Stephanie Tyler - Vipers Run

“You’ve got to go,” Blond Butt told me.

“I’m Calla,” I said.

She smirked. “I know.” Then, “I’m Allie. My old man’s Jimbo. I’ll keep an eye on them.”

“Are they going to jail?”

“For a little while at least,” she said. “Go. They’ll try to question you.”

I’m assuming she’d been questioned a lot. For me, right now, it could be the worst thing. And when I turned around, I saw Rocco was waiting for me by the back door. I was waiting for Amelia to grab my jacket.

She handed it to me, staring around me and out the window toward the fight. “That’s a beautiful thing.”

“The fighting?”

“Yes. So primal. God, I love it when they kick some ass.” She turned to me. “By the way, this whole tension between you and Cage? It’s him.”

“I guess that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“It’s supposed to make you stop feeling sorry for yourself.” Amelia leaned into me. “They don’t like to break down their walls or let us in, darlin’, but I hate to break it to you. You’re already over the goddamned wall, so stop fucking it up.”

I was quiet on the ride back to Cage’s. Rocco didn’t press for conversation, just put the music on loud enough to drown out my thoughts for the short trip. He walked me up, made sure I got into the apartment all right. I took a shower and was just pulling on a flannel shirt of Cage’s I’d found when I heard him come into the apartment.

I practically ran out there, in my bra and underwear and my shirt unbuttoned, only thinking that he could’ve brought someone back here with him, when it was too late. He stared at me and I pulled the shirt around me, because my nudity was distracting him and the way he watched me was distracting me. We had our own fight to finish, dammit.

“Are you all right?”

“Do I not look all right?” he asked. He had a day’s worth of stubble on his cheeks. A cut above his eyebrow that had been stitched. His hands looked like they’d gone a few rounds, but other than that . . . No, he looked good.

“Did they arrest you?”

“They tried.”

“What does that even mean?”

“Means you shouldn’t ask questions that will get you in trouble later, if it ever comes down to that.”

The protection thing again.

“You don’t have to keep holding your shirt closed like that,” he said. I moved to button it and he snorted. “You want to tell me what’s going on?”

“Nothing. Except you go out and fight and come home and the first thing you worry about is the fact that my shirt is open.”

He shrugged. Smiled. “You look cute.”

“Cute, huh?”

“Still pissed?”

“Yes. Actually, more than I was before.”

“Why? Because I want to take care of you?”

“Well, you can’t keep taking care of me any way you see fit.”

“Why not?” Cage demanded. “Fucking hell, woman, why the fuck not? It’s all I want to do. It’s exactly what I will do, and you’re not stopping me, so you might as well stop fighting this battle and pick another.”

“Why? So I can lose that one too?” I crossed my arms and stared at him.

“There are some battles you can most definitely win, Calla. Battles you like. Battles that leave you screaming my name and coming so hard you’ll swear you won’t see straight.”

“Try me.”

“Try you?” he echoed. “You’ve already tried me tonight, with your dancing.”

I swallowed hard, because that’s exactly what I’d been doing. And he’d known it. The game I’d played had worked, and I’d both lost and won.

He advanced, picking me up so I was slung over his shoulder, and that’s when I realized I might’ve pushed this battle thing a little too far. Because even though I might win a battle, he was about to win the whole goddamned war.

I was on the couch, the shirt sliding back to my shoulders, his hand down my underwear and on my sex. I was helpless, impaled on his fingers as he explored me leisurely. I couldn’t sit still, but I didn’t want to hump his hand. But that’s exactly what I ended up doing, especially after his mouth sucked one of my nipples through the thin cotton. He jerked the fabric up with his teeth, ripped my bra off and caught the nipple lightly between his teeth, flicking the end with his tongue as his fingers made me wetter than I’d ever been.

I arched against him and tried to squirm away at the same time, but he wasn’t letting me escape. The biggest part of me didn’t want that either.

My belly tightened, my voice thready as I moaned his name, and he knew he had me. He knew it, caught me in his gaze as surely as his hands made me his. My body responded to him in a way it would for no one else. I’d been sure it would happen that way, but now that it was actually happening, it made me want to beg him to just hurry up and fuck me.

But his hand set a leisurely pace, like he was teaching me a lesson about control. “I know you wanted to pay me back for the video. But having you sit there and stroke yourself for me, that would let you distance yourself from me. And I don’t want distance between us, baby, you got that?”

“Yes,” I managed, threw my head back as my sex contracted around his fingers, wet, slick and needy.

“I’ve got you, Calla. I told you that from the beginning. I’ve got you.” He looked down at his hand and back up at me and—fuck, it was so dirty . . . and I was going to come.

“Cage, I—”

“Go ahead and come,” he said casually and my body betrayed me by following the command immediately. The air sucked out of my lungs with the intensity of the pleasure that followed, a long string of contractions that tortured me in the best way possible.

“I’m going to fuck you tonight, more times than you can count. I’ll fuck every last bit of worry out of you, because when you’re with me, I don’t want any worry running through your mind.”

“Cage, Jesus . . .”

“I know you like dirty talk, Calla. Don’t try to deny it to me.”

I wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

“I’m going to taste you now,” he warned as he threw one of my legs over his shoulders and bent in to grab my clit between his lips. He sucked hard, then licked my slit slowly, probing inside. He flattened the bundle of nerves with his tongue, then speared me with it, hard, sending me into a shattering, all-consuming orgasm.

“Stop,” I told him, but he was still licking me, sucking me, tasting me. He watched me too, and I realized I really couldn’t do anything but enjoy him. This was all about me. I was safe. Pleasured. Cared for.

It was the most primal pairing I’d ever had, one I never thought I’d be able to enjoy. I was used to being the aggressor, picking out men who were a little afraid of me, picked exactly for that reason, so I didn’t have to be afraid of them.

I was so afraid of Cage, but for reasons that captured my heart and not my fear. And as I lay on the couch, he moved up over my body, nuzzling my neck.

“Talk to me,” he said.

I didn’t want to tell him that everything balled up inside of me, that I didn’t know where I belonged—but I told him exactly that.

He took me fiercely, rolled me underneath the weight of his body and said, “You belong with me. You belong to me.”

And strangely, the thought of being owned comforted me instead of scaring me. “Do you belong to me too?” I asked.

“Is that what you want?”

I nodded and he smiled. The pull to him was indescribable. There wasn’t a chance of denying it, or a reason to do so. No, the attraction was as palpable and obvious as the sun. If we touched, we imploded, for better or worse.

I don’t know why connections happen, but this one took me by surprise—and by the throat—and wouldn’t let go. I didn’t want it to, no matter how bad or hard it got, no matter how scared or unsure I became at times.

Like now.

It would become all of those things, but I’d been through both bad and hard and I’d come out the other side. And I was prepared for whatever happened between me and Cage to destroy me. Destroy Cage. Destroy both of us.

But we’d been joined.

“You hear me, Calla? Mine,” he emphasized as he drove his cock inside of me, reminding me whose I was, of who I was. Cage’s girl. And that’s what I’d wanted.

Taking the consequences was simply a part of that.

Maybe I’d fallen too fast and too hard for my dangerous man. He was in my blood—and that need had always been there too. I couldn’t deny it. But it would cost me. It would cost us both.

The next evening, Cage went out on his own. He’d spent the whole day with me, and I didn’t press when he told me he had more club business to attend to. He didn’t look happy about it, so I assumed it wasn’t another night at the bar.

I waited up for him—because I was worried. Because I missed him. And when he came home around three in the morning, I had to force myself not to run out to greet him. I waited in bed until he came in. And he didn’t look surprised to see me awake.

There was a bruise on his cheek and his hand was scraped along his knuckles, and that did get me up and out of bed. “Cage . . .”

“You told me you’d rather fight than run,” was all he said.

“Who did you fight?”

He sat heavily on the edge of the bed, still not talking. I went to the bathroom, got a washcloth and washed his cuts. Stripped him out of his shirts. Bent to take off his boots. He shifted to get out of his jeans and I paused to admire his long, lean body.

Whatever had happened tonight was bothering his soul more than his body.

I grabbed him a cold soda. He guzzled it. Told me, “You’re acting like an old lady.”