28. Coyote
TWENTY-EIGHT
COYOTE
Slam!
The sound of the door banging shut behind me felt final, like I’d had an opportunity to walk through it and failed so spectacularly that life shut it and locked the deadbolt on me. I’d had her in my damn arms, her lips parted, her body pliant and willing atop mine. Images of how she’d looked atop Jackal in that warehouse came to mind, making my pants suddenly very uncomfortable.
Fuck it all, and now I wanted to fuck something.
I understood the urges, and hell, for years now, I’d given myself pleasure with my hand, as most men did. But I still yearned for something I’d never felt before. Something my friends had that I hadn’t.
I wanted to bring the sort of pleasure to her face that they had with their tongues and their cocks. I wanted her to fall apart for me like she did for them. I wanted her to use me like she did the other two. Hell, I just wanted to know what the inside of her tasted and felt like.
But I’d never so much as undressed a woman, let alone pleasured one. And Ivy Cullough wasn’t the kind of girl you were vulnerable with.
I couldn’t let her know I’d never had sex. Couldn’t let her know I was less of a man than she suspected me of being. I didn’t want to put myself out there just to be ridiculed and laughed at when she found me lacking.
Still, I’d been so close to tasting her again, until that asshole ? —
I slammed the fridge closed in the common area of our suite, stomping around the kitchen, slamming cabinets and banging pots and pans around until Dingo finally emerged from his room wearing nothing but a scowl and a pair of sweatpants.
“Oi, asshole, could you maybe tone it down a bit? You could wake the dead storming around like that, and I didn’t sleep much last night.” His hand buried itself in his hair as he glared at me, jaw ticking in annoyance.
“Not my problem,” I snarled aggressively, hating that even walking was uncomfortable now. My cock pressed insistently against the inside of my zipper, and with every step, my mind was plagued with thoughts of how it might feel if she had her bare hand on me instead, covering my hard flesh, maybe even wrapping her soft lips around it?—
Fuck.
I coughed to cover up a groan as I came in my fucking pants, hips angled to hide the jerking of my cock behind the counter as Dingo settled in on the couch and laid back down, flipping the tv on in the background.
I hadn’t lost such control over my body since—well, in years.
To find myself spilling my seed in my fucking pants because I was imagining the woman dead-set on killing us eventually with her lips wrapped around my length like some cheap porno flick?—
And now I was hard again. Fucking hell, did it ever end?
“You got up early again,” Dingo shot over the back of the couch, waving a hand in my direction. “Insomnia again?”
I shook my head before I remembered he couldn’t see it, then sighed. “No.”
He clicked his tongue, tossing a leg over the back of the couch as more channels flipped past in a blur on the TV. “Are you worried about something?”
“ . . . No,” I growled, with only a second of hesitation. I was proud I managed to get it out as quickly as I had. If I’d waited another second, he might’ve suspected something.
“Just horny, then, huh?”
My feet felt fused to the floor, my shame evident in the bright blush that worked its way up my chest and over my jaw. I didn’t dare speak for fear that it would all sound like a lie. It was just that, a bald lie, but if I didn’t speak it, he’d never know .
“You know, normal dudes just take a cold shower and rub one out,” he said flippantly, sitting up with a grin. “Maybe you should try it sometime.”
I didn’t dignify his suggestion with an answer. But I did take it to heart, marching my ass right into my bathroom as I stepped out of my pants and into an empty glass box, hands reaching for the knob with a groan as my cock bobbed in the cool air.
The spray of piercing, frigid drops were like knives on my skin, sharpening their blades on my body, leaving me shivering and wet, but no less aroused. My cock, if anything, was harder now, and I groaned as I took it in my hand and tugged, the sensation nothing like what I wanted right now.
I wanted her. I wanted softness, wanted gentle, wanted to know how hot her mouth was on my rigid flesh. Wanted to know what it was like to have a woman, in whatever capacity she was willing to fill that void.
But not just any woman would do. It had to be that one, specifically. Only she did this to me, had me whimpering and needy as I fell to my knees and pulled on my dick in the shallow river of water running between my knees. Only she could compel me to resort to my baser, primal needs with such a frenzy it left me reeling. Only her, only her, only Ivy Cullough ? —
I came with a roar, painting the tiles with my seed, spilling myself on the floor as the teeth-chattering cold wracked my body and made me dizzy.
No.
It wasn’t the water making me like this.
It was her.
She was like a demon sneaking into my mind to twist it against me. Like a stray dog, she was ferocious in her feral nature yet somehow docile enough to lure in an unsuspecting passerby, eliciting feelings of pity and empathy.
I didn’t want to want her this badly. I didn’t want to feel such twisted, deep emotions for a woman whose life I’d ruined. Because in the end, the truth would ruin anything between us again, and she’d run, just like all the smart ones did.
I wasn’t some skilled, efficient lover, nor half the man as my peers. I was a boy masquerading as a grown adult, still hiding in the recesses of my mind for fear that someone might mock me for my failings.
It didn’t matter that I’d been ‘rehabilitated’ by the system, that I’d been sent to the schools and given an age-appropriate education, that I’d grown up in all the ways that outwardly counted.
At the heart of it all, I was an animal, and people never kept me around long. She would be no different if I opened up and let her in.
And yet twice more, I let my hand fall on my traitorous appendage, jerking and tugging and caressing until I came, over and over, like a punishment for wanting what I shouldn’t.
For wanting her.
I heard the nearby opening and closing of a door and shuddered, the cold nearly bone-deep now. Throwing a towel around my waist, I marched from my bathroom to my bedroom, expecting to have some privacy to collect my thoughts before I had to face the world again.
Instead, what I found was a certain someone lying across my bed, a manilla folder in her hands, a sucker hanging from her lips, her perfect white teeth holding it in her mouth as that tempting tongue twisted around it playfully, suggestively, and her eyes took me in from toe to head, doing an appreciative double-take that had my body responding in an embarrassing fashion.
She rolled onto her back and hung backward over the edge of my bed, her hair falling like a waterfall as she dangled the folder over her head and wagged it suggestively at me.
“Guess what?” She twisted her tongue around that lollipop and smiled, and my fucking cock jerked, the towel slipping free of the loose knot I’d tied it in.
I stared down at my cock, and of course, so did she, her breathing quickening almost imperceptibly.
“I’m going on the job with you all this time.”
She slipped off my bed, walked over to me, and let her hand fall on my chin, jerking my gaze up to meet hers. I didn’t miss the tint of pink in her cheeks or the fires banked just behind those expressive blue eyes.
So much I wanted to say as her eyes drifted downward, my whole body heating under her observation as my cock twitched, a bead of precum forming at the tip, begging to be touched.
Half of me wanted her to touch it. The other half was scared to discover what would happen if she did.
She bent at the waist, her face inches from the side of that hard shaft, hot breath fanning against it as she turned and blew on it, a smile cracking her stony expression when it answered with a twitch, and I with a groan of need.
She straightened slowly, my lost towel in her grasp, intentionally dragging it along my cock as her eyes met mine, holding me in place, refusing to let me go. I groaned at the sensation, needing more than I could ever admit to her or myself. Wanting her in all the worst, most primal ways imaginable.
When she stood nose to nose with me, or about as close as one could get when they were a whole head and a half shorter than their adversary, she patted my chest, shoving the towel in my empty hands as I stood there in stunned silence. I could tell something in her was uncertain, but she never let her mask slip, determined to keep the upper hand in our relationship.
“You might wanna get dressed,” she whispered, her fingertips teasing my hot skin. “Because we leave in ten.”
I could be ready in two, which meant . . .
She flicked my nose as I stared down at her, then did the unthinkable and reached down to grab me by the dick, hand gentle but firm as she stroked me once, twice, then a third time, my cock swelling in her grip, hips practically bucking at her touch.
“You might want to stop touching me, then,” I answered, my voice rough from disuse but still as clear as if I used it every day. “Or you’ll need longer than that.”
“Maybe some other time, huh?” She released me just as I was about to come in her hand, my cock twitching angrily at the absence of her hand.
As she slipped from the room, the air grew cold, and once again, I was left with nothing but my filthy, feral thoughts and the ghost of a touch that likely would never happen again.
She was riling us all up, that was it. There was nothing there. Nothing warranted how my heart hammered in my chest when she touched me. Nothing that justified the amount of time in the day my mind was occupied by her.
She was nothing more than a man-eating beast—a Helen of Troy sent to collapse our house from the inside out. Letting her in was a mistake, and keeping her here was even stupider. But as Ivy disappeared from view and left nothing but the memory of her touch in her wake, I wondered just how complicit we would all be in our own eventual downfall where she was concerned.
Because, gods help me, but I was already beyond salvation.