She was not wrong.
The moment I drove inside of her fully, filling her with all nine of my hard inches, she came.
I didn’t follow suit.
Instead, I held still, waiting for the ripples of her pussy around me to subside before I pulled back and began to thrust.
Not too hard, but not gently, either.
Just right.
She moaned as she curled her chest even closer to her legs, squeezing her eyes shut so tightly that I could see the crinkled, little lines beside her eyes.
Her face was resting on one knee as she gasped for breath.
I growled as I kept the same pace, thrusting into her over and over again, but being sure to cant my hips so that I hit a different spot inside of her.
She didn’t disappoint me.
The moment that I hit that spot, she gasped, and her eyes flew open to find mine.
Her mouth formed an O as she forgot how to breathe.
“Feel good?” I asked.
She could only nod.
I grunted as I pulled back and then shoved myself forward again.
This time I brought her hips back with enough force to make her feel every inch of me.
She did.
And then she started to come again.
Later, I’d relish the fact that I’d made her come within five strokes of having my cock in her. Later, I’d think about what it all meant.
Right now?
I was going to keep fucking her.
I picked up the pace and fucked her hard, fast, ruthlessly.
Gone was the sole focus on her pleasure—she had gotten off on it so I knew that she felt it no matter what I did.
I also knew that she might be getting uncomfortable in this position, but with the way her eyes were directed at me, and her hair was nearly dragging on the ground as she stayed plastered to her legs, I realized I didn’t care.
If she became too uncomfortable, she’d say something. In the meantime, I was going to take her how I’d been dreaming about taking her for a long time.
Hard and fast.
The sound of our skin slapping filled the air around us, and at one point, I looked up when I spotted movement.
It was Harold.
He was standing beside Lark’s mailbox, and he was dropping a fucking ruler into her grass to measure the height.
I growled as I increased my pace.
“Fucker,” I muttered.
My muttered curse was lost in the scream that left Lark’s body in the next instant.
One second she was a warm, willing hole that was soft and pliant. The next she was clamping on my cock so hard that I saw stars.
My come was pulled from my cock in the next instant.
It shot inside of her like it was searching for a new home.
Rapture consumed me.
My balls were tight. My dick was the hardest it had ever been, and I was winded.
I. Was. Winded.
I never got winded.
That was the good thing about being such an avid runner. I ran a lot—like miles. On a bad day, I did five. On a good day, I did ten or more if I could. But those good days were rare.
I ran because I loved it. I did it to keep my body in shape. I did it because it was embarrassing when, after my accident, I couldn’t go up a flight of stairs without my body screaming out in agony and my lungs pumping like I was doing a high-intensity cardio.
So, for this woman to make me winded? That was saying something.
I smoothed my hand down her back, trailing one finger back up the length of her spine when I reached her tailbone.
“You made me come.”
That soft reply brought me away from the contemplation of her hips and back. Of how fucking sexy the arch of her neck was and how I wanted to grab all the hair at the nape of her neck and fist it just so I could see the delicate curve.
“I wasn’t supposed to?” I chuckled as I pulled away.
She didn’t lean up, instead staying exactly where she was as her breath continued to come out in shallow pants.
The way she was bent over, still holding her legs while I held her hips, was likely compressing her lungs in an awkward position.
But since she didn’t care, I didn’t move her.
Why?
That answer was the trail of my come leaking out of her entrance.
I’d never seen that before.
Well, not in person with it being my come.
I’d watched porn and seen it, but this?
Yeah, this was something altogether different.
This was my come. This was my woman.
I growled and felt my cock stiffen back to its full length.
I didn’t put it back in her, though.
Instead, I let one hand move from her hip and trailed it down the lips of her sex. When I reached her entrance, I widened my hand and spread her lips, exposing her to me even more.
“Push it out.”
My voice didn’t even sound like my own.
It sounded like some other man’s voice that was much deeper and huskier—not a sound I’d ever heard coming from my mouth before.
Why?
Because she was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen. She clenched her sex and even more of my come leaked out of her, falling out of her and trailing down to her clit; I was gone.
I couldn’t take it anymore.
I had to have her again.
And I did.
Over and over and over again.
This next time we at least made it to the couch.
I was so caught up in what I was doing—who I was doing—that I didn’t give the man who was now staring at us a second thought.
I should have.
Chapter 12
I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings when I called you a fucking useless cunt. I thought you already knew.
-Baylor to a person whose car he just repossessed
Lark
He woke up early and slipped out of my bed.
I would’ve ignored the pain in my chest at him leaving had he not placed a soft kiss on what he thought were my sleeping lips.
But he did place that soft kiss there.
He also started the coffee for me, took my trash out and locked my door with a key I wasn’t aware he found.
Him leaving without waking me wasn’t something an uncaring man would do.
Then, when I heard him start his truck up and back out of my driveway, I got up and watched him go.
He gave one last longing glance toward my house before he motored down the road, narrowly missing his brother leaving as well.
I grinned when I saw him glance suspiciously at the retreating truck.
It was impossible to mistake those bright colors for anything but a Hail tow truck.
And eight hours later, after arriving back from what I considered my second job, I parked my ass on my front porch and contemplated my life.
I contemplated it so long and was so immersed in my own head, that I almost missed Baylor running past.
Since I was behind a huge fern that hung from my roof in a large, ornate planter, he missed me there.
I didn’t miss him, though. I watched him look at my house, hesitate and take a stutter step, but then shake his head and continue on down the road.
I knew where he was going.
To see his dog.
And that made me sad.
I’d done a whole lot of thinking over the majority of the day, and I’d come to two realizations.
Sal would not own my life. He didn’t get to make me scared enough to refuse to live my life. I couldn’t let him continue to play a role in how I lived based on what he’d done to me in the past.
I was protected. Sam and Free had made sure that I had resources. Sure, Harold was a dick, and he deserved to rot in hell for the number of tickets he handed out, but since he wasn’t doing it to just me, I could deal.
I was tired of being scared.
I wasn’t dead.
Sure, Sal wasn’t dead either, but he couldn’t get to me. Not anymore.
And an hour later, when Baylor started to run past my house again, I saw the sadness on his face.
He missed his dog. He missed him so much that on his way past my house, he didn’t even glance around. He didn’t glance at his brother’s house where I could hear kids screaming in excitement in the backyard. He didn’t glance at mine, where he could clearly see me from the front porch.
He didn’t do anything but run with his head down.
I pulled Baylor’s hat down lower over my eyes and watched him run into the setting sun, a plan forming in my mind.
I could do this.
I would do this.
For him.
It was foolhardy, and might very well backfire on me, but I couldn’t be the girl that I used to be. Rita Marie Donovan, the ex-wife of Sal Donovan, was no more. In her place was a new woman. Lark Mackenzie Lawrence. She wasn’t a scared mouse. She wasn’t afraid of her own shadow. She didn’t fear her husband and what he might do to her if he ever found out where she lived.
She didn’t fear anything.
Not anymore.
I stood up and moved down my steps, intending to walk just a little bit down the road, but something black caught my eye.
A shirt.
I hurried toward it and realized rather quickly that it’d been the shirt that Baylor had been wearing when he’d run by the first time. The second time he’d had it tucked into the waistband of his pants.
However, he’d been so determined to run away from what he was feeling that he hadn’t realized he’d dropped it.
I bent down, picked it up, and brought it to my nose.
It smelled like him, and it was wet with his sweat.
I inhaled again, loving the hint of deodorant that I could smell when I did.
I’d asked him that last night—why he’d smelled so good.
He’d laughed and told me that it was a combination of his soap and deodorant, but mostly his deodorant.
Underneath the smells of his body, I could determine the faint scent of his laundry detergent and fabric softener. It wasn’t overpowering…just enough to make me realize that we used the same brands.
Smiling, I walked back to my house and placed the t-shirt on the back of the couch.
I’d intended to give it back to him.
However, I never realized how handy it would come in when I did what I did three days later.
***
Three days later.
0012 hours
I’d never been scared of the dark.
Of Sal, yes. Of dying, sure. Of running out of oxygen in a shallow grave after being buried alive? Check, check, check. But of the dark? No. That wasn’t one of Sal’s torture tactics.
But, as I walked through the woods blanketed in nearly complete blackness, I realized that it was rather eerie.
I could hear movement in the woods, and although logically I knew it was possibly a raccoon or possum, my mind told me it was a person.
I knew it wasn’t a person.
Only animals made that scratching sound…right?
I’d just about convinced myself that I was going to have to turn my flashlight on when I saw the light in the distance.
The moon was out, and it illuminated the path that Baylor had forged through his hundreds of trips, but it wasn’t enough to keep the shadows deep.
That light, though? I’d never once been so excited to see one.
As I tried to calm my racing heart, the light got closer and closer, and soon I was on the edge of the road staring at the fenced yard.
I was going to do this.
Checking to make sure that everything on me was covered, including my hands, I took the first step off the road and started across the street.
At first, I didn’t see him.
It took me getting up to the edge of the fence with the bolt cutters in hand before I came to a sudden halt.
He was standing there, looking at me.
His tail wasn’t wagging, and his ears were pointed straight up.
His eyes were on me, and I had a second of doubt.
I didn’t think that this dog was going to be friendly to me.
My heart constricted.
I wanted to do this. I needed to do this.
I took a step forward, and I got within reaching distance of the fence.
He still didn’t move or react in any way.
I placed the bolt cutters to the fence and snipped the first link. Then the second. The third.
It was when I was four links from the bottom that he lunged for me.
I fell backward, heart beating fast, and stared at the dog who was now going ballistic.
Scrambling backward, I prayed that the fence would hold.
No such luck. I’d cut enough.
He poked his nose through first, then his top half, and before I could so much as get to my feet, he was on me.
I closed my eyes, lifted my hands, and covered my face.
Nothing happened.
Nothing.
I opened my eyes and stared in absolute shock as the dog buried his nose in my belly.
I was frozen.
The dog wasn’t attacking me. He was smelling me.
When I’d gone to leave, I’d spotted Baylor’s shirt. It was big, and hung on me—I would know because I’d tried it on earlier in the day because I wanted to smell him—and I’d decided that I’d wear it. It helped cover my body better, and there was no chance in hell my shirt would ride up to expose my skin.
Now, though?
I was thinking that it was no coincidence that I’d worn this shirt today. I’d grabbed the shirt almost without realizing the significance it would have.
And now that the dog was burying his face in my belly, rubbing his face from side to side, I realized that it had to be fate.
He dropped that shirt while I’d been watching him. I’d grabbed it today because I’d thought the black would help. Really, it was amazing how things fell into place.
Fate really was mysterious.
“Pongo?”
The dog’s ears twitched, and instead of lifting his head and looking at me, he only lifted his eyes.
That I could see in the halo of the street lamp.
“You want to go home?”
He closed his eyes and groaned—a big doggy groan that showed his contentedness.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
Then we walked away from his old prison, and not once was I scared of the darkness.
Chapter 13
I love sarcasm. It’s like punching people in the face with your words.
-Baylor to Lark
Baylor
The ringing of my phone jolted me out of sleep so fast that it took me a few minutes to figure out where I was.
The phone was already in my hand and placed to my ear before I’d consciously told myself to pick it up.
“Hello?”
My hello was garbled, and sounded like I was still three-quarters of the way asleep.
“Baylor?”
I sat up straighter in bed, instantly awake despite the late hour.
“Are you okay?”
I heard a shaky breath release from her throat before she said, “Can you come over?”
I looked at the clock on the wall and saw that it was half past three in the morning.
“Yes,” I replied instantly. “Is everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine,” she said. “I just…I have to talk to you.”
With that, she hung up, leaving me to sit on the side of the bed in confusion.
She didn’t sound scared, or worrie
d. She sounded…excited?
Curious now, I got up and went to the end of the bed where there was a basket of clothes that I’d seen when I got home. That only meant one thing—my mother had been in my house.
Though, she did that a lot.
It was also how I was always supplied with Little Debbies and chocolate milk.
Thankful that she’d washed my clothes, and I now had something clean to wear instead of the same sweats I’d worn to run all week, I pulled on the first pair I found sans underwear.
Moments later, I had socks, a shirt, and my shoes.
Two minutes after that, I was walking out the door with the keys to my bike in my hand.
Less than three minutes after that, I was walking up to Lark’s door.
I knocked.
She opened the door.
And I was hit in the chest with a battering ram.
I would’ve fallen had I not had my feet already braced apart.
Confusion clouded my features as I wrapped the huge battering ram in my arms and held him in place.
“What the fuck?” I looked down.
Straight into the eyes of my dog.
***
Lark
“Lark…” He paused, his eyes filled with grief. “I can’t.”
“I can draw his blood,” I blurted. “I’m good at it.”
Well, I was good at it on people. It couldn’t be that hard to do it on animals.
“I applied to work at a vet’s office. They accepted me. I start on Monday. I also made sure to take him at night so no one saw me,” I continued to word vomit. “In my previous…” I winced. “I used to be a phlebotomist. I can draw blood like a pro.”
He looked at the dog who was practically in his lap, then back to me.
We were now in my living room. Baylor was on the couch, and Pongo was in his lap. Pongo’s face was buried in Baylor’s armpit of all places, and his tail hadn’t stopped wagging in the last twenty minutes.
We’d been arguing for the entire length of time, and I was beginning to wonder if he’d ever budge.
“How the hell do I hide a dog in the middle of a city?” he asked, holding onto Pongo’s head like he didn’t want to let go any less than he wanted the dog to stop breathing him in. “Oh, and let’s not forget that it’s kind of illegal to steal a dog. Not to mention since Piper and Pruitt is a huge security firm, they won’t have a problem using money to search for him.”
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