Chapter 4 #2
The room smells like soap and sex and winter air seeping through the walls. The fire crackles somewhere behind me, a low, steady sound that makes the cabin feel smaller, more intimate.
When the rat bastard finishes, he sits on the edge of the bed, facing me.
“Why are you panting, baby?”
“How much wood did you toss on the fire out there?” Seems like a logical reason for me to be flushed and hot. I’ll go with that rather than the other obvious reason.
His gaze flicks up to my face and pauses.
His laughter is dark, and he has all the time in the world to get what he wants and that’s not only information anymore.
My hair is a mused mess. The damp locks stick to my cheeks and mouth. I shake my head in irritation, trying to clear it, but the cuffs limit my movement and the strands fall right back into my eyes.
I huff, annoyed. “I hate when it does that.”
His brow furrows. “What?”
“My hair,” I snap. “I can’t see.”
Something shifts in his expression. He glances around the room, then stands and crosses to the small dresser against the wall. He opens a drawer, rummages, and comes back holding a brush.
I stare at it like he’s lost his mind.
“You’re kidding,” I say. “You broke into my cabin to fuck me and then brush my hair?”
“Hold still,” he replies, already moving closer.
“I swear to God, Cipher, if you—”
He sits beside me and gently gathers my hair back from my face, his fingers careful, almost reverent. The brush slides through the strands slowly, smoothing them back, and the sensation sends a shiver down my spine I can’t control.
My breath catches.
He brushes it again. And again.
The tension in my chest tightens, something dangerously close to tears pressing against the back of my eyes and threatening to clog my throat. No one has done this for me in years. No one has touched me like this without wanting something in return.
Cipher does it like it’s instinct.
“There,” he murmurs. “Better?”
I nod, unable to trust my voice.
His knuckles brush my cheek as he sets the brush aside, and the contact is so gentle it wrecks me more than the roughness did.
My body reacts anyway, heat pooling low between my thighs, muscles along my back and in my core tighten like they know what comes next even if my heart is still at war with itself.
He notices.
Of course he does.
His gaze drops between my thighs, darkening as he takes in the way my body responds despite my anger, my fear, my pride. His jaw tightens.
“You don’t make this easy,” he says quietly.
I swallow. “You never did either.”
Silence stretches between us, thick and charged.
Then he leans in, bracing his forearms on either side of my head, caging me without touching. His breath is warm against my skin.
“I didn’t come here to hurt you,” he says. “I didn’t come here to take anything from you.”
“Then why am I cuffed to my bed?” I ask, my voice barely steady.
“Because your name is at the top of a hit list,” he replies, and for the first time since he walked into my cabin, I hear the fear he’s been holding back. “And because I don’t trust anyone else to keep you alive.”
My chest tightens.
“What list?” I ask, but I have a feeling I already know the answer to this. There’s only one case I’ve been working on in the last year so I can’t imagine anything other than this being about Euphoria.
His gaze flicks to my eyes, sharp and searching, like he’s weighing something. Deciding how much truth I can handle or if he can trust me.
“That’s a conversation for daylight,” he says finally. “Right now, you need rest.”
I laugh, short and humorless. “You cuffed me naked to a bed and you think I’m going to sleep?”
His mouth twitches. “You always did fight me on everything.”
I meet his gaze, heat and anger tangling low in my belly. “You left.”
Something flashes across his face. Regret. Pain. Something darker.
“I know,” he says, with so much bitterness in his tone I can partially taste it.
“I know.” He says it again but this time it’s softer and layered with years of hurt and regret. Or at least that is what I hear.
Through the open doorway, I see the fire pop, sending a shower of sparks up the chimney. Outside, the wind howls low and distant, rattling the windows with the warning of a long night ahead.
Cipher reaches for a blanket and drapes it over me, careful to cover my legs without restricting my movement further. His hand lingers on my knee for half a second too long.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says quietly. “Not this time.”
I watch him move away, my body still humming, my mind spinning with questions I don’t yet have answers to.
The cuffs bite gently at my wrists when I shift, a reminder of the danger I’m in and of the man I might still love enough to ruin myself for.
“Fuck you, Cipher. Ask me what you wanna know, and then I can tell you no. Then you can leave, knowing you tried and got a free fuck for your efforts.”
Hurt passes over his handsome expression, tightening the space between his brows.
“Free fuck, huh?”
My bare pussy clenches when his eyes fall there next. Like he is planning something deviously delicious and that particular body part is totally onboard with whatever he has in mind.
Warm liquid spills to wet me.
His nostrils flare as if he can scent my arousal.
He throws off the blanket and the gush of chilled air hits me with a sting.
My nipples turn rock hard, and his hungry gaze falls to them.
“Fuck you, Cipher,” I hurl at him. I never was good at backing down from a challenge which, given my current situation one would think I might at least learn to shut up.
“Beg me and I will, my sweet hellcat.”
He traces the rough pad of a finger over the falling blooms of my tattoo. If he were to turn me over he'd see a beautiful phoenix bird with spread wings.
He pushes my thighs apart and drags a finger through my slit,
“Rat bastard,” I snarl but there’s not nearly enough heat to my words.
He pulls back, the evidence of my arousal coating his finger. And now he actually has the damn audacity to smile down at me. I look on as he licks my juices from his finger.
“Mm. Delicious, baby.”
He reaches out and presses a thumb to the corner of my bottom lip. “It’s adorable how you bite your lip when you want something. Aren’t you gonna beg me to fuck you, baby?”
“Curse you for everything you’ve done to me. I wish I never met you.”
“And while that might be true for you, I do nothing but thank God I got to hold you and love you even for a fleeting moment in my life Harlow Montgomery. I wake every morning and ask God to bless you and protect you. I thank Him for the days I had you as mine. I wish I never let you go.” He leans over me and kisses the bruise on my cheek.
“The next time I see the man who put it on you, I’ll repay him in kind. Fuck the fight club rules.”
He steps back, letting his words hang between us with the weight of what feels like the truth coming from the man I wish I could hate with my whole soul.
He walks to the dresser up against the far wall by the chair and pours himself a whiskey from a crystal decanter on a silver tray.
I can’t take my eyes off the sexy flex of those beautiful ass cheeks and the way his back ripples with layers of taut muscle as he walks away.
But what really has me in a chokehold are his words.
I swallow hard as he kicks back a mouthful of the dark amber liquid in his glass.
And then he turns and reaches for his hard length.
I can’t look away as he strokes himself from base to tip.
He moves to the side of the bed and I quietly turn my head and take the swollen head between my lips.
Precum wets the tip and I curl my tongue around the fat head, taking his taste into my mouth.
Something that always has me panting for him to take me, and he knows it.
He steps back. “Now beg me to fuck you, Harlow. Beg me and I’ll give you anything you want.”