The Token (#10): Shepard (20 page)

Rose

Wind.

Noise.

Smells.

The temperature drops as we move through a swale in the winding country road. The heat of his body seeps into mine, providing warmth. My hands tighten around his narrow waist. The smell of WD-40, mint, smoke, and bike wafts from his leather coat. It's
his
smell.

I don't even know his name.

He could be a murderer.

But my heart says no.

We're way east of Kent, almost to Ravensdale, by the time the bike slows, and we're rolling to a stop in front of a little cabin. The pipes rumble, their heat warming my left leg.

I glance at my sports watch.

I'm late
—because I'm on the back of a bike with a man I don't know, in a place I've never been.

I slip off the seat. I'm so cold, my teeth chatter. I was smart enough to put my hair back in a semblance of a bun, but my fingers were shaking so badly that I did a crappy job.

He gets off and turns around as the kickstand sinks into the sparse gravel that blankets the dirt road.

The sun has fallen low and burns red across the trees, coating them like spilt blood. Fingers of the seeping light trail over his skin, coating it in tangerine edged by scarlet.

I think he'll come for me, peppering me with more questions. Instead, he leans back against the seat of the bike and crosses his feet at the ankles.

He digs inside a little pouch attached to the front of the bike between the handlebars and jerks out a pack of cigarettes, forearm muscles rippling with the movement. He flicks one out the top and clamps his lips around it.

A lighter appears, and the flame is a spot of gold in the dying light surrounding us.

“I don't even know your name,” I say quietly, trying to look everywhere but at him.

Impossible.

Like a magnet, his gaze seizes me again. All of me. To all of him.

“Noose,” he replies, blowing smoke rings at the sky. The twilight closes around the pale ring of smoke, darkening it to nothing as the breeze carries it away.

Noose.
That's not a name, but an object.

My disquiet returns. “I guess you know my name.” My voice sounds disgruntled. I cross my arms, which are still warm from the heat of his body, but chilled by the ride.

His chin kicks up. “I know everything about you.”

I retreat a step.

His eyes narrow at my tense body as he takes another drag of his cigarette. “Not gonna hurt you. Thought we figured that part out.”

I blow out the oxygen I've been storing up in a shaky exhale. “I want to believe you.” I do.
So
much. “I have to text my parents. They have—”

“Charles?” His eyebrow quirks.

My breath stills again. “You scare me,” I admit, cupping my elbows.

He straightens from the seat, flicking the cigarette. He moves toward me like a big prowling cat.

“I scare a lot of people, but I—” Noose comes to stand in front of me. His finger trails down my neck. Each time he finds a mark on my throat, the movement stalls. The rough caress of his skin hesitates at each spot Drake's fingers choked me. “I'm not someone you need to be scared of, Rose.”

The
way
  he says my nam
e…
I close my eyes at his touch and the deep rumble of his voice.

Remember Charlie.
I step away, and Noose just watches, his hand falling away from me.

I take my cell from my hoodie pocket and quickly text Dad to say that I ran into a friend. My eyes move to Noose's face. Bathed in low red light, he’s sinister.

Swallowing hard, I tap out the message, asking if they can keep Charlie a little longer.

Their answer rises to the top of my cell screen like trapped smoke under glass.

Yes.

Noose is observant. “Your parents cool to watch the kid longer?”

“Yes.”

He holds out his hand, and after a heartbeat's hesitation, I take it.

Noose moves toward the front door of what looks like a little homesteader's cabin. He turns at the last second, and the last piece of daylight catches his eyes just perfectly.

They're gray, a shade so translucent they're opaque ice.

*

“What is this?” I ask as he stokes wood in a fireplace bordered by huge mottled river stones of beige and charcoal, with veins of black.

“Us or the place?” Noose asks, his broad back facing me as he expertly prepares the wood to burn.

Both.
Instead, I answer, “This place.” That's easier.

“Belongs to the club. Place to crash. Thought we had more shit to discuss.”

He's a tough man. I knew that when we stared across the bank counter at each other the day before yesterday.

Noose stands from the fireplace, and I take him in, from the bright-white T-shirt to the tips of his black thick-tread boots.

He's covered in ink, some of it colorful, some of it pure black against his light skin. His beard is long, square, and well-manicured. It’s slightly red, I think, but the glowing light of the fire and a kerosene lantern lick strange shadows across the battered floor, making everything muted and uncertain. His hair is spun dark gold in this light, but I remember in daylight, it was light brown.

All my checking him out ends at his hands, his thighs, and the breadth of his chest. He's such a large guy, so strong that everything else is just icing on top of the man cake.

He knows it, but he's not cocky, just sure of himself.

I've seen muscular guys before, as well as tall guys and handsome men. Noose is all this but somehow more. There's a vibrating energy to him, a substance. I don't know what it is, but that wonderful intensity responds to mine like a harmony to melody.

I want to run my hands along every ink mark on his body. I've never followed a crazy impulse in my life. But here I am.

Noose smolders under my silent observation.

My insides cook as he stares back at me. “I want to talk.” I lick my lips.

A slow smile turns his face from hard to handsome before I take my next breath.

“But you want to fuck me more,” he says like a statement, no intro or thought as to why we're here. I’m struck by the coincidence of him showing up when Drake was going rape me, though he doesn't know that.

He offers no explanation as to why some biker I met two days ago knows everything about me—and about Charlie.

I shake my head when what I really want to do is launch myself at him like a monkey and sink myself on top of him.

I shut my eyes against the vision I have of us together.

When I open them, Noose is standing in front of me.

I startle. I didn’t hear him move. When I open my mouth to ask the questions that really matter, he takes my lips with his own.

I expect him to ravage me, but it's a brush of lips. His fingers bite into the flesh of my shoulders, cupping them forward as if he'll fold me into him, and I’ll disappear.

*

Noose

My dick's gone somewhere from stiff to fucking agony. If my wood had claws, it would be digging its way out of my jeans. Trying to ease my suffering, I shift while Rose stares at me. No dice.

Her eyes are deep moving pools of brown as they travel over my body. Rose's eyes are like a physical touch everywhere they move.

I don't feel like smoking, talking, or other bullshit. I want to be inside her.

That's the only thing I want.

But I let her look.

Finally, her gaze hits my eyes. “I want to talk.”

Nope.
Conversation sounds like a shit idea at the moment. I have to touch her, have a taste. Anything. Then we can talk.

I take a chance. “But you want to fuck me more.”

A fine blush spreads across her face, and she shakes her head.

Bullshit.
Rose feels this—whatever the fuck it is—just as much as I do. She's resisting it, though.

Rose closes her eyes as if she can't stand looking at me anymore. I stalk to her and grab her shoulders, gentleness gone before it began.

Her eyes pop open, startled.

I brush my lips above hers when what I really want to do is fuck her mouth with my tongue. But I won't force a woman. I don't have to. Still, I can't deny I'm desperate for
this
woman.

Rose stills, and I deepen the kiss.

I suck and peck at her lips, tasting sweat and sweet flesh. Rose moves against me, finally. Her hands clutch the side of my T-shirt and my boner nudges her in the stomach. I draw her against me, and our heartbeats thump together as I release the hard hold of her shoulders and let one hand glide to the small of her back. She opens her mouth, and my tongue glides in as though it's always belonged there. I loop it inside, our tongues twisting as my other hand goes to her head, tearing the bun apart. All that hair spreads between my fingers. I wrap my hand in its silk and park my fist at her nape.

Rose groans, and I come apart. Tender isn't part of me.

I yank her against me, moving my hips against her slit, splitting it apart with my prick through the thin material of her yoga pants.

“I—”

I eat the word Rose tries to say. Sucking her bottom lip into my mouth, I nip it, growling low in my throat. Why Rose would instantly make me an animal is a question I don't take time to answer.

My cock throbs against her pussy, banging for entry with each pulse of my boiling blood. My hold on her hair tightens, and a little pain noise mixed with pleasure slips between us.

I loosen my grip, working my lips down her neck.

I pull back to study the evidence of another man's fingers on her throat.

To my surprise, I kiss each one.

“No one”—peck, suck, lick—“will ever touch you in violence again.”

Her knees give, and I swing her into my arms. Her eyes sparkle like ebony gems as I carry her to the first surface that presents itself.

I spread Rose on a banquet-length table.

It's hard.

I rip a blanket off the back of a beat-up rocking chair and stuff it underneath her hips.

“I'm not screwing you,” she says in a breathy voice.

I can work with that. For now. Saying nothing, I jerk down her yoga pants.

She plants her knees together like a rubber band snapping into place.

“I won't fuck you until you beg for it, baby.”

Her eyebrows set together in a frown.

“Let me
touch
you.” My voice vibrates with my need.

Rose rolls her bottom lip into her mouth, and the nod is there only if I'm watching for it.

I am.

Rose

I give my consent with the barest nod. I hardly move my neck before Noose is pushing between my legs, powerful shoulders kicking my knees aside as he tears my panties away.

How can I do this when I was just attacked?
Probably because this assault is one I want.

I try to clamp my knees together; I don't know why. I've given this stranger permission to do what he wants. I have the feeling that Noose doesn't have to ask much.

He dips his face between my legs.

“Beautiful,” I hear, and then his tongue's on me, jamming into my clit like a finger on a button.

Wet.

Hot.

He laves the sensitive little nub, and I cry out.

He lifts his head, beard drenched with my juices, pale eyes like glittering ice above my mound. “Are we cool?” he asks in a low voice.

I manage to nod
. Cool?
Hell no
—
hot!

Those hard eyes soften like haze, then his tongue is dancing on my pussy, gently biting and nipping my labia and traveling down to stab my starved, soaked entrance.

My hips buck, and his mouth travels with my movement like water following a slope.

“Ah!” I scream into the silence of the cabin. My palms smack the table hard enough to hurt, and a forearm firmly plants on top of my stomach, pinning me in place.

I writhe, and Noose disallows movement as his tongue rolls over my clit again and again.

I didn't shave today. I'd been running for half a mile before Drake attacked me. I'm not perfect. There's no candlelight and sexy lingerie.

I don't even know Noose.

But my body does.

My legs spread wider as he attacks my pussy as if it's his last meal.

“Oh God!” I whip my face back and forth. I'm hyperventilating, and strands of hair suck into my mouth as I pant. I blow them out, making small noises of distress.

I'm not distressed; I'm sexed up as if I'm going to die.

His finger stabs my wet entrance, and I whimper. “That's right. Come on my face, Rose,” he whispers in a hot breath over my fevered slit.

His voice commands me.

I blow, exploding all over his mouth and tongue. His finger hooks inside me, and I feel my pussy spasm over it, sucking and pulling the digit in a death grip.

His low chuckle has my eyes snapping open.

Then he stabs me in the middle of my clit with his tongue. My eyes slam shut as I come again, shattering as he holds me down on the table, my athletic gear hanging off an ankle from my dangling feet.

Noose slowly stands and wipes the proof of my arousal off with the back of his hand. “Tasty.”

Heat boils over me like a river of blisters, and I burst into tears.

My pussy's still throbbing from his expert tongue, mouth, and lips. But I'm lying splayed out like a whore. I just let some guy I don't even know eat me out.

I've never done that.

Charlie's languishing at my parent's while I'm being a slut.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

Cool fingers run over my face then glide down my hips as I sob my heart out.

Noose lifts me, cradling me into his body in a tight ball. I feel myself being held, walking where he takes me.

We sit down somewhere, and I open my eyes.

My lower half is naked, and one boob is oozing out of my double sports bra.

His large hand palms the back of my skull. “Hey, was it something I said?” His lips quirk, and I start laughing.

I can't stop. First tears, then this. Comic relief.

Finally, when I've settled down to hiccups, I confess, “I'm so embarrassed.”

“Don't be.” His restless fingers lightly graze over my forehead, eyelids, and cheeks. A single finger runs the length of my bottom lip, and I smell myself on him.

My pussy gives a little squeeze, as though begging for more.

He kisses my mouth. “Every sound you make is one I want to hear.”

“I've never done that,” I say against his lips.

His eyebrows rise. “Gonna have to clarify that, Rose. Never had anyone eat that delicious pussy of yours? Never?”

My eyes shift to my bare pussy. My eyes rip up to his gaze again, light like glass and deep like smoke.

They don't leave mine, pinning me just as surely as his arm did earlier.

I can't take his penetrating gaze. “Both. All of it,” I say to my hands. “I've never had someone go down on me. Never done anything like this. Just—God—let you do that stuff to me, and I don't even know you.”

Noose plows his fingers through his hair, clearly irritated. “Time to move past that. I told ya, I know you. I know everything I need to know.”

I stare at him.

His smile is wide but tense at the edges, as if he's suffering.

Then I notice his hard-on is raging beneath me. “Oh!” I say, vaguely horrified.

I shift.

He groans. “You're killing me, Rose.”

“I-I don't mean to”—my eyes flick to his—“kill you.”

Noose's eyes hood. “
I
think you mean to.”

Oh boy
. I shake my head.

He flips me over onto my back. We're on a couch now. My legs fall open, and I don't try to hide.

He's seen the whole show.

Noose gazes down anyway, looking at everything his mouth just touched. His finger dives inside me, and I sigh.

My eyes flutter shut.
Oh God, please don't let him stop.

Noose's finger works deep. “Why the tears, Rose?”

My back arches, and pleasure churns, ready to spark.

“I don't want t
o…
” My eyes slit open.

“Want to what?” Noose's body is covering mine, one strong arm holding him off me while his finger pumps deep inside.

“Want to be like Anna,” I whisper miserably.

The finger exits.

His lips fall on mine like heated rain, petal soft, smooth, and insistent.

“Who are you?” Noose asks.

“Rose,” I answer.

“You're the girl I want. Not some ghost.”

I nod. There's no doubting I'm not my sister.

And I'm not some slut, contrary to my recent behavior.

Suddenly Noose backs off.

His pants went somewhere, and his cock stands at rigid attention between his powerful legs.

I didn't let the smoking fool me that he's not fit. I could see every hard inch of him through his clothes. There's not a soft piece on Noose. He's all man. All muscle.

But his cock is too big. Too insistent.

Noose takes ahold of all that manhood, stroking himself as I watch. Intently and methodically, he works his length.

As though mesmerized, I lean forward to close my much smaller hand over his.

Noose's head kicks back at my touch. His lips part, and his thick throat works up and down as he swallows.

My eyes linger at his cock, taking in the almost angry look to it.

I lower my face, my hair trailing over his bare thighs, and I put my hands on each one for balance.

Flicking my tongue over the swollen head of his erection, I wrap my lips around the tip and slide down just enough to cover the head.

“God!” Noose roars, grabbing my head and fisting my hair.

I'm suddenly scared.

He senses it. “Not hurting you. But if you don't suck me off this second, I'm gonna die.”

I smile, working lower. Instinctively, I take a hand back up his shaft, squeezing as my mouth climbs higher and I pop my mouth off the tip of him.

Noose's chin dips, and his eyes blaze dark pewter at me.

I slam my lips on him, giving hard hand all the way down to the base of him.

I squeeze.

“Shit,” his voice shakes as his stomach muscles clench.

A strand of his hair falls forward out of the tight ponytail as his clear gaze simmers into mine, and my hand runs up the square muscles of his stomach to his nipple. I pinch the erect tip as I ram my mouth as far as I can go on him.

Noose's shout is strangled.

I gag.

His erection grows tighter beneath my lips, and he comes hard. Hot jets of seed shoot down my throat. I swallow reflexively, taking everything he gives me.

My fingers slide down his body, which is coated in a light sweat, and I slip my lips off the end of him.

“God
damn
,” he says, collapsing backward onto the couch.

I watch him, unsure of everything.

Him.

Me.

He studies my face for a second. “Come ʼere,” he says, grabbing me and lifting me onto his lap.

He pushes my hair away from my face for the second time. “Where'd you learn to do that?”

“You like it?” I ask, hearing the uncertainty in my voice. “You're my first.” I love the power I feel admitting that and knowing I made him come.

Noose tilts my face up. His eyes dredge my soul.

“Your last,” he says with finality, tucking my head underneath his chin.

Drowsiness takes over.

I don't feel sleep come for me when it does.

*

Soft kisses wake me.

I shoot up.

Noose moves with me.

“Oh God,” I say, whipping my arm out for a cell phone that's nowhere around. “What time is it?” I grumble.

Noose chuckles, checking me out. “Aren't we pissing rainbows?”

I glare at him.

“Almost midnight.”

“Shit.”

“Why shit?” he asks.

I scowl.

He smooths the frown between my eyes. “Listen, I texted your parents.”

“Oh my God!” I shriek.

He covers my mouth with a finger. “Asked if they could keep Charlie for the night.”

I fall back on the couch, my forearm flopping over my eyes. “This is so dumb.”

“Again, very vague.” Warmth colors his voice.

I peek out between my fingers.

His eyes are dark; his mouth tight.

Anger.

I sit up, scooting my legs back and wrapping my arms around my knees. I notice I'm naked, and my eyes hunt for my stuff.

Noose stands, also naked but not caring in the least.

My eyes are glued to the view of his tight ass as he strides to my yoga pants and chucks them at me. I catch them, jamming them on without panties. My underwear's in a ripped pile by the table where h
e
…

Yeah.

Heat floods my face, and I don't have to look in a mirror to feel my shame. Noose ate me.

I swallowed his cum. All of it. I didn't leave a drop behind.

Gee-zus.

He texted my parents as if he were me and lied. So I could sleep. So we could be together.

I stand and face him.

I have to be smarter than this.
“Listen,” I begin, shoving my thick hair behind my shoulder.

“Don't give me some fucked-up Dear John thing.” His huge cock comes half alive. I can't have a conversation with him naked.

“Can yo
u…
get something on?” I swing my palm at his hard, hot body.

He crosses his arms, dick bobbing, muscles undulating as he folds them across his broad chest. “No.”

Okay.
I gulp back my fear, shame, and lust in a tight ball of misery.

Don't ask, Rose.
“What's a ʻDear Johnʼ?” I ask anyway.

An angry slash of lips splits his face. “It's a fucking blow off. A dismissal.” His words bite.

Oh.

I can't do Noose right now. I shut my eyes.
Great choice of words, Rose.
I say, “I can't have a boyfriend right now. I have some stuff going on, important stuff.”

Like not getting raped before the hearing. Like protecting Charlie from his monster of a dad.

Noose's eyebrows hike. “Who said I want a girlfriend?”

The pit of my stomach falls into the abyss of emotional fallout. “Then what was this?” I ask, voice small as I wave a hand between us.

Noose lifts a shoulder. “Getting off,” he says, voice hard. “You're fucking great at that. Blew me like a pro.”

I step back as if he hit me. “Blew you?”

Heat travels from my toes up my body in a nauseating wave.

Oh shit.
I haven't had a bit of food in almost six hours. By now, I would have been back at Mom and Dad's, had some protein, and maybe a juice.

I sway.

Great timing, as always.