by Bethany-Kris
Shit.
Who wanted to unpack all of that?
Malachi figured that nonsense out a long time ago with his own family—hadn’t he spent enough years running from his stepfather’s reach of control? —and he had zero plans to return to that drama during his time in the valley town. Hence his preference for a low profile while he was there. And he certainly wouldn’t be bringing up any of that mess with the woman waiting for him in the garage.
If all Gracen needed in a guy like Malachi was a distraction from her broken heart, the rest didn’t seem all that important to the end goal.
He wasn’t offended.
Frankly, his dick had been hard under his black denim jeans from the moment she bent over the front hood for a peek at his work getting the engine separated from the rest of the car. He’d played an uncomfortable game of keeping his erection hidden while they worked through their pizza and beer, but that time was over.
And so was his dry spell.
Nearly.
Once he’d found the last two condoms in the box hidden in his friend’s room, Malachi headed back through the small bachelor’s apartment with walls covered in 80’s wood paneling. If it mattered, Gracen hadn’t missed seeing anything important inside the apartment between the shabby couch Malachi was currently using as a bed and the white tiles with orange detailing in the bathroom. At least, the owner of the building allowed Nader to rip out all the shag carpets—that had seen far better days—in place of gray laminate flooring which made the painted white cupboards seem less old compared to the walls and fixtures.
It helped the place.
But not by much.
Malachi closed the apartment door as he stepped back into the connected garage, condoms raised high enough for the grinning girl across the way to see his motive for leaving.
Gracen nodded broadly. “Ah, smart.”
“I’ll have to replace them. They’re not mine.”
Too much info, asshole.
His inner voice really was a bitch.
Gracen didn’t seem interested in asking about the foil packets, already reaching for him with both her hands until he was close enough that she could catch his shirt. Fisting the fabric, she pulled him hard enough toward her on the stool that he stumbled over his damn shoes.
Laughing, too.
The condoms stayed safe in his closed palm while Gracen reminded him with a long kiss exactly what had officially broken his self-restraint. That tongue of hers flicked against the seam of his lips when he pulled away to breathe.
His celibacy—could he really call it that if his masturbation had been practically daily? —was only slightly accidental, but mostly chosen, aided by the fact he didn’t keep a lot of female friends, and worked for a solitary existence whenever possible.
He let Gracen’s kiss cut the chains.
He could already feel that mouth of hers around his dick until her tongue was painted with his cum. The visual was too much for Malachi, so much so that he didn’t realize how hard he’d grabbed onto Gracen’s sides, her skin soft against his rougher palms, under her hoodie until she whined against his next kiss and leaned slightly away from his touch.
“Easy,” she whispered. “I bruise easily which might not be so bad, but I think I’ve got appointments tomorrow.”
No, that wouldn’t do. He’d had just enough sense before texting her number to check out the salon across the river only to find a business that seemed well-maintained and popular. How many people walked through her doors everyday?
She couldn’t have clients at work genuinely worried only to embarrass herself by explaining the good time she’d had the night before because what choice would she have in the matter? How fast would that news make it around town?
Malachi had an idea.
Some shit never changed.
“Can’t have that,” he muttered. “And you think?”
Gracen blinked up at him, and those pretty eyes of her looked more of a greenish blue under the dim garage light overhead while lust swam in their reflection. “I wasn’t trying to worry about any of those things with you right now. You might make it a little too easy for me.”
Huh.
Well, he also liked that.
His thumb swept over the spot where he’d been too rough while he took one softer kiss from Gracen’s reddened lips. Despite his few-days worth of facial hair growth making his kiss likely prickly, she’d not shied away from the irritation. If she found it irritating at all.
“What do you like?” Malachi asked. “Tell me what you want.”
Gracen’s fingertips danced a beat down his chest until his breath caught hard in his lungs when her touch stopped on the waist of his jeans. There was no pretending like the ridge of his erection wasn’t below her hands. Within reach. Very visible. “Would you let me just ... play?”
“Girl, you can do whatever the fuck you want.”
He meant it, too.
As long as she touched him.
His consent clear between them, she wasted no time working his jeans open, and tugging them down his hips. His boxer briefs quickly followed the same path, shoved down with the rest of the offending material until his hard cock jutted between them.
Gracen nibbled on her bottom lip, half hiding her grin but also testing his patience in the worst way as her fingertips glided over the circumcised head of his dick.
Christ.
There was no way to hide the low grunt that split his lips when her thumb rolled down the underside of his shaft. Malachi would be a damned liar if he said his breath didn’t catch when Gracen stroked his bare shaft with two hands. One on top of the other so he felt it from his balls all the way to the top.
She leaned up for another kiss while her hands worked his cock, her lips pink and pouty for his mouth. Ready whenever he wanted. All he had to do was tip his head down to take the kiss.
Instead, he took a second to enjoy the view. He’d not even taken this woman’s hoodie off to get his hands on her body properly, but there was something wicked in the way she offered to please him first.
Debasing, maybe.
Or would she like that, too?
Malachi made it a note to find out.
“Say please,” he told her, huskier than he’d realized until the words crawled out of his throat.
Gracen pouted harder for her kiss, making her heart-shaped face seem sweeter. “Please.”
Only a crazy man could refuse.
He was a lot of things.
Crazy wasn’t one of them.
“Oh, my God,” Malachi mumbled against Gracen’s smiling lips, steadying his sudden weak knees by gripping tight to her bare knees. “Why does that feel so fucking good?”
“Like this too?” she asked back, switching to just one hand driving up and down his shaft while her other slid lower to cup his balls.
Fuck.
Yep.
“That’s perfect, too,” he told her.
Maybe in another life Malachi had done something wonderful and amazing to deserve the total endorphin rush and pleasure squeezing through his aching chest promising release, but in those seconds, he didn’t care to figure out what it was.
The tingling in his spine came on quick.
So did the familiar tightening in his balls.
It should have been embarrassing how fast Malachi orgasmed by nothing more than Gracen’s hands—considering his own had been his only source of getting off for way too damn long—but in the moment it barely registered.
His hard pants of breaths and choppy moans gave her a little bit of warning for what was to come when he spilled into her hand. Malachi tightened his grip on her knees, feeling the flinch race up her thighs at the force before he crushed his mouth to hers once more.
He shuddered through every pulse of pleasure, every spurt of warm cum she used to lubricate him for her next stroke. Like she knew he needed those extra twenty seconds to let the shivers race through his body while his dick softened, Gracen only slowed a little.<
br />
She never stopped until he made her with one of his hands catching hers at the head of his shaft. Body electric, every touch from then on would feel like sparks under his skin if he didn’t relax for a damned minute.
“Whoa,” he muttered, nuzzling his face into the side of Gracen’s neck, so she wouldn’t see his squeezed shut eyes.
Softly, her cheek rubbed along his.
He didn’t need to tell her.
Probably shouldn’t.
What did it even matter?
Malachi came in mere minutes while Gracen sat on a stool and jerked him off. Fuck his ego—he loved every second of it, too.
“That was the best orgasm I’ve had in years,” he admitted under his breath; his words were still thick like the muscles tight in his throat.
Gracen’s pleased smile made him think she was heaven sent when her big doe-eyes glanced up at him, and she still had his semi-hard, semen-stained cock in her hands. She only confirmed it further, cementing the fact he was the greedy fish chasing after her dangling hook, when she said, “Tell me when—I’ll do it again.”
Malachi cleared the hoarseness from his throat. “Shit, just use your mouth to clean me up. That’ll do the damn job, too.”
Gracen didn’t blink a lash at the request, and her sly smile said she wouldn’t refuse. “I think the wrong person is sitting down for that, huh?”
Well ...
She wasn’t wrong.
“Let’s fix that.” He nodded at her, his tongue flicking at his upper lip, unable to disregard her slick fingers sliding along his slowly stiffening shaft. There clearly wouldn’t be an issue getting in a round two.
Chapter 8
“We need another drink for this.”
The echoed words bounced through Gracen’s aching head as her eyes peeled open to the darkness of a strange space. The second she was awake, blinking away the dream that was replaying the events of the night before, she was able to hear the real reason that she’d been pulled from a rum-soaked slumber. It was then that Gracen knew she had screwed up.
Just a little.
She remembered exactly how she found herself snuggled in a quilt with Malachi on a ratty couch that had seen better days, and how she’d ended the late hours of the morning burying fits of alcohol-induced giggles into Malachi’s muscled chest. The rum hadn’t been a bad idea after Gracen finally convinced Malachi to climb inside the back of his friend’s car to use one of the only things that looked brand new inside the shell of a car other than the leather-wrapped steering wheel. He all out refused to tell her how much the two items, taken from a wreck at a junkyard down the highway, cost his friend.
In the end, it wasn’t that important when the only thing they had planned for the mint condition seat would do nothing to help the value. At least, they put Malachi’s shirt down. She’d let him get her totally naked for that; the bench seat deserved a proper christening, even if it wasn’t hers to do.
Who would tell?
She could still feel the red leather of the back seat acting as a cushion for her knees as the memory of Malachi’s intent gaze slammed back into Gracen’s head while she replayed through the night before and what lead her to this moment.
All things considered, she should have said no to a drink with forty-proof liquor when she was a notorious lightweight, but rum was her weakness. Blame it on the fact her Mimi—the grandmother who took Gracen in—loved a splash or more of rum in her tea at night, and it was the only available liquor readily available just a locked cabinet away for her rebellious teenaged self.
Nearly a half hour or more since her last drink, she figured the rum and coke wouldn’t be that bad. It took half the glass, and easy conversation that they took inside the apartment while they cleaned up, for her to realize how hard the liquor hit.
And when it did?
Whoa.
“My roommate hears everything,” a slightly buzzed Gracen had told Malachi the night before. It was just her luck that she also happened to be a loud, clumsy drunk. As soon as the liquor hit, she tended to lose things as much as she became acquainted with walls and furniture. Her sense of coordination had never proved great when she got tipsy.
His friend whose name was on the apartment lease wouldn’t be home until the next night, so he offered the couch, if she could stand to sleep with a partner. The liquor, and maybe the man making the offer, had been able to make it hard on Gracen to say no.
Their sweat-slicked skin peeled apart while she breathed in the unmoving air inside the apartment, and cold air rushed inside their warm cocoon when she sat up on the couch at the sound of her alarm ringing somewhere in front of Gracen. The open concept of the layout meant she sat up to face a small flatscreen sitting on a handmade wooden TV stand, and the island where she’d sat her hoodie and phone the night before. Her sudden movement earned her a grunt from the warm, hard body moving at her back.
Gracen blinked a couple more times.
Maybe she hadn’t been all the way awake until then because her vision cleared to say the curtains behind the couch weren’t thick enough to keep the morning light out entirely. The tiny apartment wasn’t as dark as she first thought it was.
“Crap,” she mumbled.
“Hey, hey,” came the sleepy call grumbled against her lower back.
She could feel every scratch of his unshaven jaw moving against the dimples he’d praised and kissed as he’d stripped her clothes one piece at a time.
It was hard to stay in the present when her mind would much rather drift back to the night before when she’d dared to take a few hours to step outside of the very confining box she called her life. Gracen couldn’t mentally afford to be one hundred percent, one hundred percent of the time, but the way she chose to express and release that frustration didn’t have to be fodder for opinion and gossip by the rest of the people in her life.
It would be kind of tough to hide a night like she just had when she was already so late to wake up on a workday with morning appointments that her phone was beeping with the alarm meant to be a notification for her daily birth control pill—that she took at ten. It wasn’t the same chime-like tune that should have woken her up quite a while ago like it did every other morning.
Long after the Haus should have opened.
Had she accidentally silenced her phone the night before?
It was a possibility. The only push notification her phone allowed in sleep mode was her damn birth control because that was a no-excuse task on the daily. For obvious reasons, even if she wasn’t having regular sex.
Last night proved why consistency mattered. Their second condom split after Malachi had finished. The couch hadn’t been used to simply sleep after the two snuggled in under the blanket and their quiet conversation around her bouts of giggles turned into a kiss with sinful intentions. One, and then another. Before Gracen knew it, she was guiding Malachi’s hands between her thighs under the heavy quilt to work her into an orgasm that she could still hear him begging her for in the darkness. His forgotten pile of clothes had been closer—with that fateful rubber.
Fuck.
“Are you going to give me another, angel? Come on, I want it.”
Gracen tried to blink away Malachi’s words. Now wasn’t the time, and she needed to focus on what should be important and where she should be.
She could smell him all around her.
Because he was still there. It aided the memory fighting to keep her happy and sleepy, wrapped in warmth and the smell of sex with Malachi on a couch, in an apartment that did not belong to her. This was not where she should wake up on a Monday morning.
More than Gracen could handle.
“Where you goin’?” he sleepily asked while his fingertips glided along Gracen’s bare thigh still covered with the quilt.
God.
She wanted him to keep touching her. To do what he had last night. Again and again. Desperately because maybe then she wouldn’t have to consider showing up to work late, apologizing to clients
who showed up to find their stylist MIA, never mind the questions she would have to answer from Delaney and Margot.
Had Delaney been worried?
Called a million times?
Probably.
Shit.
How had Gracen silenced her phone? She couldn’t figure it out, but sitting there with gooseflesh prickled skin while her greatest temptation touched her wasn’t going to get Gracen any closer to fixing what was already fucked up.
“I’m late for work,” was all Gracen managed to stammer.
She studiously ignored the man who eyed her from the couch with one arm slung haphazardly across his face while she raced around the dimly lit room to find all her things. Or rather, what really mattered.
Sure enough, her phone was on silent mode. Correcting the setting after she’d pulled on her yoga shorts and hoodie—fuck the sports bra she couldn’t spot upon an easy survey of the kitchen and living quarters; she didn’t have time to check the bathroom and garage—her phone immediately lit up with every missed call, text, and calendar notification she’d managed to miss over the last several hours.
“Fuck,” she whined under her breath, and stuffed the problem into her pocket where she could pretend like the phone didn’t exist for the moment.
“You good?” came a groggy croak.
Malachi didn’t sound drunk, or hungover. Hell, he’d ended up drinking less than her when he’d not even finished his one glass before hers was entirely gone.
Stupid, she chastised herself.
“I missed a color this morning,” she told him, heading for the door where she had toed her shoes off on a welcome mat just inside the door next to his combat boots.
“Oh?”
She didn’t need to check her calendar to know the appointment she was expected to show up to next, never mind the long-time customer Gracen would need to contact to apologize for her terrible morning.
“Yeah, and something in a half hour,” she muttered at the front door.
“Kay, I guess,” Malachi returned with a smack of his mouth, “but you could have kissed me goodbye.”