“Kiss me,” he told her, his mouth against hers. He nipped at her with his teeth, making goosebumps shiver down her neck. “Concentrate, princess. I want your tongue in my mouth. I want your hands all over my ass. I want you rubbing your tits against my chest like you’re trying to get yourself off. I don’t want you lying here like you’re going into surgery. That shit isn’t hot at all.”
“But my—you—”
She cut herself off as if the words failed her. As if she didn’t know what to say or how to say it. Which had to be a first.
Uptown could feel her straining against him, impatient and determined, like she was trying to impale herself upward and onto his cock. It was cute. He couldn’t deny it was also hot. Her exertion was making her skin feel a little slippery as she tried to work her cunt onto him from below. She was breaking out in a sweat she was trying so hard to fuck him.
He was only a man. There was only so much he could take. He was sure there was a reason he was trying to hold himself back from her but he couldn’t think of it then. It was gone from his head as if it had never been.
“Worry about impressing me with your mouth, Holly.” He shifted, dropping his head even closer to hers while he moved his hips back, keeping his cock in contact with her but out of reach no matter how she pushed herself up against him. “You need to practice for my cock later so here’s a tip. Use a lot of tongue.” He felt her shudder at that, and grinned. “Your tight little pussy is my problem.”
Her breath left her, hard. “Oh my god.”
“It’s not time to moan that, princess,” he promised her, still grinning. “But it will be soon.”
She started on his mouth, his good little obedient girl. He let her ease her way into it, holding himself perfectly still with only the fat head of his cock inside of her. Getting her ready. Telegraphing his goddamn intentions.
It was fucking torture.
But she rocked against him as she got into kissing him, much dirtier and more thorough than he’d have expected from the mayor’s uptight daughter. She kissed like they’d fucked raw and hot a thousand times. She kissed like a blistering wet dream. She wrapped her arms around his neck and she arched her sleek, naked body and those fine little tits into him as he’d ordered, rubbing herself heedlessly and recklessly against him. Over and over again.
God, she was so into it, so crazy hot it hurt. He needed the condom as much to keep himself from coming in about three seconds as anything else.
Slowly, he started to shove his way in, deeper into her cunt. He didn’t want to hurt her. Not when he had a lot of plans involving a pussy this tight and a whole, long night so far away from civilization and his rowdy, distracting brothers. It did occur to him that he hadn’t even sunk himself fully inside of her and already he wanted more—something else he couldn’t remember ever worrying about before. Pussy was a renewable and endless resource, thank god. But Holly was something else. She was more than potent. She was the most dangerous woman he’d ever met, that was obvious in a million ways already, and Uptown couldn’t bring himself to care even a little that she was clearly messing him up. He just wanted to get himself completely inside her.
He rocked his hips a little more each time, surging into her in small, excruciatingly careful increments. Inch by smooth and careful inch. The more she worked herself against him, the farther he went. Her little nipples were hard, bright points against the flat planes of his pectorals. Her mouth was a wonder, lush and open, wet and wild, and she kissed him as if she wanted to keep on doing it forever.
If he couldn’t feel the evidence of her innocence like a fist around his cock, slowly giving way to him, he’d never have believed there was anything untried or untested about her. She was too carnal, too perfect, as if she’d been crafted especially to turn him on. She fit him too well. And she wanted him too much for it to be anything but pure sincerity, obvious in everything she did. He could taste it.
There was something about her that was slamming straight through to the core of him, hitting places he hadn’t known were still there—dark, walled-off parts of himself he’d thought had died a long time ago. He wanted to get the hell away from her and whatever insane spell this was that she was casting over him. But he wanted to be full and deep inside her even more.
Uptown was the one breaking out in a sweat and shaking with adrenaline and need when he finally, finally sank inside her all the way. To the fucking hilt at last, and his heart was pounding heavy and hard like he was hauling ass somewhere. And it took him more than a moment, even two, to pull her mouth from his.
When he did, she was panting as much as he was. Her eyes were unfocused and she looked undone, her chest rising and falling too fast.
At least, he consoled himself, it wasn’t just him.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone slow at all. Much less this slow. Maybe he never had. And as much as he wanted to just slam into her and fuck her deep and proper, he wanted her to enjoy it more. He wouldn’t have said that he was all that into the responsibility of being someone’s first. She didn’t seem to care, the way she was shaking and squirming beneath him, those sharp little nails digging into his ass this time. But if he wanted all his fantasies involving the crazy tight cunt gripping him right now to come true—and he really, really did—he needed to ease her into this. He wanted her to crave him as much when they were done as she did right now.
“Are you ready?” he asked, his voice like gravel.
She considered, her eyes glittery and round. “I don’t know.”
Uptown pulled back, dragging his cock nice and slow as he went. Then he thrust back in, seating himself fully inside her hot, wet channel. Not hard. But with intent.
Her mouth fell open. She looked dazed.
So he did it again.
“You okay?” he asked, when she still didn’t say anything. Her fingernails dug deeper into his butt, her surprisingly tough fingers holding him tight. He didn’t understand why he wasn’t slamming into her, already halfway to roaring out his climax. Or, more accurately, he did understand. He just didn’t recognize himself in all this waiting and fucking caretaking bullshit that he couldn’t seem to stop. “Talk to me, princess.”
“Holy crap,” she whispered. Then she cracked that smile and doomed them both. “You’re inside me.”
And it was too much. It was beyond what any one man could bear, surely.
Uptown dropped down to his elbows, settling himself on top of her so he bore her down into the bed.
“Pull up your knees,” he ordered her, low and gritty. Caretaking time was over.
She obeyed him quickly and prettily, the way she’d done everything else tonight—something he couldn’t concentrate on or he’d lose it. He reached down and tugged one leg even higher, holding her nice and wide as he started to move.
Deep. Slow. So slick it should have killed him. He thought maybe it did, but he wasn’t stopping. He couldn’t stop.
Holly’s hands drifted up his sides, then around to his chest, her palms on his pecs as he set a deliberate pace, as deceptively easy as it was ruthless. He watched her as he did it. He watched the color rise on her face, watched her neck stretch out and get tight. He saw her lips go slack and her eyes glaze over with every slamming, glorious thrust. He pumped himself into her, one hand flat on the mattress for leverage and the other moving from holding her knee up high to tangling into a fist in her hair.
Time knotted, then smoothed out. They were all alone in the thrust, the repeat. The fire that connected them, growing brighter and more intense with every thrust. Every moan. Every gasp. There was sex, Uptown knew, and then there was this. Her face tilted up to his. Her gaze on him, solemn and greedy at once, as his cock found her and took her and made her his. Only and ever his.
He felt like he was inside a church, not behind it.
“You’re about to run out of time, baby,” he told her, hardly recognizing his own voice. All that fierceness. All that wildfire. “You better come.”
r /> “Okay,” she agreed breathlessly, and that thing inside him that he didn’t recognize—that he didn’t want to recognize—flipped over again. “How?”
He laughed at that. He changed his rhythm then, and she moaned. He slid a hand beneath her to lift her ass into each hard thrust, taking her deeper. Harder.
“Give me your tits,” he ordered her, and she arched up for him instantly, making those little greedy noises that were going to haunt him for the rest of his life, he just knew it. Perfect and sweet and sexy as hell. Hot and needy and all for him.
He sucked a nipple into his mouth, hard, fucking her deep and long. She went stiff, her hands grabbing for purchase and her eyes closing like it was all too much for her. He kept going, increasing his pace as she tensed even more, digging her heels into the bed, and then he tipped the balance by reaching down and pinching her clit. Not at all gently.
Holly cried out. Uptown slammed into her and used his teeth on her nipple, and she was a goner. She broke apart, honey and wild shaking, all around him.
And Uptown hauled her even farther beneath him, then let himself go.
He fucked her through one climax and kept right on going. He felt her body catch up to him, tossing her from her first orgasm straight into the next. Frying pan to fire.
And only then, only when she was sobbing and mindless, her mouth wide open and pressed into the skin of his shoulder, did Uptown finally let himself follow, flooding into her and shouting out her name while he did it.
Her name. Like it was etched into his bones.
He couldn’t breathe for a while after that. He couldn’t move. He could only lie there, stretched over her perfect body while still lodged deep inside her, while his heartbeat hit at him like a drum and his head spun around and around like he was wasted when he wasn’t.
Holly Chambless had given him her virginity. He’d taken it. Greedily.
But what was getting to him was the notion that he’d given her something in return. Something he couldn’t even name, from deep in all those shadowy, exiled parts of him he hadn’t looked at in more years than he could count. Something he didn’t want to think about, now or ever.
Something he couldn’t possibly take back.
—
When Holly woke up she was curled in a ball, all alone in Uptown’s wide bed. Sometime during the night, someone—and she didn’t think it had been her—had pulled the covers up over her, though it wasn’t exactly cold. It was May in the Louisiana bayou, which was akin to full summer in some places. Down here the air got thick around February and stayed that way.
She knew exactly where she was the instant she opened her eyes even though she’d never stayed here before, out in this cabin that shouted pure Louisiana from every nook and cranny, every board and screen. It occurred to her to wonder about that—but then she realized that she was in his bed. She was surrounded by his scent. No wonder she’d slept so well and so deeply. She had a faint recollection of him beside her, stretched out on his back at one point and then wrapped around her at another, but they were dim etchings at best, woven in with darker dreams and red-hot memories.
It was a gloomy sort of gray outside the windows, suggesting it was early morning in the misty bayou. Holly swung her feet over the side of the bed and sat there as the little bit of daylight washed over her, taking stock.
For the first time in her entire life, she was waking up and facing a day without her virginity intact.
She kind of thought there should be trumpets, at the very least, but there was only the sound of water licking up against the dock outside.
Holly wasn’t sure it had really occurred to her how much the simple decision to not have sex had defined her all this time. It had sunk in deep to how she thought about herself. She knew it affected how others thought about her. She’d never been particularly moralistic about her choice to wait. Some of her friends had promised themselves to the Lord, others to vague notions of What Their Husbands Were Owed, still others talked about the right guy. Holly had been more worried about disappointing her earthly father than anything else, and that had sort of snowballed as time went on. Once she’d gotten to college it had been habit to say no. A reflex. When pressed, she’d say she was saving herself for marriage, as piously as possible to nip the conversation in the bud, and for a long time she’d even believed that was true.
But then Uptown had kissed her and she’d understood that she hadn’t been saving herself at all, unless it was for him. She simply hadn’t met anyone before him who tempted her enough to bother changing her whole definition.
Or maybe, a small voice inside her suggested, you imprinted on him when you were sixteen.
Holly thought she should feel…something. Some rush of emotion. Some deep, feminine reaction or intuition. Regret, maybe, for not holding on tighter to her convictions—assuming they’d really been convictions and not merely going along to get along, which she could finally admit was how she’d survived life with her father before now. But really, all she wanted to know was when they could do it again. And again. And then a few more times, just to make sure she was getting the hang of it.
And then maybe she could take some time to feel bad that she was some kind of pawn in a DKMC game that was all about her father.
But first, this. Sex. She couldn’t believe that this was what everyone had been talking about all this time. It was as if she’d spent all this time with her face pressed to a glass window, thinking that by looking through it she knew what was happening on the other side.
She could confidently state that she hadn’t known anything. Not one thing. Nothing in her life could have prepared her for the carnal reality of the night she’d just spent, or the man whose hands should really be registered as lethal weapons—and not because of their potential for violence.
And now that she’d jumped straight through that glass window at last, with Uptown, no less, a great many things made a lot more sense. Like Katelyn’s life choices, for example. Was this what her friend got out of her association with the club? How could Holly possibly blame her for that? Because she had nothing to compare it to but her own hand and that time in an otherwise empty hotel pool when she’d furtively pressed herself against the jet and then felt like she was a terrible deviant—but if it was always like this, she could see arranging her life around sex. She could see making it the red-hot center of everything.
If she could feel even a fraction of what she’d felt last night, she’d do it all the time. She wanted to do it again right now.
When she stood, she pulled in a breath, surprised at the faint pulling sensation she felt coming from areas she’d never really paid any attention to or considered much at all before. Like that tender strip of flesh between the top of her thigh and her pussy. Who knew it was so sensitive there? Or that it could actually ache a bit when she moved after all the new positions she’d found herself in last night?
How was it possible she’d been the only inhabitant of her body for all these years—and yet it had taken a big, ferocious, insanely talented biker to teach her all the things it could do?
Holly didn’t feel soiled or stained or altered in some ineffable way, the way she thought she probably should. She felt cheated that she’d waited this long to discover what the whole world clearly already knew. She felt a little bit betrayed that she’d lost out on all these years of orgasms and delirious sensual fire and yes, Uptown himself.
It certainly made her think about that afternoon behind the church in a new light. What if she hadn’t run away? What if, when he’d come toward her, she’d leaned into him instead?
Maybe she’d known all along what she wanted to do with her life. Maybe she’d been denying it to herself since she was a teenager, likely because she’d had no idea what would have happened if she’d asked for what she’d hardly dared admit she wanted. She wouldn’t have known where to start. She couldn’t exactly have walked up to a Devil’s Keeper and asked him if he minded that she’d very probably imprinted on
him when he’d thought she was spying.
Holly only knew that ending up here felt more than simply right. It felt a whole lot more like something preordained.
There were no clothes lying around the bedroom, because Killian “Uptown” Chenier was, improbably, a neat freak on top of his day job of being an outlaw biker. Holly took a breath and decided there was no particular need for false modesty. He’d had his mouth and his hands and the rest of him all over her, again and again. What point was there in covering up now?
Especially not if you’re hoping to end up right back in this bed.
Which she was, she could acknowledge to that little voice inside of her. She really, really was.
She padded toward the door of the room in her bare feet, noticing details it had been too dark—and Uptown had been too marvelously all-consuming—to pay any attention to the night before. Like the fact the walls were bare. There was a large print leaning against the far wall in his bedroom, a bold drawing of a motorcycle by someone who was clearly more than a little seduced by the bike and likely the life as well, but that was it for decoration. The living room had been the same, as she recalled. The man liked it stark, which struck her as being at odds with that happy, grinning way he moved through the world, pretty and easy.
Holly raked her fingers through her hair, but didn’t knot it up on the top of her head the way she normally would. Maybe she was a little more modest than she wanted to admit—or a little more overwhelmed by her nakedness here, in Uptown’s house, than she was prepared to acknowledge.
It hadn’t escaped her notice that he’d been holding back last night.
She thought she wanted to handle him—all of him—but could she?
There’s only one way to find out, she told herself firmly.
And with more than a little anticipation.
Chapter 10
Holly made her way into the small hall, past the bathroom and the shadowy second bedroom, stepping out into the main living area just as the gray outside began to give way to some real light. It poured in all the windows, tumbling over the surfaces and seeming to pool on the man who sat with every appearance of bone-deep laziness on the couch that dominated the room, his legs propped up before him, one ankle stacked on top of the other.