Jade's Dragon

by Maren Smith

  If she was asleep, he could sneak into her room right now, quietly gather up his things (check on her), shave out of the rain barrel off the back porch and by morning, be so damned presentable that if she touched him again, laying that tiny tender hand of hers along his cheek, she’d be so enamored of his smoothness than she’d… what? Invite him back to bed so she could feel up the rest of him?

  He was pathetic.

  It was also worth a shot, but with his luck, he’d be gathering his necessaries off the dresser when she woke up and there he’d be, standing where he shouldn’t, caught. With a full-on erection standing high as the noonday sun where it couldn’t help but be noticed, and she’d say something gentle and understanding, like: “What the hell are you doing in my room?”

  And he’d say, “I wanted to shave my face for you.”

  And she’d say, “Get the hell out, you whore-mongering bastard.”

  And she would know.

  Hellfire and thunderation! How was he supposed to make the conversation come out right in the moment, if he couldn’t even make it go right in his own head?

  The creak of a floorboard in the hall just outside Garrett’s bedroom pricked Cullen’s ear, stopping everything. Every inch of him tensed as he listened. She was running again. He knew it just as surely as he knew if she really wanted to run, she’d have gone down the ladder, not come out into the short hall between their bedrooms where there was no lower floor access.

  His chest caught as the latch of Garrett’s door lifted, and then opened. Just a crack and no more. Neither the moonlight nor the stars were quite bright enough for him to make out her face, but he could see the shadow of her and he knew she could see the shadow of him, sitting upright on his side of the bed. He hadn’t done anything, but for some reason, he still felt caught red-handed.

  He saw the pale sleeve of his shirt more than he did her arm as she reached in through the cracked door and beckoned him. Cullen was on his feet before he knew he wanted to move. Cock leading the way—because, hell, why stop now?—he went to her.

  “You all right?” he started to ask, but got no further than “you” before she lay her fingers on his lips. That she could do it at all without arching onto tiptoes left him almost as amazed as the sheer flush of heat that shot through him at the touch. He was a bonfire and she’d just tossed a rock in it, sending spark showers flying out into all the darkest corners of his crackling body. He didn’t try to speak again. When she took his hand, he simply let her lead him back to his own bedroom, with its single lamp lit on the bedside table, casting its shadow-driving illumination across the walls.

  She drew him in and closed the door. When she looked up at him with those beautiful black eyes of hers, he became guilty of nothing more than standing there while her hands wandered down the front of the shirt she wore. Button by button, without a word, she opened it. It slid off her shoulders first, laying bare all the caramel-colored flesh his mouth ached to kiss and his fingers tightened to touch. When it got to her breasts, she paused. Her own brow beetled, as if she didn’t understand her own sudden shyness, but he did. He knew it the instant he saw it, and as surely as he knew what she’d done for a living before she met him, he knew the cause. She might well have taken her clothes off for paying men—dozens; maybe even hundreds—but never once had any of those other men mattered. Not like he did.

  Gathering the fabric and her courage, she let the nightshirt fall, becoming a forgotten puddle of pale cloth around her feet. And there she was. Beauty personified. In the sweet caramel flesh and within his reach, if only he would, in fact, reach for her.

  Unable to move, Cullen drank her in. Never in his life had he ever seen a full-grown woman without any clothes on at all. Oh, he’d seen bits and pieces. Naked breasts popped out above corset ruffles and creamy white bottoms shed fast of drawers, but always with stockings still on. He wasn’t a saint. Not by any stretch of anyone’s imagination. He’d been a soldier. Soldiers lived payout to payout, bar to saloon, and brothel to whorehouse. Half-drunken soldiers with two bits to spend on fifteen minutes of heaven rarely bothered to shuck all their clothes, and he’d certainly never bothered to ask for less from the women whose company he’d paid to keep. This sort of sight—he marveled at the exquisiteness of her—this, was something special, reserved only for husbands and wives.

  Cullen moved to touch her then. Her breast called to him and his palm ached to answer, to cup and hold, kneading soft flesh and plucking at each beguiling nipple until they tightened with her own body’s heightening need. But that wasn’t what he reached for first. He touched her lips instead, tracing the bow of her mouth with his thumb as his fingers smoothed up her cheek. Uncertainty mirrored in her eyes as she pressed her face into his palm, as if she needed to steal courage from him before she could meet his eyes more boldly.

  “I won’t hurt you,” he promised, and no one knew like he did how a man was only as good as his word.

  Taking her by the hand—her good hand—he drew her to the bed. She lay back when he bade her to, her long black hair a temptress’s entangling snare upon his pillows. He buried his hands in the softness as he kissed her.

  He tried to be gentle. He tried to make it last. He touched her everywhere, and where his fingers played his mouth invariably followed. The scent of her within the valley of her small breasts was more intoxicating than the finest whiskey. He breathed it in, but even that was nothing compared to the womanly scent that beckoned as he burned his trail of kisses down her belly, past the indent of her navel and lower still to the dusky tufts that so closely guarded all the molten secrets of her core.

  If his whiskers scratched her thighs, she didn’t protest. She bit the back of her finger even as she opened her thighs and gripped the pillow tight with her other hand the instant the heat of his mouth quested for, discovered and devoured the fast-responding nub hidden within those silken folds. She was hot and wet, and he drank that wetness in. He made her gasp, again and again. It was the only sound she made, but it was a sound she would never again make for any other man but him and that knowledge shot him through with such a sense of power and pride.

  Her hand was locked in his hair when he finally rose above her. Her legs were shaking, that deep involuntary kind of trembling that her small body would never again suffer for anyone else. Her cry as he entered her, his jutting cock sinking into her slow but deep, would never again be heard by anyone else’s ears. He savored every quivering spasm as she gripped him, trying so hard to be gentle, but he was unravelling now, every bit as much a prisoner to his own thundering pulse and the demands of his passion as he was to the insistent pull of her hands as she clung to his shoulders and arms. Her legs locked around his hips, urging him to move, to take her, deeper still. Harder still. More and more.

  And fuck, but she was so hot. Small as she was, big as he was, her body took him as if they’d been made—each only for the other. She clenched around him as tight as a fist, and he made her whole body arch and writhe, her whole trembling body strain in the grip of his. And when she cried out, that was another coup he took pleasure in counting, because when she came, she did it looking up at him with such wide and frightened, horrified and wondering eyes that he knew—knew—he’d just given her something that in all her time as a lady of the night, no one had ever done. That was for him, too. Him and him alone.

  Just like he was now only for her.

  “I think I love you,” he breathed into her hair as he lay panting and exhausted, a hot and sated mess in the sweat-soaked sheets beside her. His blood still pounded like a storm in his chest, temple and groin. Still twitching with latent shocks of pleasure and dripping his seed on her thigh, his cock was dwindling and his eyes were growing heavy. “I think I love you,” he said again, his heavy arm sliding around her waist, hugging her back against him one last time.

  He eventually fell asleep and because of that, he never felt it when she covered her eyes and then her mouth and then began to cry.

  Chapter
Thirteen

  Chin waited, listening to the rhythmic rumbles of Cullen snoring for a good half-hour before slipping out from under his arm and off the bed. The lamp had died down, so she gathered her bundle and dressed in the dark, stepping into her gown and pulling it up over her shoulders, but not bothering with the fastenings until she got downstairs. Cullen had taken away the filthy blanket that she’d used to bundle her things into, but he’d given her a buckskin pouch in trade. Once she was properly buttoned up, she slung the strap over her neck and one shoulder and crept as quietly out the front door as the squeaky hinges would allow.

  She made it as far as the front porch before she had her first breakdown. Collapsing on the steps, she cried into her skirts to muffle the sound. Only when the tears had abated and she could see clearly again, was she able to pull herself to her feet and limp out to the barn.

  She couldn’t stay. It was the mantra that kept her walking, one foot in front of the other when everything inside her continued to cry. He wasn’t going to understand. He would hate her for this. Love and hate were two sides of the same spoon, after all, but it was better that he live to hate her than to die because she couldn’t bring herself to do what she knew was right.

  Her second breakdown came in the barn after she got the lantern lit and as she was heaving a saddle off the rail it was draped over. She’d made a mistake the last time. Cullen’s horse was too big and headstrong for her to manage; she knew that now, so she chose the smaller of the two remaining horses: a pretty blonde-colored mare that snuffled at her hair and offered no resistance to being led out of her stall so late at night.

  Getting the saddle on her back was the hardest thing she’d ever done. Not because the animal fought her—it didn’t. The mare stood as placid as a cow and never made a sound. No, it was hard because all Chin could feel was this ache like she’d been kicked in her stomach and all she could hear was Cullen whispering over and over again, I think I love you.

  Why did he have to say that? Why?

  Why did she care? Men said all kinds of things in the throes of a good rough and tumble. They’d said it as they lay huffing and panting in the sweaty aftermath too. But it hadn’t felt like that. It hadn’t felt disgusting. It hadn’t felt like a chore, or a job, and it sure hadn’t felt like a free one. Instead, it had felt like something she’d never thought she would ever have. It had felt real.

  It felt like what she saw on Madame Jewel’s face each time she looked at Gabe. Or like the shine that came over Opal each time someone dropped by the Petticoat to say they’d just spotted John riding into town for a visit. It felt like what Citrine had found, and Ruby with her sheriff, and Lapis, now the mayor’s wife. Other gems had found it, but Chin had always, always known she never would.

  But here it was, dropped in her lap like a giant splat of bird droppings, and she shouldn’t want it.

  Oh, but she did. She pressed her hands to her chest. As if that alone could smother the pain. It was worse than her hand and knee over this last week of hell combined. She couldn’t just stand here. She forced herself to move and made it as far as the mouth of the next stall before collapsing again. Sliding down the post, she sat in the dirt and straw and wept. She hadn’t thought she had any tears left in her, but they came pouring out as though she’d been saving them up for years.

  “You’re running again.”

  Chin jerked her head up and there, standing in the open barn doorway, was Cullen, dressed in nothing but his pants. His feet were bare. He hadn’t even bothered to put his boots on.

  “Why?” he demanded.

  Gulping air, she covered her eyes with both hands so she wouldn’t have to see him looking at her like that. She fought to control it, but the tears refused to stop coming. “Go… away,” she said between gasps.

  “Go away,” he echoed flatly. “Go away?” He shook his head, then nodded. “Fine.” He snapped around on his heel and stalked back out into the blackness.

  For some reason, that hurt even worse. Chin grabbed her chest, rocking as she fought not to cry out for him to wait, but then suddenly he was back. Storming back out of the night into the barn’s gentle light. At least something was gentle, because Cullen, grabbing her by the arms and hauling her to her feet, was anything but.

  “You know what?” he snapped, giving her a shake. “It’s not at all ‘fine’.” If he was confused at all, she couldn’t see it. All she saw was the storm of hurt and anger flashing in his eyes. “Talk to me!”

  “I can’t!” She twisted, but there was no breaking free of him.

  “Did I do something?” he demanded. “Did I not do something?” He stopped so suddenly and it was the most awful and yet subtle shift in his angry frown when an inkling of the truth suddenly occurred to him. “You never had any intention of staying, did you? Coming to get me… what we did… you did it all knowing you were going to leave anyway.”

  And he’d had the gall to tell her he loved her. Chin stiffened her spine. She made herself grow cold and hard. She made herself hate him, because it was the only way she’d ever be able to hurt him like this and survive. “Whore, remember?”

  He jerked back as though she’d slapped him. “I never treated you that way.”

  Hoarse, hating herself for every word, she said, “That doesn’t make me any less of what I am.”

  That was true too, and he deserved better. So much better. Whether he knew it yet or not.

  “Don’t got my money on me,” he said finally, his face as cold as she now felt. “Twenty dollars, right?”

  She didn’t answer. She couldn’t. Her throat had seized up, tightening beyond her ability to swallow or speak.

  With a final nod of agreement to whatever thoughts he now kept private, Cullen walked away again. This time, he didn’t make it out the door before he snapped around and came charging back at her.

  Had Chin known he was going to grab her again, she might have put up more of a fight. Had she known he was going to drag her to the stool where Garrett had been working to repair the saddle she’d cut, she might have done something to resist. Certainly had she known he was going to throw her face down across one knee, she’d have done more than dig in her good leg and shout, “No!”

  But she didn’t know. Or maybe she did. Maybe in some small part of her, she thought she deserved it, because, though she fought him with all she had, it almost felt calming. For all her twisting, flailing and kicking, she wasn’t any better at breaking free of him now than she had been the first night they’d met. And she was glad. She could have cried—angry, bitter tears of relief—when he wrestled her down into place, pinning her good arm under her hip and yanking her skirt out of his way, before his hand came raining down in a storm as violent as it was swift. He let her feel his fury and his hurt, and she let it wash over her. Baptize her in the fire and the sting, without the soothing balm of forgiveness found in the end. As quick as it had begun, it was over.

  Angry as he was, he wasn’t so callous that he didn’t help her up again and hold her arms while she got her balance. He waited until her bad knee was steady under her before he let her go.

  “You be sure to let me know how much extra that’ll be,” he said through gritted teeth. “We’ll square up in the morning before I take you back to town.”

  He left her then, gulping at air and holding her fiery bottom in her hands. This time, he didn’t come back, though Chin waited for him to. And waited and waited, until her shoulders began to shake and the tears to flow anew. She sank back down into the dirt, with all the smells of old leather and the barnyard tainting every ragged breath she sucked into her too-tight chest. One last time, she broke down.

  For the rest of the night, she stayed in the barn, and she wept.

  * * * * *

  The sun rose the next morning, painting the sky a bright orange and pink, promising a beautiful day. What clouds Cullen saw as the front door slammed shut behind him, were as white as tufts of cotton. Dew sprinkled the grass and dampened his boots as he t
rudged through the weeds to the barn. He honestly didn’t expect Chin to still be there when he pushed back the heavy door, but there she was, lying in a short stack of dry grass, one hand tucked behind her, just above her bottom. She might have been sleeping, except that she wasn’t. Judging by the rim of red all around her eyes and nose, she hadn’t all night.

  Hers was a look that cut him every bit as sharply as a physical knife. He never should have done what he did last night. Not because she hadn’t deserved a hot butt, because she did. But he wished he could go back and do it over again. Mad as he was, he never should have touched her. He should have waited, calmed down, got her to tell him what fears were dogging at her, and then he could have dealt with it the smart way. The right way. By talking to her, soothing and reassuring her that he could and would take care of her. And then, only when they were both back to being like-minded adults, would he then tell her what it had done to him to awaken to find her side of the bed empty, her things gone from the table, and the barn door standing wide open just like the first time she’d run away. He wished he’d thought to tell her how it had felt to know the one night—apparently, the only night—he was ever going to have with her hadn’t meant as much to her as it had to him. Above all, he’d wished he’d held her afterward, because he already knew she was going to haunt him for the rest of his life. The last thing he wanted to relive was their last touch when it hadn’t been a gentle one.

  Chin hadn’t had enough gentleness in her life. Cullen could see that—standing over her, staring down at her profile, knowing she knew he was there but wouldn’t look at him. No, that look she wore said plainly that she hadn’t had anywhere near as much gentle holding as a woman ought to get. With all his being, he wished he could go back and do things over again, but time only knew one direction to move and it was far too late to change things now.