He pressed me to the wall and powered faster, harder, pummeling me as I gasped quietly through my climax and his thrusts until I felt his tongue touch my neck, his hard body go completely still and I heard his deep sigh.
We didn’t move, either of us, not for long glorious moments where I did something for reasons I did not understand. I did something I never, not ever, not ever allowed myself to do. For reasons I could not fathom, I did something I knew it was pure insanity, pure torment to do.
I believed.
For one magnificent second, connected to Nick Sebring, I believed.
I believed in a better world.
I believed I could feel complete.
I believed I could have someone by my side.
I believed I could feel safe.
I believed I could be happy.
I believed I could be loved.
I believed in a dawn coming where I would open my eyes and have all of this only for it to lead to another day dawning where I’d have it and then another day…
And another…
And another…
And another…
Until I no longer existed on this world.
Thus I made an uncontrollable noise of loss when Sebring lifted me away from him and our connection vanished.
The moment was over too quickly.
Way too fucking quickly.
As always.
I dropped my legs.
He put me to my feet and stepped back.
Lifting my eyes to his, mine I knew shuttered, his equally blank, I shimmied down my skirt.
He did his fly.
It was me who looked away in order to walk to my panties. I bent as ladylike and dignified as I could to nab them before I shimmied them up as best I could. I smoothed my skirt over them when I was done and walked to my seat. I took the last sip of my drink in a way I hoped appeared casual before I grabbed my phone, shoving it in my purse.
I tucked my purse under my arm, turned and moved back Sebring’s way.
I again caught his gaze as I walked to him standing where I’d left him but turned to watch me, shoulders against the wall, arms crossed on his wide chest.
I dipped my chin as I walked past him and began to make my way up the rises, thinking now I’d lost the club. The only thing that was mine. Like Tommy, being foolish, thinking I could have something I wanted and going for it, I’d lost the only thing that was truly mine.
I could never come back.
Not because I’d broken the rules. Sebring would have to complain and I had a feeling he would not be doing that.
But because I’d made a huge mistake fucking a man who existed in my world. A man who had the power and resources to hurt me if he so wished. A man my father could hurt if the whim struck him.
And it would.
This I knew with absolute certainty I could not have. I could not do. I’d learned that.
I’d learned it.
“I want more of that.”
It was the pleasantly deep voice which was far more pleasant now due to being roughened by sex.
He wanted more.
Of me.
My heart turned over, my stomach flip-flopped and for another nanosecond, I believed.
I turned to him, my mouth opening to tell him that would never happen.
It was a grave mistake.
The instant I caught sight of him, I froze.
He was tall.
His eyes were the color of the ocean.
And he made me believe that I could want something, take it and have it.
Own it.
Keep it.
Something precious would be mine.
Even if that belief only lasted seconds, I’d waited all my life to feel that feeling.
To really, really believe.
My feet took me to him.
I stopped a foot away.
I bent my head and opened my clutch, shoving my fingers into the side pocket until I found it.
I pulled out the pen and reached for his hand.
And like a girl at a club who had hopes for everything from getting thoroughly banged to having just met the father of her future children, I wrote my cell phone number on his palm.
When done, without a word, I walked out of the room, pulled out my phone and texted Harry so he could reverse fifty feet in the alley and take me home.
Chapter Four
Cool Customer
Nick
Nick walked down the stairs to find the girl waiting at the bottom, her eyes slits, her arms crossed on her chest, her fury unhidden.
When he got close, she leaned in and hissed, “You fucked her.”
The bitch didn’t turn off the cameras.
She’d watched.
Aggravating.
Without hesitation, he grabbed her upper arm and dragged her with him toward the back room.
The security guy came out of the vestibule as did the coat-check guy.
“Move another step, you’re both looking for a job,” he warned.
They stopped, as they would, considering six months ago, the Sebring brothers had secretly purchased the club. To keep it on the down low, both were silent partners. The old owners still ran it with the only change being that they didn’t pay Benito Valenzuela protection money. Knight and Nick were perfectly capable of protecting the club.
Valenzuela backed off without a fight considering he had recently drawn Knight’s attention and not in a good way. He was smart enough, in his current war with Chaos and the moves Georgia Shade was making, not to court a new enemy.
But as it served Nick’s purpose, the staff of the club now knew he was their boss.
Therefore, unimpeded, he pulled his employee into the back room and through it to the door at the rear.
“Nick, you’re holding me too tight,” she whined, twisting her arm against his hold.
He wasn’t. His hold was not tender but it wasn’t causing pain.
He knew how to cause pain in a variety of ways.
Deacon Gates had taught him.
He also knew how to contain someone and not to cause pain.
Hettie and Turner had taught him that.
Her fear at his actions and the fact she’d fucked up and was freaked was causing her pain.
He yanked her to his side as he hit the code into the keypad. He heard the latch unlock and pushed the door open.
He looked to the man inside watching a bank of twelve monitors with visuals that shifted every five seconds. Visuals that fed from the thirty cameras throughout the club.
The man took one look at Nick’s face and immediately lifted his hands, not at all happy he’d watched his boss fucking a woman considering that boss was right there, clearly about to get in his shit about it.
“She said—” he began.
“Delete it,” Nick ordered.
The man instantly turned to the monitors. One cleared then showed the now empty social chamber.
Within five seconds, it blanked.
Without another word, Nick dragged the girl out of the monitoring room and closed the door.
“You’re done,” he told her. “Pack your shit. Out.”
Her eyes got big.
“You’re firing me?” she asked.
Fuck, he hated stupid bitches.
He’d smelled that on her the minute he met her. It concerned him, not only for the purpose he bought the place—to get access to Olivia Shade—but because he owned the fucking place and no employer wanted a stupid bitch for an employee.
But she was liked by the old owners.
What she pulled, that no longer factored.
“Yes,” he answered, letting her go. “Get your shit and out.”
“But we—” she began.
“There is no we,” he told her.
Her head twitched in shock.
Yeah. He hated stupid bitches.
“But you took me to dinner,” she whispered. “And then we—”
“Fucked. You weren’t very good
so I didn’t come back for more. Lesson. Usually, a man takes a woman out, fucks her, wants more, he does something about that and doesn’t let three weeks elapse between the first fuck and the next.”
“But, you’ve been flirting with me for—”
He knew what he’d been doing.
He’d needed something from her.
He got it.
He knew she felt his change when she snapped her mouth shut.
“Out,” he whispered.
She swallowed visibly but that was the extent of her further wasting his time. She hustled her admittedly sweet ass to get her shit and then she got out.
He pulled out his phone, started a string to the managers of the club and tapped in the text.
Find a new Ross.
He hit send and went home.
* * * * *
An hour later, Nick sat on his sofa, foot up, sole of his shoe pressed to the edge of the coffee table, the fingers of one hand wrapped around a glass of Dewar’s and ice, his other hand lifted, his eyes to Olivia Shade’s phone number written on his palm.
Christ, she was a cool customer.
After walking to him in that fucking skirt with that fucking look on her face that made him absolutely sure he could fucking smell the wet drenching her pussy…
Then taking his cock like she did, her eyes locked to his, her hips working his dick…
And finally coming with the demure noises a princess would make while her pussy told a different story and milked him hard.
After all that, walking like she was drifting through her living room in order to grab her panties, put them on, nab her purse and do nothing but nod before she was going to walk away from him.
He had not expected first contact to go that spectacularly well.
He expected eye contact. Maybe a few words exchanged. Enough she’d get he was into her kink so he could lay the groundwork when he ran into her elsewhere.
He didn’t expect to fuck her against the wall.
And certainly he didn’t expect that fuck to be that outstanding.
He also didn’t expect to feel whatever the fuck it was he felt coming off her after her orgasm milked his right out of him.
He had no idea what it was but whatever it was, he stayed buried inside her a lot longer than he’d intended.
And it made him uneasy.
She’d given nothing away after that and it was almost like he’d imagined it.
He stopped looking at her number, leaned forward, tagged his phone off the coffee table and sat back. He used his thumb to program her in.
And there she was. A bold Olivia Shade at the top of her contact.
Her there with him everywhere he went.
A Shade in his life.
He looked across the room to the chest against the wall where the framed picture of Hettie was. A picture that hadn’t moved for four years, except for when he moved house and when his cleaning service dusted it.
Fuck.
He put that thought aside, tossed the phone back to the table, nabbed his drink, threw it back, heaved himself out of the couch and went to bed.
* * * * *
Like he had a sixth sense (and in his business, he had to), Turner called him the next morning five minutes after Nick’s workout.
“You make contact yet?”
Nick looked from his orange juice out the sunny window.
Cold. Warm. February. July. In Denver, the day dawned, odds were it’d be sunny.
“You wanna tell me why you’re asking?” he requested.
“One of her boys got dead last night.”
Nick’s back straightened but his eyes dropped to the stainless steel countertop.
“What?”
“Eli Cook, street name Green. Not sure why. Cops say the crime scene, that bein’ his apartment, looked like he was packin’ to leave town. Not sure why about that either. Don’t got a lot of insight into the Shade family dealings anymore, but no word on the street sayin’ there was an issue. He had a gunshot wound to his thigh that was not mortal, but was fresh, though not as fresh as the ones that were mortal and no one knows jack about that either.”
Even though Nick knew all about Green, including who shot him considering he had surveillance all over the Shade warehouse, he had nothing to say so he didn’t say anything.
“This is not good, Nick,” Turner went on. “The House of Shade has been a house of cards for years now. A cold wind blows, it’ll blow away and everything stacked inside will go with it. And I gotta tell you, with them taking desperate measures years ago to diversify dealings, that going so far south it dropped off the face of the earth, and them constantly scrambling with not much coming of it, now Eli Cook biting it for no apparent reason, I feel a seriously fuckin’ bitter wind kickin’ up.”
“Fucked her last night,” Nick shared.
There was a pause, then, “Say again?”
“Set it up I was with her last night at the club for the initial meet. Apparently, she liked the scene that was playin’ out and wasn’t feeling the idea of delayed gratification. She made it clear she was good to go; I took her up on the invitation. We fucked. She gave me her number after so we’re gonna do it again. But before that, it was reported to me she called in at just after six to book her viewing. She was there by ten thirty. She left at just after eleven thirty. Tail on her said her driver took her right home and that’s where she stayed. When was her boy done?”
“Jesus, Nick. I’m not callin’ you to be Olivia Shade’s alibi, for fuck’s sake. Christ. I can’t believe what you’re tellin’ me. The bitch is made of stone. First contact and you fucked her? How could you even drive your cock in there without it breaking clean off?”
Olivia Shade was not made of stone.
She was warm and soft, smelled good, and her sheet of straight black hair felt like silk.
And if he was another man he knew her green eyes had the capacity to brand ownership. He knew it because, as they held his while he thrust into her, he had to fight giving over to it.
And last but very much not least, she had a phenomenally tight, hot, wet cunt.
“Trust me,” he muttered. “She’s not made of stone.”
“Nick, nature is gonna take its course with Vincent Shade. With all of them. You do not have to use his daughter to get to him.”
He shouldn’t have told Turner his plan.
But he needed this to succeed and he was going to use everything he had to do that, family, friends, skills…and markers.
And Turner owed him a fuckuva lot of markers.
So he’d told Turner his plan.
“Your concern is heartwarming,” he joked, lifting his glass of juice and finishing it, hoping Turner would take his hint and shut up about it.
He didn’t take the hint.
“You know this family. You know those two women. You’ve done such extensive research on them, you might know them better than they know themselves. So you know the Shade sisters have two uses for men. They can take orders and/or give orgasms. Fuck, Georgia Shade uses her cunt as a recruiting tool and to make sure their soldiers toe the line. At least Olivia doesn’t fuck where she works but you found out yourself the last three cocks she took didn’t know her name and she didn’t ask theirs.”
She hadn’t asked his last night either.
In fact, she hadn’t said a fucking thing.
But she knew who he was like he knew the same of her. No one in their world didn’t, either way.
“Least last night proves one thing,” Nick said. “Not thinkin’ she’d even sit in the same room with me much less ride my dick if she knew what went down with Hettie. That close of an encounter, I’d be in a firefight by the time I hit the alley, even if she’s hidin’ her kink from Daddy and they got about ten soldiers left in their crew.”
“We already know that, Nick. Vincent rules that warehouse with an iron fist, but he tried to form a stable of girls six years ago and Georgia lost her mind. With two women set to inherit that drie
d-up dynasty, whores are not on their agenda. With them not even allowing whores, neither of the sisters knew he was involved in human trafficking. Think that’s the only thing that would have the Shade sisters breaking ties with their old man.”
That also made him uneasy. The fact that Olivia was his entry to tearing down Vincent Shade’s world. To gaining access to Gill Harkin and blowing a hole in his head just like that man had done to Hettie. To dismantling everything Shade.
Which meant both sisters would lose everything when neither of them had been involved with what had happened to Hettie.
But they lived that life. They stood by their father’s side. They did their jobs.
Sometimes you got away with dealing day to day with the devil.
Sometimes you got burned.
“Nick,” Turner called when Nick said nothing.
“Nature takes its course, I’ll walk away. But the time is ripe, Eric. So I’ll work my plan until that happens or until I get what I need. It’s in motion now. There’s no other option.”
“Please be safe,” Turner replied. “At least Georgia Shade has blood pumping in her veins. She likes a good fuck a lot more often than her sister. She likes a good time too. She’s got a life and she lives it. But outside of what Vincent tried to do to resurrect their operations six years ago, it’s widely considered Olivia Shade is the quiet brains behind their ventures and if it wasn’t for her, that family would have disappeared from the scene years ago.”
“I did gather this intel before I started this gig,” Nick pointed out.
He listened to Turner sigh.
“We done?” Nick asked.
“You get anything useful about that dead soldier, would make some folks happy in the DPD they got an even anorexic lead.”
“Right, after I finish bangin’ her again later, seein’ as the last time she didn’t say a fuckin’ word to me, I’ll ask if she feels like turnin’ rat and givin’ me somethin’ so the cops can nail someone in her crew, or out of it, for making a dead soldier.”
“You fucked a woman who didn’t say a word to you?” Turner asked.
“Yep,” Nick answered.
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