15. Riley
It’s nota confession of love, not in words, but it feels so close to it that tears spring to my eyes, my heart stuttering in my chest as the enormity of the bond between us crashes over me.
I kiss him, giving him my own confession that way, and he grips the back of my head, tangling his hands in my hair, and deepens it.
This man does things to me. He has since the first. And it doesn’t take long before the emotion between us sparks into heat.
“Can’t ever fucking get enough of you,” he growls against my lips, hauling me against his body. “That’s… why… I want…”
His mouth on mine is hot and demanding between each word, but he trails off to tip my head back and suck on my throat, making us both groan.
I know what he wants. He wants to paint me. Keep me. Memorialize this feeling, this connection that’s been between us from the start. But we’re both distracted now, and when he tugs at my clothing I help him get me naked, I return the favor by yanking his shirt off, eager to reconfirm our connection another way.
“You’re so damn beautiful,” he says, stepping back for a moment to run his hands down my sides. He frames my pussy with them. “This right here is my own personal heaven, princess. You know that, right?”
“Dante,” I say, my throat closing up even as heat blooms in my core. “I—”
He surges up and kisses me again before I can say the words burning to get out, scooping me up into his arms and carrying me over to the couch he keeps in the corner of his studio.
“You what, princess?” he asks, his voice husky as he lays me down on it, trailing his fingers down my body and dipping them between my legs. “You wanna take me to heaven? You wanna remind me what the fuck we’re fighting so damn hard for?”
I squeeze my thighs together, trapping his fingers inside me, and rock down to get them deeper.
“Fuck,” I gasp when he obliges. The man knows exactly where my sweet spot is, and the cocky, sexy-as-fuck grin on his face tells me he knows it.
“Maybe I want you to get a little heaven too.”
“This will get me there,” I pant, reaching for his cock, the thick outline clearly visible through his pants.
He grunts when I rub it, then retaliates by grabbing both my wrists and raising them over my head, pinning them to the arm of the couch with one hand.
The other is still busy between my legs.
“Dante.” I moan his name. “I fucking need you.”
“I’m right here.” He stares down at me with an intensity that makes it feel like he’s already fucking me. “Always gonna be here for you, princess.”
I spread my legs, writhing on his wicked fingers. “Please.”
He smiles at me, slow and dirty. Then he pulls his wet fingers out of my pussy and rolls one of my nipples between them, then the other.
I arch up, heat shooting through me, but he keeps my wrists pinned down and leans over me, eyes on mine as he sucks one of my nipples into his mouth, licking it clean. “Fucking delicious.”
“Shit, Dante,” I gasp, squeezing my thighs together around the flood of arousal that brings on.
“Love your tits, princess,” he mumbles against them. “They’re perfect.”
He takes the other one in his mouth, sucking it in whole, and filthy pleas tumble out of my mouth, begging him for more.
He groans, then releases my wrists and straightens up, taking a step away. “Perfect,” he repeats, his eyes roaming over me possessively.
I sit up with a gasp, my chest heaving, and reach for his pants. “I’ll show you perfect,” I promise.
He smirks and catches my hand before I can free his cock, bringing it to his mouth and pressing a hot, tender kiss against the inside of my wrist.
“You do every fucking day, princess,” he says, his voice still husky with need. “But I told you, I want to paint you… just like this.”
My jaw drops. “You want to paint me now?”
“’Course I do,” he says, heat in his gaze. “This is exactly the way I like to see you best. Soaking wet and on the verge of begging for my cock.”
I narrow my eyes and scowl at him, because he’s right. I’m definitely on the verge of begging for it. He got me all worked up, and—
And damn, I can’t be mad. Not when every word out of his mouth, every heated look and cocky smirk, makes me feel like I’m the center of his whole world.
I prop one leg up on the seat of the couch, lounging back against it. “This is what you need to work out your emotions?”
Dante sets up an easel, preparing his paints. “It’s a start,” he says as I slide a hand between my legs and circle my fingers over my clit. “But you gotta stay still for me.”
I stop moving, ripples of desire making my pussy clench.
His eyes flare with heat again. “Good girl. Now spread your legs a little wider and get those nipples hard for me again.”
They’re still puckered into twin buds, tight and sensitive from the attention he already paid to them, but if he wants me to give him a show, I will. I’m used to it, fucking good at it… except this is nothing like stripping. As Dante murmurs more filthy directions, getting me to pose the way he wants, his eyes skipping between me and the canvas he has angled away from me, I feel sexier than I ever have before.
I love the way his eyes burn for me.
I love the dirty things he wants me to do.
I love… him. The emotion is almost overwhelming, and it makes everything hotter, the deep sound of his voice turning me on until I almost can’t stand it as he uses it to guide me into the position he wants.
“Just like that,” he murmurs, his hand flying over the canvas. “Like you’re dying to be fucked.”
“I am,” I say, my fingers trembling where he wants them to rest, just inches from my pussy. I wiggle them closer. “Let me show you.”
He laughs, low and dirty. “You bet your ass I expect you to show me,” he says, the deep sound of his voice stroking over my skin like it’s made of sex. “Later.”
“Dick.”
“You can have that later too.”
I arch my back, rewarded with a flash of heat in his eyes. “You sure you want to wait?”
“I’m sure you’re worth the fucking wait,” he says, holding my gaze until it’s all I can do not to launch myself across the room and climb him like a tree.
I’m either going to need his cock or a distraction, because the man is about to make me come with his words alone.
I definitely plan on holding him to the promise to give it to me later, but for now, I go with the distraction. “How did you get into painting in the first place?”
His brush pauses for a moment, just a stutter, before he continues painting. “I told you a bit about my dad, yeah?”
I nod. “He was a hitman.”
Dante’s lips quirk up. “He was a lot of fucking things, but yeah, he was that. Took me out and trained me up from when I was young, and one of the things about it was… you gotta understand, princess, his clientele meant we were often working in some shitty-ass conditions. Dark. Dank. Dirty places with people who’d never had any fucking color in their life, and didn’t even miss it.”
I let my eyes roam over his shirtless torso. His body is gorgeous all on its own, but even more so with the bright, vibrant ink he’s covered himself in.
I already know the nature of his father’s work didn’t bother Dante, but I can’t imagine him ever enjoying moving through a world without color.
“The world can be an ugly place,” I whisper, knowing that fact firsthand.
“You got that right,” Dante agrees. “Literally, and with all the shit people do to each other in it too. But you know what one of my favorite things about my dad’s kills was?”
He doesn’t wait for me to respond. He shifts away from the canvas for a moment, holding out his left arm and turning it to expose the veiny surface of his forearm, bright with interlocking designs.
“The blood,” he says, touching the art right in the center. It’s an amazing piece of ink that looks almost three dimensional. A bullet hole exposing chipped concrete underneath, surrounded by an explosion of red splatters that overlay his other tattoos like an explosion of blood.
I suck in a sharp breath, realizing what he means. I know killing doesn’t bother Dante, but I also know it doesn’t thrill him. He’s good at it, but not a fucking psychopath. “It was bright. It added color to that fucked up world.”
He grins at me, then goes back to his painting. “Got it in one. That shade of red is still my favorite color. There’s nothing else like it. It’s fucking life, you know?”
“So how did that get you into painting?” I press.
“That was a little later in life. One of the first jobs I did on my own. The target was a true piece of shit. Ran a sex trafficking ring that catered to pedos, but painted a target on his head when he failed to tithe enough to one of the gang leaders who let him operate in his territory.”
I shudder, his words bringing to mind some of the fears I had when Austin first took Chloe. “I’m glad you killed him.”
“Yeah, I didn’t hate the job, that’s for sure,” Dante agrees, putting down his brush for a moment and picking up a tool that looks like some kind of scalpel. He works on the canvas with it for a minute as he goes on. “The thing was, he was an oily fucker, good at watching his back. I had to stake out the hole in the wall he was operating out of for a couple of days before I could get him. Spent the time in this rat-infested shit hole with a good view of the door he used, tucked into this back alley over in the warehouse district.”
I grimace, picturing it all too clearly after all the searching we did for Chloe around there.
Dante sees me, and laughs. “Yeah, you know how it is over there. Fucking ugly, in every sense of the word. But then there was this alley that the target snuck in and out of…” His eyes go distant for a moment, the hint of a smile dancing over his lips before he shakes his head and returns his attention to the canvas in front of him. “You never would’ve known it, but tucked away in all the concrete and piss and grime of the place, someone had painted the whole thing with this vibrant scene. Like a… a mural. Transformed the whole wall into some kind of urban warfare fantastical shit, dragons mixed with rocket launchers, all in colors just like this.”
He holds out his arm, and I suck in a breath, imagining what it must have been like to come across that in such a fucked up place, doing what Dante was there to do.
“Exactly,” Dante says softly, clearly reading the emotion on my face. “It blew my fucking mind. I’ve still got no clue who did it or why it was there, but the best part—” He grins, sharklike and fierce. “The best part was when I took the target out, right there as he stepped out of the doorway. Seeing his blood splatter across the concrete wall behind him, it was fucking beautiful. It was like I’d added something, my own mark, to this other scene. Like the rush of the kill was right there, emotions written in bright, vibrant colors instead of hidden away inside.”
He paints a picture with his words that’s just as vivid as anything he puts on canvas, and I find myself breathing hard, the distraction I was after not exactly working. The passion in his voice is just turning me on even more.
“How did you get from that to paint and canvas?” I ask, Dante’s eyes snapping up to meet mine at the husky, needy tone.
“I was hooked,” he says, his hooded gaze making me even hotter. “I didn’t want to wait for another kill to make that kind of art again, so I went out and bought some supplies. Started fucking around with them, and…”
He ends it with a shrug, gesturing around to all the canvases displayed and stacked in the room.
I laugh, shaking my head in awe of him. “You’re really good for having gotten your start just ‘fucking around.’ Every one of your paintings feels like an explosion of raw emotion, like I can’t help but feel things when I look at them. They move me.”
He grins. “I like that, princess. And you know, it’s probably the same with you and your dancing. You didn’t have formal training, right? But you got good at it because you loved it, and since you loved it, you wanted to do it all the time.”
I sigh, his words pulling up a different kind of emotion. “Yeah. I… miss it, you know? Not dealing with drunk shit heads. I don’t need an audience or anything. But the dancing itself was a way to just let myself go. Nothing else is like it.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” he says, his eyes boring into me with an intensity that has a flood of heat rushing through my core.
I press my thighs together, clenching my inner muscles with a little gasp, and Dante’s eyes burn even hotter.
“None of that, princess,” he says. “You need to stay still for me. Spread those pretty thighs wide and show me what you’ve got for me.”
“Fuck, Dante,” I gasp, hating him for the torture a little as I do it. The kind of hate that I’d really love him to fuck right out of me.
He grins again, a dirty promise on his face as he goes back to painting. “Seeing you on that pole for the first time was sexy as hell. Like you said, there’s nothing else like it. The way you wrapped your legs around it was all about your pleasure, not the assholes watching you. That was crystal fucking clear, and it made me want to pull you right off that stage and let you wrap those thighs around me instead.”
“You did,” I remind him, squirming despite my best intentions as my arousal starts to peak again.
“The fuck I did,” he says, his eyes glued to the canvas. “I didn’t get my cock inside you until you finished on that stage, but what I wanted to do was bend you over it with all those colored lights playing over your skin. Eat that sweet pussy of yours that you kept teasing us with until you screamed louder than that beat they had playing. Let you dance on my tongue for a while and then show me how fucking good you are at riding a pole by impaling you on mine.”
“Shit,” I whimper, arching off the couch as I dig my fingers into it to keep from touching myself.
“What’s wrong, princess?” he asks with an evil grin. “Having trouble holding still for me?”
“You know what’s fucking wrong,” I pant, my inner thighs slick with my arousal as I clench my muscles, forcing myself not to squeeze them together because the cocky asshole told me not to.
Because I want to be on display for him.
Because even though holding still is the opposite of dancing, the feeling I miss—letting myself go to the music, letting it take control and move me—is a hell of a lot like the feeling I get when I submit myself to Dante’s demands. To Maddoc’s and Logan’s too.
I trust them to move me, manhandle me, or hold me down, and it’s exactly the same kind of rush as surrendering to the beat of the music and putting my body under its command. It’s addicting.
“Touch yourself,” Dante says, his brush moving languidly across the canvas in front of him as he rakes me with a possessive look. “But don’t come, don’t even fucking think about it, princess. Not until I say so.”
“Asshole,” I pant, shoving my hand between my legs so fast my head spins.
Dante chuckles. “I definitely won’t say no to some back door action, but we’ll play with that another time, princess. Right now, just finger yourself for me. Make yourself feel good. Get that pussy ready for what I’m going to give it.”
I want to glare at him, but his dirty talk is turning me on too much for that. Instead, I do what he said and grind the heel of my hand against my clit, squeezing my legs together and half expecting him to tell me I have to spread them again so he can get a good view.
Hell, not just expecting him to… wanting him to.
Or else wanting him to make me.
“Play with those hot little tits for me too,” he says instead, his voice husky and low as he watches me. “Don’t get greedy and give it all to your pussy.”
“Both,” I gasp, doing what he says and using one hand to roughly squeeze my breasts the way I really fucking wish he would right now. “I can do both.”
“Prove it.”
I dip between my thighs and thrust three of my fingers inside myself, letting my head fall against the back of the couch as I fuck myself on them until I’m shaking with the need to come, pinching my nipples so hard that the pain spikes down to my core and almost tips me over.
“Fuck, Dante, I have to—”
“No.”
The single word is as hard as the thick cock I can see straining to break out of his pants, and it sends white-hot heat rolling through my body.
I’m panting as I ride on a razor’s edge of arousal, teetering at the brink and ready to shamelessly beg for what I need. “Please. Fuck. God.”
“Nah, it’s just me,” he says in a sex-soaked timbre, “but keep begging like that, princess. It’s hot as motherfucking hell. And work that pussy a little harder. I know how you like it.”
I moan, doing what he says. Abandoning my tits so I can be as rough as I need it between my legs. Rubbing my clit hard and fast while I clench around my fingers and wish they were a fucking cock. Letting my head fall back as desperate, obscene sounds tumble out of my mouth and my pussy… oh fuck, my pussy…
“Come,” Dante snaps. “Do it, princess. Now.”
I scream, the orgasm slamming through me on his command and whiting out my vision. It goes on and on and fucking on, the most intense pleasure I’ve had by my own hand in—
Ever.
“Fucking Christ,” Dante says with a groan, dropping his paintbrush to the ground.
He’s across the room in a flash, his pants shoved down and that massive cock of his out and in his hand while the waves of bone-melting pleasure are still rolling through me.
“You’ve got no idea what you do to me,” he mutters, pinning my arms above my head the way he did before as he fits himself between my legs.
Then he drives into me, impaling me on his cock and ripping another scream out of me when it sets off a second shockwave of pleasure.
“That’s it. Fucking scream for me,” he demands, fucking me hard and deep. He lifts one of my legs over his shoulder, bending me in half. “Give me everything, princess.”
I cling to him, my body his to control. His to dominate. His to fill up and own completely.
“Yeah. Fuck, yeah,” he grits out, like he’s either read my mind or I’ve got no filter. “That’s exactly what I’m gonna do.”
He pounds into me so hard that the couch slams into the wall behind it, and nothing else exists outside the need for more of everything he’s giving me.
“Please, fuck, make me—”
“Do it.” He releases the hold he’s got on my wrists and slips a hand between us, pressing down on my mound so that his next thrust hits my g-spot like a lightning strike. “Come for me again, princess.”
I tumble over the edge, throat raw from the screams of pleasure he loves to pull out of me as I obey him. He follows right after, his hips grinding against me as he fills me with his cum and whispers filthy praise in my ear, fucking us both through to the other side.
Our chests heave together as the intensity finally starts to recede, our bodies locked as close as they can be. I drag my eyes open, getting lost in the vibrant green of his gaze. Neither of us speak, but finally, my heartbeat starts to slow, falling into sync with his.
I wrap my arms around him, not wanting to be anywhere but here, and he pushes the hair off my forehead with an achingly tender look in his eyes, then presses a slow, languid kiss to my mouth. “Heaven.”
I don’t believe in that shit. Not in the traditional sense. But Dante almost makes me feel like it might be real after all, working the same kind of magic on my body, on my heart, as he does with paint on canvas.
“Show me,” I whisper, remembering what he brought me here for. “I want to see what you painted.”
“I already told you,” he says, gathering me close and then, with his cock still buried inside me, rolling to his feet with me in his arms. “I worked out my emotions. Put them where I could see them.”
Before I can reply to that, we’re already there. Standing in front of the easel. Looking at... me. Spread out and wanton on a field of swirling colors, my body looks ethereal and beautiful, and my face—
My heart squeezes.
“That’s not what I look like,” I whisper, emotion clogging my throat as I cling to him.
His hands tighten on my ass, and I can feel his heart kick in his chest, bumping against mine. “Yeah, it is, princess. You’re fucking gorgeous.”
I can’t tear my eyes off it. Most of his paintings are abstract, and I had no idea he could also do this. Something so realistic and yet also somehow more than real.
It’s not just my face, it’s an emotion he and I still haven’t named to each other, right there on the canvas, like he said, for anyone to see.
A choked sound escapes me, and my hand goes to my mouth. Tears well in my eyes, making this amazing piece of art, this piece of his heart, blur in my vision.
Then Dante turns my face back toward his.
“I lied to you earlier,” he says, his face as serious as I’ve ever seen it, raw truth in his eyes. “I told you I care about you, but that’s a cop out. I’m fucking in love with you, Riley. I love you. I—”
“I know,” I cut him off as all my own emotions surge up inside me, making me cling to him. “I know. I love you too.”
He grunts like the words have hit him hard, a single, powerful shudder moving through his body. Then he wraps his arms around me so tightly that my ribs ache and kisses me, inhales me like I’m the oxygen his soul requires to survive.
He kisses me for so long that all the shit swirling around us—the danger from West Point and the volatile future we’re walking into and the horror show of possibilities that no doubt wait for us there—all of that fades to the background, eclipsed by this one little slice of heaven. By the one thing that’s solid and real in my life. The one thing that matters.
This.
Him.
Us.