King growled against my neck, “If he so much as touched you, I will tear his fucking head from his body with my bare fucking hands.” There was nothing about King’s demeanor that said he could be exaggerating or joking. As soon as he’d said it, I knew he’d meant it.
I was about to answer him. To relieve him of the thought that Tanner might have touched me, when another emotion slammed into me head first.
Fury.
Why did I need to alleviate his suspicions, to put his mind at ease when I was the one who was wronged? I was the one who he pushed out the door. If he thought I could just pretend like that never happened, King had another fucking thing coming.
I placed my hands on his chest and shoved with all my might, gaining only a few inches of space between us. “You! How dare you! You have no fucking right to be angry with me right now!”
“Pup…” King started, his hard glare remained firm, a thick vein bulged in his neck under a brightly colored tattoo of Max’s name.
I shook my head and tried to take another step back but he stepped forward with me. “No! Don’t ‘Pup’ me. You knew who I was and you never told me! All that bullshit about me being ‘yours’ and you send me away the first chance you get!?” I threw my hands in the air.
“I didn’t think I had another choice,” King said. He attempted to press his forehead to mine, a gesture that would normally render me calm and compliant, but I wasn’t ready for calm and compliant. I jerked my head back, avoiding the contact.
“No! You did have another choice. You could have fucking told me. You could have let me make that decision with you instead of making it for me!” I once again pushed on King’s chest, this time gaining enough space between us to shimmy out from his grip. I left the cabin of the boat and climbed back onto the dock, walking briskly back the way I came. The humid night air hung heavily like damp laundry on the line. I waded back into the water, not as carefully as I had the first time around. The thunder cracked overhead. Lightning lit up the sky like fireworks exploding all around me. And because I was racing through the water and wasn’t as cautious as I was the first time around, I lost my footing on every other step, sinking up to my ankles in the soft ground.
There was a loud splashing behind me. “Did you come here to apologize? Because it’s too fucking late! You should have thought of that before you lied to me,” I shouted over my shoulder. Before I even rounded the trees King grabbed me roughly by the wrist, spinning me around. Water whipped through the air as my hair skipped across the surface.
“Look at me,” he growled, tilting my chin up to him.
“I can’t,” I said, pressing my eyes shut tightly.
“Look at me, Pup,” he demanded again. “I’m not letting you go until you do.”
“This isn’t fair!” I shouted, struggling to free myself from his grip. “I don’t want to look at you! I just want you to let me fucking go!” When I finally wrangled my hand from his grip, I raised it in the air. My palm was about to make contact with King’s face, when he caught my wrist midair.
“Oh, Pup,” he said and his deep voice rumbled with something sinister. He leaned down until his face was level with my own. I felt his cool breath across my check when he said, “You’re going to pay for that.” I looked up at him through my lashes just as he lifted me in the air by my waist and tossed me up into the air. I landed on my ass with a splash as I sunk underwater. I didn’t even have a chance to come back up for air when strong arms grabbed me under my arms, hauling me back up into the night air.
I sputtered, spitting out water, wiping my eyes. The salt water burned my nostrils. “What the fuck!” I shouted.
King wiped my matted hair from my forehead. Again he tipped my chin up to him. “No, look at me or you’re going back in.”
“Fuck you,” I spat. King went to throw me again, but this time, I fought against him so strongly, he couldn’t lift me up so instead he held me tight and dove into the water, dragging me under with him.
When he resurfaced with me still in his arms, in the shoulder deep water, he dug his fingers into my hips. “This shit was so much fucking easier when you were afraid of me.”
I’m not afraid of you anymore, I’m only afraid of a life without you.
And he had gone and thrown it all away.
And this was about more than being angry with him.
I was hurt.
I decided to open my eyes and get it over with. I told myself that I wasn’t going to feel anything. That I would look at him and still be able to walk away.
It’s still a lie even if you’re only telling it to yourself.
Slowly and begrudgingly, I opened my eyes and when they locked onto his, my breath hitched in my throat.
I told myself that it was the lightning flashing across the sky, charging the air around us. I told myself that it was because we were standing in the thick line of light that the full moon painted across the water that was making me want to reach out and touch the soft glow of his colorfully tattooed skin.
Because it most certainly wasn’t the way I could practically see the flames dancing in King’s burning gaze as it penetrated my fucking soul. It couldn’t have been the way his hard lines of muscle rose and fell with his quick breaths, stretching the fabric of his already tight wife-beater across his chest.
Panting. He was panting.
We stood like that for what seemed like an eternity, daring the other to make the first move, frozen in the moment. I didn’t feel one thing for him.
I felt everything.
Anger, confusion, love…lust, and it all swam around us in the water as we stared each other down.
The sky opened up. A thunderclap boomed so loud and deep, I felt it in my chest. The surface of the water rippled, and then came the rain, cold and relentless. Every drop sent the river water splashing back up at us, but it still wasn’t enough to interrupt the staring contest that was so much more than just two sets of eyes staring at each other. It was a challenge. A warning.
A power struggle.
“You could have told me—” I started to argue again, fully prepared to keep up the fight. I needed it. It’d been too long since we had a true blow out, not since the night of the carnival and I craved the back and forth between us that needed to happen.
The night I gave him my heart.
“No,” he barked. “I couldn’t have told you.” He raised his voice over mine, pulling me so close, that I could feel he was as affected by me as I was by him. He was hard, thick and ready against my thigh. And like the stupid girl I am, my knees trembled and started to buckle.
“Why?” I spat. It was hard to concentrate on our words when I knew what was going on just beneath the surface. The rain was pouring down so hard it muffled our voices as if we were talking underwater. “Why couldn’t you?”
“Because I couldn’t risk it! If you knew the truth, you would’ve… I just couldn’t risk it,” King said.
“Risk what? What couldn’t you risk?” I prodded.
“Losing you!” he boomed. “I couldn’t risk losing you!” King wrapped an arm around my waist and pressed his erection against the soft spot between my legs that was reacting to his every word, his every touch. A place that craved him almost as much as my heart did.
He cupped my ass and lifted me up, wrapping my legs around his waist. “There was one point I’d made the decision to tell you the truth. I owed you that much. But then all the shit went down with Isaac and Preppy, so when I made the deal with your father for Max, I thought I was doing you a favor by giving you your life back and getting you out of all the shit that came with being in mine.”
I squeezed my thighs around his waist, rubbing myself against his hardness. I moaned. “But you weren’t giving me my life back,” I corrected. I placed my palms on his cheeks and held his face in my hands, searching for any sign in his eyes that what I felt for him might have been wrong, but instead what I found was a resounding need to fix what was broken between us. Tears formed in m
y eyes. “You were taking it away.” King’s lips parted. He ran his thumb across my lower lip, turning his head as he kissed his way up my arm.
“Goosebumps,” King observed, running his fingertips across my already stimulated skin. I bit my lip and stifled another moan.
“It’s just the heat,” I lied.
“You’ve got that fucking right,” King growled, bending my wrist behind my back, his lips came crashing down over mine. We were a tangling of lips, clanking of teeth, sloshing through the water to better line ourselves up with each other. It wasn’t pretty.
It was need.
“I’m still fucking mad at you for letting me go,” I said into his mouth, while our tongues did things other parts of me throbbed to do.
King stilled and held my face away from his, our chests heaving in unison, my erect nipples rubbing against his hot hard skin as we panted together. Our breaths mingled in the air. He ran his hand down the side of my face and cupped my cheek in his palm. “I didn’t give you away, Pup. I released you.”
I stilled. “You released me?” I couldn’t hide the hurt in my voice. For some reason, releasing me sounded worse than letting me go.
King ran his tongue across the tip of my earlobe, holding me tightly against his warmth. Chills ran down my spine and into my very core and they had nothing to do with the temperature of the rain.
“I tried to release you, Pup. For Max. But there was a major problem with that plan, and no matter what happened, it would never have worked,” King confessed.
“Why is that?” I asked, needing to know, but at the same time acutely aware of the pulsing between my legs. Relief and release was only a scrap or two of fabric away. Throbbing for me.
“The problem was…you never released me,” King growled, crashing his lips to mine. He moaned into my mouth when I rubbed myself up against his straining erection. He pushed the fabric of my shorts aside and the second he parted my folds with his index finger, I shuddered. He plunged a long index finger inside of me, and for a second my eyes rolled back in my head until he withdrew it. I cried out in frustration, wiggling myself against him, needing him to make me feel anything other than empty.
King unwrapped my legs from around him and yanked my shorts down over my ass. I stepped out of them and he tossed them to the shore. Still holding onto me with one arm he undid his buckle and jeans. He pushed my underwear to the side. “Wrap your legs around me again.” I did as he said, my clit rubbing up against his thick shaft. He lifted me up just enough to line himself up with me. “This is going to be quick and dirty, baby, but I need to feel you.” He pressed me down onto him, filling me quickly. When he met my body’s tight resistance he pushed harder, as if he were starving for me. The deeper he sank the louder he groaned.
“Fuck!” I said in a loud whisper. I needed him to move, but the feeling of being so full was overwhelming.
“Yes, Pup. That’s the fucking plan.” He thrust inside of me fully in one long hard movement that left my thighs quaking.
“God damn it. Holy shit. You’re so fucking tight,” King swore. “I love this fucking pussy. My fucking pussy.”
I held on to the back of his neck while he fucked me with a fury that told me just how much he meant it when he said he needed to feel me. And it was almost as much as I’d needed to feel him.
“Yes. Yes. Yours.” I nodded furiously as he found his delicious rhythm, stroking my insides, creating a whirlpool of water around us. The pressure in my lower stomach intensified. Tighter and tighter I wound with each hard twist of his hips that left me more and more breathless. His strokes became longer, harder, faster.
“You feel so fucking good around my cock,” he breathed. I was ready to finally acknowledge my complete lack of control over this larger than life connection we shared. I wasn’t giving in to him. It was a fight I couldn’t win.
It was a fight I didn’t even want to fight.
“This. You. This is everything,” King groaned. With a hand under each of my thighs he gripped me hard, ramming into me over and over again. Each time he filled me to the hilt, my muscles clenched around him. When he dragged himself from me, I clenched again, seeking him out, needing more. I sat up, with my cheek pressed up against his scruffy face, as the beautiful man I loved pounded into me relentlessly.
Unforgivingly.
I felt his frustration and his hate and his blind lust, and as overwhelming as it was, I took every single thing he could give me.
Without much warning I was exploding around him, trembling as I pulsed and pulsed. Just when I thought it was starting to die down, it racked my body all over again. His cock twitched inside me. His lips parted, his eyes never leaving mine as he thrust up into me one more time, pushing in as deep as he could, holding himself there as his muscles tensed, the chords in his neck strained as he followed me over the edge.
We remained in each other’s arms as the rain assaulted us. The gentle pulsing of his cock still inside me made me want to start all over again. I slowly rolled my hips against him, relishing in the feeling of how he felt against my deliciously sore and sensitive body.
“Easy, Pup,” King teased, resting his forehead on mine. And this time, I let him. And just like I expected, a calm washed over me as we both continued to breathe heavily. “Don’t you see what you fucking do to me?”
“I can feel it,” I said.
“Even fucking better,” he said, lifting me up against his chest.
King gently drifted us around in the water, with me still attached to him in every way. “I’m still really mad at you,” I managed to say. “I’m not cuffed to your bed anymore, but when you lied to me, you were still holding me captive, because you took away my options.”
King’s gaze hardened. “Yes. But ask me if I feel bad about it. About lying to you. About keeping you. There are a lot of things I would do differently, Pup, but that isn’t one of them. If I had to do it a million times over again, I still would have kept you for myself. And if you tried to run again, I still would have chased you down and cuffed you to my bed.” He held on to the back of my neck as he spoke, trapping my head, like he was making sure I wouldn’t turn away from him this time. “And when I finally gave in to whatever this thing is between us, and you let me inside you that first time, and I fucked you up against the house…I don’t think you have to guess that I wouldn’t change that either. Not a fucking second of it.”
My breath quickened. Remembering the night of the carnival when we’d fought right up until the moment he was inside me, and then even our sex had been combative.
Deliciously combative.
“The only thing I’m sorry for is the how it all ended when you left. The shit with the senator. That’s all on me. I was fucked up after prison, after Preppy. I thought it was the only way to get back the only blood I’ve got.” King ran the back of his hand down the side of my face and leaned in closer. “It was a mistake, because this thing here, between us? It’s not the kind of thing that can just go away.” He brushed his lips against mine and I leaned forward, seeking more contact, but he held me in place by my shoulders.
“What?” I asked.
Hard lines appeared between his eyes. “I told you what you needed to hear. What I needed to tell you. Now you need to tell me what I need to know.” King’s tone grew harsher. “You’ve got ten-seconds to tell me why that fucking kid was in your room. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want.”
“I don’t?” I asked, suddenly feeling very confused.
King shook his head. “No, you don’t. But just know that if you choose to go that route, I’m killing the little fucker regardless,” King seethed.
“Jealous much?” I cocked an eyebrow at him. I was baiting him, but the fucker deserved every second of uninformed agony after what he’d put me through.
“Very,” he admitted, much to my surprise. “So don’t push me, little girl.” His hands tightened on my shoulders, reminding me that King wasn’t someone who liked to play games.
“He wanted to talk,” I explained. “And then…”
“And then…what?” he said through his teeth.
I bit my lip. “He asked me if I loved him, and I told him the truth. He made it seem like I was breaking up with him.”
“He didn’t try to touch you?” King asked again, a shimmer of relief in his voice.
“Nooooooo!” I said, drawing out the word to drive my point into that thick skull of his.
King looked almost disappointed. “Kid gets to live after all,” he said. “For today.”
“You still haven’t told me how you are even here,” I said. “How did you get out so quickly? Did you post bail or something? I don’t really know how that all works.”
King sighed. “Always with the questions, Pup.” He tucked my wet hair behind my ears in a move that was both soft and intimate. “I missed your annoying ass questions.”
“I thought I might never see you again,” I said, burying my face in his neck, willing the tears away that threatened to spill onto my cheeks.
“That was never going to fucking happen. Even if the senator hadn’t crossed me. I will always find my way back to you, baby. Always.” King traced his fingertips over my eyelids.
“What aren’t you telling me?” I asked, sensing his hesitation.
“The detective that arrested me wasn’t a detective and he wasn’t taking me to jail. He was a contractor.”
“I don’t understand…”
“He was hired to take me out.”
“Holy shit,” I said, feeling foolish for fighting him like I had when he’d been so close to losing his life.
“Thank fuck I realized it before it was too late.” The rain stopped instantly, like a faucet being turned off. Immediately, a mist started to rise from the water around us, cloaking us in white cloudy wetness.
“What did you do? How are you still alive if he was hired to kill you?” I hung on to him tighter, grateful that he was right in front of me. The question made me feel sick to my stomach to even ask.
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