Atlas grunted and chuckled and again softened the kiss. Her lips encountered the inner velvet of his mouth, but no tongue. They were fusing and sliding and warm, so warm against one another. Again, the helpless sound made its way out of her. Again, she attempted to climb even higher onto Atlas, as if the world were made of lava and he was the last tree on earth.
He sucked her bottom lip into his mouth and held it in place with the gentle grip of his teeth. His tongue slid over her lip and this time Bex’s sound wasn’t small and helpless, it was loud and raw. Like he was testing a bruise with his fingers. It felt good and bad at the same time, to be kissed like this. Like she was finally using her mouth for its intended purpose after all these years and it was sore from learning how.
“Atlas,” she whispered against him, into him.
On a ragged breath, he angled his mouth against hers and opened for her. All she had to do was seek and her tongue would find his, she knew it.
She was just leaning into it when his hands on her ass started to slide. To feel on her. To touch.
She stiffened like she’d been electrocuted as a montage of grabby hands played through her mind. Of being eighteen and running backstage at a strip club after one half of her g-string had been ripped off. Of leering eyes and licked lips and bad breath and dirty hair.
She scrabbled at his shoulders, twisting her head away. He immediately dropped her down so her feet touched the ground but he didn’t release her.
“Bex—”
Her palm cracked hard against his cheek, making his face fling to one side. She shoved away from him hard and collapsed against the couch. She couldn’t see him through the tears in her eyes. Her hand stung and ached. She cradled it against her chest.
“Oh, my god. Atlas. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. It was reflex. Total reflex. I didn’t mean to hit you. I never want to hurt you. I’m—”
“Shhh,” he said and she felt the couch depress under his weight as he sat beside her. “Baby, take a breath, okay?”
Lost, swamped with emotions, regret and lust, she did as he instructed and took a deep breath, punctuated only by her sobs.
“Another.”
She followed directions again. The couch moved as he stood up and came back moments later with a cool glass of water that he pushed into her hands.
He sat down next to her again. “For the record, I’d like to rub your back or hold your hand but I’m sensing that’s not the right move right now.”
“Why would you want t-to c-comfort me?” she asked through tears. “I’m the one who hit you!”
Atlas took a deep breath and scrubbed a hand over his face. He had left a good foot of space between them, she saw as she dashed tears out of her eyes. “Bex, something tells me that was not you that just hit me. That was all your past trauma that hit me. I think you were into it. Your trauma, however, needed some damn space and took it at all costs.”
“Does it hurt?” she asked quietly.
He shrugged. “A little. Beard took the brunt of it, though.” A grin dawned over his face and made Bex dissolve into tears again. He was so good. So sweet.
“Baby… has this happened before?”
She nodded. “With my last boyfriend. Toward the end. When I couldn’t take it anymore.”
He was quiet for a long time. When Bex finally looked up she saw, to her eternal shock, that there were tears glistening on his lashes. He was knuckling at his forehead and gave a great sniff.
“I hate that for you, Bex. I really, really hate that for you.”
She shifted so that their shoulders touched. It made her heart race to do it, and not entirely in a good way. But still, she knew he needed it. She knew she needed it.
“You ever been to therapy for this stuff?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “I never had the money. But one of my friends at the club, she used to tell me to find a therapist. She’d seen one, for different reasons, and thought it was the best thing ever.”
“I’ve been to therapy. To help with stuff that happened with my dad when I was a kid. It’s helped a lot. I think. I dunno. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.” He was quiet as he used his forearm to rub his tears away. “Maybe we could find you a therapist too while we’re at it.”
Rebecca said nothing. Just tried to ride out the wave of feelings that were swamping her.
“In the meantime,” he continued. “We’ll just go nice and slow. Takes things one kiss at a time. No hands, next time. That’s what did it, right? Me touching on your booty? I felt it was the wrong thing to do right when I did it.”
She stared at him in blank shock. “Are you telling me that you want to do that again?”
He blinked at her. “I don’t understand the words you just said.”
She laughed, shock and humor swirling into one thing. “Atlas, I just slapped the shit out of you and you want to try again?”
“Baby, up until you clocked me, that was the best damn kiss of my life. Strike that. That was the only kiss of my life. Every other kiss I’ve had just sort of disappeared.” He scrubbed at his forehead and pinched his eyes closed. After a second he sort of rolled his head to one side and peered at her through one cracked eyelid. “I didn’t know a woman could taste the way you do.”
She couldn’t have said it better herself. She hadn’t known kissing like that was even an option up until now. Her blood pumped hard in her veins from that kiss. Her belly was in knots, her muscles had gone to jelly. But… “I might hit you again. I wasn’t in control. I couldn’t stand it if I hurt you.”
“I’m tough, Bex. It was all right. Honestly…” he trailed off and Rebecca was amazed to see that his cheeks had gone pink.
“What?”
He cleared his throat and pulled at the buttons at his wrist. “I’m too formal for this conversation. Lemme get changed and meet me in the kitchen in five.”
He strode off to change and Bex jumped as someone knocked on the door. She peeked through the peephole and recognized their usual delivery guy for the Chinese restaurant down the block.
She opened the door with a small smile and if he noticed her puffy eyes and tearstained face, he’d been working in New York City long enough to know not to say a damn word about it. He just handed over the food and hightailed it out of there.
Rebecca had just set out their plates amongst the white cartons when Atlas came into the kitchen in his Tabasco pajama pants and a hot pink sweatshirt that read Eisenhower High Cheer Squad in blindingly white letters.
Rebecca turned away from him and let the smile bloom over her face. He was so ridiculous. And yummy. And sweet. She thought again of the blush on his cheeks and wondered what had scattered him so thoroughly.
He pulled a beer out of the fridge and shook it at her. She nodded and Atlas put half of it in a glass for her, keeping the other half for himself. They sat down and peered at one another, the food steaming in its cartons.
“Will you tell me what you were gonna say?” she asked.
“Yeah.” He scraped a hand over his beard and looked a little nervous to say what he had to say. Like he wasn’t sure how she was going to receive all this. “I didn’t like the part where you were scared or freaked or out of control or whatever happened. But I loved everything that happened before that. And, like I said, I’m tough, Bex. If I have to get smacked around a little bit in order to have you, I’m fine with that.”
“You’re fine with that.”
He cleared his throat. “You’re a fighter. In lots of ways. Don’t know why you’d be different in bed.” He cleared his throat again. “You need to fight me to get comfortable with me touching you, I’ll take it. Honestly, I’m probably gonna like it.”
Her eyebrows were up around her hairline by the time he’d stopped talking and there was some pink in his cheeks again. He stared at her, she stared at him.
“You sick bastard.”
They both burst into laughter. Loud, cathartic laughter that had tears once again rolling down Rebecca’s face. In a good way.
/>
“Maybe I am,” he eventually said. “But only for you. I will take you any way I can get you and I don’t mean that casually.”
She took a deep breath. And let the laughter roll through her once more. It felt good to laugh. “I’m all mixed up, Atlas. I have no idea what the hell just happened. Or what to do about it. Or…”
“Did you like kissing me?”
“So much,” she whispered.
“Then, like I said. Let’s take it slow, get your legal mess figured out, get you some damn therapy, and see what happens next.”
She glanced up at him, barely able to believe what he’d just said.
“No rush,” he said eventually and lifted his beer bottle in the air.
“No rush,” she repeated. And clinked her glass against his.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Atlas figured that Bex probably needed some space to work things out in her head. So, after dinner that night, he cleaned up by her side, blew her a kiss from across the room, and went to bed.
He had to be in at work early the next morning so he didn’t get to see her, and when he got home that night, she wasn’t there.
Atlas went for a run around the neighborhood and when he got home, sweating and panting, there she was, perched on the armchair in the living room, pretending to read a book but really waiting for him to get home.
It made him smile. She was so cute. So nervous. So damaged… that part didn’t make him smile. The darkness that Bex carried around with her was obviously heavy. She was dealing with bad things. That was obvious to anyone, but especially to a man who’d been through some bad things himself.
He didn’t want to push her. But he wanted to push her a little bit. Pushing her a little bit had gotten her legs wrapped around his waist and her moaning into his mouth. He wasn’t being selfish here, she’d obviously liked it as much as he had. And that kind of thing was good for the soul. Rubbing up on someone you liked, kissing and touching and being merry with someone who wanted to do the same with you.
He cared about Bex’s soul and what was good for it. As he watched her, perched on the armchair, a thought crystallized in his brain: he’d never wanted to make someone happier than he wanted to make Bex.
She looked up at him with a solemn face and gave a somber nod. He grinned toothily at her, sweat coursing down the side of his face.
She rolled her eyes and that made him grin even harder.
“Stay right there, okay? Don’t move,” he requested. He jogged back to his room, showered off with lightning speed and changed into some sweats and a sleeveless shirt with the pink panther on it.
He was shoving his hair to the side when he came into the living room and plunked onto the couch on the opposite side of the room from Bex.
“Why did I need to stay right here?” she asked, her eyes flicking down to his exposed shoulders and back to his face. He couldn’t be certain from this distance, but he was almost positive she was staring at his mouth. Yup. Definitely.
“So that we could sit on opposite sides of the room and I could show you that I’m not gonna up and jump you now that you’ve let me kiss you once.”
Her mouth thinned and she rolled her eyes and held up her book, but he caught the edges of a smile before she could completely hide her face.
“But,” he told her, “there’s plenty of room on this couch and I wouldn’t stop you if wanted to slide your pretty self on over here.”
She lowered the book and stared at him. “I’ll probably end up slapping you again.”
“Men have endured more for far less.”
She lifted the book up to cover her face again and Atlas was positive she was smiling. “Atlas,” she said and then lowered the book down, closing it and losing her page. “You haven’t even asked.”
He furrowed his brow. “Asked what?”
“You haven’t asked if there’s good reason for me to be wanted for questioning on those two separate murder cases.”
Atlas raised his eyebrows. Bex, his Bex, who normally danced and silenced her way through hard conversations was going full blunt. “Well, I didn’t exactly think you’d answer. And I also did a little bit of research for myself that reassured me you weren’t going to shank me in my sleep.”
She pursed her lips but didn’t seem to be able to keep from asking him. “What kind of research?”
“I had a friend, who’s a detective out in Sheepshead Bay, reach out to the head detective on those cases.” He didn’t make her ask. Delaying this would be torturous for her. “And that head detective doesn’t think you’re a murderer.”
“He doesn’t.” Her words were blank but her face looked deeply relieved.
“For a few different reasons. One, Jeff Mather, the first victim in question, was strangled to death.”
Bex winced and covered her face with her hands.
“Considering he was 250 pounds, they don’t think that someone who was 110 pounds soaking wet could have managed that. Two, Mark Ball, the second victim, had male DNA under his fingernails from the night he was killed. They think he got a few scratches in on his killer and it wasn’t a woman.”
Bex stood up and strode over to the window, looking blankly down at the street, Brooklyn bustling by below her. “I could have hired someone to kill them. One and then the other.”
“Did you?” he asked calmly, already knowing the answer in his heart.
“No,” she whispered. She whirled around, panic in her face. “Don’t ask me any more tonight, Atlas. Not tonight.”
“Okay,” he said, wanting to keep things simple and easy for her. Already she’d given him so much more than he’d thought that she would. She was answering his questions and looking right at him and maybe she’d kiss him later. He wasn’t going to take what she wasn’t offering and that included information. “Wanna watch TV?”
“Oh.” She blinked at him. “Okay. Should I order dinner?”
“Thai?”
“Sure.”
He listened to her order on her phone and then, as he’d hoped she would, she came and sat down on the same couch he was sitting on. All the way on the other end, but still, that was something.
He tossed the remote down her way and let her pick what they watched. He tossed a pillow down by her thigh and stretched himself out on the couch. He wasn’t touching her, but the top of his head rested maybe six inches from her.
After a few minutes of watching Jurassic Park, Atlas felt her start to fiddle with his hair. She was tugging it one way or another and he was in heaven. He rolled onto his back and looked up at her. There was a blush on her cheeks.
“Wanna kiss?” he asked her, trying not to push her in any direction, just trying to make it easy for her if it was already on her mind in the first place.
Her lips twitched, as if she were holding in a smile, but her eyes looked a mixture of excited and afraid. Her breath washed over him.
Her eyes on his, Bex leaned over his face. She hesitated an inch from his mouth and he didn’t move. They didn’t line up, the way they were situated. It was almost an upside-down kiss, but her mouth was angled to the side as well. Atlas would have moved, changed the angle, but he was pretty sure anything he did now ran the risk of frightening her off. Instead he held perfectly still and imagined himself reeling her in on a great, cosmic fishing pole.
Apparently she took the bait.
Bex’s lips pressed against his and her nose bumped the side of his chin. Their lips connected messily and Atlas groaned with how good it felt.
“You like that?” she whispered.
“Nothing better,” he whispered back.
“But it’s so messy this way.” As if to prove her thesis, she kissed him again, both their mouths opening in a wet, off center kiss.
“I love messy,” he told her, gripping the couch in an effort not to reach up and pin her head in place.
“Why does that not surprise me?” she quipped, her eyes on his mouth. She was about to kiss him again when the doorbell rang and she ho
pped up.
Atlas let out a long, thin breath and threw two triumphant fists in the air. They’d kissed and no one had gotten slapped in the face. That was a major win for them.
They were decidedly less lucky after dinner though. Bex had just finished clearing up and Atlas sat on the counter with a carton of ice cream in one hand and a spoon in the other. He took a bite and then scooped another and held it out to her. She leaned forward to take the bite and Atlas yanked it away.
Her lids lowered in aroused annoyance, immediately understanding the game. Atlas lured her closer to where he sat on the counter, his legs spread wide.
She tentatively took one step and then another until she stood between his spread knees. He gave her the bite of chocolate ice cream and then she shocked the shit out of him by rising up on her toes and pressing her lips to his. The flavor, the coolness of the ice cream, having her in his space, it was all a jolt to his system and just as their tongues were about to swim against one another, his knees tightened on either side of her hips.
And yup. Crack! She’d smacked him good right across the face.
“Yow,” he said bluntly, stretching his face in and out, trying to disperse the sharp pain in his cheek. “You’ve got quite the arm.”
Bex’s eyes swam with tears as she cradled her hand and he knew that the best thing to do was to not make a big deal out of this. Eventually, she’d have to go to therapy and get this shit sorted out. But in the meantime, he figured it was his job to keep her calm and let her know how much he wanted her no matter what.
“Let’s take this ice cream into the living room and watch TV. You can hold it against my cheek with your hurt hand, that way we both win.”
She’d followed him into the living room and Bex had done just that, feeding him bite by bite until it was bedtime. In that way, Atlas had felt as if he’d lost a little but won a lot.
The next day was a Saturday. A Saturday in Brooklyn in early May and Atlas felt that the only proper thing to do on a day like that was to go on a date.
“A date?” she asked skeptically over cheerios that morning. Her face was all kinds of twisted up and her spoon made patterns in her cereal.
Rook Security Complete Series Page 66