She bit the shit out of his lip, practically snarling at him when he pulled back, a tinge of red on his bottom lip. His wicked grin only widened. “You like it fucking rough, I’ll give it fucking rough.” And he kissed her hard, his flavor tinged with the coppery tang of his blood.
Oh God! That wasn’t rough? Before she knew what was happening, she was flipped over with her ass in the air and both arms wrenched back in his iron grasp. “Damien—”
“Bring me this sweet ass, Emma.”
“No!” she shrieked. “I’ve never . . .”
The sound that wrenched from his throat, the animalistic growl, terrified her. He would kill her if he did that, he would tear her up. “That’s something else we’ll have to work on, won’t we.” It didn’t sound like a question. In that moment, she didn’t want it to be. His hand came down hard on her ass cheek, a sting that vibrated through her throbbing pussy, and she yelped, writhing back toward him.
“Won’t we?”
“Yes,” she whimpered. “Yes.”
“That’s my good girl. You’re so beautiful here.” She could practically feel his gaze scorching her where she needed his dick. And then his mouth was there, and she shrieked into the pillow, all thoughts of modesty blown to hell and gone as she pushed toward his tongue’s light, teasing caresses. Too light, not enough; it only made it worse. She needed to get off. She didn’t need fine wine right now, she needed that throat-scalding shot of tequila. Begging would no doubt only make him torment her longer, or she would have pleaded with him to give his cock back to her.
His mouth trailed up her spine, slow, devouring kisses that sent shivers skittering along her nerve endings to the tips of her fingers and toes. When he reached the nape of her neck, he inhaled long and deep while she was on the verge of hyperventilating. His arm came up under her, his hand gently encircling the base of her throat. And just like that, the balm of his touch soothed her out-of-control breath, calmed her galloping heart. The man could speak volumes with nothing but his hands. His knees nudged hers farther apart, and she whimpered as she eagerly awaited his invasion.
When it came, her eyes rolled back in her head at the luxurious stretch, her thigh muscles trembling with weakness. His hand held her in place as he set a steady, paced rhythm, deep, deeper, and with his lips by her ear, he whispered the most delightfully nasty things. “I’ve waited a long time to fuck this tight cunt,” he murmured, and her hands fisted in the pillowcase.
“Is it worth it?” she managed to flip back.
His laugh was lascivious, a hot rush against her ear. “Every fucking moment spent. Every fucking cent.”
Her eyes opened blearily at the mention of the money, but what the hell. She let them fall closed again as his pace picked up and her body tightened. Oh no. That only meant he might stop again. Please don’t stop, never stop. Her legs were in danger of collapsing but she held strong because his angle was so perfect, stroking every inch of her inner walls. She would push her endurance to the limits if he only kept hitting that one spot . . .
“I want you to reach your hand between your legs and rub your clit,” he growled.
She made one half-assed move to slip her arm under her body and gave up. “I don’t think I can.”
“Do it anyway.”
“Damien . . .”
“Do it. Don’t make me ask again.”
If they had been standing in his office discussing some minor task, she might have made him ask again. Just to push him. Here, held captive within the cage of his powerful body, impaled on his powerful cock, she was willing to do anything for him. Even as the idea confused and disturbed her, she was practically scrambling to obey.
Her fingers finally completed the journey to the aching bundle of nerves between her legs, slicking through her wetness as she circled it tentatively. Emma groaned and bit her lip against the sensations buffeting her: the gentle caresses of her own fingers and Damien’s harder, more punishing possession of her body. Bliss began to swell in her middle, growing brighter and stronger, and she tried, she tried so hard to be quiet and go still and sneak the impending orgasm past him, but just as she was nearing that mind-numbing point of no return, he slowed, and held still.
“I’m learning already,” he murmured with a smug pride that made her want to claw out his eyes.
“Oh God, I can’t take any more,” she whimpered, trying to push back and rotate her hips against him.
“Stop or I’ll pull out and leave you empty.”
She stopped immediately, panting. If he pulled out she would cry.
“You can take it,” he said, “and you will. But I’ll go easy on you tonight.”
This was easy? She was near tears. By the end of thirty days, there would be nothing left of her but a pile of dry white bones.
“How do you want it, doll? I’ll fuck you or I’ll lick your pussy until you scream for me to stop.”
Her breath caught on a sob. It was rather like choosing between her next breath or the next beat of her heart. “Both,” she said weakly, and he laughed.
“Now there’s a challenge. Maybe you’d like some company if you want both at once.”
Alarm jolted through her. Was he serious? “N-no, I don’t think I want that.”
“Good. I’m always open to your desires but I’ve never particularly liked sharing. Especially you.”
Maybe she was a little sick, because those words warmed her, gave her strength. “Fuck me,” she whispered. “Fuck me and don’t stop until I come.”
She wanted to be on her back, looking up at him, watching his eyes as he moved through her, but he didn’t change their position when he resumed at a slower pace. She longed to see his face when he came, to see some fissure in his exterior. But he would deny her that this first night, it seemed. And maybe she wasn’t ready, either. They weren’t here to make love. They were here for exactly what he was giving her.
Knowing he would let her come this time made her climax build quickly between his thrusts and her rapidly circling fingers, harmonious sensations that bled together to lift her up and up until the world swirled dizzily somewhere beneath her and she felt intoxicated. Drunk on him.
She would feel sorry for herself if she went to her grave never feeling this way. “Oh, Damien,” she whimpered as ecstasy began to ricochet through her, from his dick to her fingertips and back again, over and over, faster and faster, until everything broke at once and she rode wave after wave of nothing but pure black bliss. It sucked away all thoughts of shame or degradation or reluctance; there was no room for those here. It left her mind a peaceful, humming blank as he eased her back down to life, to earth, to the bed. She only vaguely realized from the dripping wetness between their joined bodies that he had come, too. He had come inside her, and she had missed it, and she wanted to pout.
But there was time for all that, wasn’t there?
She shook violently. Her little fingers were numb, and so were her little toes. Damien drew her close, wordlessly bringing the covers up over them both, and held her tight. The night came back to her when he had driven her home after winning her in the bet against Benjamin. I have my ways, he’d insisted after she’d challenged him to put up with her for thirty days.
He did, indeed. An impenetrable veil of blackness dropped over her and she fell almost instantly into an exhausted, utterly satiated slumber against his warm chest.
Chapter Eleven
He hadn’t lied; she was exactly as he’d thought she would be, only so much more. An impossibly responsive, cinnamon-tinged angel. And Damien couldn’t imagine having her worked out of his system in a mere month.
She slept curled in the fetal position, tucked into him, and while he’d love nothing more than to hold her all night, that way lay disaster.
He slipped slowly away, making sure not to wake her, but he couldn’t stop himself from kissing her brow gently before getting up and stepping into his pants, leaving his shirt off as he stepped from her room. It occurred to him that he hadn’
t fed her; he hadn’t exactly planned for things to work out this way. All her righteous outrage had a tendency to get under his skin, riling his beast, making him want to strip her in more ways than one. He knew that under all her inhibitions, she was a passionate, hedonistic soul just like he was. Everyone was. He’d proven it tonight.
Never, ever, would he forget her flying apart underneath him that first time, milking a gloriously desperate release from him. It had been all he could manage not to follow suit. She was pure fire when she came, incinerating all that touched her.
He was nowhere near sleepy himself, energized rather than depleted by what had just happened. The pleasant, heavy ache in his cock wasn’t exactly satiation. If she hadn’t been so tired, he might have tried to go for another round. All in good time.
There were a dozen texts waiting on his cell phone when he found it in the kitchen: Zane and Mike in the running group chat they maintained, their jokes and bullshit seeming inane after what he’d just experienced; questions from employees—he could put most of them off for later. It was the messages from Stacia that he paid attention to, because she knew better than anyone when to bother him and when to handle something herself.
That Benjamin guy has been here asking for you, looking for his sister. I managed to get rid of him without the whole room hearing.
Damien ground his teeth together. He knew men like Benjamin—petty, bitter, jealous, volatile. He knew what they were capable of. He also knew how to handle them, but with Emma in the mix, that complicated things considerably.
Emma would never forgive him if she knew that Stacia was aware of their arrangement. There simply hadn’t been any way to keep it from his right hand, but what she didn’t understand was that Stacia was a vault. Once something went in that vault, it would never come out again. He didn’t have to swear her to secrecy about anything; it was understood. He doubted there was an affair he’d had that she wasn’t aware of.
What did he say? he asked her.
Nothing much. He was drunk. Just wanted to talk to her, he said, but he was definitely pissed about something.
If Emma was worried about their secret getting out, she need look no further than her idiot brother. It would spread like wildfire from his mouth alone.
Tell Jake he’s no longer allowed on the premises, he said, referring to their mammoth-size head of security.
Already done, she replied. And that’s why he had full confidence in her.
Is everything ready for Vegas?
A series of checkmarks was the answer. Only once business was handled did he go back and read more thoroughly through some of his brothers’ messages. Mike and Savannah, Zane and Rowan . . . he couldn’t be happier for Mike and Zane for finding love, but what they had wasn’t in the stars for him. He’d walled himself off, and he wasn’t even quite sure why, except that not a single person in his life aside from his brothers had stuck around. He took what he needed from the people he knew and he moved on. It was the best way to survive. Give them too much and they would try to destroy you with the very weapons you’d handed them, even if the only shot they ever fired was walking out the door.
That’s why his arrangement with Emma was so advantageous for him. He could take what he needed and walk away. Never mind that it had taken every ounce of willpower he possessed even to walk away from her bed tonight.
It was rare for Damien to call Mike; usually it was Mike pestering the shit out of him to be more communicative, but tonight he was missing his big brother more than usual. Maybe because he knew Mike would be all over his ass if he knew about what was going on here. Or maybe not—Mike had his big title defense coming up in a couple of weeks, and Damien knew things had been rough for him in the cage since Tommy Dugas’s death.
“It scares the shit out of me when your name pops up,” Mike said in place of a greeting when he answered the phone. “Are you all right?”
Damien laughed. “Yeah, I’m fine.” Even though Mike wasn’t above swinging by the club and playing some poker with him, he lived with the fear that the place was going to get busted. “Just thought I’d see how you’re doing.”
“Good. Training my ass off. Getting too old for this shit.”
Yeah, right. Mike would still be kicking ass well into his forties. “Is Savannah all right with everything?” Damien asked, knowing that Tommy’s sister had an even rougher time with Mike being in the cage than Mike himself.
“Scared to death,” his brother said solemnly, “as usual. But she’s hanging in. She’s stronger than I ever will be. By the way, she said you sent a cute redhead her way yesterday. Anything I ought to know about?”
Damien should’ve known Savannah wouldn’t keep that from Mike, but then he hadn’t thought to ask her to. “Nope,” he said, and Mike laughed.
“How did I know you were going to say that?”
“Because you know me.”
“And it’s because I know you that I know something must be going on with you. You don’t call me out of the sheer blue.”
Sadness gnawed at him at those words. The two of them, along with Zane, had been as close as three brothers could possibly be—they’d spent most of their young lives crammed in a single bedroom to escape beatings and drunken rages and sounds from their mother’s bedroom that still haunted Damien’s nightmares. Once they’d busted out of that house, that life, Damien had vowed to never be confined that way again. Sometimes, as much as he loved his brothers, seeing them put him right back there.
“I don’t know,” he said truthfully. “Just in a funk tonight, I guess.”
“Better snap out of it, little brother. We both have to be at the top of our games in a couple of weeks.”
Damien barely gave consideration to the tournament. While his brother trained at the gym, he trained every night at his own tables, and his game was always sharp. He didn’t have any reason to believe things would be different this time. Some of the best players in the world would be there, and many of them he’d beaten at one time or another.
“I’m really looking forward to all of us getting together,” Mike said. “You’d better be there, man. I mean it.”
“I will. And, well, I might as well go ahead and tell you, I’ll have the cute redhead Savannah mentioned with me. But don’t get too excited.” Better to get the hopeful ribbing over and done with as soon as possible.
“Hey, this is great news, why can’t I get excited?”
“Because you shouldn’t read too much into it. She’s a friend.”
“They all start out that way.”
“She’s also my accountant at the club.”
“Better be careful mixing business with pleasure.”
“I know. That’s why I said not to read too much into it.” He figured it was an easy way to deflect Mike’s prying. Let his big brother think he was doing the honorable thing . . . even though he was fooling himself if he didn’t think Mike probably knew better.
They talked more about Damien’s business and the fight and Zane’s tour and, even though it was good to catch up, he was left feeling melancholy by the time they said goodbye. His brothers had found their places in the world, and Damien had a beautiful, sweet, genuinely good woman upstairs that he couldn’t let himself get close to. And it was his own doing.
* * *
Emma found consciousness little by little, her still fractured reality slowly stitching itself together. A burning ache between her legs. Light streaming through her window. A familiar scent. An empty bed.
She lifted her head and glanced around, then snuggled back into her pillow and winced as she shifted positions. He was gone. It would’ve been nice to wake up to her new world with her guide there beside her, but that wasn’t what this was about, was it? She had to keep reminding herself of that. Damien wanted a month of sex, free of strings. After last night, Emma feared her strings were dangling in the wind, seeking something to attach to, and nothing was there.
The scent that had teased her nostrils was the unmistakabl
e smell of coffee. And bacon. Her stomach rumbled. She slipped naked from the bed, grimacing again as all the blood in her body seemed to rush to the rawness between her thighs. Never, ever had she been fucked like that and, as much as she wanted more, he would have to be merciful for a couple of days. She performed something of a penguin walk to the bathroom.
She brushed her teeth and showered, washing his remnants from her, and wrapped herself in a heavy, silky robe. She found Damien in the kitchen with Bentley sitting at his feet staring adoringly up at him. The sight of him sipping coffee at the granite island as he eyed what looked like stock reports on his phone stole her breath for a moment. His black hair was damp, and he wore long gray athletic shorts and a black sleeveless T-shirt that showed off his sparsely tattooed biceps—she’d never expected him to have ink. The spice from his aftershave reached her nose even where she stood. She’d never seen him dressed so casually.
“Good morning,” she said, proud of how nonchalant she sounded.
He turned his dark head and actually smiled. Not a predatory smirk, but a genuine smile as if he was glad to see her. “Good morning. Did you sleep well?”
“Like the dead.” She couldn’t even remember dreaming. “Bentley Bear, come on, let’s go outside.” Her little dog finally jaunted over to her.
“I already took him,” Damien said.
“Oh.” She bent over and scooped up the black mop of fur, dropping her face to the top of his head and breathing in his comforting doggy smell as he licked her nose. “Glad to see you two getting along.”
“There’s coffee, if you want. I didn’t know what you like for breakfast, and I felt bad that you never ate dinner last night, so I made a little of everything.”
“You cooked?”
“You sound surprised.”
“Just figured you’d have someone for that, I guess.”
“No need.”
If he’d been raised from nothing by an older brother, it stood to reason he’d learned at a young age to fend for himself, she supposed. But not only had he cooked, but the eggs, bacon, and waffles were all fabulous and perfectly seasoned. They sat in his breakfast nook eating in companionable silence, and there was no dimming the inward glow when she caught him stealing glances at her over his coffee mug.