Honor

by Jay Crownover

  I knew how to touch myself, how to move my body to offer any man watching a show he wouldn’t forget, but I couldn’t remember a time where manipulating myself, touching myself with others’ eyes on me, had ever felt this powerful, this dynamic and important. I wasn’t even sure how much he could see since I was still dressed, and even though my skirt was short, it still kept the good stuff covered up and I hadn’t pulled the material all the way to my waist . . . yet.

  I stroked my fingers over my aching clit, which Nassir had purposely left abandoned and reaching for his touch. I hummed in satisfaction and panted when his eyes switched from that candied bronze color to straight golden fire. I whispered his name and imagined it was his thick fingers touching me, pretended it was his hands squeezing my breasts through the thin material of my tank top.

  Suddenly he moved and slammed his door shut. I groaned but it turned into a squeal of surprise as his hands reached for me from the back of the car and hauled me from the front seat to the backseat through the slender opening between the driver and passenger seats. His impatience made me laugh but the feral look on his face and the heat in his eyes had the humor dying in my throat and turning into something heavier and thicker. He pushed me across the leather seat, and the friction was a sexy burn across my exposed skin. He had me so that I was half sitting, half lying against the door to the back of the vehicle. He crawled in across from me on his knees with his head ducked to keep it from hitting the ceiling as he pulled the door shut behind him.

  We both fit.

  There weren’t going to be any crazy acrobatics or any inventive positions but we both definitely fit and his hands were harsh and impatient as he reached for my skirt and pushed the fabric up as high as it would go. Luckily, the material was stretchy; otherwise there was no way it would’ve been able to scrunch up over the curve of my ass where his hands landed. He lifted an eyebrow at me and gave me a grin that cut right into my heart like a sharpened blade.

  “You can finish what you started in the front seat if you want. I can watch you find pleasure all day long.”

  As sexy as that sounded, I hadn’t been kidding when I told him all I wanted was for him to get as deep inside of me as fast as he possibly could. I always felt like I was making up for lost time with him and trying to keep him as close as I possibly could for as long as I had him. I missed him when he wasn’t inside of me, so I grabbed the front of his shirt with one hand and reached for his belt buckle, which had some designer name on it, with the other.

  “Get inside of me, Nassir.”

  He just grunted as I worked his already straining erection free from his pants. It fell into my waiting hands already throbbing and ready. I pumped my fist up and down the shaft a few times but he wasn’t in the mood to play around either because he pulled my hands away from his reaching flesh and pinned them to the door behind my head. I could see the windows already getting fogged over and it made me want to laugh a little.

  He maneuvered himself on his knees between my legs, one of which was stretched out along the seats and the other was draped over the edge, my foot resting on the floor.

  “What’s that look for?” He grabbed the base of his cock and leaned forward, dragging the tip through my swollen and wet folds. Just the hint of him there had me bucking my hips up to get more contact but he pulled back and then moved forward again to hit my clit with the head of his erection. It sent pleasure zipping through every nerve ending I had and made it hard to think enough to answer his question. He watched my face and must’ve seen how much I liked what he was doing because he continued to rock against me and tease me without entering me.

  “I was just thinking that I’ve never fooled around with a guy in the backseat of a car. So it’s a first for me and I don’t have many of those.”

  His hips picked up speed and I tugged at my hands. As good as it felt, I needed more. We were both still mostly dressed with just our most intimate and private parts connecting. It felt insanely good but I needed more of what he could give me and I could see he knew it.

  He said something to me in that other language he slipped into and then pulled back just enough so that he could line himself up with the greedy opening of my body. His eyes sparked like a lit fuse and he bent his head down so that his mouth landed on mine. “I thought we talked about leaving all the what or who came before where it was?”

  I tried to use my hips to make him drive himself into me since my hands were still locked up in his but he pulled away and just continued to hover right outside of where I needed him most. I frowned up at him and removed my leg that was hanging over the edge of the seat to wrap around his waist. It gave me enough leverage to push the tip of his engorged cock inside my waiting channel but he was too strong for anything more than that.

  I sank my teeth into his bottom lip hard enough that he jerked his head back. I glowered up at him. “You own a lot of my firsts, Nassir. You were the first man that ever fought for me. You were the first man that ever made me feel safe. You were the first man never to judge me or give up on me when I was becoming who I was meant to be, and you have always been the first man that I was scared enough of to run from and obsessed with enough to run toward. All of those firsts matter and so does being the first guy to get me to fool around in the backseat of a car you don’t even own yet. That should make you happy, not upset.”

  He lowered his head back down and kissed me with much more care than he had previously shown. He also let me draw him the rest of the way into my body and I groaned as he filled me up and as the strong muscles in his backside flexed under the pressure of my foot. Every time he was inside of me, the sense of completion that filled me up was almost too much to take.

  I tugged at my hands until he let them go so I could weave my fingers into his long, silky hair.

  He started to move with long, deep thrusts that pulled him almost all the way out of my body and then pounded him back in. It made my head bounce against the car door but I didn’t care.

  “Not upset. Territorial. I waited for you and I’m not patient. I don’t like to think about who was in my place while you were on the run from me.” His hands gathered the material of my shirt along my sides until he had the fabric up over my breasts. He used his teeth to pull the cup of my bra down and then sucked my nipple into the hot cavern of his mouth. I jerked at the sensation and then tugged on his hair and started to wildly thrust back at his grinding hips when he scraped his teeth across the sensitive surface.

  I tossed my head back and lifted myself up to rub against him so I could get as much friction between our bodies as the small space would allow. I had fistfuls of his hair in my hands and his saliva all over my breasts as he pulled the other side of my bra down and continued to bite and nibble on each puckered and excited peak. It was a lot. It was more than anyone that came before him had ever given me, but it wasn’t quite enough, and Nassir, being so in tune to everything about me, knew it.

  He pulled one of my hands out of his hair and tangled our fingers together like they had been when I started all of this moments ago. He rubbed the back of his knuckles across my breast bone and down the center of my body toward where we were joined. He rubbed circles on my belly with the back of my hand and then dragged our fingers to the spot where his much darker flesh was slick with wetness, shiny with desire, and moving rhythmically in and out of my body.

  I couldn’t look away, and when he dragged our combined fingers over the very top of my sex and used them to circle my straining clit, I started to vibrate and shake from the inside out. I don’t know if it was the sight of this beautiful, powerful man owning me, giving me everything I ever asked for, or if it was the overload of stimulation, but I lasted about two more seconds before yelping his name and clamping down hard around his cock. My entire body bent up toward his so that my breasts were flattened against the fabric of his shirt and he let go of my hand so that he could hold on to me with one arm around my back as he braced the other one over my head and continued to rut i
nto me.

  His face was a dusky red color under his normally bronze complexion. His eyes were hot enough to burn through metal and his mouth was open as he panted out short little breaths and neared his own completion. I took my hand that was now lying useless on my lower stomach and lazily reached between his legs so I could fondle his tightly drawn-up sac. He was close and it only took the barest hint of my fingernails dragging along that paper-thin skin to have him erupting inside of me.

  He collapsed in a heap on top of me and I was pretty sure he was going to have to buy the car even if he didn’t like it because I could feel our combined juices leaking out between us. Sex was always kind of a mess, but with him there always seemed to be some kind of beauty and peace in the aftermath.

  I plowed my fingers through the midnight hair at his temples and kissed him softly on the forehead.

  “No one has ever been in your place, Gates.” I took the hand he still had propped up over my head and put it over where my heart was slowly beating to a sex-drunk beat. “Your place has always been the hardest to get into and you are the only one that ever came anywhere close to it.” My heart was a fortress, and he was the only one that had ever had the keys to it.

  He said something I didn’t understand into my chest then kissed me right between the breasts as he got to his knees. When he pulled out of me we both groaned in disappointment at the lack of connection.

  His shirt was now a wrinkled mess and he had a very obvious damp spot on the front of his slacks. The entire SUV smelled musky and there was no way anyone would miss that we had just been fucking like animals in the backseat. He grimaced and adjusted himself back into his clothes while I did the same thing. I didn’t even have a Kleenex or anything to try to make myself less of a disaster.

  We both made our way back into the front of the car and he pulled out of the parking lot and headed back toward the dealership. He reached out a hand without looking at me and brushed his thumb across the curve of my cheek.

  “Don’t ever doubt that I think you were worth the wait, Keelyn.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just stayed silent as we pulled back into the luxury dealership. There were several guys gathered around obviously waiting to see if we were in fact going to bring the Range Rover back.

  I took a deep breath and went to push open the door when Nassir reached out and stopped me with a hand on my shoulder.

  “Just stay here. No one needs to know what you look like and smell like after I get you off. That’s just for me.”

  I shook my head and grinned at him. “Let me talk to the salesman. I’m really good at negotiating with men.” He lifted his dark eyebrows at me and I laughed. “Worst-case scenario, I can admit that we fucked in the back and that’s going to seriously decrease the value, but trust me. I bet I can get you ten grand off the asking price.”

  “I can afford the asking price.” He sounded arrogant and amused at the same time.

  I clicked my tongue at him and shook my head. “We’re business partners now, Nassir. That means there’s no need to throw money around pointlessly.” I gave him a pointed look. “Our future is tied together.”

  He watched me silently for a few minutes and then gave me a stiff nod. “Do your thing, puppet master.”

  It made me giddy. He wasn’t going to try to control me or the situation. The man with his finger on the pulse of everything was giving me the reins, and nothing made me feel more powerful than that. He was bossy and manipulative, but he treated me like I demanded. He let me know I was his equal and that my thing was just as important as his thing. He trusted me to do “my thing,” and my thing was people. It was why he’d brought me into the club. It was why I’d made a small fortune when I was stripping. I was why the Point would always be where my home and heart were because I understood the people that made it what it was.

  I followed the salesman back to his office and started with a smile. He told me flatly that the sticker price was the final price and there was no room for negotiation. Plus, the guy already had his commission, so his interest in working out a deal was nil.

  At least it was until I started asking him about his girlfriend. The one that was prominently displayed in a picture in a silver frame on his desk. His pretty blond girlfriend that he was going to ask to marry him. His pretty blond girlfriend that I was pretty sure I had seen in the Lock & Key on more than one occasion. When I mentioned she looked familiar, when I mentioned where I worked, his interest in talking and working out a deal for information perked right up. Maybe it was closer to bribery than negotiation, but at the end of the day it was all quid pro quo in my eyes.

  It only took half an hour and I had the guy sweating and shaking for any kind of details about his precious lady love while I convinced him to knock twenty-five grand off the asking price of the car. I gave the salesman a card, told him to come see me at the club and I would set him straight about what he wasn’t giving his girl at home and how he could make her happy. I got the deal, and fully planned on saving his relationship, and I didn’t even have to take my boobs out to do it. It was all about people and understanding them.

  I caught Nassir watching him from behind the window of the showroom, and when he smiled at me, everything he was to me was there in it. He was both my hero and my worst enemy. He had always been my savior and my captor. He was everything I ever wanted and everything I shouldn’t allow in my life, and there was absolutely no one I loved to hate more than him.

  I understood him better now than ever and I loved him, had always loved him, because he understood me.

  Chapter 14

  Nassir

  I looked at the kid Stark shoved into the seat across from my desk with narrowed eyes. I couldn’t tell if the body was a male or female with the grime coating his or her face and the ratty clothes that hung in loose layers on a slender and delicate-looking frame. Midnight eyes stared back at me, blazing with annoyance out of a face that was probably too refined and soft to belong to a man. Though there were hints of Asian ancestry in the features, it was as impossible to tell the ethnicity of the kid with certainty as it was to tell his/her gender.

  Stark looked just as irritated as his charge. His heavily muscled and tattooed arms were crossed over his chest as he glared down at the top of the kid’s head, which was covered in a filthy black beanie that further obstructed determining the gender of the street punk. There was a tic happening in Stark’s jaw and I noticed he had a scrape across his forehead, while his glasses sat on his face crookedly.

  “You wanted me to find who helped Tyler Finch get his new ID. You’re looking at him.” Obviously the kid hadn’t wanted to cooperate and proved that by glaring sulkily at both of us and sinking farther down in the chair without saying a word. I still wasn’t sold on the “him” part of that statement, but I didn’t question Stark’s assumption.

  “You helped a young man pretend to be someone he is not so that he could get inside of my club. I don’t care who you are or what laws you broke in helping him. I just want a real name and a location where I can find him. Mr. Finch and I are long overdue for a conversation.”

  Things at the club had been running like clockwork ever since the saboteur had been unveiled. There were no more incidents. No more sabotage, and even the patrons had all been on their best behavior. The cherry on my professional cake was when I purchased my new car with the money I had taken from the woman that tried to kill me. She had quietly left town, for once making the right choice. I also had all of Chuck’s guys and the rest of my security at my other locations on high alert in case the impostor was stupid or brave enough to show his face now that he had to know we knew who was behind the destruction.

  The dirty street kid crossed skinny arms over a thin chest and just stared at me balefully. The fact that those eyes didn’t waver or even twitch had a little bit of admiration trickling in under my impatience to get this over with so I could find the impostor.

  Stark swore and glowered at the kid, who seeme
d oblivious to all the heated anger being directed at him.

  “I couldn’t get him to talk to me either. I thought maybe you’d have more luck. I kill things with code not with weapons or my bare hands.”

  That made the kid stiffen. Tiny hands curled under the dirty fabric of the coat and that frail frame stiffened. Stark lifted his hands and scrubbed them over his face.

  “A gamer buddy pointed me to a hipster coffee shop where a bunch of street kids that just happen to be really good with computers hang out and offer up stuff like new IDs for runaways and other kids that need to get off the grid. I asked a few of those kids, flashed around some of that cash you gave me, and they all told me to find Noe Lee.”

  I felt both my eyebrows shoot up. “‘No’?”

  The kid rolled dark eyes at me and finally spoke. “N-O-E. But it’s pronounced like ‘no.’”

  The voice was clear and decidedly feminine, so I decided the kid had to be a young woman. That made the fact that Stark was sporting battle wounds even more impressive.

  “So I go looking in every rathole hovel I can find, looking for Noe. I asked every hacker, hard-core gamer, programmer, and software engineer I could find who Noe is, and nobody had an answer.” He shifted his weight and uncrossed his arms so that he could put his hands on the back of the girl’s chair. “Imagine my surprise when I get home from a day of digging to find out that Noe decided to come find me. Every single thing of value I had in my town house is missing. My laptop. My desktop. Every hard drive, whether it was working or not, is gone. All my TVs are missing. If it was electronic, it’s gone, and this little asshole was just sitting on my couch like he had every right to be there. You’re footing the bill for all my shit, Gates.”