressed the pad of my thumb hard on her clit after circling around and around for a long time. “Royal, look at me.”

It took a minute and I had to say her name again, but eventually her brown eyes locked on me. She was drunk on desire and so close to the edge I could see her barely hanging on. I wanted to push her over and then be right there at the bottom to catch her.

I tilted my head to indicate her fisted hands. “Put those on your tits.”

She blinked at me like I wasn’t speaking English, then slowly moved to do what I told her. Pale hands on pale breasts had my dick trying to escape from my jeans all on its own. There was moisture down there that hadn’t come from rubbing against her, and that never happened to me.

“I’m going to eat you up, and while I do it I want you to play with your nipples.” Her eyes popped wide in her flushed face and a cloud of uncertainty drifted over her gaze, so I pressed against her clit again until she jerked under my touch. “I want you to rub them, squeeze them, and I want you to hold on to them until it almost hurts. I want you to do it until it feels like the pleasure is too much, that it’s going to break you in half … only then can you stop. Do you get me?” I lifted an eyebrow at her and finally let go of her trapped clit. She moaned a little and nodded, just once, to let me know she understood. I grinned at her and I knew it wasn’t nice. It was the grin I used when I went in for the kill. “Good, because if you stop, if you let go, then I stop, too.”

She swore at me and purposely dug the edge of her heel harder into my shoulder. It made me grin at her even more. Her fight was as much of a turn-on as the rest of her.

She didn’t take her eyes off mine as she spread her fingers apart and trapped the turgid flesh between them. The rosy tips peeked out between her fingers and I watched as she squeezed, just like I told her to. That made all the want inside of me ratchet up a hundred degrees. Nothing better than a pretty girl that could get a little dirty when the situation called for it.

I used my thumbs to spread her open and then licked her from top to bottom. It made both of us groan. She was all kinds of liquid goodness that burst in brightness across my tongue. She was better than the most expensive scotch I had ever had, and just as potent. I swirled the tip of my tongue around her clit, went in closer so I could tug the tender flesh between my teeth all while keeping an eye on her to make sure she was still fondling her breasts. Her grip had tightened the more I worked her over and I could see that she was shaking and panting. She stilled one time, just the barest pause in her motion, and I immediately lifted my head and pulled my fingers out of her. She screamed a profanity at me, and I think if I hadn’t had her splayed wide open, she would’ve tried to kick me in the face. I just watched her until she pinched the obviously sensitive peaks, making her gasp and twist in my hands.

I rewarded her by humming in approval against her little center of desire and watched as it forced her higher and higher into the ether of passion. Her hips were all the way off the bed now and I had to slide a hand underneath her backside to keep her level with my mouth. I licked and nibbled. I stroked in and out. I petted her and did exactly what I told her I was going to do—I ate her up like she was my last meal. Her legs quivered alongside my head, her hands moved frantically over her own flesh, and she watched me like she was hypnotized by what we were doing.

I could see the instant it all became too much for her to handle. I saw her mouth drop open in a silent scream. I watched as her hands lost their grip on her firm flesh falling uselessly to her sides as she suddenly crested and broke into a million pieces of pleasure on my tongue. Her inner walls pulled at my fingers as she vibrated and shattered against me. Her legs clamped around my ears in a desperate bid to hold on to the sensation, and all I could think as she whispered my name over and over again was that she was the sweetest victory I had ever tasted. This was one debt I would never, ever complain about paying off.

I smoothed my hands along the outsides of her legs and gently set them back down on the edge of the bed and rose back to my feet. She was breathing shallow but her eyes were open and locked on me, slightly dazed but full of contentment and residual passion. I worked my belt open and motioned to the nightstand.

“My turn.” She reached out an arm and I heard things clattering around in the drawer until she returned with a foil packet.

She pushed herself up so that she was sitting right in front of me and eye level with the instant erection that was now popping out of the open fly of my jeans. She worked the fabric down over my ass and then fisted my cock and rubbed her hand up and down. It made me grunt and thrust into her grip unconsciously. I liked that she wasn’t afraid to be a little handsy and rough. She let go and rolled the latex down the shaft with quick and efficient motions. Then she leaned forward and kissed me right above the light dusting of blond hair that led to my groin.

“I love taking turns.” She rubbed her cheek against my hip, which had her silky hair twining around my dick. It was an unbelievable sensation. I threaded my fingers through her hair and bent down so I could kiss her again. We tasted like sex and always.

When I pulled back she was smiling up at me and tugging me down as she scooted back just enough to give me room to fall into her. Now those spiked heels were digging into my lower back and her breasts were flat against my chest as I buried myself as deeply inside of her as I could go. I kissed her one more time and started to move. She was already slick and supple, so I didn’t bother to take it easy on her. I pounded into her, I rode her hard, and between the way she responded and the bite of her shoes into my back, it didn’t take long until I was ready to release all the coiled-up pleasure inside of me into her. I hitched one of her legs up higher on my side, buried my face in the side of her neck, and drove into her welcoming heat over and over again. Her hands were in my hair and her breath was uneven in my ear. As soon as I felt the tiniest flutter race along the sides of my dick, I was done. I felt my fingers bite into her hips hard enough to bruise and muttered incoherently as she followed me into utter bliss a second later. In a true dickhead move I hadn’t even worried about getting her there again, because once I was inside her, all I could do was chase down all the amazing things she made me feel. She made me sex stupid just by being her.

I lay limply on top of her for a long minute knowing I should get up and take care of the condom, but she felt so good and her hands were stroking up and down my spine in such a soothing way that all I wanted to do was lean into her touch. I rubbed my cheek on her shoulder and asked her, “You wanna spend some time with me when we aren’t naked and in bed, Red?”

She shifted under my weight a little and her hands stilled on my shoulders. I knew she liked fucking me. I needed to know if she wanted any part of me outside of the bedroom.

“Like on a date?” She asked the question quietly and it made my back teeth click together.

“It can be whatever you want it to be.” I went to roll off of her but she moved her arms up around my shoulders and kept me pinned to her.

“Yeah, Asa, I wanna spend time with you. I don’t care if it’s in bed or out.” She laughed a little and wiggled under me, which had the part of me still nestled inside of her twitching. “Though I am a pretty big fan of what happens when we spend time in bed together.”

I snorted and pushed off of her so I could clean up. I shoved my hands through my hair and looked down at her. All those pretty promises I wanted to make to her were screaming at me, trying to force their way out of my mouth.

“I don’t know why you’re here, but I feel like I need to thank any God that might exist that you are.”

She blinked at me once and then again and I saw her blush. She moved so that she was on the bed the right way and stared at me with wide eyes.

“I’m here because you finally let me be here.” Her hair fanned out behind her on the pillows and I wished I could paint so I could capture her beauty for future ages to appreciate. “And I’ll stay as long as you let me.”

If only that was the case. She would stay until something happened or I did something that forced her to have to go. I needed a minute to get my thoughts back in order after the way she had just owned me, so I didn’t respond to her and disappeared into the bathroom to take care of business. If only figuring out what I was going to do about this girl and all the ways she made me feel was as easy as cleaning up after the best sex I had ever had.

When Asa’s phone went off the next morning, it felt like it was the crack of dawn instead of nine. Granted we had kept each other tangled up and very occupied until the sun was just starting to come up, so there hadn’t been a whole lot of sleeping going on. He groaned and reached over me to silence the noise with a flick of his finger. His amber eyes were sleepy and the dust of golden scruff on his face made him look even more rakish than usual.

I stretched out lazily under him and lifted my arms up over my head, which had his whiskey-tinted eyes turning from lethargic to hot and glowing in seconds. I was going to ask him why he had to get up so early since I thought most bartenders slept until noon, but my drowsy movements under him were clearly causing other thoughts to enter his mind. I was totally on board with the plan until I was right on the edge of an orgasm that I just knew was going to turn me inside out when he suddenly froze, went absolutely still, and stared down at me with wide, heated eyes.

I had my hand wrapped around his biceps and I felt the muscles lock rigidly into place. He was breathing hard and barked at me not to move when I went to lift up to get him back in the groove of things. I scowled up at him and dug my fingernails into his tense arms as he gritted out between his teeth, “If you move it’s all gonna be over and I don’t have a condom on.” His eyebrows furrowed even farther over his nose. “I’ve never had sex without protection before. No wonder condoms get a bad rap. I’m about to lose my fucking mind.”

His teeth were clenched and his nostrils flared as he torturously started to pull back from my body. I was too close, and even with his stilted movements it still felt too good, and so even though I forced myself not to move an outer muscle, my inner muscles were having none of it and dragged and pulled all along his length, which meant we were both left with a sticky passionate mess to contend with when it was all said and done. I thought it was funny; he didn’t seem nearly as amused as he dragged me into the shower to clean both of us off.

I tried to tell him it was no big deal, but I realized he wasn’t upset about the situation, he was mad at himself for getting so carried away that he forgot something as basic as protection. He was used to being the one running the games and I don’t think he liked it that I got to him just as effectively as he got to me. I had never been on birth control in my life. My sexual partners were too few and far between, and even with the guy I dated long term I had never been into the sex enough to really warrant it. There was no getting caught up in the moment with him. For Asa I would totally do it, but not without a guarantee that it was just the two of us from this point on, and I didn’t think he was ready for that conversation just yet.

“Why are we up so early?” He was scrubbing my hair and obviously a thousand miles away in his own head.

“I need to talk to Rome about work stuff. We’re having an issue with Brite’s daughter.”

I sighed as his fingers massaged my scalp. “Rome really looks up to Brite. That’s got to be tough.”

He moved behind me and I sucked in a breath as our slick skins rubbed together. He sounded frustrated when he replied, “Yeah. I don’t get why she’s such a brat. I mean, I was a nightmare, but I didn’t have two parents that obviously cared about me or anyone trying to give me a helping hand up from the bottom. She has this loser boyfriend that is obviously strung out and I’m positive he’s used his hands on her more than once. She has lifelines trying to pull her out of shitty situations and she just keeps turning a blind eye to them.”

His big hands worked around the front of me as the soap cascaded out of my hair and down my shoulders. He wasn’t so much cleaning my chest as he was playing with my boobs and making me pant.

“Do you think you would’ve taken the hand if one was offered to you when you were younger?”

One of his hands flattened on my stomach and I felt his lips land softly on the back of my neck. He reached past me to turn off the water.

“No. I was destined to be a screw-up from the start.” He shoved his hands through his wet hair, stepped out of the shower stall, and found a towel that he handed over to me. “My dad was in jail before I was born, my mom had a ninth-grade education and no desire to live beyond the trailer park. I was always the poor kid, the white-trash kid, and instead of being ashamed of it, I used people’s pity, their sympathy, to get what I wanted.”

I watched him carefully as he wrapped a towel around his waist and leaned back against the tiny vanity. He watched me just as closely as I rubbed the excess water out of my long hair. He crossed his arms over his broad chest and went on.

“When I started school and I realized all the other kids brought lunch or had meal plans and I didn’t, at first it made me sad.” He shook his head and his mouth pulled tight. “Then it made me mad that all those kids had something I didn’t, that I had a mom that couldn’t get her act together enough to feed me. I found a girl in my class. She was quiet, didn’t really have any friends because she was shy and kind of weird, and I spent all my time convincing her we were the best of friends.” His eyes flashed from gold to bronze and I could literally see him falling into the decades-old memory. It obviously didn’t sit right with him now if the way his shoulders tightened was an indication. “She was a sweet kid, a little slow, but she had a huge heart and came from a lot of money. She brought me lunch every single day until fifth grade.”

I wrapped the towel turban style around my head and went to move past him. But his fingers locked onto my wrist and he pulled me to a stop in front of him. He wanted me to hear this, he was always trying to pull the curtain back and show me the darkness that swirled inside of him. It didn’t seem to matter to him that I already knew he was made up of black marks and misdeeds and I just didn’t care about them.

“In fifth grade I started to understand that the other girls in class besides her thought I was cute, that if I gave more than one girl attention I could get more than just lunch. I told one she was the prettiest girl in class so she would do my homework, told another I would be her boyfriend so she would buy me clothes, let another sneak kisses so that she would take me out to eat at restaurants, not even fancy ones because there aren’t any in Woodward, Kentucky. Then was another girl, she was awful. Stuck up, mean and horrible to anyone that crossed her path but because her family had a pool and she would invite me over to swim I decided to start walking her home from school. I loathed her but I did it every day because she had something I wanted. I did all of that after coldly and callously ditching the first girl that had been so nice to me and so sweet to me for
years
. I just unceremoniously ditched her and didn’t care when other kids teased her or made fun of her even after she made sure I never went hungry. I wasn’t even a teenager yet and I was already that kind of guy.”

I shook his hold off and went into the living area so I could put on the clothes I had stuffed in my purse. I wiggled into a pair of skinny jeans and pulled on a cute, off-the-shoulder sweater over a tank top. I took the towel off and shook out my tangled hair as I dug around for my brush. Asa came out of the bathroom scowling at me, so I lifted an eyebrow in his direction and worked on making my hair manageable.

“What?” I made sure to keep my voice light because I could see he was just waiting for me to unleash a torrent of disgust and judgment at him and was unsure what to do with my indifference.

“That’s all you have to say about what I just told you?” He dropped the towel in jerky moves and walked naked to his closet. He really was perfect. Every long, lean line of his back, every flex and dimpled indent in his backside, the broad expanse of his toned shoulders … there was nothing about him that had any hint of imperfection. It was an interesting juxtaposition that such a beautifully crafted shell held so much ugliness and self-loathing on the inside.

“What do you want me to say? That you suck? That you were a total jerk and deserved what you eventually got? Do you want me to tell you that was a totally douche move not just to the first girl that gotten taken in by you, but even to the mean one because you were just using her, too? You know all of that, Asa. You might not have known it then, or not cared, but now you do, so me telling you what you already know is pointless.” Once my hair was mostly tangle-free, I pulled it into a loose ponytail at the base of my neck and dug around in my purse for my makeup kit. “Someone should have been around to take care of that little boy so he didn’t have to resort to that behavior in the first place.”

He pulled a faded black T-shirt on over his head and plopped down heavily on the bed so he could pull on his boots.

“No one made me do those things, no one taught me. I figured it out on my own, and by the time I was a teenager, I had learned every dirty trick there was in the book.”

I sighed at him and slicked a coat of lip gloss across my mouth. I crossed my arms across my chest and met his predatory look with one of my own. “Do you want to confess every single sin you’ve ever committed to me? Do you think it will scare me away or absolve you of past misdeeds? Because I have to tell you, neither of those things is going to happen.” I furrowed my brow at him and made my voice hard so he would know I was serious and told him pointedly, “I’m never going to dislike you as much as you dislike yourself, Asa.”

He got to his feet and moved toward me. He really did look like a big, wild cat stalking its prey as he prowled closer and closer. He stopped when we were almost touching but I refused to look or flinch away from him.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about, Red.”

I reached out a hand and put it right over the place in his chest where his heart was thundering. He was upset, but like usual I knew it was directed more inwardly than it was at me.

“Yes, I do, because I’ve been having a really hard time liking myself ever since Dom got hurt. I know how it feels and exactly what it looks like. Why do you think I was chasing after you so hard? I needed someone that wouldn’t tell me it was just an accident, that it wasn’t my fault. I needed someone that it was okay to feel bad with, and so do you. We aren’t always going to do the right things, make the right choices, and somehow you’re the only one I feel safe with coming to terms with that. You don’t judge me, you don’t try and make it better. You just let me feel bad while making me feel really good … I want to do that for you, too.”

His unusual-colored eyes flashed from gold to bronze as the truth and depth of my words sank in. He muttered something under his breath I couldn’t hear and then he tilted his head to the side a little and told me, “I’m the opposite of safe. I fucked you without a condom on this morning because you make me stupid with want. That isn’t exactly looking out for your best interests.”

I fisted his shirt in my hand and tugged him down so that we were almost eye to eye. I appreciated that he felt like he had to keep warning me about all the ways in which this volatile thing between us could go wrong, but at some point he was just going to have to man up, get on board with what was happening, and stop waiting for it to implode all around us.

“There were two of us in that bed this morning. I’m just as responsible as you are for what happens there. I can protect myself and am more than willing to do so if you’re willing to be honest with me and tell me if this thing between us is important enough, interesting enough, to give a shot. If the answer is no, then that’s fine, but I won’t be back and we’ll just chalk it up to raging hormones and lust.”

He curled his fingers around my wrist and let his fingers rest over my erratic pulse. I wondered if anything with him was ever going to be simple.

“I’m not taking anyone else to bed as long as you’re in it, Royal.”

That was as much of an agreement to stop being a naysayer where we were concerned as I was going to get. I would take it. I pressed up on my toes and kissed him lightly on the mouth.

“Good. Now, how about you let me drive you to the Bar so you can meet with Rome and then we go grab something to eat at the Breakfast King after? I’m starving.” It seemed like such a simple, couply thing to do and I needed that. I craved it with him.

He ran his hand over the length of my still-damp ponytail and lightly tapped me on the ass. “Sounds good.”

Why couldn’t everything between us be that cut-and-dried?

George Thorogood was on the jukebox when Asa and I walked into the Bar. It was early enough that the doors weren’t open for customers yet but Cora was sitting at the bar talking to a guy standing behind it that I didn’t recognize. Asa deposited me next to her and introduced the new bartender as Danny before disappearing off toward the back office. I told Cora good morning and then spent five minutes staring at her trying to figure out why I thought she looked different from the last time I saw her.

Her blond hair was still short and styled in an artful disarray and her two-toned eyes were still bright and glittery with mischief. She was swinging her short legs back and forth watching me scope her out with obvious amusement. She had on tight black pants and a flowy top that had a bunch of flowers on it. She was colorful and fun just like every time I saw her, but as she turned to fully face me, I felt my eyes widen when I noticed a certain part of her that seemingly had grown out of proportion to the rest of her tiny frame.

“Did you get a boob job?” I realized how rude that sounded and went to apologize when she started laughing so hard her eyes began to water.

“No, I didn’t, but I think half the reason Rome likes to knock me up is because of this particular side effect.”

I gaped at her for a second. “You’re pregnant? Wow, congratulations.” I let my gaze slide up and down her still-petite figure. Aside from the craziness happening in her bra, she still looked like a little pixie. “I had no idea.”

She nodded. “We’ve been keeping it pretty quiet. I wanted Shaw and her new baby to get all the same love and attention we got when Remy came into the world, but we’re going for the ultrasound today to see if we’re bringing RJ home a brother or sister, so it won’t stay secret much longer.”