by Max Henry
“A guy like you?” I ask, turning my head to face him.
He frowns and then swallows hard as he shunts his door open. The car rocks as he exits, the echo of his door as he slams it painful in my head. I watch as he rounds the hood, the sound of my ragged breaths loud in the otherwise quiet vehicle, the muffled thud of his boots on the concrete an ominous beat as he approaches my side. The car protests with a creak as he pulls my door open and steps back.
“Get out.”
“Please, April. Sure, Dallas,” I mock as I rise and look toward the house.
“Inside.” He points to the front door, closing the car behind me.
“No.”
His jaw goes rigid, the set of his shoulders firm as he gives me his full attention. “Inside. Now.”
“No,” I say a little firmer.
“Fucking hell, woman. I don’t have time for childish tantrums. Get your motherfucking ass indoors.”
I watch the vein in his temple pulse with the kind of sick fascination a person would take as they witnessed a firing squad set up for their execution. “Or what?”
He says nothing, his top lip twitching upward as he seems to suppress a snarl. I gasp as Dallas drops a shoulder and rams into me, the air pushed from my lungs as he hefts me over his shoulder and heads for the house.
“Put me down!”
“Make me,” he growls.
My fists pepper his back, my legs pumping furiously to get him to loosen his hold. Yet all he does is jostle me around until my legs tangle in his arms, and he has my head pulled back at an unnatural angle by the grip in my hair.
It burns, the tension on my scalp, and the shame that he’s essentially proved the point he made in the car: I can’t defend myself against the brute strength of a man. I have no chance of surviving on my own.
I really am caught between a rock and a hard place.
“I let you go because I wanted to know how it felt,” he says as we cross over the threshold. “I wanted to know if I would feel anything.” He kicks the door shut behind us with a firm boot, the wood rattling in its enclosure. “You walked down that driveway, and I expected to carry on with what I had to do, get that fuckhead you dated out of my car and be done with it all.” He marches up the hallway, past the kitchen, and to a room I didn’t see the first time I was here.
His room.
My scalp sings at the relief as he lets go of my hair, and yet the pain only shifts focus as he throws me down violently on the bed and then yanks me toward him with a firm grip on my ankles. “You walked away, and you know what I realized?”
“What?” I ask, trying to keep up with his rough movements as he tugs the shoes from my feet.
“I hated you for that. I hated that you thought you could leave me.”
“I’m free to do what I want, Dallas. You say you own me,” I argue as I pull out of his hold, “but you don’t. You don’t own anyone.”
“Bullshit,” he shouts, reaching out and snagging me around one calf. “I fucking own you!”
“No, you don’t!” I kick at his hands, trying to free my leg, yet he succeeds in snagging me by the ankle once more and hauling me down the bed until my legs hang off the side, my feet on the floor, and my spine arched over the edge of the mattress.
With a firm hand on each knee, he jerks my legs apart and steps between, leaning over to pin me in place with his hips. I close my eyes and wince as he punches his hands, one after the other, beside my head with enough force to make my shoulders bounce off the mattress.
“Tell me why I don’t own you, April,” he growls before ducking down to run his nose up the side of my face. “Convince me.”
“Because I owe you nothing,” I grit out, wedging my hands between us, against his chest.
He refuses to budge when I push, instead pressing back harder so that I’m forced to pull my hands out before my wrists get hurt. “I killed him for you,” he says with venom lacing his words. “I fucking took a life to save yours.”
“Why?” I challenge, pushing off the bed as best I can to bring my face close to his.
Our noses brush, and he drops his gaze to my mouth as he rears back. “Because you needed me to.”
“I never asked for your help.”
“You didn’t need to,” he says with a frown.
“So tell me, Dallas. Why did my welfare matter to you then if I never asked? Why did you help me if I never said I needed you to?”
I dare him to say it, to acknowledge what I can see clear as day.
“Because …” He sneers, eyes on my lips still. “Because I wanted to.”
I tuck my elbows back, pushing against the bed to rise and ghost my lips over his. “Why?”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.” His confession is but a whisper against my mouth.
“Yes, you do.” I capture his bottom lip between mine, tugging gently at the flesh. “Say it.” For me.
“I can’t.”
“You can,” I urge before dragging my bottom lip over both of his. “You just don’t want to.”
His chest pushes against mine with his labored breaths, the panic evident as he moves his gaze from my mouth to my eyes, and back again. “Because …” He flinches—the truth seems painful for him to admit.
Good.
“Because?” I twist, tucking my head into the crook of his neck so I can lay a gentle kiss on his throat as he swallows, struggling to get the words out.
“Because I care about you,” he admits on a grumbled whisper.
His entire body goes rigid as I set my head back on the mattress and smile up at him. “Wasn’t so hard to say, was it?”
“I don’t know how to care for something.” He panics, frowning. “What if I accidentally kill you?”
“You won’t.”
“How can you be sure?” His arms shift to cradle my head, his hands in my hair as he carefully regards my face. “I do things without thinking about it, April. I could … fuck, I could make you suffer before I even realized what that meant.”
“You won’t kill me, Dallas,” I say, not as sure he wouldn’t hurt me like he said, though. “If I didn’t mean anything to you, you would have done it already.”
He jerks back to stand, and with strong hands beneath me, lifts me off the edge of the mattress to toss me higher on the bed. I’ve barely had time to catch my breath and settle onto the mattress once more before he’s on me, his weight crushing as he sits astride my legs to roughly tug the sweatshirt from my body.
“Been dying to get this fucking thing off all day,” he grumbles, jerking my arms through the sleeves. “Who would have thought not being able to see what’s mine would drive me so crazy for it?”
The sweatshirt pulls free of my head and I re-open my eyes to find Dallas frozen above me, the clothing clutched in his white-knuckled hands.
“What?” I force myself not to shield my chest with my arms, remembering his earlier promise.
“Are you sure I won’t hurt you?” he asks in a deep throaty tone. “Because right now all I can think about is how much I’d like to mark your untouched flesh with my fucking name.”
A chill ripples across my skin, goosebumps erupting in its wake. “I said you wouldn’t kill me,” I tell him carefully. “I never said you wouldn’t hurt me.”
His nostrils flare as he tosses the sweatshirt aside. The crazed look in his eye sends my heart into overdrive, my flight instinct rearing its head as he reaches into the back pocket of his jeans and pulls out a goddamn flip-knife.
No fucking way. “Dallas …”
He keeps the blade tucked away, using the handle of the knife to trace feather-light lines across my chest, right beneath the bruises on my neck. “Here,” he whispers. “My name, here.” Fire ignites in his gaze as he looks to me expectantly. “Can I?”
“No,” I snap, slamming my hands over the still tingling flesh. “Like fuck I would let you cut me again.” My cheek buzzes where he nicked me with the knife last night, as though to agree.
>
His chest rises and falls rapidly as he pulls his hands away and flicks the blade out. I wriggle beneath him, trying to work out if it would be possible to flip him off my legs. He merely cinches his thighs tighter and pins me in place as he runs the tip of the knife along his bottom lip: enough to dent the flesh, yet not cut.
“You’re scaring me, Dallas.” My voice shakes with the fear I can’t hide anymore.
Is he about to stab me? Pin me down and cut me anyway? Will he kill me?”
“Uh, uh.” He shakes his head, the tip of the knife pushed against the center of his lip. “Don’t be afraid, baby.” The point punctures his skin, a bright spot of blood bursting forth as he pulls the knife away and leans down, setting his hands either side of my head. “We’ll work up to cutting.” The blood smears across his lips as he talks.
All I can think about is how there’s no way in fucking hell I’d ever be okay with knife play … and how strangely hot he looks with blood on his lips. What the fuck is wrong with me? My tongue peeks out as he eyes my mouth, his chin dipped and the look in his eye positively wild.
“There’s something invigorating about tasting your blood,” he whispers. “You should try it.” His hard chest presses against my bare breasts with each breath he takes. “Or … you could just taste mine.”
His kiss is every bit as brutal as the man. Dallas punches the fingers of his free hand through my hair, the lengths tangled in his grip as he tightens his hold. I cry out against his mouth, yet he doesn’t relent, the urgency of his kiss stealing my thoughts away from the pain and refocusing them on the heat of his tongue as he spears my mouth.
I can taste his blood, the coppery tang alive on my taste buds. He’s right: there is something invigorating in the taste of blood, and I’m horrified to realize I don’t want this to end.
“Don’t be afraid,” he whispers against my mouth as the cool touch of metal greets my hip. “Trust me.”
My breath catches in my throat as he slides the blade under the strap of my panties, and yet, the feel of his forehead pressed to mine, and the depth of black in his eyes as he holds my gaze and jerks his hand away from my body comforts me.
The elastic gives with a quick sting against my skin. Dallas sucks in a sharp breath, almost as though the action turned him on. Fuck—if he felt how damp the material between my thighs is he’d know it turned me on too: a mix of danger and lust, heady enough to leave me drunk on his warped kind of love.
“Still with me?” he asks as he untangles his hand from my hair to pass the knife over to the other side.
“Yeah.” I nod against his head, anticipating the sting of the elastic as he repeats the process.
The metal slides against my skin, and I shut my eyes while I hold my breath. He grunts as the fabric gives way, sealing his lips over mine immediately after.
I match his intensity this time, desperate for the remnants of copper on his lips, the taste that connects us on a much deeper level than anything else could. Dallas pulls away, panting as he searches my gaze—for what, I don’t know.
“Do you trust me completely?” he asks.
A flash of apprehension settles in my chest at the urgency in his eyes, yet I nod, uttering a simple, “Yes.”
He rears back onto his knees, his free hand placed against my chest between my breasts as he holds me down. I watch with sick fascination as he uses the hand that still holds the knife to jerk what’s left of my panties away, lifting my hips a little to help him. He reaches up quickly with the hand on my chest and tips my chin up with two fingers under my jaw, urging me to watch him, hold his gaze, as he once again pins me down.
“Stay here,” he says, gesturing to his eyes with the hand clutching the knife. “It’s safer.”
My heart thumps so fucking hard in my chest that the stress on the organ is borderline painful. Yet I do as Dallas says and hold his gaze as he lowers the knife-wielding hand to my body and runs the back of his knuckles through my slick folds. A shudder wracks his chest as he sighs, his lips parted ever so slightly as he watches me squirm.
It feels so fucking good. So wrong, and yet so good.
“You’re so fucking wet for me, baby,” he says with a slight sneer on his lips. “Drenched.”
Does he realize what I have to work with here? Of course I’m soaked and ready for him when he looks so damn good, lost in his lust. He still wears his dark T-shirt, the fabric stretched over his strong shoulders and thick arms as he slowly strokes his knuckles back and forth over my quivering center. The fact he’s dressed only adds to the anticipation, only serves to tease me more.
I know what hides beneath, and the longer he keeps it under wraps, the more I want him to show it to me—I completely understand why my sweatshirt drove him nuts now.
“Eyes, April,” he grumbles when my gaze lingers on the straining bulge in his jeans.
I flick my gaze back up to his, and gasp as he tilts his hand to continue stroking me with the end of the knife handle. The smooth tip contrasts with the rough surface of the knife's grip as it slips every so slightly inside on each pass. Dallas’ gaze is pure midnight as he moves the hand on my chest to my breast and roughly kneads the flesh under his palm.
“What do you want?” he asks on strained tones, the muscles in his neck clear as he tips his chin higher. “Tell me what you need.”
“I need something inside me,” I say breathlessly. “Anything.”
“Anything?”
“I need release.” I close my eyes and pinch my brow hard, desperate for him to ease this pressure that threatens to blow me apart.
I’d hoped for the roughness of his fingers inside of me, or maybe the sound of his belt as he released his cock, but not this. The clinical coolness of metal is unmistakable as he slips the handle of the knife into my pussy, moving the hand on my chest to my stomach so he can press his thumb against my clit at the same time.
Deep inside I’m alarmed, slightly frightened, but what wins over is unhinged arousal. I’m dancing a fine line with the devil letting a man as unpredictable as Dallas fuck me with the handle of a knife, but there’s no denying I like it. Not when my arousal allows it to slip so easily in and out, working me to the point of no return with his thumb as he rubs tight circles over my sensitive clit.
“You have no idea how good that looks,” he mumbles. “Open your eyes, April. Fucking look at me. Look at this.”
I force myself to do as he says, only spurred on by the sight of him as he stares at where the knife slides in and out of me, transfixed. His breaths come short and fast, the muscles in his forearm twisting and bulging.
He wants me to come, and as close as I am, I don’t want to yet.
Dallas’ gaze shifts, his mad desire locked onto mine as he instructs me. “Push up on your elbows, baby, and look at this.”
I tuck one arm under myself and then pause to moan as he changes the angle of the penetration just enough to tickle my most sensitive spot. It takes everything in me to find the strength to tuck my second arm under and crunch up far enough to see how he fucks me hard and unrelenting with the lethal weapon.
His hand bleeds where the blade digs into his palm; the fine trickles of red webbed across his wrist.
“Doesn’t that look amazing?” he marvels, reaching out to place his wet thumb against my lips. “Taste how much you like it.”
I lick his thumb clean, swirling my tongue around it before I suck hard and finish with a pop.
“Such a dirty little whore,” he growls. “I told you I own you, April, but fuck …” He hesitates to watch the knife again. “You’re perfect for me. Perfect.”
“Dallas …” I moan as I drop back onto the bed. “I can’t …”
He pulls the knife from me on the next stroke, uttering a “Nuh-uh” as he lifts the wet handle to his mouth. His lips part and he slides the slick metal into his mouth, never once looking away from me as he sucks it clean. “So good.”
He tosses the blade aside and backs off the bed, wrenching his
T-shirt off in one sharp movement. I feel a pulse straight to my core as he doubles over to push his jeans down, all the muscles in his side and back on glorious display as he kicks the denim aside.
Dallas straightens, palming his cock as he grins lazily down at me. “You want me to fuck you now?”
“Of course.” I roll over and crawl across the mattress to him, rising to my knees so I can set my hands on his shoulders.
His muscles roll and bunch under my left hand as he continues to stroke his dick. “Swallow my cum, and I might think about it.” His eyes flare, the challenge clear in his gaze as he waits for my response.
He doesn’t get one—at least, anything verbal. I drop to all fours, my ass in the air as I wrap my right hand over his and take control.
“Fuck yes.” He takes hold of my hair in two fistfuls and groans as I slide my mouth over his cock, taking him to the back of my throat. “All the way.”
His moans and the way he sucks his breath in between his teeth as I set a steady pace make my pussy pulse with need. I want to feel as full as my mouth does. I want to be satisfied everywhere, all at once.
He tightens his hold on my head, pulling me to him on each down stroke. So hard that his cock bottoms out on the back of my throat, making me gag. “Get it now, baby?” he asks, holding my head in place a second too long. “I got plenty of ways I can choke you until you can’t breathe.”
Tears crest my cheeks as I break away and suck in a much-needed pull of air. And yet, I go back for more, addicted to the feel of his silky shaft across my tongue. Dallas matches my pace, rocking his hips to fuck my mouth as I suck and pull at the taut flesh with my lips. His groans grow deeper, throatier, and louder as he increases his speed. The man has lost control, and the thought that I’m the reason for that has my pussy so wet that my arousal runs down the inside of my thighs.
Enough—I want him to show me what damage he can do with that cock of his in my greedy pussy.
I pull back, my hand still closed tight around the base of his cock, and rise to meet Dallas face-to-face. He darts forward, licking the wetness from my chin. I wait until he’s satisfied, and then lean forward to whisper in his ear, “I want you to hurt me now.”