Good Gone Bad, page 14
“Yeah,” I said, trying to downplay the way that tattoo made me feel, as if Danner had linked his heart to mine with ink and thought. “Guess not.”
He reached into an open cupboard and grinned at me as he revealed a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. “My specialty.”
I laughed, thrown back to the early mornings before school the ten months I spent living with the Danners in elementary school. On mornings that his mum, Susan, was busy with her charity work or shopping, Danner was in charge of making King and me breakfast. Cinnamon Toast Crunch was about the extent of his culinary prowess, so it was a good thing that both of us fucking love the stuff.
“My fav,” I said as he slid a bowl drowned in milk over the counter to me and then took up a lean against the counter to eat his own portion.
“We should talk about a few things,” he said, taking off his cap, tossing it to the counter and running a hand through the longer hair on the top of his head.
I tried to focus on what he was saying, but I gave myself a pass because any woman would drool over a man as ludicrously hot as Officer Danner.
“Talk?” I echoed lamely around a mouthful of cinnamon-y goodness.
He grinned. “If I’d known taking off my shirt was all it’d take to make you docile, I’d’ve done it a long time ago, a helluva a lot more.”
I glared at him and haughtily brought my mug of liquid heaven to my lips. “I just haven’t had enough coffee yet this morning.
His eyes slid to the empty coffee pods strewn across the counter and then back to me, one eyebrow raised.
“Don’t judge me,” I warned him, which made his lips twitch. “Let’s focus. What did you need to talk about?”
He sobered instantly, discarding his bowl of cereal and crossing his arms over his chest so that every muscle in his biceps bulged and glistened in the morning light.
I spoke into my mug before he could get started. “You want me to pay attention, I suggest putting a shirt on.”
I smiled as I took a sip of coffee when he burst out laughing and stalked over to grab his discarded tee.
“Better?” he asked when the tight athletic shirt in a shade of green that exactly matched his eyes was glued to every inch of his beautiful body.
“No,” I answered truthfully, but I waved the concern away with my hand. “Continue anyway.”
“What happened last night, it’s not going to happen again,” he promised. “I called Sgt. Renner this morning and we’re going to put a plainclothes officer on your apartment while you’re at home. We’ve got the budget and thanks to that crap you pulled yesterday morning, you’re worth it to the RCMP to keep alive so they’re extending the funds to do it. You’re also going to fucking obey me when I tell you to take Hero with you every-fuckin-where you go unless you’re with me. He’s a trained police and guard dog, Harleigh Rose, and he loves you. There aren’t many situations he isn’t an advantage in.”
I chewed my lip, hating that I had to agree with him.
He continued despite my lack of agreement. “I’m really fucking unhappy with that stunt you pulled offering up your services as a fucking C.I. but now you’ve done it, there are some rules.”
“They went over those with me,” I interrupted, only to receive a glacial look from Danner.
“Yeah, they went over their rules, but you’ll see Rosie, I got rules of my own. The most important of those being, you do not, under any circumstances, go off half-cocked without me, you understand? I know you’re dead set on endin’ this club for a variety of reasons I won’t argue aren’t valid, but you don’t know shit about police work and that same passion that got you into this could end up ruining this investigation.”
“I’m not a dumbass, Danner,” I snapped.
“No one said you were. What I did say was that you got a tendency to go off half-cocked when you get your teeth into something big. Don’t do that.”
I glared at him. He stared impassively back.
“There goes my good morning,” I muttered, staring into my empty coffee cup. “I need more coffee.”
“You’ll get an ulcer the way you drink that stuff,” he told me as he walked to the other side of the counter, planted a forearm into it and leaned over to palm the back of my head. “And you’ll still have a good morning, Rosie. We just haven’t got to the good part, yet.”
“Uh huh, sure.”
He bit the corner of his grin. “You wanna get there, tell me you’ll stick with me in this, okay? I need to know you’re safe or I’ll do stupid shit I don’t need to do to make sure of it.”
“Like what?” I asked, perking up with curiosity.
It didn’t say good things about me that I loved when he was stupid for me, even more when he did bad for me.
“Like never leave your side.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, now be good for me and say you get me.”
I wanted to. God, I wanted to.
But the asshole had left me for three years without so much as a fuckin’ goodbye. How the hell was I supposed to trust him?
“Left me once, Danner. No reason, no fuckin’ explanation. You think I’m goin’ to trust a guy who could do that?”
“Trusted yourself with a guy that beat you,” he snapped back, cruel with sudden anger. “You know I’d never do that. You fucking know if I left without sayin’ goodbye it was for a good fucking reason.”
“There is no reason on this goddamn planet to abandon your family,” I shot back, standing up in my rage so I could snarl over the counter at him.
“What the hell do you call what you want to do now? Isolating yourself from The Fallen?”
“I’m doing it for them,” I yelled, throwing my mug of coffee across the room because my anger had no eloquence and I needed him to understand. “I’d do anything to keep them safe.”
“You think I don’t feel the same fucking way about you?” he challenged, unfazed by the crash and clatter of the mug or the shard of it all around him. “I’d break my own heart a million times over if it meant keeping you alive.”
He stormed over to where I stood panting, and wrapped a hand firmly around my throat, thumb over my pulse. It was such a dominant move, one that instantly made me weak in the knees and weak of resolve.
I was a badass biker chick, but I wanted to submit to him as he was now, transformed by anger and need into an alpha so dominant he demanded my obedience.
Only for him had I ever felt that desire, and only for him would I ever give in to it.
“I’ve been savin’ you since you were six-years-old, Rosie,” he said, eyes blazing. “I’ve done it again and again even when it meant going against what I stood for because in the end, what I stood for was you, safe and happy after all the shit you’ve been dealt. If I left you, you think it was for any other reason than that?”
“How am I supposed to know when you never explained it to me,” I countered, leaning against his hand at my throat so it tightened like a collar against a rabid dog, so I felt leashed by him in a way that made me wet. “How am I supposed to ever know how you feel when you’ve never fucking told me?”
“Maybe you haven’t been takin’ notice, but I told you every time I played music for you, every time I hung out with you at Mega Music, and every time I stayed home as a young guy to look after you and King. I told you when I bought you that bike you wanted with fucking pink skulls on it and when I took you to pick out Hero and name him. That’s not enough for you, I told you when I picked up your call, havin’ kept that old phone for the sole reason that I wanted to have it in case you called, and dropped fucking everything to risk my undercover cop and rush to your side.”
He bent closer, his lips against mine. “You need more, I’ll tell you now. You said you don’t abandon family and that may be true, but you’re doin’ it now because your family needs that and I did it then to you because you needed it, even if you didn’t know it. Wasn’t right that our friendship was turning into something physical, not when you were a teenager, not when I am the way I am.”
“And I didn’t get a say in that?”
“No, Rosie, you didn’t. Because whether you like it or not, I was the adult and you were the kid. We don’t come from the same side of the law and more, our fathers would kill each other if they could. Anything romantic was, and is, impossible.”
“So, you left,” I whispered, hurt and so angry, lost again like I had been at eighteen when he’d left.
“I did, not saying now I know what that did to you, turning you to Cricket like it did, that I would do the same now. Maybe I could’ve found the strength to keep my hands off you and still protect you from all the ugly in the world. But I didn’t, and Cricket’s death is just as much on me as it is you.”
“Yeah,” I told him, because I was honest and it was true. “It is.”
I’d been with Cricket to fill even a fraction of the void Danner left behind and after a year, when he still hadn’t returned, I decided having any kind of love was better than having nothing at all.
“Not gonna leave you again,” he told me sternly, in a voice low, smooth and dark as smoke curling around my body. “Swearing it right now.”
“Don’t know if I believe you,” I countered.
“Don’t fucking care, I’ll prove it like I’ve proved it before. I’ll show you.”
“You get me?” he demanded.
“I get you,” I breathed, then remembered myself, swallowed my instinctive willingness and rolled my eyes. “If you get on the same page as me, we shouldn’t have any problems anyway.”
The tendons in his neck were straining in a way I was trying not to find delicious. I wanted to focus on my anger, demand to know why he had left me. But now that I’d had those wide palmed, rough tipped hands on my body, I wanted more.
I wanted to gorge myself on his body until I had my fill so I could finally get Lion Danner out of my fucking system.
“You gonna keep your hands off me while you’re protecting me?” I asked, licking my lips at the thought of that gorgeous body back on mine.
He ignored the last bit of my statement and shifted his grip so his hand cradled the side of my neck. “That brings us to the good stuff. We started something last night. Actually, we started something about three and a half years ago when you were still too young, but we picked up the thread last night and I don’t mean to let it go again if I can help it. We’ve got to go slow, be careful, because our lives depend on it, Rosie. First sign of trouble, if I’ve got to leave you to keep you safe, I will. Do you understand that?”
The warmth of his declaration froze in my veins. “No. You just said you want to be with me. I’ve wanted you for fucking years. You can’t say that shit one second and then take away from me the next. You’re either with me or you aren’t.”
His jaw clenched, and his hand tightened hard in my hair. “I’m with you until being with you threatens to harm you, Harleigh Rose. You can fucking give me that.”
I threw up my hands, wrenching my head out of his hold. “I can’t believe you’d ruin the first time you’ve ever admitted you wanted me by being a fucking coward about it.”
“Coward?” Danner said, his voice octaves lower, cold and heavy like the weight of steel shackles against me. “Wanting to keep you safe is cowardly?”
Hurt that he’d ever even consider leaving me after everything we’d been through, after I’d made it clear in actions if not in words how much I needed him, burned through my insides like lava wrecking ruin over Pompeii.
I got into his face and hissed, “Yeah, Danner. You care about someone you don’t let them go in the face of a threat, you hold them tight, keep them safe and warm through the storm and hope to fucking God or whoever the fuck else that you both get out of it alive.”
Danner stood there, implacable as a stone statue, his eyes darkly shuttered as I finished my tirade and breathed heavily into the silence.
“You obey me, Rosie,” he repeated, this time in the dark tone that sent shivers down my spine. “You obey me in the field, and we do this, you obey me in bed, on the couch, in the back of my ‘Stang, where I decide to fuck you. You want this, those are my rules.”
“You want me to submit,” I said, knowing that as I’d known it when he’d taken me over his knee when I was seventeen.
“Fuck, yeah,” he growled, his fingers fisting at the back of my hair and tugging so I was forced back, looking up into his cruelly handsome face. “This is the game we’re gonna play, rebel. You can sass me, fight me and disagree with me all day long. It’s you, and fuck knows, I like that. But now, when I’ve got my hands on your body, I’m your Dominant, and if you want my cock, you’ll fucking well have to earn it by being my good girl instead of my rebel one.”
Each of his filthy words piled like kindling in my gut, but there was a small part of me still that told me giving in was wrong, weak in the way of Berserker biker women who let themselves be used by their men.
“Why do I want this?” I whispered, clamping my hand over his on my neck. “It doesn’t seem natural. I’m not that kinda woman.”
“You meet me, you think I’m the kinda guy that wants to spank naughty teens and fuck them so hard they scream?” he asked bluntly. “No. Took me a long time to learn it, but I’m gonna teach you. There’s only strength in submission, only care in Domination. We do what we do because we get off on it and we leave it mostly in the bedroom. You can still be badass little rebel Rose, and I can still be good guy Danner.”
His free hand moved to cup me between my legs, over my shamefully wet panties. “But we’ll both know the truth. It may be your body, Harleigh Rose, but I own it.”
Then he kissed me.
I softened in his arms like melting body until only his hands at my neck and over my pussy kept me upright.
He tasted good, like coffee and cinnamon and man.
I clung to him and opened my mouth farther so he could kiss me harder.
“Gonna take you, Rosie,” he told me against the skin of my neck, his tongue licking over my throbbing pulse. “Gonna tame you, leave you just wild enough to fight back against every touch, buck back against every thrust of my big cock in your tight, wet cunt.”
I groaned, my nails raking over his tee covered back. “Yes, fuck me.”
His fingers rubbed over the soaked placate of my panties then slipped underneath to run between my silky folds. “That’s it, Rosie. So wet for me.”
His thumb found my swollen clit, wrenching a gasp from me.
“I want to play,” I panted. “I want you to play with me.”
He grinned. “Did my naughty girl do some research after I played with her years ago?”
“Yes,” I hissed as he sunk two fingers into my molten core.
“You ever played before?” There was a sharp edge of jealous that ran like a knife point through my leashed inhibitions.
I loved him jealous, I loved him mad with desire in a way I knew instinctively only I could make him be.
“No, but I thought about it every night when I lay in bed touching my cunt, thinking about you inside me, your fingers, your cock, your tongue.”
“You want me to make you break for me,” he said, his voice sinking into that low octave I remembered, that one that tied me with rough ropes to his will. “You want me to earn your submission.”
My legs wobbled and the next instant I was on the counter, my legs spread wide by his palms so he could look down at my pussy. When he looked up at me again, his eyes were torches.
“I’ll play with you, I’ll even break you open with pleasure until you sob my name, but when you do Rosie, you call me by my name.”
“Yes, Danner,” I breathed, desperate for his touch on my cooling, exposed cunt.
He lashed out with one hand and spanked my pussy hard.
I cried out and tried to close my legs, but he held them open with his biting grip, leaned over and blew chilled air against my stinging clit before sucking it into his mouth for a full, wet kiss. When he straightened, his lips were wet with me and his eyes were ice cold against my heated skin.
“You say my name,” he repeated.
I swallowed my instant resistance. It was a defense mechanism I’d honed well over the years, throwing sassy shields to hide my vulnerabilities.
I didn’t want to hide them from him, not anymore.
So, I tipped my chin and looked him right in his blazing, beautiful green eyes as I said, “Yes, Lion.”
He moaned raggedly, reached forward and twisted the tips of each breast with his hand before giving them both a sucking kiss that arrowed heat straight to my clit.
“I could keep you here like this all day. My good little whore presenting herself. I’d eat you for breakfast, torture you for lunch and then, when you were starved for it, I’d fuck you all through dinner and gift you my cum for dessert,” he told me almost conversationally as his hand played with my pussy, his thumb rubbing hot, tight circles over my swollen clit, two of his fingers twisted and pumping inside.
I loved how he played with me, as if I was an object that existed only for his pleasure. It should have felt wrong, maybe even degrading, but it didn’t because Danner was playing me the way he played his guitar, masterfully, removed only because he needed the focus to strum every string just right.
“Are you on birth control?”
I nodded, desperate for the feel of him bare inside me. “Yeah, and, sucks to say, but I got tested after Cricket and I’m clean,” I told him.
His smile made the pain of the memory disappear like a phantom. “Never fuck without a condom, haven’t touched anyone in weeks. You trust me?”
I didn’t have to think. “Yes, always.”
I moaned when he moved away, but he only smiled a cruel little smile that touched me like his mouth to my pussy and moved away. I watched with low lidded eyes as he pulled open a drawer filled with plastic bags, rubber bands, clothes pins and other catch-all materials.
“What are you doing?” I questioned.
He quelled me with a single, displeased glare.
I chewed on my lip as he moved back to me, his hands behind his back until he fell into a crouch and revealed a zip tie in one hand. He watched my eyes widen, my chest heave as he slowly bound my left ankle to the drawer of one cabinet and then the right to another. I could see the intent in his eyes, the gleam of wickedness and satisfaction that I was open and secured for him.
