Ten Thousand Lies (35 page)

Jaime

“Oh my God, would you look at that?” Ronen griped, pointing at the computer screen.

With the shop being customer-free this Friday afternoon, we’d found the time to go on the Internet and scope out pictures of piercings gone wrong.

Glancing at the photo he’d found, I cringed. “And that’s what happens when you don’t bother to clean your freaking navel piercing.”

“Do
you
have your navel pierced?” he asked.

“No.”

“You know…for a piercer, you don’t have many piercings.”

“Just because I don’t want my body punctured doesn’t mean I can’t stab other people.”

Ronen gave me an appraising look. I had my ears stretched to modest-sized plugs with several cartilage piercings but nothing else pierced.

“Nipples?” he asked quietly.

“Nope. But Xanthe wants me to do hers soon.”

“Please let me watch. Her tits are fucking off the chain.”

That made me laugh. “Yeah, if she says it’s okay, I have no problem.”

“Sweet.”

We went back to perusing infected piercings when I heard Ricki’s office door open and shut, and his footsteps made their way down the hall toward us. Even with his big-ass boots, his steps weren’t heavy. Ricki was actually a very graceful man, his movements controlled. I supposed it was because of his…job. Both he and Ronen were quite stealthy.

“Oh, man!” barked Ronen, elbowing me in the ribs.

Well, Ronen is stealthy when he needs to be.

I’d been so focused on listening to Ricki that I hadn’t noticed the crusted Prince Albert piercing splayed across the screen.

“My eyes!” Ronen wailed.

“Jaime.”

We both looked to see Ricki’s head and one arm poking out from around the wall.

Feeling all warm and gooey inside, I replied, “Hmm?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Okay.”

“In my office.” He looked and sounded angry.

Ronen and I slowly turned our bodies around to stare at him. I’d never been in his office. It had always been off-limits.

“Are you…” Ronen’s voice inflected, asking Ricki something I wasn’t privy to.

“No,” Ricki replied, his voice deep and smooth. His head disappeared as he made his way back down the hall.

“Uh…” I said.

I looked to Ronen, who seemed almost as scared as I felt.

Ricki’s steps faded in the distance.

“Is he breaking up with me or something?”

“I fucking hope not,” Ronen replied. Then, he spun back to the computer.

“You’d tell me, right?” I whispered.

“Now, Jaime!” Ricki barked.

“Shit.”

On legs that felt like rubber, I made my way down the hall.
Is there anything I’ve done to make him want to dump me?
Shit, I’d never been in this situation. I was always the one delivering the it’s-not-you-it’s-me speech.

I was going to be sick. This was fucking Karma coming back to slap me in the face for the countless times I’d rebuked past lovers who wanted more from me, professed their love, only to have their hearts returned in pieces, scorned and dismissed.

“What’s going on?” I asked weakly as he held the door open for me.
I won’t cry in front of him,
I thought, my throat spasming around the knot of undissolved tears lodged there.

His dark eyes were blazing, and they singed me to my soul. Swallowing past the lump in my throat, I headed inside to the sacred space of Richard Darcy Conklin.

Stopping just inside the door, I took in my surroundings. To my right was a large desk, one side pushed against the wall. A smaller drawing desk sat behind it in the corner space, loose papers tacked to the wall above it. To my left were a sofa and love seat of some benign color—grayish brown—with a low coffee table.

Before me was the outline of a plastered window. I stared at it, wondering about the view beyond.

Behind me, the door shut quietly, the click of the lock resonating in my ears.

Ricki’s hand enfolded mine, tugging and pulling me back. He was suddenly in front of me, his hands on my face and his mouth on mine.

An intense relief flooded through me
. He isn’t dumping me!

He was backing me into the locked door, urgently kissing me. His hands went from my face to my breasts, squeezing firm and rough. Through my shirt, he pinched my nipples, just short of painful, and,
holy hell
, was it hot.

Moaning, I arched against him, pushing our groins together, rubbing into the bulge in his jeans.

“Oh God, Ricki,” I groaned.

His mouth left mine to trail hot, wet kisses along my jaw and neck. His big hands massaged my tits hard, making my hips jerk in reflex.

Grinding himself between my legs, he growled, “I want to fuck you so bad, Dollface.”

“Yes, please,” I panted.

Roughly, he yanked on the waistband of my jeans, popping open the button. Sinking to the floor, he tugged my pants to my knees and then slid his hands to my ass. His fingers digging into my cheeks, he pulled my hips toward his face.

“Fuck, babe!” I gasped.

Soft and warm, his breath caressed over me.

“I’m so sorry it took me this long to come face-to-face with this part of you,” he said quietly. “You’re so fucking beautiful, Jaime.”

“Please,” I begged.

In contrast to his manhandling, Ricki pressed the gentlest kiss to my core. Threading my fingers through his thick brown hair, I pulled him in, arching into his mouth. His tongue slicked between my lips, teasing over my clit.

“Oh, fuck,” he groaned. “You taste
so fucking
fine.”

As he went back for more, I realized what Xanthe had meant about the beard. It rustled over my skin, heightening all sensation. But nothing—
nothing
—could compare to Ricki’s mouth. Kissing, licking, he made love to me with it, made out with my sex, as though it were my own lips and tongue.

Watching his dark head between my legs was possibly the most sensual thing I’d ever seen.

His mouth spread the most deliciously erotic vibrations through me. My eyes rolled, and my head dropped back against the door. My thighs trembled as I melted from the inside out.

Raising my head, my vision zeroed in on the drawings taped to his wall. It dawned on me that, with the exception of a few, they were all of
me
.

“Ricki…” I whispered, stunned.

Lightly, he slipped his hand between my legs and pushed two fingers inside me, and all thoughts fled from me. I was nothing but throbbing nerves and shimmering tingles where his tongue and lips lashed and sucked. With a speed I’d never known, the pressure built and shattered apart inside me.

“Oh my
God
!” I cried, my head banging back against the door, as the most incredible orgasm quaked through me.

My knees gave way, knocking Ricki back. Seizing me, he smoothly lowered me to the floor. I still hadn’t recovered before he tore off my sneakers and jeans and rolled me onto my belly. Grabbing my hips, he hauled me to my knees.

I heard the sound of his zipper releasing, and then the feel of the head of him rubbing along my sopping seam had my inner muscles clenching.

“You want it, Jaime?”

“God, yes,” I moaned, pushing back.

He teased my entrance with the tip of his cock, slowly thrusting home.

Fuck, he was big. In this position, Ricki filled and stretched me beyond anything I had ever felt before.

“Fuck,”
I grunted into the floorboards.

Ricki grabbed a fistful of dreadlocks and yanked me back. His bushy face tickled my neck and ear.

“I bloody well need to go crazy on your arse.” His voice sounded dangerous. His other hand slipped from my hip to go in between my legs, skimming along my overly sensitive clit, touching where our bodies joined. “Is that okay with you?”

“You can do whatever the fuck you want to me. Whenever you want.”

He pulled on my hair, making my neck arch. “Is that right?”

This was Killer Ricki. Controlled, maybe even a little cold. Fuck me running, it lit an inferno in me that blazed bright.

Holy shit
. I was so turned on by this.

“Please, Ricki,” I begged.

I loved begging him. He deserved to have me on my hands and knees for him. All the love he’d shown me the last few days was incredible enough to last a lifetime.

“Please what?”

Oh my fucking God, who is this man? Where the hell has he been hiding?

“Please fuck me.”

He shoved me forward, one hand on my waist, the other holding me down by the back of my neck. Pulling back, he threw himself full-force into me, stunning a gasp from my chest.

“Like that?”

“Yes!”

Long and hard, he battered into me, punching tingles of pain through my center. I had to steady myself with my left hand or risk scraping the skin off my face on the floor. The pressure kept building, promising to deliver an orgasm of epic proportions. Whimpering beneath the onslaught of Ricki’s body, I snuck my hand between my thighs and rubbed my clit.

Holy fucking shit.

“Fuck, Jaime. I need to feel you come on my dick.”

“Fuck me harder!” I demanded.

Releasing my neck, Ricki fisted the flesh of my ass in a bruising grip. Our slick bodies slapped together in a frenzy of mind-blowing sex.

“Oh, fuck!”
he groaned. “I’m close. Fucking come for me.”

I sounded like I was in distress, but I was close to blacking out from how amazing this felt. When the orgasm exploded through my core, my scream could tear the roof off the place. White spots dazzled before my eyes, and if Ricki hadn’t been holding me up by my ass, I’d have dissolved into mush all over the fucking floor.

“Holy fuck!” he shouted, pounding once, twice, three times, as hard as I’d ever taken it. With a primal violence, his cock throbbed viciously, and he bellowed, emptying himself deep inside.

With a grunt, he collapsed on top of me, his breath fanning across my cheek. The aftershocks of his own release pulsed through me, ebbing as the seconds passed.

“You…” Taking a deep breath, he tried again. “You all right?”

“No,” I replied, dazed in the most pleasant way possible.

Gasping, he pushed himself up, pulling out of me and dragging my limp ass into his lap. “Oh God, I’m—”

“Ricki, I was teasing. That was
the hottest
sex ever.”

“Oh.” Tucking my head beneath his chin, he hugged me tight. “I thought so, too.”

Laughing, I asked, “You mind telling me what set that off?”

“Yes,” he replied.

I laughed even harder. “Come on! You can’t just spring crazy-ass sex on me like that and not tell me what made you want it.”

“
You
made me want it,” he said. “I wondered if you’d like it, and it fucking made me horny, so I figured I’d give it a go.”

“Yeah, well, you can do that to me anytime you want.”

“I think I will,” he replied, kissing my forehead. “You make me want a lot of things. And…I want to give you everything you’ve ever wanted, too.”

Bizarrely, tears burned behind my eyelids, and my sinus stung. “Damn,” I whispered.

“It’s true.”

Winding my arms around his torso, I hugged him back. “More than anything, you make me want the things I’ve always tried to avoid.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Like what?”

“Like commitment. Trust. Loyalty and love and…all of it.”

“Do you trust me then?”

I took a few seconds to think about it and came to the terrifying conclusion that, “Yeah, I think I do. I’ve never trusted any man, not really. Not like this.”

He made a weird, happy humming noise in his chest.

“What?”

“I think I trust you, too.”

Sighing, I relaxed in his arms. “Now, all we have to do is prove it.”

Ricki

It wouldn’t be a hardship to prove to Jaime that she had my undying loyalty, fidelity, and love. There was no other woman for me; there never had been.

Though I hadn’t told her who I was in my past life, I planned on doing so soon. I’d told her about my life growing up, but she didn’t know my father was The Godwin or that my brother held the title now. Hell, I wasn’t sure if she knew about the Godwins at all. She didn’t know my mother had been taken from the Ukraine to be sold as a high-end sex slave.

What she
did
know was how Xanthe and Rex had met us. Rex had told her about what had happened to him all those years ago. She just didn’t realize how deep my connection had been with the crime ring. Xanthe, Rex, and David had made it out as though Ronen and I’d just happened to be in the neighborhood to save Rex.

A part of me was scared to tell her. Not because she’d tell anyone else. It was just…what would she think of me after she found out that, at one point in my life, I’d been on the other side of the cause? Would she see me differently? Or would she understand that I’d grown up trying to fight it from the inside? How would she take it, knowing I’d killed people who weren’t considered sanctified kills? Granted, I hadn’t killed
innocent
people, but they’d been murdered by my hand in a selfish bid to keep my family at the top of a terrifying food chain.

After we closed shop on Saturday, I took her out to dinner for some Mexican food, leaving Ronen bitching about having to fend for himself. He’d end up with Xanthe and Ellen, so I wasn’t too concerned. Ronen just liked to bitch.