Ezra Sokolov (Cypher Security Book 2)

by Celia Crown

  I am going to prove to Ezra that I can protect her and provide for her. I will love her with every emotionally constipated cell in my body. I don’t understand romance, and never had much of an opinion about it. Not until Ezra came into my life with her uncanny strength and fiery eyes.

  I can say she has stolen my breath away.

  She did throw me on my back.

  “I want to tell you something when the fight is over,” I mutter, and a rumbling purr ripples through my chest.

  She makes a little noise and bends her neck to shake off the ticklish sensation that went in her ear.

  “Tell me what?”

  I love you.

  I settle for saying, “You’ll have to wait.”

  Her lashes flutter slowly as she searches my face for anything to give her an answer. Ezra laughs like the tinkling of a bell, so light and satisfying.

  “Okay,” she agrees delicately.

  She snuggles deeper into my chest, but the silence does not last long when her phone buzzes on the kitchen counter. Ezra peels her cheek off my shirt and makes a beeline for the phone.

  It’s too far for me to see the message while her brows curl inwards.

  “Everything okay?” I call out.

  She sighs as her shoulders drop. “Yes, I need a moment.”

  As she says it, I think she means a moment of silence or privacy. I didn’t expect her to move past me and walk towards the door where she put her shoes.

  “There is a message I need to take in the lobby,” she mentions off-handedly without waiting for my answer.

  She is gone the next moment.

  While I trust her to be able to take care of herself, I also know just how vicious paparazzi are. It does not surprise me whenever security contacts me about uninvited guests who found a way inside the building.

  It is not a security breach since I have not gotten a call from security, so the message must be related to work.

  Or it could be a call from her father.

  Speaking of which, I did not tell her about that. He wanted her to call him, and it completely slipped my mind.

  Anyway, that is not important right now.

  I pull the phone off the wall and dial the security office. They are fans of mine, but I have never taken advantage of it. I am friendly with them but never go overboard.

  This is the first time I have resorted to this despicable tactic.

  I want to know what she is doing. I should not violate her privacy, but the vile part of me does not care.

  As illogical and stupid as my justification is, I am a selfish man, and she is mine.

  “I need access to the lobby’s security feed,” I mumble over the receiver when the guard picks up the call.

  He hesitates and tells me about the legalities, but frankly, I do not care.

  For his consideration, I add, “please.”

  Politeness helps. Just like that, the guard taps into the feed and connects it to my screen for viewing.

  “Thank you,” I say, and hang up the phone.

  I have trouble finding her at first, but I recognize someone else who leads me to Ezra in the frame.

  It is Peters, Stein’s coach.

  “What the hell?” I hiss to myself.

  They seem to be talking cordially one moment with a respectable distance between them. But then he moves quickly to close the distance, hands touching my Ezra’s face and angling his face towards her.

  The implication is obvious.

  He fucking kissed her.

  Fury shakes the steady rate of my heartbeat, singeing my skin, traveling in my veins, and poisoning my self-control.

  Then, the unexpected happens.

  Ezra sinks her tiny fist into the man’s gut, her leg swiftly delivers a crippling stomp to his knee, and her elbow collides harshly with his jaw as he falls.

  I can’t tell if he was taken by surprise at how lethal she is or if he didn’t fight for reasons of his own, but he had been beaten by a woman who is half his size.

  Strange, I note to myself.

  Anger leaves me quickly after seeing Ezra put the man in his place with a harsh rejection. She is emotionless when her face becomes clear on the monitor, and guards surround them.

  She is swift in explaining and gesturing to the man who is already back on his feet. There is not a hint of pain in his body language.

  This situation is more than what it seems. Peters did that for a reason, not because he wants her for himself but because he has an ulterior motive. I have studied Peters more times than I can count, and he is not someone who does anything without reason.

  He is escorted out of the lobby by another guard as Ezra turns away, presumably to come back to me.

  I shut off the feed and shake my head. I am jealous and infuriated by his audacity in touching what is not his.

  I count the seconds it will take for the elevator to get back to the penthouse while I pour myself a glass of water. I drink it slowly as time ticks by, then the keypad sings the tune for my passcode.

  She comes in, unfazed, and almost bored. However, her façade does not fool me. She is shaken up but does not want me to know it.

  “Come here,” I whisper gently while opening my arms.

  She knows that I know, but she does not ask me how. She just falls into my arms and shudders intensely.

  “I’m sorry,” she mumbles, “I should have expected a stunt like that.”

  I pat the back of her head. “No one expects that.”

  “I knew I remembered him from somewhere,” she reckons bitterly with a grumbling sneer.

  “You do?” I repeat after her.

  “Annika and I were on the job, and I remember she had said something about him being a standup guy. Turned out that he was a snake and tried to turn us against each other. I don’t know why he wanted to do that, but I can venture a guess that he wanted some drama.”

  Peters had a Hollywood-themed childhood, spoiled and detached from the world. He knows how to get under people’s skin and bring needless trouble to others.

  “I think he still holds a grudge for his destroyed career when he tried to sue us and failed,” she mentions.

  Sue them? Now, that has me questioning just what they had done to the man.

  I want to say I regret looking up to him when I was starting as a professional boxer, but his fights had taught me a lot of things. I can admire someone for their skills, but I can detest them as a person.

  He is that to me.

  “Annika didn’t know he was a boxing champion then, and I didn’t either. But he was stirring up drama and being belligerent. She did what she had to do to protect our client, so she shot him and shattered his humerus.”

  I grasp her shoulders and tilt her head up. “That’s not what is bothering you, is it?”

  She bites her lip and shakes her head fervently. “I never had anyone… kiss me.”

  “So aggressively unwelcome, too,” she mumbles shakily.

  On a basic biology level, she is still a woman, and he is a man twice her size. Some studies have shown that women are innately afraid of them, something they can’t help.

  “I’ll help you,” I offer with a chaste kiss to her pink cheek.

  “Help me?” she asks with confused awe as I take her small hand in mine.

  I tug her into the bedroom and let the implication settle in her head. But she has not yet grasped my meaning as she stands by the bed.

  “Yeah,” I breathe, “I want to help you forget about it.”

  “Oh,” she quips awkwardly, “How?”

  I smile and hook my hands under her arms to throw her on the bed. She sputters in shock and begins to climb on her elbows when I find a steady grip on the waistband of her pants.

  One yank and everything below the waist comes off. She fumbles and pulls her shirt down to stretch the material over her pussy.

  “W-what are you doing?” she squeaks delectably.

  “I recall you saying that you are to do everything your client
asks you to,” I recite her words back to her.

  “Your time isn’t up yet,” I say as I take a quick look at the digital clock on the nightstand.

  She holds the shirt firmly in flustered defiance to keep her thighs closed. If it helps her avoid any apprehension, I would gladly kiss the doubt away; to chase the traces of that man away from her quivering lips.

  “Trust me?” I ask.

  She nods like the good girl she is

  Praise is what she deserves. “So pretty.”

  “Thank you,” she mutters shyly.

  The mature and independent Ezra Sokolov is gone, leaving a soft-spoken and anxious little girl in my care.

  I test the resistance of her thighs by grazing my fingers down their sides. I massage the supple skin before sliding my thumbs between her thighs and pressing gently. They fall at the unspoken command, a voluntary move that strains the taut muscles at the crook of her knees.

  “Let me see,” I croon delicately, just like the stroke of her thighs.

  I am aware of my strength and how much damage I can do. I am mindful to avoid giving her the impression I am dictating what she can and cannot do.

  I am lying to myself and to her—lying about the control she has. It is a half-hearted attempt to ease the guilt about the depraved intentions in my head.

  It’s not working, not as I am untangling her fingers from the shirt.

  She is wet, slippery slick, and prettily pink.

  Chapter Nine

  Ezra

  I don’t know what’s worse: staring at my puffy pussy with invigorating interest or savoring the humiliation in my eyes as he brushes a calloused finger on the swollen clit.

  Reese watches quietly.

  If his chest was not rising and falling in synchronization with his finger nudging that bundle of nerves, I would think he was a statue.

  The amber eyes navigate with strict focus as he holds my gaze with unrelenting interest. He is not bashful about this utterly embarrassing situation.

  With painstakingly methodical deliberation, his finger trails down between my sodden folds and parts them crudely with no regard for my comfort.

  A shiver rattles through me as a drop of slick seeps out of my exposed little hole, and the senseless blushing extends from my cheeks to every single inch of me.

  My walls twitch and clench; it wants something. I don’t know how to make it go away.

  “Reese?” I whisper, bashful, and ashamed.

  He hums in distracted fascination as his finger circles the virgin hole, not pushing inside but prodding insistently at the ring of muscles agonizingly convulsing.

  “W-what should I do?” I ask as the pulsing in my ears swallows the words.

  I am used to having full control of my body: agility to dodge attacks, strength to hold my ground, and sharp intelligence to outwit my enemy.

  When I am on the satin sheets of his king-sized bed, I’m experiencing dissonance in my body.

  I am weak, trembling with quivering need, and strangely addicted to the ministration of his fingers grazing ruthlessly around the tiny hole.

  My mind runs slowly. Heaviness has settled into my bones, pushing lethargic poison into my blood and stealing my independence.

  “What should you do?” he echoes back with an odd flicker of confusion on his face.

  I feel like my hands should be doing something other than clenching the front of my shirt while being clueless and unable to suppress the greedy need for more of him.

  “You don’t know what to do,” he says as if he is shocked by my inexperience.

  Maybe he is.

  I nod my head and choke a whine through a throttled breath when his finger dives between the soiled folds and breaches the unused hole.

  I wince at the unfamiliar sensation of having his thick finger separating my walls, the calloused pad of his finger arching to rub against spongy tissue. I squeal at the delightful sensation.

  “Huh,” he muses. “You’re a virgin.”

  I can’t tell if he is shocked or happy. The blank swirl in his amber eyes and the tone of his voice leaves me in a state of uncertainty.

  “I’m sorry,” I say by default.

  It’s easier to take the blame than to argue.

  Customers are always right, so it would make sense for the client to always be right. What I do at Cypher is business, and I cannot risk getting the boss angry.

  “Good girl,” he notes tenderly.

  He wiggles his finger inside me, scraping the spasming muscles and strengthening the strokes of his long digit to reach deeper.

  “I am?” I mewl in delight.

  Whatever I did to earn that praise, I need to keep doing it.

  “You saved yourself for me,” he coos through a rumbling laugh. “’No one has ever touched you.’ Is that what you meant before?”

  I vaguely understand what he is pointing out, and he is correct.

  I am a virgin despite having access to men who are abnormally attractive at my company and on the job. But none of them ever made my heart yell at me to kiss them.

  When my heart and brain don’t work together, I end up disliking many things.

  Money will not get me to sleep with them, power will not get me to turn my head, and promises of status have never been attractive to me.

  “Yeah,” I mumble shyly. “I’m sorry.”

  Men want someone who has experience with sex. They don’t want to go to the trouble of teaching me and wasting time when they could be going for another round right about now.

  “That’s a good girl,” he purrs darkly. “Yes, my good girl.”

  He brings his finger out, wet and dripping with my juices as he studies it with intrusive eyes. An abrupt curl of his tongue removes the glistening slick, and a vile smile breaks out on his face.

  “Maybe I would have hunted down the man who had touched you, Ezra,” he notes with a quiet threat.

  With a hazy brain, I think I just saved someone from a horrible death.

  A bruising grip burns on my knee as he pushes it down on the bed, the silkiness unsatisfying as I’m left achingly swollen and exposed even more.

  “Arms up,” he quips suddenly.

  I listen to him as he snags the last defense of my dignity.

  The shirt and the bra get discarded on the floor as his eyes scan my breasts with shameless lust. A trail of wetness from his finger has moved to the side of my breast as he squeezes the plumpness.

  He latches onto one, lapping the flushed pink nipple into his mouth. Sucking and teething at the sensitive bud, Reese growls behind his throat and gets a moan from me with the vibration. He is careless when he snatches the other nipple between his fingers, tweaking and pinching until he is satisfied with the redness that flourishes under his touch.

  He releases his lips and slithers his tongue across the hardened bud, wrapping his hands around both breasts and squeezing them at the same time. It’s hot and painfully tight under his palms as he silently watches me squirm.

  Another sense of prickling need shoots down to my pussy, muddling my senses with his scent and his crudeness in lengthening the torture.

  “What do you need?” he asks, slyly mean.

  A thick finger traces down my trembling stomach, ghosting circles around my clit and avoiding my bucking hips.

  With a burst of courage, I latch onto Reese’s unrelenting wrist and hope my feeble strength will guide him to the right place with the right firmness in his touch.

  The practiced ease of his wrist shaking off my hands is scarily laidback, but I still flinch; more from the rough pinching of my clit than his dismissive action.

  “I want—” I swallow the mortification as I blink through the tears collecting at the corner of my eyes.

  “I want you to touch me,” I whisper.

  He smears the viscous slick on my folds and spreads them sordidly with deft fingers. A swish of goosebumps rises on my skin. My nipples go tight at the fluctuation in temperature as my body heats up even more to cou
nteract the sudden brush of cold air from somewhere.

  Reese chuckles as he keeps my thighs on the bed, the impatience in his body seen in the tension that ripples through his grooved muscles.

  It’s a weird sensation to be under this man while he is between my legs.

  I am somewhat caging him, yet I am the one who is feeling smothered by him.

  He snuggles into my cunt, breathing in and savoring the heady scent while tasting the slick folds. I can smell myself from up here; I can only imagine how pungent my pussy smells from where he is.

  He is not repulsed; in fact, he is putting more effort into sniffing my cunt.

  It is dirty, filthy to the depths of hell, and immensely humiliating.

  I squirm futilely. “Stop it!”

  He presses a few more hot and fervent kisses against my pussy as an active denial of my request. He hums quietly and sucks on the throbbing clit with abandon, the cruelty of his tongue scraping the sensitive bud with slow twirls.

  My hands fly to his shoulder, pushing and weakly hitting the broad muscles before I move them into his hair. I am so confused about what to do with my hands, but it doesn’t take long to find out.

  He takes my hands in his hair as permission to eat my pussy with vigor. Tits shuddering and hips rocking to his face, Reese chuckles at my desperation with a slither of his tongue down the drenched slit.

  The sensation forces a gurgle of broken wheezes from my heaving lungs, my back arches, and my writhing limbs stiffen.

  He murmurs, lips brushing the soft folds, “I could eat your tiny, little cunt forever.”

  “C-can’t,” I babble. “You can’t—no, you can’t.”

  He licks his lips and eases out from between my thighs to settle his knees on the bed. My legs lay uselessly on his thighs as he jerks me closer to him.

  “Can’t?” he mocks cruelly. “Are you afraid that your dirty, little pussy might get addicted?”

  With a shameful nod, I answer him, “Yeah…”

  “Well,” he teases with a vile grin, “We can’t have that, can we?”

  I nod my head again, but it feels right to shake my head too. I just don’t know which one is the correct answer, so I settle for both.