Maybe that was what she wanted, because she angled herself even closer.
“I came in my pants,” she told him, her voice low. Intense. Deliberate. “It was amazing. Best orgasm of my entire life, from a simple little kiss.”
“You’re a fucking liar,” Chaser growled, slick murder and glorious retribution all over his harsh face, and then he was on her.
He took her head between his huge palms, caging her while he ate at her mouth, fierce and uncompromising, tongue and teeth and that same powerful need that stormed through her. He claimed her. He branded her. He didn’t seem to give a crap that she was shaking against him, that same old greedy hunger making her think she might topple over where she stood. Or maybe he knew exactly why she was shaking. Maybe he knew he was the one making her shake.
But when she fought against him, against his grip on her, it was only to get closer.
It was a battle. It was angry and violent and delicious. He ripped her wrap dress open, grunting out his approval as her breasts were bared. He dropped his hands to let his tough palms caress her, pulling back to look for a single, charged beat before taking her mouth again.
Their lips clashed, their tongues tangled, wet and insane. It was like dying. It was like resurrection. It was lighting herself on fire and enjoying the burn.
Chaser’s hands moved from her breasts to her hips, wrenching apart what was left of her dress so it hung open like a jacket. It was his certainty that killed her. As if he knew exactly how to touch her, and where. As if he not only knew her, but had done it so many times before her body responded to the slightest brush of his fingers, on his command.
With no hesitation, one of his big hands slid into her panties, insistent against her swollen clit as he stroked his way through all her smoldering, sodden heat.
“You’re wet as fuck,” he muttered against her lips.
And in case she’d ever wondered if she was really, truly as bent and crazy and wrong as all her relatives, she answered that question here. Definitely.
First she nipped at his lip, making his big chest rumble in some combination of warning and appreciation.
“Not for you,” she threw back at him.
And he let out a low, lethal sort of laugh that she felt everywhere, like her skin was suddenly too tight, too small, too much. More his than hers, somehow. Chaser twisted his wrist and thrust two blunt fingers deep inside of her. Lara bit back her moan, but it didn’t matter. She was sure he knew exactly how she felt about the new sensation. She was slippery and wet all over his hand.
“Lucky for you, I don’t care why you’re wet,” he growled at her. “The juicier the better.”
Then he was taking them down, one strong arm going around her hips to hold her up as he twisted so he was beneath her on the stairs. Lara clamped her knees on either side of him as he propped them both up, settling her against the hard, huge erection pressing against the fly of his jeans.
Lara reached down between them and ripped at his zipper, her hands shaking with need as she pulled out his cock at last. She snuck a look at him while he dealt with the condom and almost tipped over the edge at the sight. He looked ferocious. Darkly intent. Harsh with the same gripping need that held her so tight in its fist she thought she might break in half.
“You better hurry up,” he gritted out.
Lara knelt up, grabbed onto his shoulder to steady herself, then guided him to her hungry pussy with her free hand.
And they both groaned when he was there at last, the fat head of his cock a broad, delicious insistence against her soaking wet folds, and then she was pushing down as he was shoving his way inside, making them both groan.
“Damn you,” he muttered against her mouth.
And she agreed, but she couldn’t say so. His hands wrapped around her hips, he thrust deep, and Lara exploded.
She shook and she shook, but Chaser didn’t stop. He didn’t so much as pause. He hammered into her, slamming her from her initial climax straight into another wild, mad build.
“Ride me,” he ordered her, his hands moving to play with her breasts again. “And you better rub that greedy little clit all over my cock. You better make yourself come again, Lara, because I’m not feeling that nice.”
Lara didn’t need to be told again. She moved her hips, finding her way into a slick, dirty rhythm that had Chaser groaning while sensation stamped through her. She braced her hands on his big chest, under his cut where his skin was steaming through the T-shirt he wore, and she could feel those flat, fascinating muscles she still hadn’t seen. And it was dimly lit in the stairwell, but she could see him perfectly. So beautiful to her he looked almost cruel.
“Come again, baby,” he told her in a low, demanding growl. “Now.”
And Lara couldn’t help herself. She took him harder, faster. And then she obeyed him.
This time, as she shook against him and fell apart on top of him, he pumped himself into her, roared out his pleasure, and followed.
Coming back to earth, however, was less blurred through with exhilaration.
Chaser only watched her, brooding and silent, as Lara moved herself off him. She didn’t think that was a good thing. She was beginning to feel tender spots on her knees, suggesting that a stairwell wasn’t the best place to do what they’d just done. Not that she could really regret it.
She tried to stand, but her legs shook, and Chaser’s hand shot out to steady her even as she grabbed for the wall. Lara told herself there was no reason that should make her heart seem to swell in her chest.
Because, said that same old caustic voice, you’re an idiot.
He stood then, and she couldn’t read the expression on his face. She didn’t try. He scooped up the shoes she’d forgotten about with one hand, then straightened. He studied her for a moment, then tilted his head toward the door at the top of the stairs. Her apartment.
Lara swallowed. She didn’t understand why she couldn’t speak. She forced herself to clear her throat.
“Isn’t this where you swagger off to share club pussy with your boyfriends?” She made herself smirk. It felt steel-plated and very nearly painful, but it was armor all the same. “I beg your pardon. I mean your brothers.”
Chaser slid off the condom and zipped himself up, never shifting that dark, brooding gaze from hers.
“You’re not getting off that easy,” he said, but she thought his voice was different now. Rougher, but less angry. Like he was fighting the same thing she was. Or maybe that was what she wanted to tell herself. Maybe that was what she needed to pretend. His hard mouth moved in one corner, and she understood the truth. She didn’t care. She just wanted him. “I’m only getting started.”
—
In the middle of the night, a long time after midnight but nowhere near dawn, shit got a little blurry. Or it did with Lara, anyway. Chaser had never experienced it with anyone else.
After the stairwell, Chaser had followed Lara up to her apartment with every intention of hitting it another time. Just to take that edge off and keep it off, he’d told himself, and then he was getting the hell out of there.
But that wasn’t what happened.
The fucked-up part was that he’d been the one to come sniffing around for more in the first place. What the hell was that? Chaser was used to beating women off with a stick, not following them around like a pussy. He didn’t understand how it had happened. He’d been having a few beers with a couple of his brothers out in the town’s dive bar, Dumb Gator’s, a rambling old shack practically falling into the bayou on the road out of town. Pony, one of the club’s prospects, had been making them laugh the way he did, telling stories about his variety of female problems. Butler and Target had been going shot for shot with a couple of groupies, all tits on display and pouty lips. Chaser had been having a perfectly fine evening. One of the girls behind the bar had offered to suck his dick, always a pleasant way to start an evening, and he couldn’t have said why he’d declined.
You’re gonna make poor
Katelyn cry, Butler had said, smirking at him. She was trying to get a full set tonight.
Chaser hadn’t had it in him to care about the troubles of club groupies like Katelyn, who challenged each other to do things like suck the dicks of every brother in the bar of an evening. Some nights he found that crap fun. But not tonight.
And maybe it wasn’t surprising that he’d found himself in that alley in town, like some pathetic, obsessed stalker bitch. He’d told himself he was headed home, and that’s where he’d pointed the bike, but instead he found himself on Main Street. Next to the goddamned bakery. Hanging around for no apparent reason.
He’d been about to start his bike again and get the hell out of there with what was left of his dignity and his fucking balls when Sheriff fucking Archer had pulled up.
And then Chaser had been forced to stand there and watch the squeaky clean douchebag sheriff walk Lara to her door, then mack on her. Worse, he’d watched her kiss the asshole back like she was into it.
He hadn’t had any frame of reference for the poisonous, evil restlessness that had burned in him then. He’d never felt it before. It was dark and vicious, gripping him with both hands and twisting hard. Only the fact that it was the goddamned sheriff of the parish kept him motionless on his bike in the shadows. Any other little punk and he would have peeled the fucker off and bashed his head in.
It had occurred to him that what he was feeling was possessive. And more than that, jealous.
Two things Chaser had never felt before in his life.
He’d wanted to howl at the moon. He’d wanted broken bones and blood as payment for this shit. He’d watched Lara go inside and he’d forced himself to wait until Grady Archer drove away, looking like a man who’d just had a great little date.
That had enraged him and he’d had plans to share that rage with the cause of it.
But then, when she’d opened her door and gotten right in his face, all he’d wanted was to get inside her.
Chaser didn’t understand any of this. Once he’d gotten it out of his system in the stairwell, why had he taken her up to her apartment for more? Why had he settled in like he was going to stay all night when he wasn’t that guy? He’d showered with her. He’d taken his time with her. He’d laid her out naked in her bed and gotten his mouth on every part of her lush little body.
And then he’d done it again. And again.
Now it was the middle of the night and they were tangled up with each other in her full bed that barely fit the two of them. That meant she was slumped on top of him, still panting way too hard from their last round. He told himself that he was holding her there, running one hand up and down the indentation of her spine, because there was no other room in the bed.
He was so full of shit.
“Who takes care of Kaylee all night?” she asked, her voice muffled against his chest.
And maybe it was because he’d busted a nut about five times already, but Chaser couldn’t work up the temper he’d normally default to at any suggestion that he was a crappy father. He could think he wasn’t exactly a stellar parent. But he didn’t like it when anyone else agreed.
“I put her out in the yard like a dog,” he rumbled.
Okay, so maybe there was a little temper.
Lara shifted against him and he found himself gripping her in case she thought she was rolling off him, but she wasn’t. She just propped her chin on her hands up there on his chest and gazed at him. It was dark as hell in her bedroom, so he could only see the suggestion of her face.
“Was what you said about her mother true?” she asked, sounding as unbothered by his slight show of temper as she had been by a whole lot more of it earlier. That made something inside him turn over. Then hum a little, down deep. “That she kidnapped Kaylee?”
“Yeah, it’s true.” He didn’t want to be on his back any longer, for reasons he didn’t feel like exploring, so he shifted her onto the bed beside him, then rolled over to prop himself up on an elbow. “Why do you care?”
She sighed a little. “Because I want to hurt you. It’s all part of my nefarious plan.” He expected her to move away from him then, but she didn’t. She moved closer, and he threaded his legs with hers like that was why she’d done it. And because there was that dark, possessive thing in him that wanted her locked down. He didn’t examine that, either. “That must have been awful.”
Maybe it was the dark. Maybe it felt like confession or some shit. Chaser didn’t know. All he knew was that he kept winding a strand of her hair around and around his finger, and that he opened his mouth. And kept right on talking even when he realized what he was doing.
“It sucked,” he said, his voice low. “I never wanted a kid. But then she was here and I forgot there was ever a different life when she wasn’t. I kept telling Destiny not to get messed up on the hard shit. But she didn’t listen.”
“Addicts aren’t great at listening.”
Chaser laughed a little. “No shit. She got fucked up one too many times, so I took Kaylee away from her. Honestly, I didn’t think she’d care.”
“Not a lot of men sign up to be single dads.” Lara traced a pattern over the tattoos on his chest, as if she could read in the dark that the one on his heart said kaylee. “And even fewer outlaw bikers, probably.”
“It wasn’t a question of signing up.” He tugged a little on the strand of hair around his finger. “She’s my kid.”
Lara shifted, but only to get a little closer. “You love her.”
“I’m not a goddamned robot,” he growled. “Of course I fucking love her.” But he smoothed his hand over her hair and found himself holding it there, at her nape. “I moved my sister here to help me with her while I was working. Everything was fine. Then Destiny showed up again when Kaylee was four and said she wanted to be back in her life.” He shook his head, feeling himself get tight and pissed all over again at the memory. “I didn’t trust her, so I said she could spend the afternoon. In my house. On my watch. I was out back working on my bike. I was worried about her burning the house down or nodding off. I never thought she’d just…grab Kaylee and go.”
Lara murmured something unintelligible and then her hand moved to smooth its way down his side. Once, then again. Until she built up a rhythm. He didn’t understand what she was doing.
And then suddenly, he did. It felt like a flash of light. She was comforting him. Him. Chaser couldn’t recall the last time anyone had bothered or even tried.
He opened his mouth to tell her he was a badass motherfucker who could chew goddamned nails and consider it a tasty snack, but that wasn’t what came out.
“It took me six years to find her,” he said instead. His voice was low, almost indistinguishable from the dark around them. “Everyone told me she was probably dead. Or worse, gone. There were times I hoped she was dead, because it was better than the alternative, trafficked god knows where at her age. It made me sick. It made me fucking crazy. But I kept looking.”
“Who doesn’t do crazy things for their family?” Lara murmured, still rubbing him in that same way, like someone as tiny as she was could keep him safe when he was three times her size. And he didn’t know what to do with the part of him that believed she really could. “Especially when it’s bleak and shitty. But what’s the other option? Giving up on them?”
Chaser thought her voice sounded a little too raw then. He rubbed his thumb back and forth on the nape of her neck. Like it was his turn to offer up a little comfort, and it was dark enough that he could let himself do it. It was dark enough that he could pretend he was that kind of man.
“It never occurred to me to give up,” he said after a while, his voice like a rumble in the room. “I’d either find Kaylee, or catch up to Destiny, or hunt down someone who knew what had happened. There was no other ending I was gonna accept.”
Lara shifted then, and he could feel the tension gripping her. It made her taut against him.
“And now she knows it,” she said, that raw thing in her v
oice bleeding into something fierce. “She knows that no matter what happens, she can depend on you to find her. No matter how long it takes. Not everybody has that, Chaser. Most people don’t have anything close to that.”
He frowned. “Lara—” he began.
But whatever it was that had seized her in the dark, it was taking her over, and he couldn’t say he minded. She crawled over him and he let her, flopping over on his back as she licked and sucked her way all over his chest, from his kaylee tattoo on south, until she could take him deep into her mouth.
And then it was her turn to make him crazy, and it turned out his dirty little schoolteacher was very, very good at it.
When he came that time, his hands fisted in her hair while her greedy mouth made him feel like a teenager again, he actually roared out her name loud enough to wake the neighbors, if she’d had any.
That was bad enough.
But he wasn’t done. He’d thrown her beneath him and gotten his face in her hot little cunt. He’d made her come a few times, all lazy and thorough, until she was limp and delirious and her taste was all over him.
Then he’d made everything that much worse by stretching out in that fluffy, girlie, ridiculous bed of hers, hauling her close to him so they both fit, wrapped around each other like that, and falling asleep.
When he woke up again there was a hint of dawn in the sky outside, casting the room and the woman beside him in grays, and Chaser didn’t know what the hell had happened to him. He didn’t sleep with random pieces of ass. He didn’t bare his soul in the middle of the night.
He didn’t do any of this shit.
Chaser hauled himself out of her bed and hated that it was hard to do. He took a quick shower and really hated that when he was done he wanted to crawl right back into that bed again. Like he’d turned into a goddamned stranger overnight.
He didn’t like any of it.
Chaser let himself out of her apartment and headed down the stairs. He let the heavy door at the bottom shut behind him, and then he dragged in the thick air like he was a drowning man. His heart was pounding like he’d just outrun a pack of Black Dogs on an ambush mission, and he had no place to put any of this. What the hell was she doing to him?