by K. J. Dahlen
When he heard the click of my heels on the marble floor, he finally looked up. I barely recognized his face. It was taut with stain, purple bags under his eyes, and his scar stood out on his cheek. “Viktor.”
He didn’t respond to me, only put his head back down.
“Viktor, you need to come home,” I said, begging.
I missed him. I missed his laugh, and his controlling temperament, and I missed his big body against mine at night.
“Home?” He laughed harshly. “It’s just a house. It can be your home. I can live anywhere.”
I heard what he said, but couldn’t figure out what had changed. “But… it’s our home? It’s been our home. What are you saying?”
“Anya, you saw what I did,” he said morosely. “I’m not a good man.”
I stalked over to his desk, grabbed his chin, and forced him to look up at me. His beard was both soft and ticklish against my palm. “You’re the best man that I know. You saved me. You saved me, Viktor. I would’ve died if they’d given me over to one of the Dons. And I would’ve died had you been taken into custody.”
“But don’t you get it, printsessa? I belong in custody.”
“Da. Mine.”
“Anya…”
“Viktor, I—” I thought about it for a second, and then admitted in hushed tones, “I need you. You’re my life now. I love you.”
He blinked in surprise. “No, you don’t. You can’t.”
I laughed. Typical. “Leave it to you to tell me what I can and can’t feel. I do, Viktor. I love you. I want my husband back. I miss him.”
He stood up, pushing me back against his desk. “Don’t say that.”
“Don’t say what? That I love you? That you’re my life? That you’re my husband? That I’m going to have your child?”
His grip on me loosened, his eyes wild as they met mine. “What did you say?”
“I’m pregnant, Viktor. I’m going to have your baby. Our baby.”
It wasn’t exactly how I wanted to tell him. I wanted to celebrate, not use it as a kind of emotional weapon to lure him home. But he was leaving me with few choices, and I had to work with the ammunition at hand.
I placed his hand on my belly, willing him to feel the truth of it. I knew my body, knew that it was changing. That something was different. We were going to be parents, and I wanted him to understand the sheer joy and happiness that I felt in knowing that.
“Printsessa…”
“You’re going to be a papa.”
He looked in amazement at my face and then my belly. “I’m going to be a father.”
I smiled through the tears welling up in my eyes. “You are. Are you happy?”
“Anya, I… I don’t know that I’ll be a good father. I was raised with violence and aggression. That’s the world that I know.”
I covered his hand with my own, pressing it into my belly. “You’ll be wonderful. You’ll be you, and that’s enough. You’ve been kind and generous, and protective of me. I know you’ll do the same for our child.”
He laughed. “I don’t know that those are the words I’d used to describe me, Anya. I’m a killer. I’m cold. I’m ruthless.”
“Now you’re just bragging.”
He smiled, as I’d meant him to.
“You’re not a killer,” I told him. “You killed men because you had to. And you killed that man because I would’ve died if you hadn’t. You’re my savior, not a killer. He was going to traffic me or confess everything to the military. You would have gone away for life or been killed, leaving me unprotected and alone. You did what you had to do. Don’t you know that I would have done the same if the roles were reversed?”
He chuckled. “You would’ve killed a man for me?”
I knew the answer before even thinking about it. “I would do whatever I had to do to save you, Viktor. Anything. And that’s how I know I love you.”
He thought for a moment, his hand coming to rest on my cheek. “I think I’ve loved you since I first saw you, though I didn’t want to.”
My heart raced. Could it be true? “Say it.”
“I love you, Anya. Deeply and forever. I can’t stop loving you. I’ve tried.” He smiled his eyes a little misty.
That couldn’t be right; Viktor, crying? That must mean exactly what I thought it meant. Joy filled me.
“You love me,” I repeated back to him, tears slipping down my face.
“Yes, printsessa.”
His lips crushed down on mine. He kissed me deeply, his mouth salty with the taste of my own tears. His mouth slanted over mine, over and over until I was aching and my lips bruised and red.
“I want you, Viktor. Here. Now.”
“I am your slave, Anya. But a man has his limits.”
I raised an eyebrow at him and offered him my swollen, tender breast. He growled in defeat. “I never claimed to play fair, Viktor. You’re mine and I am yours.”
He grabbed my hands and placing them on the desk. “I’m not going to tie you, but you’re going to keep your hands there until I release them. Understand?”
A shiver ran through me at his words. God, he was hot when he was like this. I never wanted him to change. I didn’t need gentle. I needed him—rough, controlling. If this was something he needed in order to let go of his own guilt or whatever plagued his heart, then I would go all in with him. I would take whatever test he put before me, and gladly.
I placed my hands against the desk. He spread my legs with his feet so that I was in the shape of an X against his desk. He unbuttoned his shirt slowly, making my mouth go dry with every inch of tanned skin that was revealed. He ripped off his tie and threw it on the ground. He tore off his shirt and let it drop in a pile, adding his pants and shoes so that he was standing before me naked, except for a pair of black boxer briefs.
He looked like a god, or a demon… I wasn’t sure which one could set me on fire more. I felt my pussy grow wet, my breasts ache and grow heavy.
I wanted him. I’d missed him.
He kneeled before me, lifting up my flowy floral dress and pulling down my pink lace underwear.
I couldn’t stop my shudder at the feeling of air on my mound. The shudder turned into a gasp as he ran his tongue along my skin and over the top of my clit, suckling on it until I screamed.
I had never been in this kind of tortured agony of pleasure before. I wanted to come from the heady sensations, but I needed to hold out. When his hand reached up, grabbing a breast and squeezing, I lost all control. I came, over his mouth and his hands, my entire body quaking with the force of my release. I was dazed by the rapidity of my fall.
He spun me around, flicking up my skirt. When he pulled down his boxer briefs and entered me in one smooth stroke, we both moaned with completion.
“Yes!” I hissed, feeling triumphant. Whole. Loved.
I’d never felt that kind of pleasure in my life. He was so big, entering me so hard that I felt it all the way up my body. I clenched around him, unable to prolong it. He thrust inside of me a few strokes and then dove so deep that my pussy started to pulse around him, milking his orgasm as my own flooded through me.
He shouted, releasing his seed inside of me, squeezing and holding me against the desk while I collapsed on it. After a few moments, he withdrew and flipped me over. My legs went around his waist, just reveling in the closeness of our bodies.
I was sweaty, aching, and ridiculously happy. “I love you, Viktor.”
His mouth twisted into an expression that looked strange, until I realized it was his smile—a pure smile of unabashed happiness. “And I love you, printsessa.”
Acknowledgments
As this series is coming to a close (a year after it began), I find myself always with more people to thank for their support and friendship. Maya Hughes, Bobby Kim, Sylvia Kane, Cassie-Ann L. Miller, Arianne Cruz, and so many more. For this book, I must thank Kris Hack and Temys Designs, Bobby Kim, Leanore Elliott, NJ Cole, and Nicole Hartmann for their assistance.
<
br /> The other books in the Billionaire Book Club series are available now.
1.The Billion Heir
2.Read My Lips
3.Help Yourself
4.Mafia Mistress
5.The Hot Seat (April 2018)
6.If you’d like to find out more about me and my “fuction,” please visit my website at http://www.nikkykaye.com, my Author Central at http://author.to/nikkykaye or my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/officialnikkykayeauthor.
7.For exclusive content, sneak peeks and free goodies, join my “Coming Attractions” mailing list at http://subscribepage.com/nikkykaye.
Thanks for reading!
About Nikky Kaye
You know that feeling you get at the end of a really great book, when you have a bubble of joy in your chest? That's what turns me on, as both a reader and an author. I love sexy, smart stories that make you giggle then fan yourself.
I could make up a bunch of crazy stuff about me here, like a penchant for skydiving (never done it) and a career as a cryptozoologist (actually I was a college professor). The reality is that I when I'm not writing, I'm being held hostage by half-finished house projects, and a horrible addiction to diet cola. But apparently, that's not often.
According to my young twin boys, "Mummy's hobby is work." It could be worse. Stepping on Lego all day long--that's worse.
Damned
Prequel to the Black Devils MC Series
J.R. Ryder
1
Jaxson Coltrane lit a cigarette and leaned out of the open sash window of his bedroom. Icy-fingers of cold wind blew in and whipped at his face. His eyes narrowed against a beam of the early morning sun, and he put one hand up to shade them. Taking a deep draw, he looked out onto the empty streets below, taking in the view of the clubhouse in the distance; an inconspicuous outpost of the town he called home.
He smiled. Nothing had changed about the place in the last ten years; still unappealing and functional looking from the outside. At this time of day, it always seemed like the forlorn, abandoned storage warehouse it had been before. Inside, it had been refurbished: scrubbed up, gutted out and turned into a fully operational clubhouse. Inside was where the real magic happened. The place came to life; a die-hard biker’s paradise. Every single operation since day one had been planned in the back office. But it was more than just the club’s fortress. The place had been the home that sustained him for the past decade. It was ten years to this day when it all began; ten hard and dangerous years with the Black Devils MC.
Life in an MC had taken him to hell and back. Those who survived the years always carried the scars to prove it. Jaxson knew he was lucky to have come through largely unscathed. Being Vice President of the club for the past three years, he’d hustled and fought to earn his stripes. Though, how he’d managed to do so, was a mystery to him. For others, those whose pictures adorned the Wall of Death, it had proved to be lethal. It’d always been an unnerving thought that he may not have been so lucky. There weren’t many weeks that went by when he didn’t get the stomach-churning feeling that this would be the week when De Luca would tap him on the shoulder and say: ‘sorry kid, I was wrong about you.’
Jaxson still remembered the look of shock on his mother’s face when he told her he was joining the club at the age of 17. She’d wanted him to join the military and ‘make a man of himself,’ instead; she got a punk outlaw biker for a son. She’d warned Jaxson to steer clear of the formidable Bruno de Luca. Bruno, the notorious head of the De Luca crime family, and the clubs’ president, had told him he saw a lot of himself in Jaxson and took him on as a prospect. If she’d wanted a son that lived on the right side of the law, she was doomed to be disappointed.
She told Jaxson she had a horrific sense that her son would be six feet under within months. “He’s a user. He’ll make a puppet of you and cast you aside when you’re broken. You’ll see.’ Warning him that he would be no more than a means to an end for De Luca. She knew the danger in Jaxson making himself a vessel for De Lucas whims.
Undaunted, Jaxson hustled tirelessly as a young prospect to prove his worthiness as a brother in the club. Sure that if it hadn’t been for Bruno, he would be locked up inside the joint, Jaxson became determined never to disrespect the opportunity Bruno had given him. The club was all he had. The club had given something he felt he was missing in life: a sense of family. And it had given him a lot. In return, he became what they wanted him to be, bound for a new life in a new world.
It’d been a frustrating time for Jaxson with no fancy education, no job, no father in the picture, and a mother busting her ass every day just to get by off of waitressing tips. Formal education had dubbed him ‘unemployable.’ Like most of the guys, he had nowhere else to go. It all had left a chip-on-his-shoulder and a drive to succeed no matter what.
Jaxson’s eyes fell closed. Nothing would ever beat the feeling of his first solo ride on that black Harley soft-tail. The sun glinted off the polished silver as he climbed on and cranked the engine. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up as the beast roared to life. The rush as he raced out of the parking lot, wind whipping past his face and through his hair, as he weaved through traffic it was simultaneously thrilling and yet remarkably and amazingly tranquil. It calmed a piece of his soul that life had left hollow.
Life had gotten a lot better very fast for Jaxson. As a unit, the club felt unstoppable. He had a job, an intense passion for bikes, and a brotherhood there to defend him anytime he was threatened. The club protected the town too, not that they seemed to notice, and he was rather proud of this. Although on the surface, Coronado was a charming and agreeable coastal community, there were dark and severe threats to the town from crime groups in neighbouring territories.
To Jaxson’s profound surprise, now three days away from the election of a new club president. Jaxson, it turned out, was infinitely more clever, hardier and dependable than anyone had ever supposed. With the big day rolling closer, he was the favorite to be voted in as the new leader. Too fucking close for comfort, he thought. The prospect of taking on the responsibility of ‘boss’ for the whole MC was unsettling and it had set him on edge for weeks.
Plus, he had to wonder whether accepting the role was a smart thing to do. There was a serious problem in this, as not everyone would embrace this change warmly. Even in a close-knit MC brotherhood, there were always male rivalry that left tensions brewing beneath the surface.
De Luca’s son, Antonio, four years Jaxson’s junior, had always been disturbed and deeply offended at his father’s affinity for Jaxson. Jaxson knew his underlying jealousy and frustration would become stronger if he were promoted to president. To Antonio, it was all crushingly unfair. To compound his misery, he would have to work under Jaxson every day with no hope of being promoted to take his father place as president, and for that, he would always quietly hate Jaxson to the grave. And Jaxson didn’t relish having to look over his shoulder every moment of every day for the rest of his life, waiting for the knife he knew Antonio would have ready for him.
But this was a world where you had to take the bad with the good. For Jaxson, it had meant having to harden himself to the sight of death. Over time, he got used to it. Yet, he still had flashbacks of his first killing to this day. All he could do was look down at that body, brokenly. The amount of blood he saw took his breath away. Sure, he never pulled a trigger, but the man had died at his hands.
A vision of himself at home in the shower, scrubbing his body over and over, that night, flashed into his mind.
Jaxson closed his eyes and bowed his head slightly, remembering that cursed day. Late one night, he and two other young prospects were engaging in illicit activity. Rumor had it, a large stash of homemade moonshine was being held in the old factory by the docks. The rumors also told him the moonshine belonged to the Hellfire MC. He thought if he could prove it then he might have to go to Bruno and let his own MC do something about it. He knew for a fact that Bruno wouldn’t allow the Hellfire�
��s run liquor through their town. Foolishly, the three men rode there at night and failed to bring a flashlight, which was extremely dangerous since the whole place was nearly pitch black. The mezzanine floor where they entered was busted up—which they couldn’t see in the dark. The three of them fell right through to the basement below. None of the others survived. The man who saved him was barely conscious after being hit by the beam that fell on him. Jaxson heard the police sirens in the background, and took off leaving the bloody, broken bodies behind. A coldness came over his body and that same stomach-churning feeling he had that day returned the moment he realized, ‘I just got them killed.’
Since then, it’d been ten years of looking over his shoulder, worrying that someone would find out it was him and take him out. He couldn’t be absolutely sure that no one had seen him run away that night. Almost expecting it, in fact. After all, he never found out who called the police that night ten years ago. Had it been the man who helped him or was someone else there that night? Jaxson didn’t know for sure. As fate would have it, no one ever came out for his blood. Not yet, anyway.
He rested his head on the wall beside him. He hadn’t thought about this for a while. That same night, Jaxson had come home with blood on his shirt, and his mother snapped—she grabbed a bag, filled it with some things, and in the place of a goodbye, yelled, “That club is bloody suicide. And I’m not going to be sitting at home like a fool waiting for a knock at the door telling me you’re dead.” With one brief pause, she stared into Jaxson’s eyes, tears rolling down her cheeks, in the hope of a concession, but it was too late—he was one of them now. Fifteen minutes later, a taxi came and picked her up. She was out of his life, forever. If Jaxson’s fate were to be as tragic as his mother had thought, it seemed reasonable to infer that she didn’t want to stick around to watch it happen.