“Calm the fuck down?” Tegen shrieked. Cage winced. Jesus fucking Christ, this bitch needed to be strangled.
“He shows up drunk, scaring the crap out of my mom and making her cry, and now he’s puked and possibly shit all over her car, and you want me to calm the fuck down?”
Nostrils flaring, Cage stormed through the open gate and right up into her face.
“Do you ever shut the fuck up?” he growled. “Ever?”
Tegen closed the remaining inch between them. “Only when I’m taking it up the ass,” she hissed.
He was so used to Tegen’s dirty mouth that he’d thought nothing she said could faze him, but he’d been wrong. That statement caught him so far off guard, he nearly fell over. It also made his cock twitch. And a little pissed off. And, why the fuck did she smell so good? Like soap and…breakfast. Damn. He was seriously hungry. For both food and pussy. Her pussy.
“You tryin’ to tell me somethin’?” he asked, pressing into her. As she started to back up, he palmed her back and pulled her flush against him, immediately grabbing hold of her ass and pressing his quickly growing erection into her stomach. The change in her was instantaneous; her eyes widened, her lips parted, and Cage found himself thinking back to last night, when he’d grabbed her in the foyer and then again outside. How every time he would physically touch her, she’d quiet the fuck down and soften, not just verbally but physically.
And suddenly a lot of shit made sense. The way she treated him, always screaming and yelling and spouting off her hard-ass bullshit, always keeping her distance, refusing to be in the same room as him, it could only mean one thing.
Teacup still loved him.
He smiled down at her, watching her drink him in, watching her pupils dilate, and feeling her body relax even further.
“Why are you smiling?” she whispered.
Ha. No fucking way was he that stupid. If he so much as mentioned the L-word to Tegen, he’d have a knee in his groin and a fist in his eye faster than a hooker gave out herpes.
“Stay,” he said, running his hands up and down her body. “Come inside. Back to my room.”
He knew the very moment he’d fucked up. Again. As soon as “my room” had fallen from his mouth, Tegen’s body had gone stiff.
“Let go of me,” she muttered, pushing on his chest.
He didn’t release her. “Don’t start this shit.”
“Fuck you!” she cried, glaring up at him. “I’m not one of your whores!”
“No?” he yelled as she struggled to get free of him but he only tightened his grip. “Then what the fuck are you?”
“To you?” she yelled back. “To you, I’m nothing!”
Cursing, Cage released Tegen and she immediately spun away from him.
“Goddammit, Tegen!” he shouted, running his hands through his hair, hating how crazy she was and worse, how crazy she made him feel. “When are you gonna let that shit go? I was nineteen! I was nine-fuckin’-teen! I don’t even remember it!”
Glittering with rage, Tegen’s eyes went saucer-wide. “You really fucking suck, West!” she spat. “You’re a waste of big dick and a pretty face!”
Cage’s mouth fell open.
What. The. Fuck.
He. Was. Going. To. Kill. Her.
Nostrils flaring, he took a rage-filled, deliberate step in her direction when, “What the motherfuck,” a familiar voice growled. Cage glanced to his left and found his father standing on the opposite side of the car, peering down at Jase and grimacing.
“Wat up, little lovers,” Cox drawled, walking up beside Cage. The asshole glanced between him and Tegen, and grinned.
“You gonna stick around, Tegen?” Cox asked, looking her up and down, his smile full of dirty fucking thoughts, blatantly checking her out, making Cage want to grab the fucker and start ripping all his piercings out. Slowly.
Even so, he couldn’t blame the guy. She looked hot as fuck.
She was wearing a man’s white ribbed beater, the bottom torn off, showing her tattooed midriff, no bra, her nipple piercings showing through the thin material, and shredded bell bottom blue jeans, two sizes too big for her, hung low on her hips. Her dreads had been swept to the side in a long braid that hung over one shoulder and tied together with a beaded strand of hemp.
And she was barefoot, her toes covered in toe rings, which, for some reason, turned him on something fierce.
“Are you serious?” Tegen asked, gaping at Cox. “Because I’d rather grow a dick out of my forehead.”
Cox shrugged. “You want a dick on your forehead, I’m sure little West is up for the job, seein’ as whatever the fuck you did to him with that patchouli-smellin’ pussy of yours has got him all sorts of worked up, calling you his girl and threatenin’ me and shit.”
Tegen’s eyes grew wide and, suddenly embarrassed, Cage cursed.
“Fuck off, old man,” Cage growled, shoving at the crazy Puerto Rican.
Cox shoved him back. “Old man?” Cox shouted, sounding offended. “Old fuckin’ man?”
“Cox!” Deuce shouted. “Make yourself fuckin’ useful for a change and help me get this drunken shit outta D’s car. Cage! Go find me a fuckin’ prospect and have them clean this up for Tegen!”
Embarrassed, pissed off, and horny, Cage stomped off across the tarmac, muttering curses and mentally berating himself for how he’d reacted earlier. But there wasn’t much he could do about it now.
Inside the clubhouse, he grabbed the first asshole he saw, Anger, a relatively new brother. He wasn’t a prospect but he was close enough. “Prez needs you out front,” he growled, shoving the guy in the direction of the front door.
The half-Native American turned his hard, angry, dark eyes on him, glaring, and Cage glared right back. Anger might have been aptly nicknamed due to his volatile temper, but Cage wasn’t scared of him. Quite the opposite. He thought the idiot was rather comical when he was off in a fit of anger.
“What?” Cage demanded, lifting his chin, silently begging the brother to start some shit with him. He would do well to release some of this pent-up…
Aggression? Sexual frustration? Or, how about Aggressive Sexual Tegen Frustration. Yep, he had a bad case of ASTF.
“Nothin’,” Anger mumbled. Cage stared after him, watching as he yanked open the front door.
“Watch it, fucker!”
Anger reared backward as Tegen got up in his face.
“Fuckin’ bitches,” Anger muttered, sidestepping her and heading outside.
“Fucking bikers,” Tegen muttered, glaring over her shoulder at Anger’s retreating figure.
From across the room, Cage took it all in, the too-big arm holes of her tank, baring the sides of her small breasts, her long, sleek body, the small curve of her ass.
All those damn tattoos.
Hell, even her dirty feet were making him crazy.
Goddamn, he had to fuck her again. She damn sure wasn’t going to go to his room, so what did that leave him with? His house? She hadn’t had a problem letting him dick-dive at his place.
Now he just had to figure out how to get her there.
“Tegen,” he called out. “Jase’s ride at D’s?”
“Yeah,” she said warily.
Perfect.
“Once they get the car clean, you give me a ride over?”
Her eyes narrowed; she knew what he was doing, but like he gave two fucks. She liked to play fucking games, he’d play them right the fuck back.
“Yes or no?” he asked when she still hadn’t answered him.
Her teeth clenched. “Fine,” she hissed. “But keep your dick to yourself.”
His teeth clenched.
The second he had her begging him for it, he was going to zip up his fucking pants and walk away laughing.
“Not a fuckin’ problem,” he shot back.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Screaming, Ellie bolted upright, her arms swinging out in front of her, her legs kicking furiously. It took her a moment to realize t
here was no immediate threat, that she was, in fact, still on Dirty’s couch, covered with an old black comforter, wearing the same sweats and tee she’d fallen asleep in.
It took her another second to realize that it hadn’t been her screaming but…Dirty?
Without thinking, just panicking, she scrambled out of bed, tripping over the entanglement of covers as she tried to run from the living room to the hallway, toward Dirty’s bedroom where those god-awful sounds of agony were coming from.
Grabbing the doorknob, she threw open the door and rushed inside and…froze.
Dirty was naked, curled up on his side, gripping his shredded pillow with one hand and the other was…
Oh my God.
Tears were streaming down his cheeks while he periodically cried out in loud gasping sobs.
“Please,” he begged, his voice hoarse and strained, sounding more like a little boy than a grown man. “Please don’t hurt me…please…please, Mommy.”
Mommy?
But he’d seen her, his eyes had opened and zeroed in on her, and now he was sitting up in bed, looking straight at her.
“You fuckin’ bitch,” he seethed. “You disgustin’ fuckin’ bitch!”
In a flash, he was out of bed and grabbing the gun on his nightstand. Ellie cried out as she spun around, her mind spinning. Where did she go? Right? Back into the living room or left, out his door and down the stairs and into the street? She didn’t know, all she knew was she had to get away from him. In the midst of her panic she made a split-second decision to turn left, deciding to take her chances with the street.
She had her hand nearly on the doorknob when she was slammed into from behind and thrown face first up against the door. The impact caused her surfacing scream to lodge in her throat.
“I dream about hurtin’ you,” he growled, pressing his face into her hair. “Hurtin’ you the way you did me. Doin’ all that dirty shit you did, not carin’ that I was screamin’, beggin’ you to stop.”
Ellie’s breath caught. He was still dreaming or…he was caught up in whatever he’d been dreaming about, hadn’t yet realized he’d woken, or was too entangled in the memories of his pain.
That’s when she felt it, the protruding hardness pressing painfully against her backside and the cool metal of the gun barrel being jammed against the side of her neck.
“I want you to scream for me,” he hissed. “The way you used to make me scream for you.”
Oh God, oh God, he was going to rape her. This couldn’t be happening; how could this be happening to her?
“N-n-no,” she choked out. “D-d-dirty, please, you’re dreaming.”
Her sweatpants were wrenched down and—
She found her voice and screamed at the top of her lungs, desperately trying to turn her body, no longer caring that there was a gun pressed to her throat, only caring that she was seconds away from being nearly raped again and she was not going to let that happen. At the very least, she was going to do everything she could to not let that happen.
The next thing she knew Dirty’s weight was gone and she spun around to find he’d backed several feet away from her. He was shaking violently, his eyes wide, focused solely on the gun in his hands.
Trembling, she reached behind her, trying to find the doorknob, when he glanced up and caught her gaze. She froze, waiting for it, waiting for him to come at her again but he did nothing, said nothing, just stood there looking horrified and terrified and pained and sad and, oh God, so utterly broken.
The gun fell from his hands and dropped to the floor with a loud thud. Ellie used that moment to pull up her pants, yank open the door, and burst into the hallway. She was only five steps into her mad dash to safety when she heard a slapping thud and a superseding grunt of pain. She faltered, paused, and then decided to continue when she heard another noise, this one worse than before, and she couldn’t stop herself from turning.
Dirty had fallen to his knees, his gun in his hand, the barrel pressed up against the bottom of his chin while he slammed his face forward and into the wall. Ellie winced as the meaty thud radiated out of the apartment and into the hall. Blood ran down the side of his face and yet he didn’t let up; he continued to smash his face into the wall over and over again.
Ellie’s skin began to crawl as nausea settled low in her gut. It made sense now; Dirty made sense. Dirty wasn’t the biker pig she’d remembered him to be; in fact, she was pretty sure he wasn’t a pig at all, but instead a damaged, deranged shell of a man more than likely with a past worthy of a Lifetime movie. She’d taken enough psychology classes and had interned at women and children’s shelters to know a history of abuse when she saw it.
Please don’t hurt me…please…please, Mommy.
He’d been crying out in pain yet simultaneously jerking off, screaming and begging for whatever demons his memory was forcing him to relive, to stop…
Bile rose in her throat. Her vision grew fuzzy and her body heavy.
“Oh God,” she breathed, reaching out for the wall, suddenly no longer able to bear her own weight.
His mother. His mother had hurt him. His own…mother.
Her vision swimming with unshed tears, she backtracked her steps into the apartment and shut the door softly behind her.
Blood dripping down his face, he warily watched her approach him, his body suddenly rigid. She made sure to keep her distance for both his sake and her own, and took a seat several feet away from him but still close enough that she was able to extend her arm and offer him her hand.
He stared at her hand, unblinking, unmoving, until eventually the hand holding the gun to his jaw slowly lowered.
“Don’t touch me,” he said, his voice strained.
Ellie immediately retracted her hand and placed it in her lap. Dirty turned away from her, but not before she saw the tears that had slipped from his eyes, joining and blending with the rivulets of blood still streaming down his cheeks. Her eyes traveled from his face to his bare chest where she couldn’t help but stare, horrified by what she found. And then lower, to his groin and his thighs and, oh my God, he was covered, literally covered in scars.
He’d been burned repeatedly. There were small circular burns as well as larger rectangular ones scattered in between long thin slashes, all spaced evenly apart, some running diagonal, some horizontal, all apparently methodically administered.
Releasing a deep breath, she let her head fall back against the wall.
It was so pitiful and yet rage-inducing. How could anyone hurt an innocent child? How could a mother hurt her child?
She didn’t feel safe by any means, but as strange as it was, she felt safer with Dirty than she did knowing that, if she were anywhere else, Daniel could get to her.
Was that weird?
Maybe. But she was too damn exhausted, both physically and emotionally, to really give a damn.
• • •
“You need stitches,” Ellie said, both looking and sounding irritated.
From his seat on the windowsill, Dirty turned to glare at her. “I’m fine,” he muttered and took another drag off his cigarette. He didn’t have a clue why she’d hadn’t continued her screaming run for safety but had instead come back inside and taken a seat beside him, had even gone so far as to offer him comfort.
What the fuck?
He’d been seconds away from raping and killing her and she’d offered him comfort?
Jesus, God only fucking knew what she’d heard come out of his mouth during his nightmare. He could only imagine.
Fuck, he hadn’t had a nightmare in so fucking long. Years. It was all this shit with Ellie, seeing her being attacked, her touching him, seeing her naked.
Then watching her cry while she asked to stay with him. With him? No one needed him. No one had ever once, not fucking once, needed him for anything. But she’d needed him.
And then, hearing her laugh, watching her laugh, knowing that he had made her laugh despite what she was going through, the fear, the unknown. He, a f
ucking worthless, piece-of-shit scumbag, had made her laugh.
He was so incredibly fucked-up. His thoughts were going a mile a minute, veering off in directions he wasn’t familiar with, new territory, dark and confusing roads lined with guilt and a new sort of pain, one he wasn’t handling well, one he didn’t know what to do with or how to push away or relieve it, because, fuck, nothing was working.
Fucking the whore hadn’t worked, jerking off thinking of Ellie hadn’t worked, no, nothing had worked. He was still thinking about Ellie, about her body, about her laughter, and he was feeling guilty, guilty about the way he’d been handling his thoughts, guilty for the way he’d been living his life because, FUCK, who was he to save a girl from the same fate he’d handed to too many women to count. WHO THE MOTHERFUCK WAS HE?
He was nothing. He was shit. He was a damaged, deranged, sick motherfucker who deserved to be put the fuck down. He shouldn’t have lived for as long as he had; he didn’t deserve to share the same earth with people like Ellie, people who laughed over burnt popcorn even after they’d been stripped of their dignity.
And at the same time, he hated her for all of it. For making these fucking emotions surface, slap him in the face and fuck up everything he’d worked so hard to repress the best he could.
No, it wasn’t a life he’d recommend to anyone, but it was how he’d survived this long and now…
After snapping the fuck out of it, realizing he’d been about to rape her, probably kill her, he knew he didn’t deserve another second of air. Because if she knew, if she fucking knew the man she’d tried to comfort, even after what he’d done to her, that he was no better than the man he’d saved her from, she’d run away screaming and she wouldn’t come back. She wouldn’t laugh over burnt popcorn, she wouldn’t care that he had a giant gash on his forehead, she wouldn’t give two fucks if he lived or died.
WHY THE FUCK DID HE CARE IF SHE CARED?
If he had one iota of intelligence, he would get Ellie the fuck out of his apartment before she fucked him up even more and he ended up doing something he absolutely did not want to do to her, because he needed a fucking place to put all the bullshit she was stirring up inside him.
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