Merritt lifted her chin high. “The point is, it’s not your business either way.”
“You need to wake the fuck up, baby. This is Lagrange and you’re mine. You don’t like it, run away again. You have a whole wide world out there where you can get your independence on. But here?” Greeley shook his head, that hard gaze never shifting from hers. “Not a chance.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” But her voice was little more than a whisper.
“You were back in town all of fifteen minutes before I had you naked and coming on my hand,” he reminded her in that same quietly ruthless way, as if that was something she might have forgotten in the past twenty-four hours. “Now you’re in my house and in my bed. You just screamed your head off when I made you come the way you always do, and the night is just getting started. What do you think is happening here?”
Merritt opened her mouth to throw something at him, but shut it again because her heart was beating so hard she thought it might tip her over. She told herself that was the only reason. Still, she pulled her knees up closer to her body and hugged her legs tight, and she didn’t pretend she was doing it for any other reason than comforting herself a little while Greeley continued to just…sit there, that intent gaze so hard on her that it made her feel scraped and raw inside.
“I don’t know,” she admitted, not sure why she was going with honesty. Only that she couldn’t seem to keep herself from it. “I never knew.” When his expression only darkened in a way she could feel like a hard lick between her legs, she hurried on. “To be honest with you, I kind of thought I made it all up, what happened between us. Or made it all more dramatic in my head. I definitely thought that either way, you would have moved on. I didn’t think it would matter one way or the other if I came back here.”
He moved then, but he was only toeing off his boots. Then he stood, shrugging out of his cut and placing it carefully on the back of the chair against the wall, then tossing his T-shirt and kicking off his jeans. When he was naked he came back to the bed, crawling up to throw himself next to her, not grabbing for her, though the iron weight of his big body made the mattress dip and she had to fight to keep herself from rolling into him anyway.
Then he took one finger and carefully traced a simple little line down the length of her thigh. It might as well have been a blowtorch, the way that tiny little touch blazed through her.
“What out there is scarier than me?” he asked.
His voice was so quiet she almost answered him automatically without thinking it through—but then caught herself.
“What?”
“Back at Petit Joe’s you said there were scarier things than me. Like what? Because I take some pride in being really fucking terrifying, darlin’.”
He didn’t mean the particular ways he terrified her, Merritt knew. He meant as a scary ass member of his scary ass motorcycle club. Trust Greeley to focus on the one thing she’d thrown at him tonight that actually mattered. How did he always manage to do that?
“The New York City subway system.” She gave a mock-shiver. “Horribly claustrophobic and smelly. Especially in summer. And the bar exam, obviously. That sucked.”
His eyes met hers and she couldn’t hide the very real shiver that coursed through her then.
“Why did you come back here?”
It was another too-quiet question, and all his attention was focused on her, more brooding and dark than the room around her.
“I needed a vacation and, like no one else ever, I thought, why not a wholly overlooked armpit of the Louisiana swamps?”
“Try again.”
Merritt sighed. “What does it matter why?”
He laughed again, another sound without mirth, and then his hands were on her, tugging her down and rolling her beneath him again. Except this time he was naked. This time there was no barrier between her and his stunning, mouthwatering body or all those beautiful, dangerous tattoos that marked him the outlaw he was.
She felt him inside of her, even though he wasn’t. Deep inside. A humming recognition that swirled around and pulled taut in her lungs, her belly. Her pussy, as soft and wet as if she hadn’t already had him once tonight.
He had no problem whatsoever bearing her down into the mattress and she knew she should. She should feel trapped. Bullied, maybe. But instead it was as if the world fell away and he was the only thing she could see anymore, and she couldn’t seem to help herself. She melted.
And then hated herself for it. Maybe if this man didn’t make her melt when she should fight, she wouldn’t have misread Antony so badly. Maybe if she hadn’t broken herself right here five years ago she would have known better than to get involved with a man like Antony in the first place. Seen the red flags and the warning signs. Heeded them.
Greeley had ruined her for all other men, it was true. Just not in the way he’d meant when he’d promised her he would. Or not only in that way. He’d also made it impossible for her to gauge how dangerous men were, because he was undeniably and unabashedly lethal, and still her body seemed to think he was as safe as a church.
She wasn’t sure that was fair. But there in the dark, beneath him, she didn’t really care.
“I came back,” she said now, trying to summon up a little outrage. Or at least something that looked like it. “People do that sometimes. Why do you care?”
“Because when you told me you’d come back here over your dead body, you meant it.” He smoothed her hair back from her face, his gaze heavy and much too knowing. “And leaving me wasn’t easy, but you did it. You wanted to stay gone. You didn’t even show for your father’s funeral. And now you’re here and within twenty-four hours you’re taking off your clothes at Petit Joe’s. Five years ago you had to take a dare to set foot in the place and you were so freaked out you couldn’t stop blushing the entire time you were there.”
“I was not blushing. It was summer. I was hot.”
“You were scandalized, baby. And tonight you were onstage, getting ready to flash the crowd. I get that tequila was involved, but this isn’t you.”
“You don’t know me.”
But there was no heat in the way she said that, not when he was right there, on top of her and nestled between her legs like he belonged there. Like that was his place. She could feel his cock getting hard again as they talked. She could feel her own body react to him the way it always did, making her wetter and hotter. Making her breasts feel big when they rubbed against his chest. Making her forget all the reasons she should never, ever let this happen. Again.
“Maybe what scares you is the possibility that I do know you,” he murmured, his face so close to hers that there was nothing else in the entire world but him. She was sure it was deliberate. She didn’t really care. “Better than you know yourself. What then?”
And this time, when he kissed her, he took his time.
This time, he wrecked her.
He was slow and wicked and he demanded her complete surrender. And she gave it. He rolled them over and over each other on the bed as he took his time reacquainting himself with every last inch of her body, and he let her do the same. She got her hands all over those muscles of his she loved, and she tasted his tattoos until he groaned. She worked her way down his beautiful torso and only got the chance to taste his cock, just the plump head, before he pulled her off him and got her beneath him again.
“But I want…” she began.
“I know what you want,” he told her, his voice insistent and hot and right there at her neck. “Trust me.”
And there, in the dark, splayed out beneath him on his big bed, she did.
She didn’t even question it.
Greeley took his time removing her tiny little stripper garments, and he wasn’t shy about sharing his thoughts on each of them as he took them off—though he didn’t use words. He used his big, rough hands. He used his mouth and that beard that was as much an instrument of torture as it was a glorious complexity against her oversensitive skin. He spent a long t
ime teasing her with his mouth on her nipples and the hint of his teeth, making it more than clear he knew exactly how sensitive she was.
When she was finally writhing and sobbing and begging him to please please please he moved lower, tracing his way across her belly as if he could stay there all night before he buried his face between her legs.
He licked deep into her pussy. He sucked hard on her clit.
And when Merritt came this time, she screamed out his name, loud enough to split the bayou in two.
She was still riding out that climax when he climbed his way up her body again and surged into her, the slick possession of his hard cock tossing her from the middle of one climax into the build toward another, seamless and hot. She arched up against him, her head thrown back and her heels pressing into the bed, her fingers digging into his wide, smooth shoulders while sensation tore through her.
“Stay with me, baby,” he murmured, laughter in his voice.
He rolled them over once again so she was on top, and his mouth was curved and hard when he propped her up, his hands on her hips, while she fought to get her bearings. She was panting so hard it made her breasts move, and he only sprawled there beneath her, that gleam in his eyes that told her he knew exactly how she felt with him so huge and hard inside of her.
“You gonna move up there?” he asked her softly, shifting his hips to drive himself deeper. Merritt caught her breath. “Or you just gonna hang out?”
She reached down and braced herself against the fascinating planes of his chest, stamped with all those tattoos that offered colorful snapshots into who he was. All his deepest secrets laid out before her, masked in art. His back was dedicated to the club colors and proclaimed him an outlaw. But his chest was covered in tattoos he’d chosen and sometimes designed himself that told all the different stories about the man he was beneath his role in the club.
Merritt traced them with her fingers, reminding herself of all those stories he’d told her that summer. The names of the friends he’d lost in the Army wrapped around a knife. The living friends he considered blood brothers made into a set of intricate blood and thorns. The tattoo he’d gotten because he’d been eighteen and out of the country for the first time and why not get a fucking bullshit rose on his way to a war?
“Merritt.”
She took longer than she should have to drag her gaze to his, and she was sure he could see all the emotion she was pretending she didn’t feel. Because she didn’t want to feel it and she certainly didn’t want to show it. Still, it was a heavy weight in her chest and a knot in her belly and worst of all, that searing, too-bright sensation in her eyes. She was sure it was written all over her, as obvious to him as the hot, wet slide of her pussy around his cock.
He lifted one of his big hands from her hip and fit it to her cheek.
“Baby.” His voice was so low it seemed to weave its way under her skin, and she was sure she could see the Greeley she’d known that summer in his gray gaze then. Never sweet, exactly. Not this hard, dangerous man. But softer in these stolen moments alone with her than he ever was anywhere else. “Concentrate.”
She slid her hands up a little bit higher on his chest, then she shifted her weight and started to move. It should have been lazy. Easy. But it was a bright, hot, critical fire. It was all that emotion and nowhere to put it but the slick slide up his cock and then the sweet torture of taking him back inside her again.
And again. And again.
She watched him break out in a sweat, but she didn’t speed up. She felt him tense, hard and hot as hell beneath her as she rocked herself against him, but she didn’t hurry. She couldn’t say a single one of the things that clawed at her throat. She wouldn’t let herself give in to the near-overwhelming urge to spill all the things she’d tamped down deep inside of her for five years. Need and longing. Loss and regret. All the ways she’d missed him, all this time, despite her best attempts to forget him. She couldn’t.
But she could do this.
Eventually, his jaw got so hard she thought it would shatter, and he moved one of his hands between them, working her clit as she kept up her same, torturous pace, working out her confession the only way she could.
“That’s cheating,” she panted at him as the stark, impossible pleasure battered at her.
“Deal with it,” he retorted, from between his teeth.
And it didn’t take long then. She felt it coming from a long way off, rolling toward her like a storm, then walloping her. Sensation charged through her, lighting her on fire and letting her burn. She melted all over him. She dropped down and got her face into the crook of his neck and she didn’t care if she cried. She didn’t care what he saw in her while she was lost in the flames.
Only then did he flip her over one last time so he could slap a hand on the mattress beside her and get his other hand beneath her to lift up into the fury of his thrusts, pounding himself into her until he finally groaned out his own release.
And after that, she didn’t have the energy to debate her return to Lagrange with him. Or anything else. She drifted into a dazed sort of sleep, only waking up when he picked her up and carried her to his shower, crowding into the stall with her so he could wash her down to his satisfaction.
But that only led to the both of them, too slippery and too strung out on each other, taking care of that same greedy, impossible hunger when it flared anew. Greeley bent her over the sink, still slick and wet from the shower and wetter still between her legs, and told her to hold on. Then he gripped her hips and slammed them both over the edge, fast and furious.
“You’re gonna kill me,” he muttered, his mouth against the back of her neck when they were both shuddering in the aftermath of another explosion.
Merritt didn’t reply. Because maybe she wouldn’t mind it so much, death by Greeley. Naked and wrapped all around him and coming until it killed her. There were a lot worse ways to go. Her long nights pretending to sleep next to Antony had given her ample time to consider a number of them, in detail, while dreaming of her escape.
“Hey.”
She blinked and found Greeley studying her through the bathroom mirror. He was a hard, intensely male slab of granite behind her. He had one tattooed arm wrapped around her, right under her breasts, and she wondered how long he’d been holding her like that. He’d pulled out but kept her close, so her ass was pressed to his thighs and she could feel his semi-hard cock against the small of her back.
Merritt wasn’t used to feeling so cared for.
“Where’d you go?” he asked her, and not in the soft, loving way of someone wondering idly about their lover’s thoughts. Not Greeley. There was a hard glint in his gaze, and she had the unsettling notion that he could read her mind and all the dark shit that lurked in there that she didn’t want him to know. Ever.
You are so screwed if he can, an unhelpful, semi-hysterical voice inside of her chimed in. Unnecessarily.
“You just fucked my brains out,” she said, all bravado and what was left of the tequila she’d had too much of earlier. “Again. I’m literally incapable of thought.”
He didn’t look like he bought that at all, but he didn’t say anything, and Merritt took that as the reprieve it was. He handed her a wet cloth and a towel, and when she’d finished cleaning herself up and then drying off to his satisfaction he swung her up into his arms again.
“I can walk,” she whispered.
She didn’t want to walk. She wanted her whole life to slow down and be this, right here, and nothing else. High against his chest, his strong arms wrapped around her, his beautifully fierce face right there, so close to hers.
As if it could stay like this. As if this was real.
He only shifted her so she was even tighter against him, and then he brought her back into the bedroom, laying her down on the bed and following her onto the mattress to wrap himself around her.
She’d forgotten they’d slept like this the few times she’d actually spent a whole night with him that sum
mer—no. That was a lie. She hadn’t forgotten.
But she hadn’t let herself remember. She hadn’t dared. It hurt too much.
He thrust his thigh between her legs and tucked his face against her shoulder and Merritt let her eyes drift shut, because the fact they fit together so perfectly and so easily was obvious. She didn’t need to make a proclamation about it. She bit back the urge to do it anyway. So far, she hadn’t said anything she shouldn’t. She could pretend this was only sex. And there was no reason in the world she couldn’t lie here and bask in him, whether it was just sex or not.
“The thing about letting you walk is that you walk away and then you stay away,” he growled a long while later, in such a low voice he might have thought she was asleep. She pretended she was. “I’m fucking tired of that shit.”
He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t let go of her. And Merritt lay there for a long, long time, waiting for her heart to shrink back down to its usual size.
The next time she woke she was curled up in the center of his bed and he was pulling on his clothes by the side of it. There was a lighter sort of dark outside the windows, casting the whole room in a gloomy gray. It had to be early morning, though there was no clock anywhere nearby to check that. Only his wall of books across from the bed, books that she’d spent hours investigating that summer while he was off tending to club business, picking through the clues he’d left behind in the novels and textbooks he had collected. Those books had helped her imagine she knew him, too.
Merritt didn’t think she made a sound, but Greeley’s head came around as if she’d shouted out his name.
“Sleep,” he ordered her. Then he bent down to take her mouth in a long, hot kiss that scrambled her brain and made her stomach flip over. “I’ll be back.”
And she knew on some level that she should have a problem with that, but she couldn’t think why. Maybe she didn’t want to. She was too worn out in every delicious way possible to get into whatever crap was lurking around between them and inside of her and it would all be there in the daylight, wouldn’t it? Why get into it now? So she only murmured something, some kind of acknowledgment, and drifted back to sleep.