Loaded: A Bad Boy Romance (9 page)

H
e’s right
, and I know it. Even if he’s going to shoot me later, that’s a better death than the one I could have had, slowly dehydrating in the desert while vultures circle overhead.

I don’t say anything, because what the hell am I supposed to say?

Thanks for proving again how trapped I am?

You’re right, I should just wait here, patiently, until some rescuer comes along?

No, thanks.

I can hear him doing something in the kitchen, but I just keep my eyes closed. My feet hurt so much that they barely feel like feet, and more like two orbs of stabbing pain connected to my ankles.

I probably can’t even make it to the bathroom right now, unless I crawl. Somehow, I managed to do the one thing that’s made
sure
I’ll never get out of here, and all because I was angry and scared.

I hear Alex’s footsteps coming back to the couch where I’m sitting, and I open my eyes as he sets a big pot full of water in front of me, next to a red duffel bag. He pulls a water bottle out of the pot and hands it to me, and I take it and drink.

“Lift up your feet,” he says, and I do. He slides the pot full of water under them, and then he takes my calves in his hands and lowers them.

“This is gonna sting,” he says.

I shut my eyes, and holy
fuck
is he right.

When my feet his the water I gasp and my body goes rigid. I bite down on one knuckle, absolutely
determined
not to cry in front of him, even as I’m practically hyperventilating.

I keep my eyes shut. I don’t think I can look at him right now, because I’m just
humiliated
. I’ve tried to act brave, tried to act like being taken hostage by some criminal organization doesn’t scare me. But it fucking
does
.

Right now, I don’t feel feisty or brave or strong or
anything
. I feel like a terrified idiot. I feel like what I am: just some clueless girl who’s gotten swept up in something sinister.

There is
nothing
I can do, and that feels worse than walking barefoot over a cactus.

Alex is scooping water over my ankles and letting it trickle back into the pot he’s using as a basin. For a moment, I let myself be surprised at how gentle his hands are.

“Lift your right foot up,” he says, and I do. My eyes are still closed.

“This is gonna hurt more,” he says.

I hold my breath, and something soft presses against the sole of my foot. It feels like I’ve just stepped on a stove, and my foot tries to jerk away but Alex has a grip on it.

Then he lets go, wiping the water off my calf.

“This foot isn’t so bad,” he says.

He’s holding me by the calf again, my knee almost straight. I can feel him inspect the bottom of my foot.

“Did you walk into a cactus?” he asks.

“I didn’t see it,” I say.

“I figured,” he says.

I can hear him rummage through the bag, and at last, I work up the nerve to open my eyes.

He’s kneeling in front of me, his undershirt splashed with pink water, and he pulls a pair of tweezers out of the duffel bag. Then he looks at me.

“Let me guess, it’s gonna hurt,” I say.

That gets a slight smile.

“I’d get you drunk if we had any alcohol here,” he said. “We used to keep a couple handles of vodka around, half for disinfecting and half for making things hurt less. I don’t know what happened to it.”

“It’s fine,” I say, gritting my teeth.

The spines are in the side of my foot, and a shudder works its way through me as he closes the tweezers on the first one and pulls, but he’s fast and his hands are sure and it’s over almost before I can take a breath.

“Done,” he says, and I relax for another moment.

He takes my other foot out of the water and dries it, and then he examines it for a long time. Too long.

“You’ve gotten something embedded in there,” he says. “It’s gonna be tricky.”

I swallow. Then something occurs to me.

“Take me to a hospital,” I say.

He doesn’t answer.

“It could get infected,” I point out. “I could lose a foot.”

Alex is going through the duffel bag, and he comes out with a very long, sharp pair of tweezers.

“I guess you should have thought of that before walking two miles barefoot through the desert,” he says.

He puts the tweezers on the towel, then also grabs some kind squirt bottle, some gauze. My stomach clenches, and I try to pull my foot away.

“I need a
doctor
,” I say. “Something besides a guy with tweezers and vodka who probably didn’t graduate high school.”

“I told you there’s no vodka,” he says, with a forced, steely calm.

“Take me to someone with medical training,” I say, on the verge of pleading.

This
is my last resort. After this ploy, I’ve got nothing.

“This could be really bad,” I say.

Alex sits back on his heels, and he looks at me for a long time, like he’s thinking about something.

“When I was eleven, I dug a bullet out of my cousin on my mother’s kitchen table,” he finally says.

“Eleven?” I whisper, and he shrugs.

“He was older. Seventeen, I think, and already mixed up in all this. He and another cousin got shot, and my mother’s basement apartment was the closest place they could go. My other cousin had been shot in the shoulder, so he couldn’t get the bullet out himself.”

He looks at a spot on the wall behind my head. Remembering.

“I had a steak knife and a carving fork,” Alex says. “And Pablo was leaning against the wall, his shirt covered in blood, as he told me how to dig the bullet out of his brother. I’d barely seen blood before, and never that
much
. I’d never had to dig through someone’s flesh like that.”

My stomach is doing flip-flops.

He shrugs.

“I did it,” he says. “I got the bullet out. When my mother got home, she wasn’t even surprised, just upset that I’d had to do it instead of her or my brother. I had no idea my mother knew how to treat bullet wounds.”

“Why not go to the hospital?” I whisper.

“They report gunshot wounds,” he says. “The last thing we wanted was the police involved.”

“Did he live?”

“A couple more years, yeah.”

We’re quiet again, and then Alex lifts my foot.

“I’ll be quick,” he says, and before I can protest, the tweezers are under my flesh, digging for the rock that I’ve embedded in my skin.

“Fuck!” I shout. “Jesus
fucking
Christ fucking shit
fuck
!”

I keep going, and after what seems like forever, Alex is holding up a pebble in the tweezers.

“That’s it?” I ask. It
felt
like he was digging out a Mack truck.

“It’s a lot to be embedded in your foot,” he says. “But yeah. That’s it.”

I slump back onto the couch, a sweaty mess, and he pulls gauze and bandages out of the duffel bag. He bandages my feet carefully, almost tenderly, and I watch.

“You never told me what the date on your arm was,” I say, suddenly.

I didn’t look that closely before, but it’s obviously a life:

Nineteen. Whoever that tattoo is for was nineteen when they died.

“They got killed,” I say, still looking at it.

His hands don’t falter, but they pause.

“He,” Alex says.

He finishes wrapping the bandage and anchors it against itself. I look down at my mummy-like feet and feel stupid all over again, like some dumb, spoiled brat who has to be taken care of every minute of her life.

After a moment he pulls a bottle of Advil from the duffel bag and hands it to me. I dump four into my palm and swig them down with water from the bottle as Alex puts the supplies back in the bag. He takes the bag to the utility room and the pot of bloody water to the shower, where he dumps it out.

Then he walks back to me and holds out one hand.

“Can you stand up?” he asks.

I look at his hand. Everything in me wants to ignore it and stand on my own, just to prove to him that I can.

Just this once, accept some help
, I think.

I take his hand and the muscles in his arm bunch as he pulls me to my feet.

It fucking
hurts,
but not as bad as it did.

I get lightheaded for a minute and close my eyes and then his hands are around my shoulders, holding me up, skin against skin.

“I’m fine,” I say, and he lets me go to walk gingerly around the house, trying to get used to this. I feel like the Little Mermaid, the original story, except instead of agreeing to walk on knives in exchange for being with the man I love, it’s just because I was an idiot.

Alex is leaning against the kitchen island, watching me.

“Don’t say anything,” I tell him. “I know it was dumb.”

“That’s not what I was thinking.”

I walk a few more tender steps and collapse into a kitchen chair.

“When we let you go and you tell the cops about me, leave this part out,” he says.

“What part?” I ask.

“The part where I tell you it took balls of
steel
to do that,” he says. “That I know dozens of gangbanging meatheads who carry guns and talk big, but who wouldn’t make it half as far as you did.”

I narrow my eyes at him, wondering if he’s just trying to make me feel better.

Then I remember that he, of all people, probably doesn’t give a shit how I feel, so I just nod.

I
make
pasta for dinner again, and we eat while we watch
The Matrix.

Still nothing from Manny. At this point, I know full well that with every hour, the news gets worse and worse. I don’t know what’s happened, but I know it’s not good for Tessa.

I’m just praying that Manny will send someone else here to do the job. He
knew
how I felt about this job when I started it, and now I’ve gone
way
the fuck above and beyond.

The least he can do is send someone else to finish her.

After dinner she clears the dishes to the kitchen before I can get up, and I don’t bother to argue with her about it. I know that she’s just trying to prove something, so I let her.

I stand and stretch.

God, a shower and different clothes are going to feel good
, I think.

“Ready for bed?” I ask.

She shrugs.

“Sure,” she says. “I think that was the last movie we’ve got here.”

“There’s still
Sorority Sluts One
,
Two,
Three
, and
Five
,” I say.

“What happened to
Sorority Sluts Four
?” she asks. “You wear out the tape?”

I laugh.

“I don’t need VHS tapes to see that kind of thing,” I say. “I just show up on a college campus.”

Tessa rolls her eyes, but her spark is coming back.

“Sure,” she says. “I bet you show up and panties just
fall
to the ground.”

“Worked on you,” I say.

“Fool me once, shame on me,” she says. “Maybe next time you can kidnap a porn star who’ll put out.”

I don’t
want
a porn star. It’s not the thought of
Sorority Sluts
that’s slowly making my dick hard.

It’s Tessa, standing in the kitchen, arms crossed, bandage-wrapped feet.

“You know any with accountants for parents?” I ask. “That’s not such a bad idea.”

Something just
barely
flickers in her eyes, and she breaks our gaze.

Jealousy?

“I don’t, but it can’t be too hard to find someone with fake tits and a daddy complex, if that’s what you’re into,” she says.

“Now you’re speaking my language,” I say, and grin at her.

I shouldn’t be taunting her like this, but she
started
it, and god
damn
if it doesn’t make me want her more.

“Predictable,” she says, cocking her head slightly. “Deep down, you’re just like everyone else. I’m going to bed. You need to watch me sleep?”

Something about that stings, but I let it go.

“I’m going to bed too,” I say. “Long day.”

In the bedroom, she stands by the door and looks at the bed, like it’s a challenge. Her floor-length dress is
filthy
: the bottom is in tatters, and it’s covered in dust and mud. She’s been wearing it for two days straight.

Tessa walks toward the bed, carefully, and sits on one side, still fully clothed.

Fuck, I can’t let her sleep in that. It’s probably covered in cactus spikes or something.

“Wait,” I say, and open the closet.

I rummage through some things, and finally find a white sheet. I hand it to her.

“I’ll turn around while you take the dress off,” I say.

“It’s fine,” she says.

“You’re caked with mud, dirt, and probably your own filth,” I say. “You take it off or sleep on the floor.”

I’m half expecting her to sleep on the floor. I hold out the sheet, but she looks down at herself, her white bandaged feet under her tattered dress.

Then she sighs.

“I rented this thing,” she says. “I guess now I get to buy it.”

“You can sue me for damages,” I say, still holding the sheet toward her.

“It’s probably the least of my worries,” she says.

I realize it’s been almost a whole day since she asked about her dad.

Tessa takes the sheet and I walk to the foot of the bed and stand with my back to her. It’s a long time before I hear the zipper slide down, but she doesn’t ask for my help with it.

I shut my eyes and try to think of something besides the V opening over her back, the dress slowly falling down around her body.

A black mass lands in the corner, and I can barely see it out of the corner of my eye.

A flesh-colored strip follows it, and I realize it’s her strapless bra. Then underwear.

Now she’s naked, behind me, only feet away, and my dick’s gone from half-mast to full staff. I hear her unfurl the sheet, and she takes an agonizingly long time to wrap it around herself.

It takes
everything
in me not to turn around.

“Okay,” she says at last, and I glance over my shoulder.

She’s just wearing the sheet, tucked under her armpits, both shoulders bare, her hair tumbling over them. I can see the outline of her dress in her sunburn on one shoulder.

Her eyebrows are raised in a
what are you looking at
expression, so I reach out and flip the lights off, then walk around to my side of the bed. I shove the keys under the mattress, and she sits gingerly on the edge, then swings her feet up and around.

“Remember what I said about the keys,” I say, not facing her.

“You’ll handcuff me to the bed if you catch me trying to steal them,” she says. “Which you
really
don’t want to do.”

“Right,” I growl.

“You sleeping in your clothes tonight?” she says, her voice almost sweet.

I turn and look at her. I’m still in my clothes because I can’t make my erection go away, and the second I lie down, she’s gonna know
why
I’ve got a massive tent.

“Would you rather I didn’t?” I ask. “I can take my clothes off again. Just ask, tiger.”

She’s got her left arm holding the sheet tightly across herself, but her right arm is behind her head on her pillow, like she’s posing for a nude painting or something.

“I don’t think there
are
handcuffs,” she says. “I think if I went for the keys, you’d get pissed, but there’s no handcuffs here.”

“Have I lied to you yet?” I ask.

“You told me your name was Brent,” she says.

“Since we got here,” I say.

“I don’t know,” she tells me. “I haven’t seen much proof of anything. This could just be how you get off, for all I know. Kidnap girls and take them to the middle of the desert.”

“Trust me,” I say. “I would rather be
anywhere
but here right now.”

I stand and walk to the closet and reach up to the highest shelf. I rummage for a moment, grab the metal loop, and take down the handcuffs.

“They are
very
real,” I say, letting my voice go low and dangerous.

I dangle them from one finger and the moonlight from the window slides along the metal. I walk to the bed and hang the handcuffs from the post above Tessa’s head.

“What’s to keep me from chaining you up while you sleep, taking the keys, and leaving?” she asks.

“Try it,” I say. “I bet you’d
like
cuffing me to the bed.”

“Only if it got me out of here,” she snaps back.

I laugh and walk to my side of the bed again. My erection is still
raging
, and I’m starting to feel like I’m just going to have a hard cock for the rest of my life.

“So you could go back to missionary with the lights off?” I ask, standing at the foot of the bed.

“I’d give up sex forever to get out of here,” she says.

“You’ve been having the wrong sex, then,” I say, and I take my shirt off.

Even in the dim light, I can
feel
her eyes on me.

Fuck it
, I think.
Maybe she’ll get curious
.

I unbuckle my pants, let them fall, and kick them away before walking back to the bed.

“You
do
get off on this,” she says, slowly. “On kidnapping girls and making them helpless.”

I just chuckle.

“I was thinking about the sorority sluts
,
” I say, but she doesn’t believe me for a second.

“I bet you practically busted a nut when you rescued me from the desert,” she says. “Since now I can barely even walk.”

Actually
, I think,
that was pretty much the only time all day I wasn’t rock hard.

I turn onto my side, facing her, and prop myself up on one elbow. Her eyes flick to my body again before resting on my face.

“Would the handcuffs just complete the damsel-in-distress package?” she says, mock-sweetly. “Then you could do
whatever
you wanted to me.”

“Tiger, I’ve barely touched you,” I say. “And when I did, you
wanted
it.”

She rolls onto her side as well, propping herself up. The sheet follows the curve of her hip and her waist, the swell of her ass, and all I can think about is squeezing her, watching her eyes slide shut with pleasure.

The way she’d sound when she gasps my name.

“But you like this
more
, don’t you?” she whispers. “When I’m helpless?”

It’s wildly untrue. If I wanted her helpless, I’d have drugged her
days
ago. I’d have cuffed her already, locked her in the bedroom or something.

Helpless is easy, and she’s
still
anything but.

It’s her
fight
that turns me on.

“Shut up,” I murmur.

“Make me,” she fires back.

“You think I can’t?”

“I think you won’t,” she says, practically daring me to do something.

My self-control just
crumbles
.

I put one hand over her mouth and before I know it, she’s on her back and I’m on top of her, propped up on my other elbow, one knee between her legs, my erection pressed up against her deliciously.

“Is this what you wanted?” I growl. “You want to push me until I snap? Because you’re
damn
close, tiger.”

Her eyes lock onto mine for a long moment, and I take my hand off her mouth.

“If this is damn close, what does snapping look like?” she asks.

She locks eyes with me and I can feel her breathing hard against my chest. She
should
be afraid but she’s anything but.

“Unless that was an empty threat,” she whispers.

I know full well that I should roll off of her, go jerk off in the bathroom, and sleep on the floor, but I’m so far beyond making good decisions that I can’t even see them in the rear view mirror.

I press my mouth to hers and she presses back, and in seconds her tongue is already between my lips, her hands tangled in my hair, pushing my face against hers as hard as she can. I fight her back, winding my tongue around hers as I feel her back arch, her body pressing harder against mine.

As I draw back she bites my lip hard, almost hard enough to draw blood, and I laugh as I turn her head to one side and hold it there, licking and sucking at the soft skin on her neck.

“You’ve got a hell of a bite, tiger,” I say, and nip at the cords of her neck.

She gasps, so I do it again, and she squirms. On a spot right above her collarbone I suck at her delicate skin
just
hard enough to leave a mark.

“Dammit,” she whispers.

“Don’t want you forgetting where you’ve been,” I say, my lips heading lower.

Her hands are on my shoulders, and I think she’s trying to pull me back up, toward her, but that’s not what’s happening. I need to
see
her, to
taste
her. I bite at her earlobe and roll one nipple between my fingers, through the sheet, and she bites her lip, her hips moving up and toward me.

“I think we should finish what we started back at the wedding,” I murmur.

“Should I call you Brent again?” she asks, her voice raw and throaty.

“Fuck no,” I say. I pinch the nipple and she gasps. “When you shout a name, you shout
mine
.”

“Who says I’m a shouter?” she asks.

I laugh and pull at the sheet around her. It’s wound tight, but I loosen it enough to pull down over her perfect, round tits, her nipples at attention.

“I say you’re a shouter,” I tell her, taking one between my teeth.

Her hands clench at my shoulders, and I flick my tongue across it lazily, feeling her whole body stiffen in response.

“And if you’re not now,” I say, pinching her other nipple between my fingertips, “You will be.”

I bite down a little more and then suck at it, hard, and when I take my mouth off, it’s puffy and a little swollen. I do the same to her other nipple until she
moans
, a tiny, soft sound.

“See?” I say.

I plant my lips right between her breasts and pull at the sheet, but it’s wound too tight now. She arches her back, trying to let me get more of it out, but it’s not working.

“Shit,” she mutters, and props herself on an elbow. “Wait, here —”

I just grab the sheet and
pull
. For a second I’m afraid it’s not going to work and I’m going to look like an idiot but then it tears straight down the middle and then Tessa’s naked and I’m
desperate
to taste her.

I trail my lips down her stomach and over her hipbones, her hands in my hair again as I push her thighs apart, then run my tongue straight down over her clit and between her lips, the tip
just
entering her, my nose filled with her sweet musk. Her whole body jerks and her fingers tighten in my hair as I slide my tongue up again, pushing further inside her. A soft moan escapes her lips and the sound drives me
wild
with lust.

I pull her against my face and close my lips around the mound of her clit, licking and sucking as she pushes my face against her. I lift her up just a little and slide my tongue inside her as far as I can and she moves her hips, pushing herself into me.

I back off, just a little, flicking my tongue across her clit lightly, again and again, sliding it between her lips without entering her, no matter how desperately she wants me to, or how desperately
I
want to. I want to make her come, again and again, but not yet.

I close my lips around her clit again and flatten my tongue against her and I hear her
moan
, her body rocking again, and I pull my face away an inch. She pushes my head toward her, but I resist.

“God, I’m so close,” she moans.