by Anne Malcom
We were at the precipice of something, I knew that. Kershaw had been dormant for too long. And men like him didn’t skulk off with their tails between their legs, especially after being bested by a woman. He was planning something. I had to be two steps ahead.
Then there was Jacob. It couldn’t continue on like this, despite our time together having an expiration date. The tension was getting so tight between us it was going to snap.
I was going to.
He was chained to my routine, and he was not a man that was designed for such things. I expected to get down for my run one morning and not see him. For him to just melt back into the shadows from where he came.
If I was honest with myself, that was my greatest fear. Not whatever Kershaw was planning. Not the prospect of losing everything I’d worked for. And not even the prospect of losing myself to the disease that claimed my mother and killed my father.
It was Jacob.
Or more accurately, the absence of him.
And on that thought, as if by something Molly would’ve described as fate and I put down to coincidence, he strode through the door to my office.
The air turned wired with his presence and I was too much of a coward to meet his eyes, cold certainty washing over me that this was it, this was him coming in for whatever sort of goodbye a man like him would offer.
I pretended to look at my screen while Jacob stood in the middle of the room, staring at me, yanking at the loose threads of my soul with nothing but his attention.
I waited. Didn’t breathe.
“I wasn’t there that night, in the alley, by chance.” His voice was a low rasp, gravel and whisky.
I didn’t look up. “I know.”
There was a loaded pause as I took Jacob by surprise. I steeled myself not to look up so I could witness it. And like with most exercises of control with the man in front of me, I failed.
He was staring at me in something more than the flat and intense gaze that was characteristic, a small change, but important. With people that had such constant control, there were no such things as small changes.
“You know?” he repeated.
I nodded. “Rarely anything in this world happens by chance, regardless of what people like my sister believe. There is no fate, no destiny. Everything in this world is controlled, calculated by people like me. People who pull the strings. It’s only once you get high enough that the fall is fatal do you realize such things. So I know you weren’t just taking a midnight stroll, kismet for such things do not exist.”
“You know why I was there?” he asked. I was collecting his questions, not as victories, as they should’ve been, but something else.
“No, but I could take an educated guess.” I put down my pen. “Though I don’t take guesses, educated or otherwise. It seems you’re ready to enlighten me.”
He clenched his fists. Another small change, another huge signifier of what emotions he was feeling. That he was feeling anything at all.
“I wasn’t lying when I told you I wasn’t a hitman,” he said.
I regarded him. “I know.”
His jaw ticked. “But I do shit. Sometimes for money. Sometimes for free.” He paused. “Though everything costs something. Feeds something.”
I wasn’t surprised. I’d accepted as much about him. Maybe that’s why I was so obsessed with him. I was obsessed with death, my own more specifically. He was the embodiment of it. Death itself and my own demise.
“Wrong people got in touch with me, armed with the right information about who I was.” He paused again. The jaw tick resumed. “About who I am,” he corrected. “Took the information about what they needed. Not so politely declined.” His gaze was an anchor on my chest. “Knew it was a woman, and it didn’t bother me. I’ve killed women before. Death doesn’t discriminate, so I don’t. That’s not why I said no. It was who the call was comin’ from. People I knew weren’t killing for the right reasons, if there ever is a right reason. Knew there was a chance, a high one, you’d be innocent. Still wasn’t plannin’ on interfering. I walk at night. Lookin’ for shit. Or waitin’ for shit to find me. My feet found me in that alley. I don’t believe in fate or destiny either. Or I didn’t. ‘Til I slit the throat of the man who was tryin’ to kill you.”
I blinked at him. Once. Twice. Three times.
I needed to find my composure.
I had to.
He had just told me that he got a call about someone planning my assassination, that he wasn’t planning on stopping it until he actually did.
If there were ever a reason to call security and get him out of my office and my life, beyond all of the others, this was a huge and glaring one.
I pushed my chair out, got on unsteady feet and rounded my desk. He didn’t speak, didn’t move his body, apart from his eyes, which followed me.
I stopped in front of him. My breathing was sharp, punishing my lungs. Or was it the air that surrounded him?
I didn’t think. I did. My hand was fastened on the back of his neck, yanking him down before I realized I was touching him. And his mouth smashed down on mine and all of my coherent thought disappeared.
The kiss was violent.
There was no other way to describe it.
Every second we’d spent together had led up to this moment. Our mouths clashing in a brutal war for control. I wasn’t yielding. Neither was he. It lasted for an eternity and for a mere second until I yanked my head back.
I stared at him. “You’re everything that I shouldn’t want. Shouldn’t crave,” I whispered. “You’re wild. Chaos. I can’t control anything when I’m around you. Not even my breath. I’ve worked my whole life for it and you’re making me want to throw it all away.”
He stared at me. “You’re everything I don’t deserve.”
His hand had found its way to my hip, the other was tight on my neck.
“Happiness,” he continued, voice rough and his hand began to squeeze.
I reveled in the pain. “I don’t think that’s what this is,” my voice was a low rasp. “That’s what we promise.” I ran my eyes along him greedily. “We are a lot of things. But I don’t think we’ll be happy. We’ll be better. And worse. And it may destroy us both.”
The words hung in the air, an omen, a promise, a death sentence perhaps.
And then there weren’t words in the air. There was only the blur of motion as he attached his mouth to mine. My entire body submitted to his control immediately, without question, without fight.
Surrender.
It was always surrender with Jacob.
His hands tore through my carefully styled chignon, tearing at the pins holding the strands together while his mouth’s brutal assault of mine tore at the pins inside me, holding me together.
If you’d asked me before this moment whether a mere kiss could tear you apart and not care if you’d ever be put back together or not, I’d call you a romantic idiot and go about my day.
But now, my day wasn’t anything but a plea that this would never stop. I worried some little sliver of me that remained logical, whether my day or life might never be the same again after this kiss.
I cried out in surprise, pain, and pleasure as his teeth grazed my lips, sending warm blood into my mouth. His assault quickened with the metallic twang being shared between us, as the wolf craved the blood and went crazy with it.
My hands moved underneath his tee and I raked my nails down his back, tearing through the skin, warm liquid seeped onto my fingers. He let out a grunt at this and the hardness at his belt buckle pressed into me harder.
Maybe I had a wolf in me too.
He let out a low growl in his throat and his hands went to my hips, lifting me, walking us back and placing me—not gently—on my desk. Then, he leaned back, depriving my lips of his.
My pussy clenched the second my eyes met his. There was no control left in them. There was no man. This was all monster.
His hands went to the bottom of my skirt, grabbing the delicate fabri
c in his rough and scarred hands he ripped. From hem to waist, he tore at the fabric until it was split in half and exposed my garters and stockings.
He let out a low hiss that was not human. That I felt right in between my legs. My legs were spread apart with the same violence the kiss had started with. I didn’t expect any tenderness here. I didn’t want tenderness. Polite, passionate touches as I’d had in the past.
I wanted wild, fierce, I wanted pain. Agony.
His fingers pressed into my inner thighs with a force that would leave bruises on my pale skin.
My teeth sank into the flesh of my lip until I tasted blood. I didn’t even feel the pain, but warmth spread from my lips as some of it escaped.
Jacob’s feral gaze traveled up to focus on me. He zeroed in on my mouth, his hand was up, wiping the thin trail of crimson from my mouth with his thumb. He lifted his hand, slowly and purposefully put it into his mouth.
I bit my lip harder, needing more pain to survive this moment. Though I feared I’d need a lot more.
My panties fared the same fate as my skirt once he stopped sucking my blood from his finger. He didn’t wait, didn’t tease me, or pause. His fingers entered me with brutal beauty.
I let out a strangled moan at the back of my throat as he maintained eye contact the entire time his fingers moved inside me. His other hand came to the back of my neck, leaning forward so our mouths could crash together once more. His teeth grasped my lip, where the skin had opened up. He sucked at it, drawing more blood from me.
An orgasm, brutal and unexpected shattered me as he did this, my entire body breaking apart from his fingers and his mouth on mine.
I was barely over the aftershocks when I started ripping at his clothes, desperate, greedy to have him inside me, for him to fill me up. Or him to empty me completely.
His hands left me so he could yank his tee off, hurling it to the floor and then snatching my neck to pull me into another frenzied and violent kiss.
My entire body shook, and I sank my nails into the corded and scarred skin of his back, eager to draw more blood, I wanted to add my own scars to his roadmap of torment, I wanted to hurt him more than anything else. He let out a low growl as I broke the skin, a growl that made my pussy clench, and my blood sing.
“Fuck me. Now,” I commanded, my voice was so husky it was unrecognizable.
Jacob froze. His grip on my hips tightened past the point of pain, right to agony and his eyes bore into me, noting the way I tensed up with discomfort, but he didn’t loosen his grip. “You think you’re in charge here?” he rasped. “You think this,” he pushed his finger inside, my eyes rolled back, “is something else you can control? You think I am?”
My body fought between the conflicting pleasure and pain Jacob was putting through. My mind was frayed, rapidly coming apart in his hands.
“This is gonna be like flyin’, Boots,” he growled. “You’re not in control here, and there’s no chance of a safe landing either.”
He didn’t move.
I didn’t breathe. He was right. Despite the fact that with every other sexual partner I’d ever had, I was in charge—some might even call me a Dom—it all fell away, ripped from me like Jacob had torn apart my clothes.
With devastating slowness, he pulled his fingers from me.
He didn’t break eye contact, and still, his grip was violent instead of tender, as was his gaze. But the pain was a caress against my rough soul. He unbuttoned his belt and I thought about the situation, the fact he had not locked the door behind him and that anyone could walk in right now.
Not that anyone was able to walk in, they’d have to get past Vaughn, but he could also come in. That knowledge did not urge me to hesitate, to tense and tell Jacob to stop. Nothing would. Not my image as ice cold, Charlotte Crofton being shattered if someone found my bodyguard fucking me on top of my desk.
I wasn’t that Charlotte Crofton anymore. Not under Jacob’s gaze. Not with his touch. I wasn’t anyone or anything.
I moved to grasp his belt, desperate for him.
His grip tightened. “What the fuck did I just say?” he growled. “Hands flat on the desk.”
I obeyed his command immediately. The only man I’d ever obeyed in my life. The only person.
His body was taut, pulsating with an energy that mimicked my own.
I watched him, rapt, as he undid his belt with devastating slowness, one hand still tight on my neck, tight and warning me about doing anything under my own volition.
When he freed himself, I let out a harsh hiss in between my teeth.
He didn’t give me time to examine a part of a man I’d never been intent on inspecting...ever. With Jacob, it was different.
With Jacob, everything was different.
With Jacob, I was different.
I wanted not only to examine him. But worship him. I wanted to sink down to my knees and do what the man with a gun had tried to get me to do in an alleyway two months prior. The man that Jacob killed.
But there was no time for that.
As soon as he was freed from his jeans, Jacob surged inside. Right inside.
The second I was about to cry out from the brutal and beautiful intrusion, his palm covered my mouth, stifling my scream.
Another thing a man had never done before, physically or metaphorically—silence me.
And I loved it.
My teeth sank into the flesh of Jacob’s palm as he moved inside me, fast, hard, magnificent.
My hands were still flat on the desk, because he hadn’t told me to move them, and somehow, I’d became a slave to him, I wouldn’t exhale if it weren’t under his command.
“Touch me,” he grunted. “More blood.”
I moved immediately and hungrily, clawing at his back once more.
He let out a guttural noise in his throat as I opened his skin, my orgasm came at the same time his blood trickled onto my fingertips.
Another scream into his palm.
My entire body shook, split apart, shattered in his grip.
He moved his hand and replaced it with his mouth as I milked his own release from him.
His lips stayed on mine, tasting like mint, man and a coppery aftertaste of blood.
A mixture that spelled the end of me.
12
I didn’t make bad decisions in my life.
Every move I made was calculated, measured, purposeful.
I’d failed in my life. Because success was impossible without some kind of failure. But all those failures didn’t signify mistakes since I had something to gain from each of them. I was made of my failures, not my success.
But this was a mistake.
I knew it.
I wasn’t gaining anything.
No, I was certain I was losing a lot.
Everything.
He’d already taken enough, there was nothing to control how he got the rest of me.
It was a foregone conclusion.
I wanted more from him. I’d given in, let him inside me, in every way possible, and then he’d disappeared. Not technically, since after we’d dressed—me in a new skirt, luckily I kept spare clothes in a closet in my office—he’d left the office without a word, but with one last brutal kiss. He’d been waiting in the car when I finished for the day and gone straight to a business dinner.
He’d been there on the ride home, the energy in the air humming with the knowledge of each other’s bodies, each other’s pleasure, and more importantly, pain. The way his gaze had seared into me, I expected him to touch me, to fuck me in the back of the car, with nothing but thin glass separating us from Ralph.
I ached for it.
But he didn’t.
His fists stayed clasped atop his knees, gaze cementing me in place the whole ride. I knew what he was doing. He was manipulating me, asserting his power with nothing more than a look and the memory of his brutal touch still fresh on my skin.
I submitted to it. Didn’t fight it, though my entire body was desperate for him l
ike I assumed a drug addict might’ve been for a fix.
I’d been careful to avoid drugs because anything that had the power to alter your mind had the power to control your mind. And that’s what Jacob was doing, altering everything about my thought system, so nothing, least of all my thoughts, were under my control.
Drugs could ruin lives.
Not like people could.
Humans were the worst substance on earth.
I’d gotten out of the car on shaky legs, said goodbye to Ralph and walked up to my apartment.
Alone.
He didn’t come in the shadows, like I’d lain awake expecting him to do all night. He was controlling me with his absence.
Saturday morning, instead of going grocery shopping, or working like I should’ve been, I was here. Trying to take my control back or abandon it completely.
For once, I was certain of nothing before acting.
“Are you sure this is the place, miss? my driver asked, looking up at the building and the surrounding street in concern.
The weekend was only time I could do this, since I didn’t have Ralph to ask questions and this was the one day Jacob wasn’t with me as I informed him I’d be in my apartment.
With additional security. Whom I’d sent home.
I didn’t need anyone tracking my movements. Hence me using a new car service. Reputable, of course. Expensive. And discreet.
I glanced around. It was a bad neighborhood, there was no mistaking it. But New York was a bad neighborhood in itself, I’d almost gotten murdered in one of the most expensive parts of the city, so the men loitering on the street staring at the car didn’t bother me. Outright danger was always safer than false security. “Yes, I’m sure,” I replied. “I expect you can stay here until I call to tell you otherwise.”
The driver glance at the same men I did with unease, but he met my eyes. “Of course, ma’am.” The tone was professional. He knew who I was. He knew that if his answer was anything else that I’d have him fired and that he wouldn’t work in the city again.