by Avery Flynn
“You broke the rules,” he said, gripping her hips and flipping her over so she was on her back on the bed, her long legs dangling off the end.
“Never,” she said, her voice low and husky with want as she watched him move from sitting on the bed to being on his knees on the floor, one of her legs on either side of him. “I’m English. We follow the rules.”
“I told you to get naked. You didn’t.” He laid his palms on her knees and spread her legs. “Now you pay the price.”
“That sounds dastardly.” She slipped her bra off and tossed it to the floor. Then traced a finger up her bare thigh, drawing his attention to her glistening folds. “Do your worst.”
“I plan to.” He could already taste her on his tongue, but she wasn’t getting off that easy—not yet anyway.
He started with her calves, touching and caressing them as she cupped her tits, pinching the nipples and pulling them taut. His cock was heavy against his thigh, pre-cum wetting the tip. The need to sink himself deep inside her thundered inside him, but he held it in check. He wanted to watch her come first.
“That’s it,” he said between kisses and licks on her inner thigh, getting closer and closer to her core.
Continuing upward, he lingered at the edge of the tight, springy curls framing her wet folds. Her scent was intoxicating, and he moved his mouth within a half inch of her swollen clit, close enough to blow on it as she shivered in response.
“Nick,” she begged, lifting her hips. “Please.”
Ignoring the gift she offered up, he moved his attention to her other leg, just above her knee. “That’s not much of a punishment if I give you what you want.” He looked up at her and glided his hands up her thighs until they were as high as they could go, thumbs and fingers just barely brushing her curls. “You’ll thank me later.”
“Not bloody likely,” she said, her obvious frustration building along with her need.
“Are you going to follow the rules next time?” He reached out his thumb and touched her clit with light, feathery caresses, not enough to satisfy, just enough to make her want more.
“Yes,” she said, her hips squirming.
He chuckled, dropping kisses up the insides of one of her smooth thighs. “I don’t know if I can believe you.”
“Nick Vane, please,” she begged. “I can’t take it.”
“We both know you can.” But he wasn’t going to make her wait. He was a dick sometimes, but not a complete asshole, so he put his mouth exactly where she wanted it.
She tasted like warm heaven and he couldn’t get enough. Using his hands to spread her wide, he licked and sucked and teased her sweet, sensitive flesh, lapping his tongue against her swollen clit again and again as she writhed beneath him, her words replaced by moans of encouragement and pleas for more. He moved one hand lower, grazing her opening with his thumb and sliding inward. She grasped him tight and let out a shaky groan, so he did it again, giving her more of exactly what she wanted until she came apart against his mouth, calling out his name.
Sitting back, he watched Brooke come down from her orgasm, the beauty of it taking the air from his lungs and replacing it with a kind of awe he hadn’t experienced before. Something moved in his chest as he watched her roll up into a sitting position, her gaze hazy and satisfied. This woman could break him if she wanted. He was beyond out of his depth with her. However, before the realization could take an icy hold on him, she reached up and curled her hand around the back of his neck and drew him to her for a kiss, and the part of his brain that sent up flares for danger short-circuited.
He curled an arm around her waist and pulled her upward on the bed as he joined her on the mattress, their bodies a tangle of limbs as they each tried to touch, caress, nip, kiss, lick, and revel in each other as much as possible. He cupped her tits, rolling her nipples between his thumb and finger as she kissed her way down his neck. If his cock had ever been harder, he didn’t know when.
“Nick, I want you inside me,” she said, reaching down and taking his dick in her hand. “Now.”
Jesus. Electricity shot through him as if he’d been hit by lightning. “Yes, ma’am.”
He reached across the bed and yanked open the nightstand drawer, pulling out a condom. While he watched her hands skim across his abs as she dipped her head and licked his nipple, he rolled on the latex. With both of them on their sides facing each other, he hooked an arm under her top leg and lifted it, then lined himself up with her opening and slid his cock inside her until he was buried to the hilt. It felt like his eyes rolled back in his head, and for a moment he couldn’t move as her core held him tight.
“So fucking tight. So good.”
He withdrew and thrust forward again and again, but the angle wouldn’t let him get deep enough. He wanted more. He needed to make her his in this moment. Releasing her leg, he pulled back as she groaned in protest.
“On your knees.”
She followed his command, getting on her hands and knees on the bed in front of him. Even though his dick was actually aching at this point to get inside her, he forced himself to wait and take in the sight of her as the moonlight coming in through the window highlighted the smooth lines of her back, the round curve of her ass, and the lust burning in her eyes as she looked over her shoulder at him.
He took his dick in his hand and rubbed the head against her slick opening. “Is this what you want?”
“Yes.” She pushed back, trying to take him in, but his palm on her ass stopped her.
Keeping his hand high on his cock, he plunged forward so only the tip went in. “Just this?”
She shook her head. “I want you. All of you.”
The words were the final thing that snapped his self-control. He released his grip and sank home, hard, inside her. Gripping her hips, he pulled her back against him in time with his thrusts forward, taking her, claiming her, making her his. He couldn’t get enough of her and wasn’t sure he ever would. She met his every move, rotating her hips and grinding against him as they came together in a frenzy that had them both panting, their bodies glistening with sweat. Over and over, he buried himself inside her warmth, pleasure skittering through him like a runaway freight train. The tingling at the base of his spine came too soon—he didn’t want this feeling to end, but his body had other ideas. Everything had been building between them like extended foreplay for too long. He slid one hand down between her legs and circled her clit. She let out a strangled cry and her arms gave out, her face hitting the mattress.
“Don’t you dare stop,” she demanded, continuing to thrust back toward him, her thighs shaking.
He didn’t. Gritting his teeth to stave off the orgasm making his balls tight, he stroked her clit, circling the sensitive nub and fucking her until she screamed out, her hands fisting the sheets as tight as her core gripped his dick. That was all it took. He got one more deep thrust in before his own orgasm hit, arching his back and turning his body stiff with release.
They both collapsed on the bed—well, he collapsed, Brooke just let her lower half join her upper half on the bed. His balls were heavy, his eyelids drooping.
“That was—” he started.
“Phenomenal,” she finished, sitting up and moving to get off the bed.
His lungs clenched with some foreign emotion at the prospect of her going, and he wrapped a hand around her wrist. “Don’t go.”
“Just going to the toilet,” she said with a shy smile. “I’ll be right back.”
He cleaned up while she was in the bathroom. When she emerged, still naked and blindingly beautiful, he flipped open the sheets and patted the bed beside him. She joined him under the covers, her head fitting just right in the pocket of his shoulder.
“I have a confession to make,” she whispered, trailing her fingers through his chest hair and keeping her focus firmly away from his face.
His pulse
picked up. “What’s that?”
Her gaze rose to his face. “I like you, Nick Vane, and this might get complicated.”
“I like you, too, and complications don’t bother me,” he said, heartbeat slowing as he stroked the long silk of her hair. “I like working out puzzles.”
She smiled up at him, kissed the spot just below his collarbone, and closed her eyes.
Five minutes, an hour, a lifetime later, Nick lay in his bed with Brooke and stared out at the room. It wasn’t much. A bed. A nightstand. A dresser. It didn’t have the lake lapping lazily outside his window like his place in Salvation or the sound of croaking frogs coming in on a warm breeze drifting in through the window—but it had Brooke. And as she snuggled against his side, her naked body fitting perfectly against his, he decided that at that moment, it was better. It was the only place he wanted to be.
The realization should have scared the shit out of him. He held his breath, waiting for the itch of fear to prick at the back of his brain. When it didn’t come, he let out a long breath, wrapped his arm tighter around Brooke, and fell asleep.
Chapter Twenty-One
The undead were everywhere, and Nick couldn’t find Brooke.
Mace must have hired 90 percent of the village as extras for the big zombie wedding ball scene. Nick made his way through the zombies walking from the makeup trailers in the stable house driveway to the big house, where they stood on the edge of the set, which Mace had called a “no-go zone,” where only director, actors, camerapeople, and other must-haves were allowed. He was not and neither, it seemed, were the zombie hordes. Brooke, however, had managed to get past the invisible velvet rope.
One of the crew, a skinny guy in a black T-shirt and artfully torn jeans with—no lie—a newsboy cap was next to her, chatting her up. He was the kind of guy who only ordered craft beer made in small batches that had been flavored with the stolen acorns of woodland fairies and talked in condescending tones about the true righteousness of records played on his authentic gramophone. Nick wanted to crunch his nose to dust.
“Fancy meeting you here,” Daisy said, stopping to stand next to him.
Or at least he thought it was her. Gray skin, one eye hanging halfway down her cheek, and only a few blond wisps of hair covering her oozing head.
“Daisy?”
“In the undead flesh.”
“You look horrible.”
“Thank you.” She grinned up at him, showing off a mouth with only a handful of yellow teeth in it. “Check out Riley’s heart.”
He glanced over at the big man next to Daisy before his brain could warn him off. Riley’s face was pretty much the same, if grayer and slimier, but the real stomach turner was the hunk of skin and muscle missing from his chest that gave the perfect view of a putrid heart behind his exposed rib cage.
“The makeup folks really know what they’re doing.”
“It took forever, but how could we miss this?” Daisy slipped her hand into Riley’s. “Bowhaven’s never seen anything like it.”
Well, things sure had changed since he’d been village-napped.
“So who made the first move?” Nick asked, not bothering to hide the shit-eating grin he aimed at the big forest ranger.
Riley’s blush managed to give his makeup a pinkish hue. Daisy, on the other hand, just grinned.
“Me, of course,” she said. “Now the village has something else to talk about other than just wondering if you and Brooke are more than just heir and secretary.”
“They’re talking about that, huh?” As if magnetized, his gaze went back to Brooke inside the forbidden zone with the skinny guy who was standing way too close to the woman who’d been screaming Nick’s name as she came hard only a few hours ago.
Caveman tendencies? Possessive? Jealous? Him? Fucking A, yes he was.
“Take a breath there, John Wick,” Daisy said. “She’s just talking to him.”
Only half aware that there were other people in the world, he turned back to the diminutive zombie next to him so she could read his lips. “What?”
“Nothing,” Daisy said with a chuckle that ended when a hard look entered her eyes that gave him pause. “You know what happened with Reggie?”
That fucker? Oh yeah, he knew and wanted to squash him like a bug because of it. However, since she’d already called him out for being a me-Tarzan-you-Jane dipshit, he just said, “Yeah.”
“So know this.” She leaned forward, enough grit in her tone to make his blood chill in his veins. “No one will ever hurt her like that again.”
Subtle? Not in the least, but that wasn’t Daisy’s style. “I understand.”
“Good, because I like you, Nick Vane, but I love my sister.”
And there it was, the thing he couldn’t give Brooke, not now, not ever—that sense of permanence. He didn’t know jack shit about forever except that it was a lie. Everyone leaves, so why bother trying to pretend otherwise? Brooke believed that following the rules meant success, she believed right triumphed over wrong, she believed that forever wasn’t a fairy tale—even if she wouldn’t admit it to herself, let alone him. If she didn’t, she never would have been making all this effort to bring Bowhaven back to what it had been and push it toward what it could be. And he would be nothing but a sometimes visitor to that world. It was all he knew—that was all he could ever be—because he knew better than anyone else that forever was nothing but a cruel promise that wasn’t any more real than Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella.
The shrill squeak of feedback over a loudspeaker made him flinch before he could respond to Daisy’s threat.
“All zombies report to the great hall,” a woman in a baseball cap armed with a bullhorn said as she walked through the crowd of the undead.
Riley tapped Daisy’s shoulder and she stopped giving Nick the I-will-fuck-your-world glare to turn an adoring gaze onto her new boyfriend.
“We’ve got to go,” he said, once she was turned to him and could read his lips.
She nodded, and a huge smile broke out on her face. “Let’s go eat some brains.”
Riley laughed and they walked off together until they were a part of the undead horde streaming into Dallinger Park.
That left Nick alone to watch the controlled chaos that was a film shoot. It was a lot like baseball. Hours of boredom broken up by a flurry of activity, screams, and cursing. He scanned the area for Brooke, but she wasn’t with the skinny guy anymore. Not by the entrance to the big house. Not on his side of the do-not-cross line. After a few minutes, he finally spotted her deep in discussion with Mace. Her hand was on his forearm and their heads close together as they looked at a monitor showing what was going on inside the great hall.
He’d known Mace for his entire adult life and a good number of years before that. In all that time, he’d never wanted to strangle him. Of course, that was before he saw his oldest friend give Brooke the smile that usually led to a game of: Panties? What panties?
Every muscle in his body was strung tight as he watched them, willing himself not to give in to the urge to pound his friend into the ground. Then Mace turned his head toward Nick and shot him a nothing-going-on-between-you-huh? grin behind Brooke’s back. The asshole. He must have seen Nick approaching and decided to poke the bear. Nick flipped his friend off. Mace just shrugged and turned back toward the monitor Brooke was engrossed with, but this time letting some sunshine—if this country actually had some—between their bodies.
Shit. He needed to dial back this…whatever the fuck it was. He wasn’t the guy. He wasn’t just the one everyone left. He took off, too. He’d walked away from every girlfriend he’d ever had since he’d kissed Jenna Hoffman in sixth grade at the middle school dance. Staying wasn’t in his DNA. And he was leaving soon for Virginia anyway, to get his life in order for the six-month split between there and here.
Of course, that didn’t make him want to
touch her any less, and that was the part that had him walking a thin line. He was the wrong man for her and he still wanted her anyway. Badly. More than he should.
“There you are,” Brooke said, a huge smile on her face as she crossed under the rope cordoning off the no-go zone and over to him. “I was wondering where you’d run off to.”
Standing close enough that the hum of electricity between them practically buzzed in his ears, she reached up and picked off invisible lint from his shirt as if she couldn’t help but touch him. Without thinking, he took her hand in his, the rightness of her fingers being intertwined with his setting off sparks of awareness and a lightning bolt of realization. He didn’t just want her. He was falling for her. And as she looked up at him, desire burning in her blue eyes as she parted her lips expectantly, he knew the last thing she needed in her life—even temporarily—was a man with his kind of baggage.
A better man would have walked away right then. Nick wasn’t a better man. Instead, he gave in to the urge to make Brooke his, dipped his head lower, and claimed her mouth in a kiss that promised everything he couldn’t deliver. He put everything he had into it, all the yearning and bittersweet wanting and tomorrows they couldn’t have. It wasn’t gentle or nice or teasing. It was delicious agony, and he never wanted it to end.
He never heard the other man approaching. It wasn’t until the flash went off and the man hollered “oi” that Nick realized the rest of the world still existed. Drugged on this kiss and denial, Nick broke away from Brooke enough to figure out what was going on. His gut sank.