In other words, it was a night just like every other.
Still half-asleep and panicked from his nightmare, he flung an arm out to the other side of the bed. He took a steady breath when his hand found Harper’s warm, smooth skin.
She muttered something unintelligible under her breath and rolled closer, reaching for him in her sleep as easily as she reached for him when she was awake.
He envied her that. Her ability to love with complete abandon. Complete fearlessness.
Riddick lived in a constant state of fear. Fear that he’d lose control. Fear that he wouldn’t be able to protect Harper from whatever dangers she managed to find—and damned if she didn’t always find some kind of danger.
Fear that he’d lose the only light he’d ever had in his life.
He assumed it was the fear causing his nightmares. They came every night about four hours after he fell asleep. They were different every time, except for the ending.
Every nightmare ended with Harper dead.
Riddick wouldn’t—couldn’t—let that happen. She was everything to him. All he had in the world.
It had taken him most of his so-called life to realize that he hadn’t really been…well, living before he met Harper Hall. God knew he’d never known love before her.
His memories of his mother were fuzzy at best, and few and far between. He knew that when she hugged him, which was often, her soft black hair brushed against his skin and smelled like baby shampoo and clean, sun-warmed laundry. She made him macaroni and cheese and sang Nina Simone songs, off-key, while she did it.
Then one day, she went to the hospital and didn’t come back.
Cancer, his father told him. He’d been five at the time and had no idea what cancer was. All he knew was that it took mothers away.
It was just him and his dad after that. Ken Riddick wasn’t an abusive father. He never hit his son or really even raised his voice at him. He just…wasn’t there. Even when he was there he wasn’t there.
Riddick quickly learned to take care of himself. He made his own dinner, packed his own lunches, got himself to school on time every day. It wasn’t so bad, really.
The only thing he never got good at handling himself was laundry. So when he showed up to school day after day in dirty clothes, it didn’t take long for kids—asshats that they were—to notice and start picking on him.
He was…oh, maybe six or seven when he got sick of the bullying. And that’s when he first discovered how different he really was.
He never knew the name of the boy who shoved him down on the playground and called him dirty trailer trash, but he’d never forget the strangled sound that came out of the kid’s throat when Riddick punched him in the face, broke his jaw, and knocked out four of his teeth.
He hadn’t even meant to hurt him. Riddick just wanted to be left alone. The boy had been years older, fifteen pounds heavier, and Riddick had broken him with a warning punch that had been backed off to half-strength.
Noah Riddick was officially a freak.
His grade school promptly expelled him, after which his father decided Riddick was too high-maintenance to keep around. He signed him over to CPS the next day.
Riddick spent the next nine years bouncing from foster home to foster home. Most of them weren’t that bad. One of them even paid for him to see an expensive shrink who said he had borderline personality disorder, characterized by bouts of intense anger and abandonment sensitivity.
That diagnosis pretty much killed any chance he’d ever had of getting adopted or finding a more permanent placement.
Whatever they wanted to call it, Riddick knew the truth: he was a freak, and freaks needed to stay away from normal people.
Mostly he succeeded in isolating himself. He didn’t play sports, didn’t date, didn’t socialize. There were always the occasional bullies or jocks who thought maybe he was an easy target because he was such a loner. They quickly learned he wasn’t. Usually after the first wave of challengers ended up with broken bones, any others with delusions of grandeur gave up and left him alone.
When he was sixteen, he was transferred to a new foster home. And for the first time in his entire foster care career, he ran into a man who didn’t ignore him or fear him.
The guy had a foot in height and a hundred pounds in weight on him, but when he sneaked into his room at night and tried to hold him down, Riddick picked him up and snapped his spine like a toothpick.
There were two other kids in the house at the time. God knows how long they’d been there, abused and scared. Riddick didn’t ever learn their names, but he did remember the look on their faces as the cops led him away in handcuffs.
Complete and utter horror at what he’d done rode their features. They looked at him like he was a monster, no better than the dead man he’d so easily broken.
And Riddick was pretty sure they weren’t wrong, which was why he didn’t tell anyone he’d acted in self-defense. Who would’ve believed him, anyway? He’d broken the guy’s back, for God’s sake. Not exactly the act of a scared kid.
He was actually a little relieved when he was sentenced as an adult to life in prison without the possibility of parole. At least he wouldn’t have to worry about hurting anyone or hiding what he was.
And that’s when Mischa Bartone and Sentry found him.
Mischa, a watcher with Sentry, didn’t call him a freak. She called him a natural. Killer, that is. She told him Sentry usually created slayers with huge doses of hormones and performance-enhancing drugs. But he was born with his…dubious skills.
People like him were usually killed by Sentry. Put down like stray dogs. But for some reason, Mischa thought he was different. She saw something in him she hadn’t seen in any other naturals.
Humanity.
So Riddick was plucked out of C-block and quickly became the most celebrated slayer in Sentry history. He was stronger, faster, and smarter than the other slayers.
Which was probably why his bosses tried to kill him when Sentry eventually disbanded. Who knew what he’d decide to do if he was left to his own devices, without orders from Sentry to keep him in line?
But Riddick wasn’t any more dangerous on his own than he’d been with Sentry. He was used to being alone, after all. Had been his whole life.
Until he met her.
Harper Hall had blown into his world like a gale-force wind, a perfect storm of life and color and heat, showing him what living was supposed to be like. He’d merely been surviving before her.
He quickly became dependent on her. She was a drug and he was a strung-out junkie.
Now, a year later, she was the very best part of him. The only part that was worth a damn.
Being with her helped him keep his true nature—which he’d recently started thinking of as a six-hundred-pound, slavering, snarling, wild beast on a chain—under control.
He glanced down at her. The faded flannel shirt she wore—-his, if he wasn’t mistaken—was open down the front but for one button clinging stubbornly between her breasts.
She was sound asleep, her face turned toward him, one leg thrown over his. Her gold-tipped brown curls fanned across her pillow and her lashes rested on her high cheekbones in delicate semicircles. A quiet little snuffling snore escaped her pink lips.
She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, and by some weird twist of fate or random miracle, she was his.
He’d never done a damn thing to deserve her, but he was a selfish bastard, and now that he had her, he wasn’t letting go. Ever.
And God help anyone who tried to take her from him.
Chapter Three
Harper awoke to warm, wet kisses being trailed slowly down her neck, over her shoulder, her collarbone. Gentle teeth latching onto her…
“Oh, God,” she moaned, arching her back.
She lifted her head and looked down to see the top of Riddick’s dark head as he dropped feather-light kisses across her belly. She had no idea what had happened to her shirt and panties
, and at the moment, she really couldn’t care less.
“Good morning,” she murmured, her voice thick with sleep.
“Not yet,” he said, his lips moving against her skin. “But that’s the plan.”
She all but purred as she shifted under him and felt the warm, smooth slide of his bare skin against hers from chest to thigh. The fact that Riddick slept naked? Yeah…just another thing to love about him.
Again: suck it, other women everywhere!
On some distant level, his words registered with her. She glanced over at her alarm clock. It was only five.
“Why are you awake so early? Is something wrong?” she asked.
He lifted his head to meet her gaze and she couldn’t help but notice the faint dark smudges under his eyes. “I’m fine,” he said.
He could be bleeding from his eyes and ears and still say he was fine. Such a guy. “I can tell you’re not fine. What can I do to help?”
He lowered his head again to dip his tongue into the hollow at the base of her throat. “My plan is to make you come until I’m too tired to do anything but pass out. So, you can help by coming. Again and again and again.”
Harper gasped as his warm lips slid up her neck to her ear and his palms covered her breasts. “Oh, my God. That plan is…genius.”
She felt his smile against the sensitive spot just beneath her ear and she shuddered in the most pleasant possible way.
Harper moved to slide her hands over his chest, but he grabbed her wrists and pinned her hands on the pillow on either side of her head. “What are you—”
“This is about you.”
She started to argue, but he lowered his mouth to hers and swallowed her words with a hot, deep kiss. One taste of him was enough to drive whatever point she’d been about to make from her mind forever.
They’d kissed thousands of times, but still, every touch of his lips, his tongue, to hers was stunning in its heat and intensity. Riddick kissed her as if his very life, his next breath, depended on it.
She uttered a small sound of protest as his lips left hers, but that quickly turned into a moan of pleasure as his mouth moved purposefully down the length of her body, pausing briefly, teasingly, on each nipple, before sliding down her belly, down the length of her legs, all the way down to her toes.
He worked his way back up over her calves, moving her legs apart as he went until he was nestled between her thighs. “I love the way you taste,” he whispered. She shuddered as his breath blew gently across her heated, already-soaked flesh.
His first slow, long lick made her stomach muscles tighten and her hips jerk off the bed. But when he gently sucked her clit into his mouth, she was lost. Completely mindless.
He brought her to the brink again and again, until she was sweating and her legs were shaking, until she begged him to fill her and fuck her and end this delicious torment. She cried out his name in a hoarse groan as he sank two fingers into her, unerringly finding the spot that always made her toes curl.
“Come for me,” he growled. “Now.”
And she did.
Really, it was the only thing he ever ordered her to do that she did willingly. Every time. And not even the staunch feminist in her felt the slightest bit bad about it.
Before her breathing could return to normal, he knelt above her, looking like a rumpled, sleepy-eyed, Greek god. Her rumpled, sleepy-eyed, Greek god. And that’s when she remembered.
He was going to marry her. She was getting married.
Harper jerked up, and in a few quick, limber movements, he was flat on his back and she was straddling him. “Oh, my, God, we’re getting married!” she squealed.
He laughed as she dropped kisses all over his face, his neck, his chest. “So, I’m guessing you haven’t changed your mind, huh?”
She sat up and pushed her hair behind her ears. “Are you kidding? After that? No way am I ever letting you go.”
His eyes moved over her hair and face as if he was memorizing every line, every curve. “I’m a lucky man, Sunshine.”
She gave him her best naughty smile. “Not yet, but you will be.”
His eyes darkened as he wrapped his hands around her waist and lifted her, then groaned as she wrapped her fingers around him, guiding him into her wet heat. They both shuddered as she sank down and he slid home.
When she would’ve moved hard and fast, Riddick gripped her hips and forced her into a slow, deep rhythm that made her wonder if a person could OD and die on too much pleasure. The effort to keep going slow made a sheen of sweat break out over both their bodies.
He must’ve sensed how close to the edge she was, because he slipped a hand between their bodies. It took only one brush of his thumb over her sensitive flesh to break her.
His own control seemed to snap at that point, and in no more than three deep, hard strokes, he joined her, her name falling from his lips as he came.
Harper collapsed against him. Riddick wrapped his arms around her and threaded his fingers through her hair. They held each other like that for about twenty minutes before Harper asked, “Feeling tired enough to get some more rest now?”
She gasped as he flipped her to her stomach and pulled her up on her knees. “Not just yet,” he said as he slid into her from behind. “But maybe we should keep working on it.”
“Oh…my…God,” she cried out brokenly. “Absolutely…genius.”
Three hours later, Harper wasn’t sure if Riddick was any closer to a restful state, but since she’d come so many times she’d lost count and couldn’t feel her legs anymore, she wasn’t sure how much more she could do to help.
He was lying flat on his back, pulling her hair idly through his fingers while she was splayed across his chest. “I guess we’ll have to pick out rings at some point, huh?” she asked.
“Oh, shit,” he muttered. “First I ask you to marry me on the floor of a strip club, then I forget to give you the ring. Why the fuck do you tolerate me?”
“Um…besides the fact that you just made me come so much that I’m dehydrated?” Then his words really hit her. “Wait…you already have a ring for me?”
She hated that her voice had taken on the tone of a pre-teen at a One Direction concert, but hey, weddings and the idea of sparkly rings did that to her. Shoes, too, but that was another story.
He eased her off him, then leaned over the edge of the bed to grab something. When he rolled back toward her, he was holding the most gorgeous ring Harper had ever seen.
“This was my mother’s,” he said, sliding it on her finger. It fit perfectly.
When she remained silent, he started looking nervous. “If you don’t like it, we can get something else.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “I just thought…shit, I don’t know. It looked…like you.”
Harper felt tears stinging her eyes and her bottom lip started to quiver. This ring was probably all he’d ever had of his mother, and he was giving it to her.
The stone was the most brilliant, vibrant orange she’d ever seen, and at least two-and-a-half carats, pear-shaped. The setting was white gold and vintage-looking, fashioned in the shape of an intricate vine, winding around her finger all the way up to just below her second knuckle. It was ornate and completely unique, somehow managing to look elegant and flashy and dramatic all at the same time.
In other words, he was right. It was totally her style.
“I love it,” she murmured. “It’s absolutely perfect.”
He breathed a relieved sigh and grinned at her. Her own breath caught in her throat. Shit, if she could bottle that smile and weaponize it, women of the world wouldn’t stand a chance.
“What kind of stone is this?” she asked. Not that it mattered. She was probably one of the few girls in the world who would say that orange was her favorite color.
“It’s a diamond. Natural orange, according to the jeweler I had appraise it. He seemed weirdly excited about it.” Riddick shrugged. “Said it was pretty rare.”
Harper almost laughed
out loud at the thought of Riddick in a jewelry store. She briefly wondered if the appraiser thought he was being robbed before Riddick handed the ring over. Even she had to admit that while he was a good guy at heart, his face and body had bad guy written all over them.
“If it’s rare, and obviously a family heirloom, are you sure you want to give it to me?” she asked. “What if something happens to it?”
He grabbed her hand and kissed her fingertips. “It’s only a piece of jewelry. I’m not worried about it. She’d want you to have it, anyway.”
“Do you think she’d like me?”
He gave her his crooked smile. She sighed. That one was her favorite. “How could she not love you?”
She swallowed against the lump in her throat. Damn it, there were those tears again.
Then he said something that made her blood run cold.
“So…,” he began, his blue eyes twinkling with pure mischief. “Do you want to tell your family tonight at dinner?”
Harper groaned and pulled the covers up over her head, ignoring his answering laughter.
Chapter Four
Riddick wore the shell-shocked visage of an avalanche survivor.
Harper knew this look well. She’d seen it on the face of every outsider she’d ever brought to one of her weekly family dinners.
Poor Riddick.
Harper knew that on a normal day, her family was…quirky. Maybe a little dysfunctional.
But on a day like today, they could really only be described as a train wreck. In the middle of a quagmire. At the end of a complete clusterfuck.
First of all, her mother had taken one look at her and started squealing like a schoolgirl while jumping up and down, which Harper had suspected might happen. One of the dangers of having an empath for a mother was never really being able to surprise her—or keep a secret from her, for that matter.
That in and of itself wouldn’t have been a problem, but after totally blowing the surprise for everyone else, she spent the rest of the dinner yammering about pretty grandbabies and tales of her own pregnancies and breech deliveries.
Semi-Human (Harper Hall Investigations Book 2) Page 2