“Let me lick you first,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“That’s my call,” she said, swaying over him. Nudging his cock head inside her and shivering with excitement as she took it inch by inch. Slow, slick. Sinking down over him. “I want your cock. I say when. I say where. And I say now.”
He choked off a breath as she took him deeper, rocking and surging. Relaxing around that thick club of flesh, until she’d bathed him all over with her body’s slick sex juice. Up…and down…in a tight, caressing slide. Taking him in so deep.
He filled her completely. She clenched and shivered around him, charged with intense pleasure and emotion. Her body felt sensitized. The plunging sensuous strokes got even deeper, stimulating every single one of her inside hot spots. Her whole body was a universe of intense, tingling sensation. She thrummed with excitement.
He reached up to touch her breasts. She slapped his hands away.
He looked startled. “Why not? Let me—”
“No,” she gasped out, rising up to take him in still deeper. “Can’t. Goddamn it. Goddamn you, Luke.” Out of nowhere a feeling was coming over her, like she was cracking open.
And God only knew what would emerge from in there, all naked and shivering.
She grabbed his big hands and clamped them down against his huge chest, letting her nails dig into him. He could have easily wrenched them free, but he stayed right there, bracing her, as she clutched him, rode him wildly. Yelling out the rage and the confusion as the power rose up and claimed her. Taking her all the way to a violent climax.
She found herself slumped over him after, shaking with silent sobs. Her face was wet. So was his shoulder. She didn’t dare look up.
Luke tried to lift her head, but she wouldn’t let him. “Don’t,” she said savagely. “Just…don’t.”
He was silent for a moment, then slid his arms around her. “No.” He rolled her over on the bed, pinning her down. Cock still wedged inside her, deep and throbbing.
“What the hell?” She wiggled beneath him in a spasm of startled panic. “I didn’t say you could do that!”
“I didn’t ask your permission,” he said. “Know that about me right up front. I can only be a good obedient boy for so long before I push back hard. Blame it on my weird upbringing. I’m not big on following orders.”
She bucked and writhed, but his steely weight kept her there. He gazed down into her wet eyes. Her desperate movements only heightened the intense sensations of being so wet and slick and melting, quivering around his thick, stiff cock.
“Are you mad at me?” he demanded. “What the hell is with you? Talk, Dani.”
Her throat shook. She had to stop and swallow a few times before she could speak. “I’m pissed at everything,” she said. “You included.”
He ignored the jab. “Is this about Naldo? Those Obsidian goons coming to your house?”
She glared up at him. “I guess. It must be.”
“We won that round,” he said forcefully. “Remember that. Between the two of us, we pounded those shitheads into the ground. We won, Dani. We’re alive, and free, and angry as hell. Those punk assholes will think twice before taking us on again.”
“Get real,” she said. “Punk assholes or not, I had nothing to do with pounding them. That was all your work and you know it.”
“Bullshit. You are the hottest, fightingest damn thing I have ever seen in action. And I’m going to crush those shitheads for messing with you. But first, I am going to make you come again. So hard, it blows your mind.”
She wanted to laugh, but the weight of his hot body wouldn’t let her. His mouth descended, kissing her breathless while he scooped her legs up over his arms, spreading her out wide. It made her feel so open to him, intensely vulnerable, but the fear wasn’t big enough to withstand the pleasure. Everywhere he touched her melted and merged with him in erotic surrender. In seconds, she was arched back, offering herself, hips lifting again and again to meet each deep stroke.
It got wilder, hotter, faster. She couldn’t think, no breath to cry out, just clutching and writhing as the pleasure rose to a wild crescendo.
She floated, soft as a cloud, mindless and exhausted. Luke lay next to her, playing with her hair. She turned to him, still aglow.
“You may not remember much about yourself, but just know this, buddy,” she said lazily. “You’re a total god in bed.”
He grinned. “It’s you,” he said. “All you.”
She harrumphed. As if. But fine. Let him give her all the credit if he felt like it.
She trailed her hand down his belly, and encountered his cock, as stiff and erect as before. “Hey. Didn’t you come?”
“No condoms,” he said. “Sex hasn’t been on my radar for a very long time. And we hadn’t talked about it. It happened so fast.”
She propped herself up on her elbow, startled. And amazed that he’d been able to control himself in that wild, hot frenzy of fucking. “Yeah, but…”
“I’m good,” he said. “Don’t sweat it. Blue balls never killed a guy yet, and it’s a worthy cause. I fucking love making you come. I could do it all day.”
But she was already sliding down his body, inhaling the hot sexy smell, seizing his cock in her hand. Stroking and circling, licking his cockhead.
“Hey,” he said. “You don’t have to—”
“Shhhh.” She lifted her head, waving her finger at him with a secret little smile. “Not another word. It’s a matter of personal honor.”
He caught his breath. “Oh. Well, if you put it that way…Oh God, Dani.” His words broke into a moan as she pulled him slowly into her mouth.
Not an easy task, but she got into the groove, relaxing and adjusting around his big, gorgeous cock. It was so arousing, the hot scent and his big body, the pulse of his heart against her tongue. Pleasure racking him. She loved his skin. So smooth and taut with that tracery of veins, tasting of salty drops of precome. His shudder and groan as she flicked and rolled her tongue over it, and then swept it around his cockhead…and around. Gripping him at the root with both hands, pumping, suckling, pulling him deep.
His hands wound into her hair. His cries were thick and incoherent, body shaking when the pulsing jets of hot liquid spurted into her mouth. A few moments of gasping for breath, wiping her mouth.
Luke’s face was turned away, eyes hidden behind his hand.
She dropped a tender kiss against his thigh, feeling shy.
When he finally turned to her, the look on his face was so raw and unguarded, she had to look down herself, or else start to cry again.
“That was…” He stopped. Cleared his throat. “So fine. I never felt—”
“Don’t say it.” She headed him off at the pass, just in time. “You can’t say that, Luke. You’re an amnesiac. How would you know?”
“Even so.” His voice was low and stubborn.
“Am I the first woman you’ve been with since you lost your memory?”
“Yeah.”
“Well?” She shrugged. “So you don’t know. It’s OK. I still appreciate the sweet talk. You’re a real honey, Luke. Keep it coming.”
He looked irritated. “You’re a pain in the ass, Dani.”
“Tell me something I don’t know. No, wait. I take that back. I’ve learned enough. I’ll stick with what I know so far. That’s enough to deal with at the moment.”
He grunted, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. Then he grabbed jeans from the pile of clothes on his dresser and pulled them on. He fished around in a plastic box on the desk and took out Naldo’s metal capsule.
All the feelings and terrors that Luke had pushed away came crashing back at the sight of it, all the harder for having been displaced. She saw Naldo’s sunken, tormented eyes, the trauma inflicted on his bleeding chest. His bloody handprint on her leg. The waxy paleness of
his face. The moment when she realized that her friend was dying.
The blade, slicing into her hand. She closed her fist convulsively around the reddened cut at the base of her thumb until it stung and throbbed nastily.
The metal capsule looked seamless, but Luke peered at it for a moment, and with a twist of his strong fingers, snapped it open. He removed what looked like a minuscule computer chip, then paced silently on bare feet out into the other room.
Dani took a moment to throw her T-shirt on, and went out to find Luke on a stool at a worktable, under a powerful hanging light, surrounded by blinking electronic stuff.
He was in all-out work mode now.
She watched him type with mind-boggling, rattling swiftness on a computer keyboard. “Luke?”
He didn’t seem to hear her. His face was expressionless.
“Luke!” She waved her hand in front of his face. “You in there?”
He blinked and focused on her, as if he were forcibly reeling his mind back with a very long cable from some far place. “Huh? You need me?”
“Talk to me. About that.” She pointed at Naldo’s capsule. “Is it what you expected it to be? Does it have what you need?”
“No,” he said flatly. “At least not in a way I can use.”
She was dismayed. “No? What’s the problem?”
“The drop-off info is encrypted.”
“Oh. Well, shit. Can you crack it?”
“Maybe. Eventually. But Braxton encrypted it with people like me in mind. It’ll take a while, and by the time I crack it, Manticore will have switched everything up again. So there’s hardly any point.”
“So it was all for nothing,” she said. “Naldo dying. You, risking your life to fight those Obsidian types.”
“Nah. I did that for you.” His fingers rested on the keyboard edge for a moment and he looked around, meeting her eyes “Nothing about that was wasted.”
Huh. It was a nice thought for him to express, but please. She’d never been the sentimental type even before the hardest of her hard knocks.
“Did Naldo say anything about a key?” he asked.
She closed her eyes and tried to remember, but it was all just a horrible blur of blood and desperation. “Not exactly. He did say something weird. About how juvie would show me the key.”
“Juvie?”
“Yeah. Where we met. In a juvenile detention facility. And he mentioned some girl I don’t remember. Ivy. Said I was supposed to help her. And then he managed to tell me to watch out for Manticore. That was it. He was close to dying when he got to my house.”
“Yeah.” He gazed up at her. His eyes were penetrating. Pulling the moments out of her mind, even though she didn’t want to remember them.
“I could barely make out what he said,” she said. “And to tell the truth, I wasn’t paying much attention. I was just trying to keep him alive, not understand his babble. But he mentioned juvie more than once.”
“What did he say about it?”
“Not much,” she said. “He could barely speak.”
Luke looked thoughtful. “Juvenile detention? What did you do to get put in there?”
“I put my mom’s no-good lying drug dealer boyfriend in the hospital with a broken skull,” she replied. “I was fifteen. My mom took a fall for him. He’d stored his stash at our house. She got eight to ten. And while she sat in prison for him, he started patting my ass. So I clocked him with a cast iron skillet.”
His eyes widened in admiration. “Good work.”
She shrugged. “Anyhow, Naldo said I was supposed to stop them from hurting people.”
“Ivy,” he murmured thoughtfully. “But no explanation. Nothing about the encrypted data. Or where the key is.”
“Nope,” she said. “Nothing that I understood. If juvie was supposed to show me the key, it failed.”
He turned back toward the data on the screen. Lifted up his fists, and crashed them down on the tabletop, making all the equipment rattle and shake. “Fuck.”
Dani took a cautious step back.
He shot her an embarrassed glance. “Sorry,” he said gruffly. “Tantrum.”
Huh. She’d seen much worse from other guys, and with far less provocation. “How did you know all this stuff about Manticore if you were locked in a cage?” she asked.
“Braxton liked to brag, and I was a captive audience. Besides, he meant to break me down for parts. No reason for him to hold back.”
“Got it,” she said.
“He went on for hours about his techniques, his brain stim designs. The money he was making. How smart he was at investing it. I data-dived into his files before I left. Got into every last fucking thing he had. I’m renting this place and got that car and all the weapons and the other stuff with money I siphoned out of Braxton’s offshore accounts. And there’s plenty more where that came from.”
“I see.” She sort of did. Offshore accounts weren’t her area of expertise.
“I learned a lot from him,” he said. “Particularly about brain blocks. I even blocked my own hearing at the end so he wouldn’t be able to stun code me. That was how I escaped. By making myself deaf.” He shook his head. “I was so fucking glad when that one finally wore off. Scared myself.”
“Wait.” She held up her hand, dread growing inside her at where this was going. “Slow down. Stun code? Tell me about that.”
“That was part of my original Obsidian security programming. It was embedded so deep, I couldn’t scrub it out. My control codes. Three-word sequences. Three of them in all. There’s a stun code which blocks my movement, a release code which undoes the stun code. And then there’s the kill code. That one stops my heart.”
Dani glanced away so he wouldn’t see her eyes. There he went again, veering right back toward crazytown. Control codes, stun codes, kill codes. It all belonged in the paranoid fantasy category, along with hostile alien telepathy and tinfoil hats.
It was infuriating. This guy was awesome. Beautiful, brave, smart, stellar in bed. He was all kinds of amazing things. She was into him in every way.
But he could be mentally ill. Sometimes heroes were. That could be part of what it took to be one. She told herself to stop. He could make her delusional, too.
She had to grit her teeth and face that.
She kept her voice low and neutral. “That sounds terrible.”
“Yeah, it sucked,” he said absently, still typing. “But the auditory block worked. He tried to stun code me in the end when he was loading me up for transport, and I didn’t hear him. It gave me my chance. I took a few bullets. Here, and here.” He pointed at the shiny scars on his forearm, his shoulder. “But I got away. I was deaf for about a week until that block wore off. It didn’t go as deep as the memory blocks. I built it faster, and it had less of a charge. But I pumped a massive charge into the memory blocks. I welded those motherfuckers shut like nobody’s business.”
“So how do you know you even have a family?”
It took him a while to answer. “I don’t know for sure,” he admitted. “I feel the shape of them in my mind. Like shadows in the space where they were. And something in me reaching for them. There must be something reaching back.”
Tears sprang into her eyes. Being mentally ill didn’t make his grief and loneliness any less painful or real. On the contrary. She brushed the tears away before he saw them.
“Good luck with that,” she said. “I hope that they really are out there for you.”
Luke turned to look at her, frowning. “You sound like you doubt it.”
“It’s not for me to doubt,” she said carefully. “But we all have that ache, I think. For something we lost, or something we never had but should have had. I feel it, too. For a long time I thought it was for Naldo. He’s the only person from my past that would reach back for me. But now he’s gone, and guess what? I
still have the ache. I’m always going to have it. Even if there’s nobody left to reach back.”
Luke’s eyes blazed as he grabbed her hand. “There is now.”
She tore her hand away. “Don’t say that! You just met me. Just getting laid is no basis for stupid pronouncements like that.”
“It’s not stupid,” he said calmly. “There aren’t many things I know for sure about myself, but the way I feel about you is one of them. I like knowing it. Feels right.”
“Stop,” she said stonily. “Hold it right there.”
“Dani—”
“Not one more goddamn word!”
He stopped. Swallowed, and looked away. “OK,” he said evenly. “I’ll save it. But it’s still just sitting there. Waiting for you.”
“Let it wait. Because I’ve got no place to put it.”
He let out a sigh. “Aw, shit. Now you’re angry.”
“Yes. You’re spouting bullshit. Just don’t.”
He was silent for a moment. “Sorry. I forget what’s appropriate to say or not to say. You lose your social skills when you’re locked in a cage.”
She waved that away, too. “Let it go, OK? Just let the whole thing rest.”
The look in his eyes still made her nervous. Time for a radical change of subject. Like the data glowing on the screen. She gestured at it. “So? Do you have a plan?”
“I’m getting there,” he said. “One, decrypt the data on this chip. Failing that, two, hack into Manticore again and intercept another delivery. But they’re careful and paranoid, and they don’t make many. And after what just happened, it’s going to be even harder.”
“Got it.”
“And protecting you,” he said.
“Um…I see.” Dani folded her arms over her chest. “Luke, you do know that I can’t just stay up here with you indefinitely, right?”
His frown came back. “Sure you can,” he said. “This is the safest place for you right now. You can’t go back to Munro Valley. You wouldn’t last a day. Those assholes know where you live. Where you work.”
“But I have a job.” Her voice was forceful. “I have a life, Luke. I had today off, thank God, but I’m due at the hospital tomorrow morning early, and I cover the free clinic in the evening. And we’re short-staffed, so there’s nobody to cover for me. I have to get back, talk to the police, figure out a plan for getting on with my life. I can’t hide up here and play house with you. Much as I appreciate what you’ve done for me.”
In My Skin (The Obsidian Files Book 3) Page 11