Very aware he hadn’t answered any of the questions she’d almost asked, even though he had to know how she’d have finished them if she had the nerve. Did he break out of jail? Did Nick and the club have anything to do with his release? Were the authorities looking for him?
“If I should know something—”
“Then you’d know it,” he said over her.
“Yes, but, if you’ve done—”
“There is no but. And I haven’t done anything.”
They looked into each other’s eyes; hers reflecting her fear, his cool and distant. The warning he’d injected into that last interruption had been loud and clear. And as an old lady should, she heeded it by closing the subject.
But not before she confirmed something. “You’re not leaving me again, right?”
Within one blink of his gold eyes, warmth returned to his expression and her lover was back. “I’m not leaving you, baby,” he reassured her.
“’Kay.” She tried to smile but couldn’t, so she laid her head down and tried to slow her heartbeat as she stared across the room into the darkened walk-in closet. Was it even possible for someone to break out of jail anymore?
“Come on. Impress me with talk about what a good girl you were for me,” he cajoled. “I’m beginning to think you’re using that other shit as an out so you won’t have to admit to having swallowed someone else’s tongue.”
She took a quiet breath and decided she couldn’t do much more than trust him. Well, she could turn on CNN the minute she was alone… “Er, I didn’t abstain completely, no.”
He playfully tugged on a hunk of her hair. “Really. Tell me about that.”
“I wanted to learn how to kiss, so I tried it a few times before thoughts of you started ruling my life.”
That hunk was pulled on until her head went back far enough for him to look into her face. Those lowered brows weren’t playful at all. “With who? When?” He wasn’t angry, but there was a mild reproach in his voice that had her shrugging and trying to look away. He didn’t let her.
Fine. “Ian Owens kissed me behind the photo booth at eighth-grade grad. Neil Pearson kissed me at the first football game I ever went to—it was my freshman year. That same year, Paul Reardon and Evan Baker taught me how to French kiss. But those were four months apart, and I didn’t go back for more, not with either of them. I remember when you picked me up after school the day I kissed Evan, I saw you and wanted to die. I felt like I’d cheated on you. I never went near anyone else ever again.”
“You were fourteen.”
She nodded.
“You were fourteen, and you let three different guys kiss you in one fucking year, Tish.”
“I was trying to learn in case I ever got the chance to kiss you,” she said in her defense. “I didn’t want to be totally useless.”
“I could have dealt with totally useless. Evan Baker still run the tire shop in town?”
“Yes.”
He released her hair but kept his fingers buried in it. “When I need some rubber, make sure I send Nick. I wouldn’t want to get stupid and pop the kid in the beak for something he did six years ago.”
“Okay. Can we stop talking about this? I’m afraid you’re going to let the name of someone you were with slip out now just to spite me. What if I know her and have to live with the knowledge that you slept with her. It’s one thing to kiss someone, but to have sex with them is entirely different.”
He scooped her against him and rolled onto his back, so she sprawled across his hard body. “I’d never do that to you.”
“Good.” She rested her chin on her forearm and tried to get her happy back.
“You’re so fuckin’ breakable,” he murmured after a little while. He was testing her hips with his big hands, his thumbs going under to caress her lower belly. Again. “Another drawback to me being so much older than you is—”
“There is no drawback, Josh. When we’re on a date, the men will want to high-five you, and the women will want to be me. So what?” She was further cheered by a thought. “I’ve never been on a date before. Where will you take me for our first?”
Something began growing under her belly, and she squirmed when Josh’s long fingers went down to knead her ass, opening her pussy up from the back with every squeeze. “Do your nipples always stay hard for this long? Are they sensitive? Is that why you keep getting goosebumps? Oh, and I don’t do dates. But I am going to show you off first chance I get.”
He could call it what he wanted, but if they went out together, it would be a date. She looked down at her beaded nipples. “If you must know, I’m not used to rubbing up against the hair on your chest and legs. When my pussy is over your thigh, it tickles. I’m trying not to think about it, but it’s making it difficult for me to settle down.”
“How sore is this pussy I’m tickling?”
She reached down and stroked his rigid shaft a few times before bringing him home. “Not too sore to take you.” She lined him up with her entrance and slid down while he pushed up. The glide into her warm channel was easy because as she’d said, she couldn’t settle and had been growing wetter and wetter with every passing minute. “God, that feels so amazing.”
“Fuck, yeah, it does.” He pushed her hips down and met her with a slow pump. “Look at me.”
She raised her head from where she’d been about to lick his nipple. She’d noticed it pebble when she stroked her finger over it and was now wondering if the area was as much of an erogenous zone on a man’s body as it was on a woman’s.
“We’re gonna go all the way, Tish. You’re the beginning of the family I’ve dreamed of having since mine was taken away from me when I was a kid. And that drawback I mentioned? That’s me being at an age where I’m dying to breed my woman. I want you with a round belly and swollen ankles caused by my kid growing inside your body. You open to expanding on this hot unit at some point?”
She swallowed hard and tried not to panic as she dug her knees into the mattress. She clamped them together to still his hips. What to tackle first. “What do you mean ‘taken away?’ You never told me that. How was your family taken away?”
His expression wiped clean, but not before she saw a staggering amount of sorrow devour the apprehension that had slowly spread through his eyes at her lack of an answer. “That isn’t something I talk about.” Grief dripped from his words, and not concerned in the least that he didn’t want to share his history with her, she grabbed his face and dropped light kisses around his mouth and jaw.
“Then you don’t have to.” She wanted the pain radiating from him gone. “But if you ever change your mind, just know I’m here, okay? No pressure, though.” Her fingers itched to call her uncle and get the story. But she never would because that wouldn’t be right.
Josh pushed at her knees and rolled her over. “Are you sure this is what you want?” He withdrew his cock until just the tip was inside her. He fucked her with it. “This? Me? Because even though we’re doing this right now, and I’d do you every chance I got for the rest of this week, I really would make one fuck of an effort to let you go if you think it’s all a mistake.”
“Really? You’d do that for me?” You jerk, she added silently. How could he say that after everything they’d talked about? Why couldn’t he just accept that she wanted him and loved him?
“Yes. If you regret this, I’d try.”
Big jerk. “Huh. So you’d do me all week, just like this, and then when I got used to having sex whenever I wanted it, you’d cut me loose to feed my addiction elsewhere? What would happen to the jealous asshole you just said you were where I’m concerned? He’d disappear?” She narrowed her eyes and flicked her finger at his goateed chin. “I don’t buy it. Know why? Because I trust that you care about me, and I know it would affect you.” She wrapped her legs around him and pulled him in sharply. She forced herself not to moan around the pleasure that brought her. “I think you’d be a wreck if you came into Bubba’s for a beer and had to watch m
e ask my boss if I could leave early because some guy wanted to take me home. Could you picture letting me leave with him, knowing I’d be doing this exact thing thirty minutes later in his bed?” She grabbed his hand and brought it to her breast as her hips undulated. The wet sound of his shaft working in and out of her pussy was so sexy.
He shook his head and kept shaking it as he moved down her body. His cock slipped free and was replaced by his mouth in the next second. His tongue slipped inside, so did two of his fingers which he continued licking around, making loud sucking noises. “It’s my cunt,” he said against her. “I’m a liar. Shouldn’t have offered something I could never follow through on. It would never happen. Can’t let you go. Not now. Not ever.”
“That’s better,” she whispered through a tight jaw as he ate at her with such fervor.
Her head went into the pillow, and her heels dug into the bed so she could raise her hips up. The action brought her knees together and, not appreciating it, Josh hooked his arm under her thighs and wrenched it down to open her again. He clamped his lips on her clit and batted the bud from side to side as he turned his wrist to angle his buried fingers up. He applied a firm pressure to massage the front wall of her pussy.
She came for what she knew had to be the last time this night. Her body ached as it spasmed, her hips rising high. Josh rose with them, and after one particularly hard suck, he left the apex of her thighs to travel up and claim her mouth. She tasted the tangy flavor of herself on his tongue and let loose a low sound of appreciation when he replaced his fingers with his cock. He fucked her through the tail end of her orgasm and had his own as she was drifting back into her body.
A short while later, she was returning on shaking legs from a trip to the bathroom. “You did that just to get the smell of sex back on me, didn’t you.” She collapsed onto the side of the bed.
“Did I mention that I usually get what I want in the end?” His arm was over his eyes; the blanket pulled up to his hips. His rolling muscles and tattoos were on full display.
She smirked at the size of his ego and stared for a moment just because she could.
“It’s rude to stare like that at the father of your future children.”
Her heart skipped a beat as that familiar fear and trepidation swirled through her again at thoughts of getting pregnant. She wasn’t sure why the negative feelings continued to linger. It wasn’t as though she’d be alone in the intimidating venture of parenthood as her mom had been. Or rather, as Tish had been. Rachel had had her drugs and strung out bliss for company. Tish had had loneliness. But that wasn’t the case anymore. Now, aside from Nina and her uncle, along with the extended family that was the MC, she had Josh. And he eventually wanted to give her another littler version of himself.
Once she made it personal, rather than ambiguous, her heart melted, and then opened wide with an eager acceptance. “A boy,” she said quietly. “When I’m ready, I’d like a boy who’s just like his daddy.”
Josh lifted his arm and looked at her, that pain from earlier rolling back into his eyes like storm clouds. “I’d like a girl first. And I’d like to call her Elli. I want her to have your blond hair and my eyes. That’s what my little sister looked like.”
Tish just looked at him as something he’d said the other night echoed through her mind. “…you were my own little blond angel with the eyes of an adult. Man, I wanted to lock you away so bad. I was so afraid something was gonna happen to you too.”
Something had happened to his little blond sister, she realized, trying not to react to the revelation. He’d used the past tense, but did that mean she’d been taken away by someone, or was she deceased?
Tish came in and stretched out next to him, forcing herself to be patient. If he only felt able to open up to her little by little, she’d have to live with that.
“Okay. How about this? When the time comes, I’ll tell my baby maker what your preference is, and we’ll see what we can do to please our master. And we’ll go to the trouble because we love you. Now, we know you don’t trust that love yet, but your young old lady will work on that for you since you are very generously—if unnecessarily—working on a multitude of things for her.” She pressed her lips to his pec and then laid her head down over the kiss. “Soon you won’t remember what it was like to live without my love in your life, Josh. And even if you never love me back in the same way, I’m still yours. Don’t ever forget that.”
“You done?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“Good. Because all this hearts and flowers you’re about is starting to piss me off.”
Grinning at the gentle tone he’d used that proved he was teasing, Tish cradled her hard-ass, ex-con close and lovingly petted his powerful body.
He drew her in tighter and it was a few minutes before he spoke again. “Should have gone easier on you tonight,” he murmured as he stroked her side. So touchy-feely, she thought, as she soaked it in. “Uh,” he cleared his throat, and because it was so unlike him, her ears perked up at the discomfort in the sound. “Before you fall asleep, I have to apologize for the way I spoke to you on Friday. When you offered yourself to me, and I was a fuckin’ idiot thinking I wasn’t the first guy to hear those incredible words, well, we both know I didn’t like that.”
He grunted and unnecessarily adjusted his pillow before stilling again. She nodded but kept her head down because it was clear he was brutally uncomfortable. To have her looking at him would make it worse.
“I’m sorry, Tish. I was way out of line. What I should have said before walking out, was; I’m so proud of you. I’m proud and sometimes a little awed by your strength. Your character is stellar, and you have an ingrained sense loyalty—which explains why Rachel is still around—and that’s something I respect the fuck out of. You commit, and you’re there, solid as a rock.” He dropped his lips to her hair. “You’re the most valuable thing I own. And I mean that with a reverence you’ll never fully appreciate. I’ll stand before you and protect you with all that I am, and I’ll kneel at your goddamn feet because I’m man enough to know my young queen is my greatest strength.”
Staggered, and more honored than she’d ever been by anything ever said to her, Tish turned her head and buried her face in his neck, and she cried. It was the first time in her life that anyone had ever said she made them proud. What didn’t surprise her, as he held her in his strong arms, soothing her with a quiet apology, was that it was Josh who’d given her this by recognizing what she’d worked so hard to become: A good person. His words touched her very soul, and she knew she’d treasure them forever. A forever she’d spend with him, her king.
“Sorry,” she sniffled a moment later when she came out of his soaked neck and accepted the corner of the bedsheet he handed her.
“I’ll never fuckin’ open my mouth like that again. I told you I’m not good with that shit.”
She finished mopping up her tears and dropped her hands to just stare at him. “That was the most incredible thing anyone’s ever said to me, Josh, and by saying it, you reminded me why my love for you is what it is. Please open your mouth like that again, but only on special occasions, because I’m not a fan of crying. ’Kay?”
He cupped her face and caught the tears hovering on her lashes with his thumbs. “I’m not a fan of seeing you cry. You’re sure they’re not sad tears?”
She gripped his wrists and nodded. “I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.”
He brought her down into the security of his arms. “Then I’m doing good so far.”
“You’re doing great, as I knew you would.”
She laid her head over his heart, and they finally allowed the stillness of the night to close in around them. Savoring each moment that ticked by, Tish closed her eyes, and just before she fell asleep, she humbly thanked God for answering the desperate prayers of a lonely ten-year-old girl.
~ THE END ~
(but not for Josh…)
~ Coming Soon ~
HER PROUD KING
(Steel Jackals MC #1½)
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~ About the Author ~
Tiff P. Raine
An award-winning, bestselling romantic suspense author (under a different pseudonym), Tiff P. Raine has now crossed genres into erotic romance. She writes about her possessive alpha males and their spirited women from her home in Southwestern Ontario. And, yes, she is a reclusive cat lady, but currently has only one beauty of a feline to keep her company. You can find her social media links below.
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~ Acknowledgements ~
A very large, exuberant thanks to the readers who continue to one-click, the bloggers who continue to pimp, and the faithful fans who share, get excited, and continue to support me while I empty my mind of stories. You’re the best!
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His Young Queen: (Steel Jackals MC #1) Page 13