HIS VIRGIN VESSEL: A Dark Bad Boy Baby Romance (War Cry MC)

by Nicole Fox

  I grinned. "I'm guessing there were vases of flowers and some lacey throw pillows?"

  "Mostly it was girlie pictures on the walls and a shiv under my mattress, just in case, but still."

  "It was your own."

  "Exactly." He looked a little embarrassed. "It would be nice to do that properly. To own a space. Sorry."

  I frowned. "What are you apologizing for?"

  "It's hardly the bad boy that you signed up for, is it? Dreaming of interior design."

  Suddenly, I felt a bit embarrassed myself. "I didn't go for you just because you were an outlaw biker."

  "Yes, you did," Asa cut in. "That's what you want in your life. A little excitement, a thrill, or something forbidden."

  I wanted to deny it, of course, but just hearing him say the word 'forbidden' made my knees weaken. He wasn't one hundred percent wrong. "It worked out though. No matter how it started—look what happened."

  "Yeah, but for how long?" Asa stood, narrowly avoiding cracking his head on the low ceiling. "Let's say this all goes to plan."

  "It will."

  "Well, okay. What then? We settle down in a place together in the city? You paint, and I get a job? Is that what you're thinking?"

  "Maybe."

  Asa half-smiled. "And then, on the streets of the big city, you meet a mugger, or a drug dealer, or someone else who awakens that thrill-seeker inside you, and I never see you again."

  "That won't happen!"

  "You don't know that." Asa shrugged. "You're encouraging me to stop being the thing that you found attractive in the first place."

  "That was bad Corinne,'" I argued. "You told me that she's not real anyway."

  "There may be no such thing as bad Corinne," agreed Asa. "But good Corinne has a thing for bad Asa, and bad boys in general. Are you going to tell me that's not the case?"

  I pouted a bit and kicked at the carpet. "I don't know."

  "That's because you won't look inside yourself. You don't want to examine yourself too closely because you're afraid of what you might find."

  "Well, listen who's talking!" I wasn't just going accept that level of hypocrisy. "How many years have you been on the wrong side of the law? Are you going to tell me that was because you were happier, or because you weren't willing to take a good look at yourself?"

  "My childhood ..." Asa began, but I interrupted.

  "Ended like fifteen years ago. You've got to stop using that as an excuse."

  Now it was Asa's turn to hit back at me. "I use my childhood as an excuse? At least my parents deserve to be blamed. You blame a man who loved you, looked after you, and gave you everything you wanted."

  "I'm so sorry my childhood wasn't as bad as yours, but everyone has an equal right to be screwed up by their parents, even if those parents were good. And I still had a bad mom. You can't take that away from me."

  "You don't want to end up like her," said Asa firmly, saying something that my dad must have said to me a hundred times.

  "I should end up like my dad?"

  "Not necessarily. You should end up like Corinne. And the only way to do that is to stop running, and look at yourself. You run away from your dad, toward this memory of your mom, toward danger, toward bad influences, like me. You're always running, when you should be settling down. Stop flying by the seat of your pants. The right thing won't just bump into you. You've got to look for it."

  "Didn't you just bump into me?"

  Asa paused. "Okay, maybe that was a bad example. But I was just a lucky chance. Generally speaking, the good things in life don't just fall into your lap. You've got to make them happen."

  I gave him a hard look. "I take it this is 'do as I say and not as I do' type of advice?"

  "I learned the hard way," Asa said. "I don't want you to have to."

  I shook my head. "Are you reading this stuff from The Big Book of Brian Dugas Quotes?"

  "Is that your way of telling me that I sound like your dad?"

  He really did. Except that I was listening to him. "I'm just saying that you're being pretty damn judgmental about the decisions I've made in my life, given that you're turning yourself into the police tomorrow, and there's still a fifty percent chance of you going to jail for crimes you did commit. How about understanding rather than judging?"

  Asa sat back down on the bed. "That's a totally fair comment."

  I went and sat beside him. "I bet there were times when you enjoyed being a part of War Cry. Times when it was a thrill, like nothing else you've ever felt, and when it was good to be part of something. Hell, I'll bet there were times when it felt good to be bad."

  Asa couldn't suppress a smile that spread across his face. "Okay, while I'm not saying it's a good thing, or endorsing criminality as a lifestyle—hell, yeah! There were times when I loved it."

  "But you're happy to step away from it?"

  He turned to look at me tenderly. "Of course. The good times with War Cry were fleeting, a surface thrill. Deep down, there was always an emptiness. Even when you're surrounded by people, you can still be pretty lonely. I could have quit years ago, but I guess I didn't know what I would have left if I did. Now I've found something better."

  "If you can accept all that about yourself, why can't you accept it in me?" I asked, fervently. "I know I have ... let's call it a 'thing' for bad boys. I get a thrill when I'm doing something that I know I shouldn't be. But, like you said, it's fleeting. And it's nothing compared to the thrill I get when I'm with you. You, Asa. The real you. Not just some bad boy with a cool bike and an attitude, but a man who I ..." I shied away from finishing the sentence. I wasn't cagey about how I felt for Asa. I knew what I felt, but I wasn't sure yet how he felt, and I knew that if I said the word, then he would feel pressured to say it back, and that wasn't how I wanted it to happen.

  He kissed me, which was almost as good.

  "I'm glad we talked about this."

  I nodded. "Me too."

  Why could I speak to him and not to my father? I might have had a very similar conversation with Dad, but, with him, it always degenerated into shouting, accusations, and door-slamming pretty early on, so we never reached the important bit. I found myself really hoping that I would get to say these things to him one day soon. With Dad and me, it was always a war, both of us fighting to win, and, as a result, we both walked away losers. We needed to break that cycle.

  "You miss him, don't you?" Asa could damn near read my mind sometimes.

  "Yeah," I said simply. "He's the only parent I have. And he's been a great one, I guess. A bit judgy. But if that's the worst you can say, then ... It's always so hard between dad and me. I guess because we're such different people."

  "Perhaps because you're such similar people."

  I almost choked on my own shock. "Are you insane? We're nothing alike. Dad is all about the law. I'm ..."

  "Whose idea was it that I hand myself into the police?" Asa asked mildly.

  "Hey!" I wasn't standing for this. "In my bad girl days there were plenty of times I broke the law."

  "Were there, though?" asked Asa. "I'm guessing there were plenty of times you skirted around the edges of the law, but never actually broke it."

  "Me and my friends used to get drunk, go out, and raise hell!" I said, hotly.

  "Drinking, huh?" said Asa. "I'm guessing this was after you turned twenty-one?"

  "Shut up." Of course it was after I turned twenty-one.

  "What sort of hell were you raising specifically?"

  "It was ... It was ..." I racked my brains for a believable lie, but, in the end, just gave up. "I'm the worst bad girl in the world."

  "I prefer the good one anyway."

  I looked up at Asa. "Am I really like my dad?"

  "Well, you don't look like him."

  "A relief for both of us."

  Asa put an arm around me. "You know what your dad and you really have in common? You're both struggling to come to terms with who Corinne Dugas is."

  "Does War Cry also do Psyc
h 101?" I asked sarcastically.

  "Every Tuesday," Asa replied. "Your dad hasn't had a handle on you for years. But I'm guessing the time he lost that sense of who you were, was around about the time you started pretending to be someone else. You lost a sense of yourself and reached out for your mother as someone to be. Which, maybe, wasn't the best choice. It confused him and probably scared him, I think it's fair to say that he didn't deal with the changes you were going through in the best way, but he keeps trying."

  "You should really take that psych class. You're a natural."

  "Well, while I'm on a roll, here's another insight. I think you lost a sense of yourself, because you lost a sense of your dad. Maybe he was busy with work, or maybe he favored Risa a bit. I don't know. But you got that thing in your mind that told you that if you couldn’t be him, then you had to be your mom."

  "You're saying Dad and I could both do a better job of trying to understand each other?"

  Asa nodded, and I was again struck by how easy it was to talk to him. What had started off as lust and a desire for the forbidden, had turned into something honest, loving, and with surprising depth. That Asa would be a good bedmate, someone exciting to lose my virginity to, had never been in doubt. But to find that he understood me and wanted to help me—that was surprising, wonderful, and special. I supposed, by the law of averages, there must have been other men out there who could make my toes curl in bed the way Asa did, but I had a hunch there were none who would understand me as he did, and none who would care so much. I almost felt like crying at how lucky I was.

  "I'm going to give my dad a call. Just to let him know I'm okay. And that I'm happy."

  Chapter Eighteen

  Asa

  For some time now, I had been trying to push Corinne back in the direction of the father who was, in his own clumsy way, trying to help her. It seemed like maybe I had finally succeeded. That was all good, and just in time, too. There was a reason that I was leaning on the subject so hard tonight, because this might be our last night together.

  By my count, this was the fourth time that a night had been our last night together. We seemed to make a habit of it. But this time was not just a question of whether it was the right thing to go our separate ways. There was a decent chance that I would be in jail this time tomorrow, and a decent chance that I wouldn't be coming out again for years. If I could leave her and her dad with a better chance at reconciliation than when I met her, then perhaps my presence in her life was not for nothing. Corinne was a fragile person, however much she tried to pretend she wasn't. She needed someone to lean on, and if it couldn't be me, then her dad was the best choice by far.

  Perhaps my going to jail would be the best thing for her. Then she could make a clean break and start a new life. If that was the case, then I would go with a light heart. And there was a good chance of it happening. Porter had made it all sound pretty straightforward, like there were just some forms to fill out, and I thought Corinne had believed it. But I knew better, and Porter knew it. I had caught his eye at one moment, when he was explaining things, and an unspoken acknowledgement passed between us that much of this was for Corinne's benefit. Deputies do not get to decide who gets to do an informant deal, and deputies who are old school friends with the man they are trying to get registered as an official informant are looked on very suspiciously indeed. This was a long way from a done deal. The truth was that a lot would depend on how Brian Dugas reacted, and that did not speak well for my chances. I hoped that Corinne would not take it too hard if things went contrary to how we hoped. I didn’t want her to blame her father, or for our little conversation tonight to be for nothing.

  Well, not quite for nothing. It had given us a genuine intimacy that, perhaps, had not existed before. We had been physically intimate of course and quite a lot, really. But, although I had felt something for her that I had never felt for any other woman I had slept with, there had always lingered the great unasked question: was this just sex? When the sex was that good, that frequent, that intense, there was always that possibility. But to talk as we had talked, and of what we had talked, so easily, so comfortably, and so normally - that had answered the question once and for all. No matter how great the sex was, there was undoubtedly more between us than the physical.

  There had been a few times in that conversation when I had heard Corinne drifting in the direction of the dreaded 'L' word. She had always pulled back from actually saying it, afraid, I imagined, that I would not have been able to say it back, or worse that I might have felt coerced into saying it back when I did not really mean it. I was very grateful that she had not said it. Not because I didn't feel it, and not even because I didn't want to say it. I did want to say it. I'd known for a long time that I had fallen for Corinne Dugas, in a way I had never imagined possible.

  I had never really believed in 'love.’ It was just something for people who struggled to get laid—a sort of sexual safety net. I certainly didn't need that. If I did believe in it in any way, then I supposed it was a little like what I felt for Fiona. She was someone who was always there, a friend who was also a lover and equally adept at both, someone I cared for and would be sorry to see hurt. But falling for Corinne was like seeing the world differently. It was like everyone else ceased to exist. Much as I liked Fiona, if a pretty girl came into the bar, then my eyes went straight to her. But when I was with Corinne, I saw the pretty girls, I knew they were pretty, but it just didn't matter. I thought that falling in love required you to change, but that was wrong. You didn't change, but the whole world changed around you, like a lens, focusing you on the only person in it, the only person who still existed.

  I wanted to say all that to Corinne, or even just the three little words. But some habits die hard, and over the years, I had gotten very used to being Asa Covert, president of War Cry, a man who didn't say 'I love you.' Even knowing that, knowing that the reason for not saying it was some stupid macho guy thing, I still couldn't bring myself to actually do it.

  Corinne cuddled up next to me. "Should we go to bed now?"

  "Yeah," I said.

  I had to tell her. I might never get another chance to do it face-to-face.

  "Corinne?" I began.

  "Yeah?"

  "Nothing."

  I'd been in fights; I’d been in chases; I'd been cornered by men with knives who were intent on skinning me. I'd taken a bullet, and I'd faced it all without backing down. But sometimes I could be a total pussy who should have been ashamed to call himself a man.

  If I couldn't tell her, then I had to at least let her know. I hoped that all I had tried to do for her, all my easing her back towards her father and helping her see herself for who she truly was would give that message, but it needed to be more personal than that.

  I shed the last of my clothes and came up behind Corinne, undoing her bra and peeling it away from her body.

  She giggled. "Do you know it's been almost twelve hours since we've had sex?"

  I said nothing. This would not be like that. She was always looking for sex to be different every time. Well, this time would be very different, and not just for her.

  I swept her up off her feet into my arms, and she draped her arms around my neck, kissing me as I carried her to the bed. I kissed her lips, her cheeks, her forehead and her closed eyes before moving on to her neck. I worked my way on down her body, spending long minutes on her breasts while she purred in pleasure. She let out a whine of keening frustration as I kissed her lower belly then pointedly skipped over where she most wanted me so I could kiss her feet and begin working my way up her long slim legs.

  "Oh, you're making me crazy," she sighed, writhing like a cat on heat.

  "Seems fair." I murmured my reply between kisses. "I don't think I've done a single sane thing since the day I met you."

  My kissing tour of Corinne's lithe, taut body reached her inner thighs, and she whimpered as I drew closer to her core. I could feel the heat coming off of her, radiating her desire. She grabb
ed a handful of my hair, tugging me closer to her, but I resisted. Let her pull as hard as she wanted, but we were going to do this at my pace, and she would appreciate that in the long run.

  Finally, having worked my way around it for so long, I descended on my ultimate goal. Corinne gasped sharply as my lips brushed against her, and my tongue snaked out to lap gently at her nether lips.

  "Oh, my ..." She could not even finish the sentence, but pulled harder at my hair, threatening to tear it out by the roots. Still, I continued at my own slow speed, building her passion up by degrees, converting frustration to satisfaction with each lick. She was incredibly hot, and I felt I might burn myself on her as I kissed, nibbled, and occasionally allowed my tongue to dip inside her.