Shadowed Secrets: Saint (Nightfall Syndicate #5)

Chapter 1

two

Remy

Her fists are in my shirt before the room registers. She pulls me down, not to her height, but close enough, and her mouth finds mine like something she's been holding back just snapped its leash. She's not waiting for me to bend.

Evangeline Blanchard. Darcy's best friend. Sixteen the last time you saw her and your hands are—

Both hands land on her shoulders to push her back. Her teeth scrape my lower lip, and one hand slides into her hair, fingers tightening, while the other wraps around her waist and pulls her closer.

Stellar self-control. Really top-notch.

The sound she makes when my fingers tighten in her hair is a small ruined thing that bypasses every wall I've built since I left Louisiana. I pull her back an inch, just enough to see her face, her eyes blown dark and her lips already parted.

Her waist fills my hands. No, my hands swallow her waist. Fingers nearly meeting at her back, and she's so small under my palms that something dark and greedy floods through me that has no business being this loud.

She's too small. Too soft. Too much Darcy's and too much Blanchard's and none of that is slowing my hands down.

I press her backward. Shoulders hit the door.

I pin her there, one thigh between hers, and the heat that meets my leg turns my brain to static.

She rocks against me, barely, just a shift of her hips, and the friction travels straight up my thigh into my chest. She makes a sound against my mouth that I want to hear again for the rest of my life, pulling a sound out of me that isn't language.

Low and rough and from somewhere I couldn't stop if I wanted to.

I don't want to. And that's the problem.

Because I should. Because she's twenty-four and I'm thirty-two and she was sitting at my grandmother's kitchen table doing homework the last time I saw her and my cock is hard against her stomach and I don't care.

Every reason I should stop is right there, lined up and waiting, and my mouth is on her neck and I don't care about a single one.

"Hi," she breathes.

My chest cracks open. "Hi."

Her hands slide down my stomach, grab the hem of my shirt, pull. The angle defeats her because I'm a foot taller than her and the fabric snags at my shoulders. The noise she makes is genuinely, personally offended.

"How does anyone undress you?" Her voice is raspy from the bourbon and the kissing and the heat underneath both. "Do you come with instructions? Is there a, a pulley system I should know about?"

I laugh. The sound breaks out of me before I can stop it, real and loose, and this room was supposed to be serious. I reach back with one hand and drag the shirt over my head and toss it somewhere that doesn't matter.

Her hands land flat on my chest and I stop breathing.

She goes still when she touches me, fingers spread wide over my chest, and the look on her face strips every layer of charm I've ever built. Not hunger. Not appreciation. Something worse. Recognition.

"You are not what I was picturing." Her voice is barely there, the accent softer than it was at the bar, all that polish gone and her voice just quiet and real. Her fingers trace down my chest and sensation follows her touch through me. "I mean, I had a pretty good imagination, but this is..."

She doesn't finish. Her thumb traces the scar across my ribs. I close my hand around her wrist, gentle, reflex. She looks up at me and I let go.

"Later," I tell her, and my voice sounds like someone else's. Lower and more Louisiana than I've let myself be in years.

Her eyes hold mine and she lets it go. Doesn't push and just files it somewhere I'll deal with later, or won't.

I pull her shirt up and over. She lifts her arms to help, and then she's standing in front of me in a bra that's simple, dark, nothing designed for seduction. She didn't come to that bar for this, and that's worse. That means she came for me, and the wanting happened anyway.

The bird inked on her lower hip catches my eye. A single unbroken line, and my thumb traces the flight path before my brain authorizes it. She trembles hard enough that it travels through my hand into my wrist, my forearm, settles somewhere in my groin.

"When." Just that. Low, my mouth already dipping toward the ink, not a question so much as a need to know.

"Last year, I..." She starts to answer, but my lips follow my thumb. Her words fracture into a breath that catches and holds. Her fingers sink into my hair and grip. The sound she makes goes straight to my cock and I stop thinking about tattoos entirely.

I straighten into her kiss, one arm banding around her waist, and walk her backward. Her heel catches the rug. I catch her before she can stumble, and she laughs against my mouth.

Not the bar laugh. Nervous and real, and it gets somewhere the kissing didn't because the kissing I could file under lust, but the laugh I can't. It just sits in my chest, warm and dangerous.

My shin hits the bed frame. I lower her onto the sheets and she opens for me, legs parting, hands on my shoulders. The sight of her spread out on white cotton, dark hair fanning, chest rising fast, knocks the last coherent thought out of my head.

Darcy's best friend. Darcy's best friend. Darcy's—

"Remy." More breath than voice, my name barely formed on her lips.

My mouth maps her like a man who's been starving and didn't know it until someone put food in front of him.

My mouth finds the hollow of her throat.

Her pulse pounds against my lips, fast and hard, and I can feel it in my own chest, my heart syncing to hers without permission.

The bra clasp doesn't give on the first try.

My fingers, which have sutured wounds in a moving vehicle, fumble on a simple hook-and-eye because her breath is warm against my collarbone and it's ruining my fine motor skills.

Second try. It gives. I drag the straps down her arms, she arches to help, and when my mouth closes over her nipple the sound she makes vibrates through my jaw and into the back of my skull.

She grabs the back of my head and holds me there, fierce, and the greed I've been trying to keep leashed goes loose in my bloodstream.

Her skin is salt and jasmine and Louisiana in June, and I can't get enough of it.

My mouth drags lower and I stop thinking in sequences, stop tracking the map.

Just taste and heat and the feel of her under my lips, the softness of her that wrecks me more than muscle ever could.

Her fingers are in my hair, tightening and releasing in a rhythm she doesn't know she's setting, and every pull makes my cock throb against the mattress.

The inside of her thighs. My mouth goes gentle before I make the decision to be gentle.

The skin here is different under my lips, textured, and the medic reads what my mouth already knows.

Age. Depth. Spacing. A timeline mapped in scar tissue that started young, got less careful.

I could write the clinical history in two sentences.

I will never say a single word about it.

She was a child.

My hand curves around the back of her thigh. I press my lips to the crease where thigh meets hip, and the sound she makes is the one I've been waiting for, an unfinished thing that vibrates through her thighs and into my jaw and I feel it everywhere.

"Remy, I want..." She trails off. Her fingers twist in my hair and pull, not directing, just holding on. "Can you just, I need your..."

She can't finish. The boldness had her sit down uninvited and ordered my bourbon is still running the show, but the words won't come. The gap between her nerve and her vocabulary undoes me in a way I wasn't braced for.

"I know." My mouth is against the crease of her thigh and the words vibrate against her skin. "I've got you."

I slide my hand between her legs and the world stops.

Drenched. The heat of her against my fingers is staggering, slick and swollen.

When I drag two fingers through her folds she makes a broken sound, hips jerking hard enough to push into my hand.

The wetness coats my fingers instantly and in my chest hunger surfaces, greedy and dark.

Nothing to do with technique. Everything to do with this being for me.

"Oh my God." Her voice is hoarse. Surprised.

I don't give her time to think about it.

My mouth replaces my fingers and the first taste of her cunt hits my tongue and my eyes close and I'm gone.

Hands gripping her thighs, jaw working, and I become the simplest, most dangerous version of myself.

A man who wants to make this woman come apart under his mouth and will not be stopped by anything, including himself.

Her thighs clamp against my jaw as my lips seal around her clit, and I've barely found my rhythm, her body already racing ahead of me.

The pressure of her legs against my face, the way her whole body goes taut, the wet heat flooding my tongue, I feel all of it in my hands, my chest, the ache in my cock that's gone from arousal to punishment.

She makes a noise that's not a word and not a moan, half sob and half gasp Her back bows off the bed. Her fingers go from gripping to pulling. She comes against my tongue in a rush that I swallow, chase, drag out until her thighs are trembling and her hand pushes weakly at my forehead.

I press my hips into the mattress and breathe through it. The taste of her is still on my tongue when she reaches down, grabs my shoulders, pulls.

She kisses me with her taste on my lips and doesn't flinch. Doesn't hesitate. Kisses me deep, filthy, certain, her tongue chasing the taste. Against my mouth she says, "I need you inside me. I need, Remy, I want all of it. I want you to..."

She doesn't finish, but her hand is already on my belt, fingers sure on the buckle, fumbling on the button. My chest goes tight, a heat that wraps around my ribs and squeezes.