So Good (An Alpha Dogs Novel)

by Nicola Rendell

  Kitten.

  I’d never been one for pet names, but that one felt so good, it was like walking into the cold room at the liquor store. My whole body prickled and tensed and relaxed.

  Kitten!

  Oh, but wait, was there a question? What question? What was the question? I stared at him, blank-brained. Kitteennnnnnn. “What were we talking about?”

  He climbed on top of me, taking the apple slice from my fingers and putting it on the dresser. He lowered his weight and took one of my wrists in each of his hands. “I was saying I was going to overstep and that you were going to let me. Right?”

  He was right at my opening. I was wet already—pretty sure in spite of my dreams, he’d kept me wet all night—and he moaned as he slid himself along me. I couldn’t even form a sentence. Whatever he asked me to do next, it was almost certain to be a blurted-out Yes! But I still had some semblance of logic left. “Maybe.”

  “No maybes,” he said and put some pressure on my opening. He growled a little as the head entered me.

  I growled, too. Softer than him. Almost a purr. Kitten, indeed. But I tried to focus. Focus, Rosie. Focus. On the hunk of beautiful man in front of you who is just about to…focus. I flexed my fingers, trying to grab him, and in response, his grip tightened. “I know you won’t take my money.” His eyes got all bedroomy and narrow and aggressive. “But you’re going to take a loan from me, Rosie. No arguments.”

  I thought about it, in as much as I could do any actual thinking right then. For the amount that I was going to have to dump into the house, that would be a lot of generic logos. So many smiling toilets. So many owls for library insignias. So. Many.

  But suddenly I was back in the Land of Should, where sleeping with your best friend is tied with taking a loan from your best friend for a bad idea. This place wasn’t his responsibility, loan or not. This house had been in my family longer than some hereditary disorders. It was mine to figure out—my problem to solve. Never had a Madden taken charity, never. But as he let me feel his power and his weight, I knew, too, that I was between a rock and a very hard place. So I went for the middle ground and hitched up my hips to draw him further into me. “With interest.”

  He answered with a groan, but it took him a moment to find real words. “No interest. You can help me with repairs, but it’s all on my dime.”

  “Yes to helping, no to the loan.” I parted my legs a little more and gave him a squeeze.

  “Fuck,” he snarled. He let my hands go and took hold of my hips, squeezing so hard that my ass cheeks parted because of it. Still, I stayed strong. “I’ll say yes only if you charge interest.”

  The growl came from somewhere in his throat. “I set the terms of the interest.” He punctuated the word with a thrust so intense that I grabbed hold of the sheets in my fists, and I heard the fitted sheet pop off one corner with an elasticky thump. “You can pay me back in quickies and all-night marathons. And cupcakes. And kisses.” He moved his hand to my clit and drew it up between his fingertips. Halfway between a pinch and a roll, and just enough to make me turn my cheek into the pillows and whine.

  “Please, Rosie,” he said, his tone softer now. “Let me take care of you. Starting now. Don’t fight me anymore. Let me do what I need to do.”

  My heart tumbled and fluttered. I had to give in. I had to. Actual goddesses would have knelt for less. “Okay,” I whispered. He let his eyes slide shut as he drove into me again. But before he pushed me into the pleasure pond, I knew I had the sense to give him one more dig. One more tease. One more jab like I knew he loved. “Compounded daily.”

  Now the cheek-pinch smile hit us both at once. I pushed my hips into his, and he came down over me, nipping my lip, as he drove into me all the way, saying, “I’ll show you compounded daily,” as he did.

  23

  Max

  Three hours later, Rosie pulled our cart over in Aisle 11B of Home Depot, ran her fingertips over a sawhorse made of two-by-fours, and said, “This is nice.”

  Awwww, fuck. “Listen,” I told her, pretending to be pissed, but not really pretending either. I loved what she did to me, loved how she talked and how she acted. But there were things she didn’t quite get. Like painfully intense hard-ons that made me want to fuck her in public without even getting my pants down all the way. Being a woman, I was pretty sure she couldn’t fucking comprehend the need. “I come here all the time. I can’t be walking around rock hard, you hear me?”

  She straightened her shoulders, and her eyes moved over the stuff in the cart. She took a packet of 400 grit sandpaper and propped it in front of the leg holes where a kid would sit, but which was also totally giving away the size and intensity of the bulge in my pants. “There, see?” She turned around, bending down in the most crazy-making way. “You think we could make this…taller?” She pouted and lifted her ass in the air by coming up on her tiptoes, pure old-school pinup. “Because that would be much more convenient for…”

  I grabbed a second package of sandpaper and shielded the other leg hole, to keep the goods covered. “You. Paint. Now.”

  She play-huffed and ran her tongue along her teeth. “I like making you crazy, Max. I really, really do.” She swaggered on down Aisle 11B as my raging hard-on and I followed.

  We didn’t even get one aisle farther, though. Instead, she took a detour to a nearby end cap and plucked a pack of extra-large zip ties off a hook. “Oooh.”

  That was my limit. Goddamned Fifty Shades of Grey, for Christ’s sake. I was all for kink, but not at the expense of safety. “I’ll buy you some soft cuffs,” I told her as I snagged them from her fingers and put them back on the shelf. “Zip ties are dangerous. Believe me, I know.” I pushed the cart along, and she trotted to keep up.

  “Wait,” she said, giving me a little shove before looping her arm in mine. “How do you

  know? Who do you know with?”

  I snorted. I couldn’t fucking help it. “Who do you know with? We playing Mad Libs now?”

  A red flush crept up her chest to her neck, and she grabbed hold of the cart, her small and polished hands totally the opposite of mine, yin and yang. She elbowed me and tried to bring the cart to a stop. She huffed again. “I get turned on, and my words get jumbled,” she said, smiling hard. “But seriously! How do you know?”

  There was no way in hell I was gonna talk about some other woman with her, because not a single one of them held a fucking damp sparkler to the blazing brilliance that was Rosie. “Internet.”

  She glared and smacked her lips. “That’s annoyingly vague.” She curled a finger in the air, a come-hither move that made my balls ache. “Details, handsome. I want details.”

  “Paint…” I told her, forging ahead, past fixtures and fasteners.

  But this time, I was the one who got distracted. On the next end cap were garbage disposals. The inspector hadn’t written that down, but I’d been in the house renovation business long enough to know that it was one of those details that could seal the deal. Might even make someone overlook a damp basement. The noise of a perfectly working garbage disposal was real-estate magic. I picked a solid choice, top of the line, no froufrou bells and whistles, and put it in the cart. Two shelves down, I spotted something that was right up her alley. I picked up a female and male piece of PVC pipe. “Take a look at this.”

  That was when I realized she wasn’t with me. I turned around and saw her fussing with something, with her back to me, a few aisles back.

  I made a U and damn near knocked over an old lady buying a new toilet seat, but with a few long strides, I was back with Rosie. “You okay?”

  Her eyes were wide and nervous. “Ummmm…”

  I looked down at her wrists. Somehow, she’d managed to work one zip tie around one wrist and looped the other around it, to bind herself into cuffs.

  “Holy shit.” I inspected her wrists to try to see how much room she had. Answer? None. “Christ. I told you. Soft cuffs. Leopard print, whatever you want.”

  “I
don’t want soft cuffs,” she said, flexing her fingers. “But I think I might be in over my head.”

  She most definitely was, and I found it super fucking sexy. Totally goddamned inappropriate, but I couldn’t help my thoughts from rushing toward all sorts of inappropriate things, shit we could only get away with if we stayed in here until after closing. What a fucking time we’d have. I’d take her on every washer-dryer set they sold—high-efficiency, low-profile, everything.

  Not now, man. Not fucking now. There’s a time and a place for everything, and this wasn’t it. I wrapped my hands around the zip ties, the bindings digging into my palms. “You’re a piece of work, you know that?”

  “My pinkie is going numb,” she said with a little giggle. “But it’s still pretty sexy, right?” She wiggled her fingers and made little fists, then gave the ties a tug by rotating her forearms a half inch. As she did, the ties tightened under my hand, and I had to suppress a groan.

  This was a side of her I didn’t know—daring, naughty, the secret sex kitten that had been right under my nose all these fucking years, the girl who’d try out a little bondage at eleven a.m. on a Sunday in Home Goddamned Depot—and I absolutely fucking dug it. But secret sex kitten or not, we had to do something about those zip ties. This was going to go one of two ways: I was either going to have to free her, or fuck her. So I put my arm around her and made her put her cuffed wrists behind the sandpaper barrier in the cart. I guided her back toward the main aisle that linked all the others. A guy with his cart full of petunias that shook as he walked along gave Rosie the old up-and-down. Ass.

  “Oh my God, these plumbing parts have genders!” Ties be damned, she snatched up the male pipe and the female elbow and laughed in this sultry way, with her tongue pressed to the roof of her mouth. “How dirrrrrrty!”

  “Thought you’d like that,” I told her and took a right into Tools.

  The weirdest thing about Home Depot was that sometimes, there was nobody. I’d been there on days when I couldn’t find a guy to help me in lumber if I sold a kidney on the black market to pay for it. I’d been in there on days when the Patriots could’ve practiced in the aisles and never collided with another living soul. But sometimes, it was like a fucking Fourth of July parade. Like today.

  Tools and Fasteners looked like a commercial—all sorts of employees in orange aprons were doing demos for customers. Couples considered things like power drills. A big guy who looked like Santa used a Dremel on a screw poking out of a two-by-four, while an equally big guy, who looked like Johnny Cash, lifted his palms to say what else you got? A lady with big hair and yellow clogs demo’d a vacuum for a family, sucking up packing peanuts from a plastic cylinder the size of a fifty-gallon drum. A few kids were playing right by the pliers, rolling a beach ball back and forth. A little girl dropped her juice box, and her mom grabbed a pack of shop towels to dry it up.

  There I was in the middle of the commercial with a woman who’d cuffed herself for me and whose very presence was turning me into an unthinking animal.

  Next to me, Rosie whispered, “What’s our escape strategy?”

  To take you into the unisex bathroom and fuck you until the supports come off the walls. No. Wait. I looked down at her hands. The grooves were deep and red, and though I didn’t like the idea of her hurting, I did, sorta. A little. “I can’t believe you did that, you vixen.”

  She snorted. “Teach me about screws and nuts, boss. The bigger, the better.”

  I’ll show you screws. And I’ll show you nuts. Awww, fuck. I shifted my thighs a little because my erection was pushing against my zipper. Keeping my body positioned away from the throngs of people, I glanced side to side and took her cuffed hands in mine. Her smile was so fucking contagious that pretty soon we were standing there having a totally wordless conversation next to the hammers. Because I wanted her. Fuck yes, I wanted her. “I want you cuffed, I want you free, I want you every single goddamned way,” I said near her ear as I chose a small pair of pliers with a blunted end instead of a sharpened one. I wanted to hurt her, but there was only one tool I’d ever use to do it.

  Rosie swallowed hard. “What are you going to do about it?”

  I studied her and edged her up against the display racks, and she tugged on my belt loops with her fingers. A lock of her hair got caught on the claw end of a hammer, and I pulled it free. “You’ve got no fucking idea how sexy you are.”

  She slid her lips together. “Neither do you,” she added as she pressed back into my thighs with her hips.

  Fuck.

  Fuck.

  Knowing I wouldn’t have to wait much longer, I forced myself to step away, pliers in hand. “Come with me,” I told her and headed for the empty back corner of the store.

  24

  Rosie

  He took me down an aisle full of doors and windows, which opened and closed in display frames. The farther we went down the aisle, the fewer and fewer people there were around us, until it was nobody but us, the sound of our footsteps, and the music from the PA system. It was even a little darker back there, because half the fluorescents above were switched off to save energy. It was like a little quiet corner with just us, amid all the hardware store chaos. With my bound hands in his, his massive girthy fingers enormous in comparison to mine, he pulled me to him. Our bodies collided, and I gasped a little, which made him groan. He looked back over his shoulder and then opened a big door—a white one, no windows, brass lock. He yanked me inside the little display foyer, closing it behind him, and then locked the deadbolt.

  We were in a little fort almost, a makeshift space between the huge shelves. It was no bigger than a broom closet, and the only light was what came through between the slats. Even the music playing over the speaker system was quieter back here. But I could still hear it. Collective Soul’s “December.”

  “Remember when this song came out?” I asked. The lyrics transported me back twenty years, to me in his Blazer, to the summer when we worked together as lifeguards. I remembered stealing glances at his legs as he drove and his red shorts along his tan line. It hit me as it had once and again that I’d been gawking over him for decades, without letting myself feel a thing.

  But now I was feeling it. Like Uma Thurman in that wild scene in Pulp Fiction, he had my heart pounding. Every breath near him felt like my first.

  “Fuck yes, I do,” he said. “I remember driving you around while you sang at the top of your lungs.”

  We listened to the chorus in silence for a second. “So dirty. I didn’t even realize it then.”

  He groaned again. “I fucking did.”

  He was possessive here, not so polite like he’d tried to be out in public. He drew my hands up above me slightly and worked the pliers between my skin and the zip ties. He was gentle, but it made me hiss—they were that tight. He froze, watching me close. “You okay?”

  I winced. “Totally!”

  Without taking his eyes off of mine, he snipped one tie, and my hand came free. The blood rushed back into my fingers, and I flexed my hand into a fist a few times.

  “Better?”

  “Much.” I brought my free hand up to the back of his neck. It was a rather yummy combination of sensations—the pins and needles of my circulation returning and the soft prickles of his short hair under my fingertips. I shifted the chain of his necklace, just an inch back and forth.

  “I like it in here.” I glanced up. “Like a secret hideout.”

  He nodded and took my other wrist, working the metal between my skin and the plastic. He snipped the second tie free, and both fell to the concrete floor with a soft clatter.

  “I kind of want you to tie me up, though,” I whispered.

  “I definitely will,” Max said gruffly. His strong hands moved around behind my ass, and he hoisted me up on the shelf behind me. “But not right now. Not yet.” My ass was only half on the shelf, and I turned to make sure I wasn’t going to collide with anything. Where I sat was empty—behind me, it looked like there were
refrigerator boxes or ovens. It smelled like lumber and paint and him, the very distinctive smell of Max’s cologne, and his skin. As he parted my legs with his body, I knew that another smell was also getting mixed up in there—the smell of the two of us together inside me. My favorite, favorite, favorite.

  “I want to fuck you here—and everywhere.”

  “We could,” I whispered back. “Why not?”

  He eyed me closely, and his fingers dug into me a little bit more firmly. “You’re a screamer, though. Fucking noisy as hell.”

  I shoved him a little. That was ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous. “I am not.”

  “Fuck yes, you are,” he said, smiling so hard I saw the very rare right dimple. “Max, Max, Max, please, please, please. Turned up to eleven.”

  “No way,” I whispered as he brought his lips to mine so they were touching without actually being a kiss. One of his hands moved up my waist and gripped me hard. We locked eyes, challenging each other to take the first step. “Are we going to have sex in Home Depot?” I whispered.

  He got this cocky fuck yeah look in his eye and undid his belt. “Got a problem with that?”

  “None,” I told him and hung on tight.

  The shelf was just high enough to keep me at the perfect height—lower than a kitchen counter, higher than a bed. He shoved my dress aside and gripped my tattoo. “That makes me fucking crazy,” he growled as he pushed into me. “Makes me want to go with you to see you get tatted up somewhere else.”

  I pressed my lips to his shirt to force myself to be silent. “Yeah? Like what?”