Knife & Flesh (The Night Horde SoCal Book 4) (10 page)

He knocked again, and she peeped again. He pushed away from the door; he was changing his mind.

Her state of dishabille be damned. She opened the door.

She opened the door.

And they just stared at each other.

Every time Trick had seen Juliana since she’d told him he wasn’t good enough to be her friend, she’d been dressed for work, in elegant dresses or a skirt, high heels, her hair and makeup perfect. Stunning and out of his league. Now, her face was blotchy, her hair was a knotted mess, she had on a baggy beater and little faded-pink shorts.

He liked her better this way.

But why was he here?

Because she’d kissed him, and he couldn’t get it out of his head, even though he’d pushed her off before he’d even had a chance to really feel it. Because he felt bad about the shitty way he’d spoken to her. Because he was worried about her. Because he wanted her, and she’d opened the door a crack, and he was too tired tonight not to go through it.

Stepping through the door, he took her head in his hands, and he kissed her.

If she’d have resisted him, he would have backed off, he had that much presence of mind left, but she didn’t. Instead, she went almost limp. Her mouth opened for his tongue. Her arms dropped to her sides, and she let her body sway toward his. He took that as an invitation and moved one hand from her face to slide down a slack arm and grab her hip.

When he pulled her hip toward him, pressing their bodies together, she came alive. She lifted her hands and pushed them under his kutte, around his waist, and held herself closer to him, inside his kutte. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and he could feel the swell of her breasts and the small knots of her erect nipples against his chest. Her tongue moved with his, and she moaned.

With an answering grunt, he took another step forward, forcing her backward, into her apartment, then slammed the door closed with his foot. As he took two more steps, instinctively seeking somewhere to put her so he could press his whole self into her, she tore her mouth from his.

“Trick, wait!”

His breath already coming in heavy gasps, he didn’t answer. But he opened his eyes and looked into hers—those black deeps.

“Is this just a quick fuck?” her voice was nothing but air.

Hearing his shitty words tossed back to him, Trick winced. His thoughts were too jumbled up to know the answer, or even to know if she deserved an answer. He was still hurt, still angry. But he felt safer in honesty, he always had, so he gave voice to the jumble. “No. I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

One corner of her mouth turned up in an ironic twist. “‘Think’?”

Another of his own words lobbed back. Instead of answering that challenge, he asked, “What do you want, Juliana?”

The smirk left her face, and her expression became vulnerable. “I’m afraid of what I want.”

She hadn’t answered his question, and despite the demand of his impulse, despite his physical need, he needed her to open herself for something, too. He needed her to answer that question, to be honest. He needed in. “What do you want?” he asked again.

“You.”

Her eyes widened and scanned his, as if she were trying to see inside him, to find his response before he made it.

His response was to kiss her again, and when he did, she whimpered and clutched him more tightly. Her hands moved up his back, hooking over his shoulders, under his kutte, and she kissed him back with abandon. Her mouth and tongue moved with his with a need he recognized, a need like his own.

Juliana was part of why he’d been so fucked up the past week; he knew that was true. Her rejection of him and La Zorra’s interest in him had collided and made him feel broken—more broken. He was a thinking man, and he’d thought deeply about why it was these beautiful women who had triggered so much old ugliness to explode in his mind. He thought it was because of what it meant that a woman like Dora Vega would want him, and what it meant, what it said about him, that a woman like Juliana…he didn’t know her last name…would not.

What it meant, what it said, was what he already knew.

He was not a good people.

Now, though, she’d said she
did
want him. Whether for this moment or for longer than that, Trick didn’t know. There was danger in that uncertainty, but he was too weary from nearly a week—hell, more like a year—of constant mental struggle to care. Right now, she was kissing him back, moaning into his mouth, her fingers digging into his shoulders, and he didn’t fucking care what it meant.

He tightened his hold on her, sliding his hand from her jaw around to grip the back of her neck, and he began to walk her backward to her room.

After a few steps, she broke her mouth free of his again. “Wait!” Breathlessness gave a sense of urgency to the word, and Trick stopped, trying to gird himself for what she’d say next.

Her eyes were unfocused; she blinked and gave her head a hard shake. “My bed—I’ve been—I’m sewing.”

He didn’t understand. “What?”

She blinked again and made a little shy laugh. “Sewing. I’ve got stuff spread out all over my bed. It would take forever to make room for us, and there’s too much work there to just knock it to the side.”

“Sewing?”

She grinned, and one hand came off his shoulder and out from under his kutte. Wrapping her hand around his beard where it was free of his chin, she gave a little pull—and his cock jerked in his jeans. The gesture was sweet and proprietary, and he nearly gasped. “Sewing. Making clothes. I was doing that.”

“You make clothes?”

“I do. I don’t want to talk about that, though.” She stepped back and took his hand from her neck. Turning him around, she walked to the living room. As she stopped at the nearest of her sofas, he noticed that there was writing on her little shorts:
DELISH
, they said.

He laughed and broke the surface of his fugue. When she looked back at him, he nodded and said, “Cute shorts. You make those?”

“No.” She blushed. “Obnoxious gift from an obnoxious friend. I wasn’t expecting company.” Her expression became serious, and she faced him again. “Why are you here, Trick? If not for a quick fuck?”

As she asked, she brought her hands up and slid them under his kutte, pushing it off his shoulders. He helped her, rolling his shoulders up and back until the leather slid down his arms. He folded it and laid it over the back of the sofa, holding her gaze all the while.

“I want you,” was his reply to her question. “You know that.”

“But you’re mad at me.”

He nodded. “Yeah. I was.”

“You’re not now?”

He shrugged; he didn’t know. “I want you.”

There was a pencil in the knot of hair at the top of her head, and he reached up and pulled it out. The knot came loose, and she shook her head, letting her long, dark tresses fall over her shoulders.

God. He felt paralyzed by his need.

She took the pencil out of his hand and turned, stepping over to set it on the white plastic table between the sofas. The style of the room was strange: aggressively old-fashioned but somehow fresh and cheerful. He’d noticed the furniture when Lucie had led him in the week before—the curved, 1950s-era mated sofas, upholstered in a gold damask shot with pastel threads. Each sofa had only one arm. He’d spent a night on one of them, and he’d seen that they were the components of a sectional and would make a semicircle if pushed together.

Since he’d last been here, Juliana had unpacked and made the bland apartment into a vibrant home.

She had arranged the sofas facing each other with that white, rectangular, 1970s plastic coffee table between them and a sheepskin rug under that. On one wall was a set of white IKEA bookcases, the shelves made of individual squares. Books filled most of the squares, but there were framed photos, too, and a few brightly-colored knickknacks. One square was taken up with a red “J” and another a blue “L.”

Framed on the wall were sketches—watercolor or pastels, it was difficult from where he was to tell which—of girls in pretty clothes. Like fashion design sketches. She sewed, she’d said. Made clothes. He wondered if the sketches were hers.

Was she an artist, too? Jesus. He turned back to her and found her looking up at him, her hair now framing her face.

“I’m sorry I hurt you,” she said.

Trick shook his head; he didn’t want to open that Pandora’s box right now. He knew he was wrong for her. But she was right for him, and he needed something right. To close off further discussion, he slid his hands around her face, into that thick, glorious dark hair, and kissed her.

She filled his senses: the flower of her shampoo, the velvet of her lips, the sweet of her tongue, the airy lilt of her whimpers. He felt her yielding to him, and to herself, and he pulled her closer, delved more deeply into her mouth.

Her hands moved to his waist, and she lifted his t-shirt. He released her mouth and leaned back, reaching over his shoulders to grab the cotton over his back and pull the shirt off. He cast it away without noticing where it landed.

She smiled and put her hands on his bare chest, scratching her fingers through the hair across his pecs. He closed his eyes and surrendered to the feel of it.

Then her mouth was on him, over his pierced nipple. She sucked, and he felt her tongue working the ring, pushing and pulling at it. Groaning, he dropped his hands onto her shoulders and clung to her as electric bursts of desire shot from her mouth to his cock.
Fuck
, that was good. He flexed and arched backward.

Then that miraculous touch went away. “I’ve been wanting to do that since I first saw the piercing. It feels good?”

He opened his eyes and smiled at her. “God, yeah.”

With a pleased lift at the corners of her mouth, she leaned in and did it again. He closed his eyes again and let the pleasure roll through his body.

While her mouth worked at his nipple, her hands went to his belt and flipped open its big silver buckle. He grinned and widened his stance, shifting his hips toward her. As she opened his jeans, her mouth left his pierced nipple, and she kissed and licked her way to his unadorned one.

“God,” she murmured against his chest as her hands sought and found what she was after. One hand circled his cock, and the other delved deeper to cup his balls. “God, you’re big.”

She freed him from his jeans, and Trick shifted his stance again so that the denim wouldn’t just drop to his ankles. He still had his boots on. And she was still dressed.

Before he could reclaim some sense from the flood of sensation, she gasped, and her mouth left his chest. Her thumb had passed over the head of his cock. It retraced its steps. He opened his eyes and found her staring down at what she had in her hand.

“It’s called a Prince Albert,” he said.

“I know what it’s called. I’ve just never known anybody who actually had one.” She looked up. “You pierced your cock.”

He grinned. “Well,
I
didn’t do it. I had a professional do it.”

“Didn’t it hurt?”

Her hand still moved over him, exploring even as she watched his face. Trick had trouble focusing on the conversation she wanted to have. “Sure. I’m not afraid of pain.”

“Why?”

The best answer to that question was a demonstration. Undoing the space between them, Trick kissed her, hooking an arm around her waist and lifting her up so that he could push his cock between her legs. Guiding himself with his free hand, he brushed over her mound. Though she was still wearing those pink knit shorts, a shockwave of pleasure blasted through him.

And through her. Juliana jerked in his hold and gasped, dropping her head backward, away from his mouth. “Oh, my God.” She lifted her head again and met his eyes. “You did that because of how it would feel for women?”

“Feels good for me, too. Feels better inside.”

“Oh, my God,” she whispered again, her eyes round.

He was holding her up, her feet barely skimming the ground, so he turned and laid her down on the sofa. Stepping back, he toed off his boots and then dropped his jeans and underwear, catching his socks and pulling everything off in a heap. Before he stood, he rooted in his pocket for a condom.

When he looked back up, Juliana was as naked as he. And God, she was beautiful.

She was long and lean, her body smooth, with no sign that he could detect that she’d given birth. Her skin was olive, a shade or two darker than his, and seemed unblemished, that beauty spot on her face the only mark anywhere. Her breasts were small, and her nipples were dark, tightened now into hard knots as she writhed under his regard.

“Trick. Please.” Her voice had the high pitch of a plea.

He put his knee on the sofa and loomed over her, propped on one hand, the condom gripped in his fist. With his free hand, he smoothed her soft skin, over her shoulder, down her arm, to her waist, up her side, and finally around her breast. As he brushed his thumb over her nipple, she sucked in a breath, her chest jerking with it, and he bent down to take that aroused tip into his mouth.

He’d been wrong, he saw before he closed his eyes. Her body did show signs that Lucie had been there. A few faint lines radiated along the side of her breast. Then he stopped his visual consideration of her and focused on how she felt, and on how he felt to her.