Chapter Sixteen
I glanced over at Chloe, confirming what I already knew—the woman was out. Dead to the world, with her lips parted, head lolled to the side in an unnatural position that only a child would wake up from without a crick for the rest of the day.
Frustrating, but not surprising.
After she said goodbye to the doctor and her mother, she locked herself behind a fortress. By the time she hauled her ass into the truck, she’d not only retreated into the bowels of that fortress—she’d built a moat. I figured my best play was to give her time. Unfortunately I gave her too much.
Now she was asleep and had been since I got on the freeway thirty minutes ago.
Again, not surprising.
My eyes went back to the road, but all I could see was Chloe’s desperation.
Hell, I’d felt it from across the room. The feel of it only intensified the closer I got.
By the time I’d wrapped my hand around hers, I’d been drenched in it—pain so deep it looked like she was being swallowed up by it.
Pain that I didn’t understand but I needed to.
With one call I could have Fallon digging into Leisure Village’s records and get the answers I wanted directly from Chloe.
I’d give her until morning.
Then I’d set Fallon on it.
Decision made, I spent the rest of the drive preparing for the battle I knew was coming when Chloe woke up and saw where we were.
“Chloe.”
“Hm.”
“Baby, wake up.”
Her eyelids fluttered before they opened.
Christ, she had pretty eyes.
“Hm,” she mumbled again.
“We’re home. Let’s get inside.”
She blinked away some of the sleep, slid her gaze to the windshield, and did the opposite of what I thought she’d do.
Instead of handing me my ass because we were at my place, her shoulders slumped and she sighed.
Without argument she undid her seat belt, grabbed her purse off the floorboard, and opened her door.
I shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Maybe even count my blessings I was going to get Chloe out of my truck without so much as a dirty look, but I fucking hated it.
Chloe was not docile. She didn’t sigh in defeat.
She spoke her mind, yet here she was standing next to me, waiting for me to unlock the front door, without making a peep.
She said nothing when my hand went to her hip and guided her inside.
Wordlessly, she walked through my house and turned down the hall.
Another gift-horse moment, yet I wanted a full dental inspection of the motherfucker.
I tossed my keys on the table, pulled out my phone, and shot off a text to Pete letting him know I was home and I’d call him in the morning. This in an effort to pull my shit together before I joined Robot Chloe.
By the time I walked into my bedroom, Chloe had her shoes off and she was curled into a ball in the middle of my bed, facing away from the door.
She gave no indication she heard me come in.
I made quick work of taking off my boots, got into bed behind her, wrapped my arm around her, and pulled her snug to my chest.
Still no response, just more desperation—heavier, like she was blanketed in it.
“I can’t quit the Vault,” she whispered.
Jesus fuck.
My arm tightened, and my mouth opened to tell her she damn well could, but she wasn’t finished.
“I know it’s the smart thing to do. The safe thing. But I can’t.”
“Chloe—”
“I can’t,” she pushed out with so much force her body jerked.
Ten months ago, Chloe stopped depositing money into her savings account.
Eight months ago, she started taking monthly withdrawals.
Five different part-time jobs.
She had seventeen dollars left in her savings account.
“Baby, who’d you visit today?”
Her limp body tightened, and that blanket of desperation got heavier right before she made a low, pain-filled sound that sounded like it only rumbled out from the back of her throat, but the true origin of it came straight from the pits of hell.
Her hips bucked, her shoulders jerked, then the sobs came.
I rolled deeper, giving her my weight, doing my best to absorb whatever pain she’d let free.
I’d seen a lot of death. I’d smelled fear.
I’d witnessed shit that nightmares were made of in real time.
I’d consoled frightened women and children.
I’d carried wounded men. I knew what pain felt like.
I knew the power it held. And whatever the cause of Chloe’s, it had her in its claws.
“I got you, Chloe,” I whispered.
It took a long time before her body stopped shaking, longer for the hitches to even out, longer still before I felt her suck in a deep breath and let it out.
“You wanna talk about it?” I gently asked.
She shook her head and burrowed back.
“Okay, baby. Sleep.”
I’d changed my mind; I didn’t want Chloe to tell me who she’d visited. I wanted that intel from Fallon. I wanted to be armed with the information I needed to make sure Chloe never again had dead eyes and body-racking sobs.
It didn’t take Chloe long to fall asleep.
Neither did it take long for me to start mentally berating myself for missing Chloe’s pain—months of pain.
Going on damn near a year, and I’d been so wrapped up in my attraction and fighting against acting on that attraction I’d missed something big.
Something that was hurting her. Something that, had I not been so goddamn stupid, I would’ve seen.
I heard Gavin come home. I listened to him quietly move around the house.
I rolled out of bed long enough to undress and pull the covers out from under Chloe.
When I got back in, I yanked the blankets up, wrapped myself back around her and lay there awake longer still, seething mad about what an asshole I’d been.
Then I fell asleep still curled into Chloe.
At some point Chloe had turned in her sleep. Therefore, when I opened my eyes, two things happened at once—first, in the dim light I saw Chloe staring at me. Second, I felt her hand on my face, her thumb gently tracing my bottom lip.
“Chlo—” Her thumb silenced me, as did the shake of her head.
“No talking,” she whispered, releasing the pressure to resume her sketch of my lips.
I lay still with my hand resting on her hip, allowing her to take whatever she needed.
It took approximately two seconds before she did just that.
Her head tipped back, her lips went to the underside of my jaw, and she pressed the sweetest kiss there before she moved down to my neck, doing the same.
Then lower to my shoulder, my pec, my nipple.
Christ, she was going to kill me.
From there she shifted her body lower, added her hand to my chest, and pushed. I gave her what she’d nonverbally asked for and rolled to my back just as her lips hit my stomach with the addition of her tongue.
Fuck.
Her soft body snug against my side, heaven.
Her mouth on me, a goddamn miracle.
But it was the middle of the night and just hours after Chloe had basically cried herself to sleep.
“Chloe,” I tried again.
“Shh.”
“Baby, I’ll happily lie here and let you do whatever you want, but first I need to know if you’re sure this is what—”
“Positive,” she said against my stomach, then, as a follow up, swiped her tongue along the band of my boxers.
Christ.
My hands fisted the sheets, my jaw clenched, and I fought for control. Or more to the point, I fought not to take control.
Her hand glided down my stomach. My abs responded by contracting under her palm. She paused her descent to use her fingertips to lightly skim up and down, her tongue still working magic, testing my willpower to such an extreme, I locked my body.
Chloe froze, lifted her head, and looked up at me.
“Do you not . . . Is it okay . . . I mean . . .”
It took me a moment to decipher her broken question.
“I told you, you can do whatever you want.”
“But . . .” She trailed off, her fingertips digging into my stomach muscles.
“Chloe, baby, I’m trying really hard to lie here and let you take your time with whatever it is you want to do.”
I knew the moment Chloe understood my plight.
Her head tipped down, her fingertips went back to lightly grazing my stomach, but they didn’t stop until she was tracing my hard-on through my boxers.
“You want to touch me.”
“Fuck yeah I want to touch you.”
“But you’re not going to.”
Good Christ. Never in my life did I think I’d be in danger of blowing my load with nothing more than a barely there touch of my dick and a teasing purr.
“That depends,” I told her honestly.
“On what?”
“On you.”
Chloe lowered her head, brushed her lips over the fabric of my boxers, slipped her hand under the elastic, and with another sexy purr demanded, “Keep your hands to yourself and lift.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I lifted my hips.
Chloe yanked my boxers down, freed my cock, and within the space of a heartbeat her lips were back, this time without the barrier of fabric.
My fists twisted in the blankets.
My ass clenched.
Chloe licked from base to tip.
“Mm,” she hummed, right before she took my dick into her mouth and commenced her plot to torture me.
Slow.
So fucking slowly, she worked her mouth up and down my cock—flattening her tongue on the way up, sucking hard on the way down.
Up and down.
Down and up.
Goddamn torture.
“Chloe.”
“Hm,” she hummed again, this time with her mouth full of my cock. I felt the vibration and groaned.
“Christ, baby, your mouth,” I grunted. “I need to touch you.”
She shook her head, cupped my balls, and rolled.
Fucking minx.
“You like sucking me off, baby?”
Obviously she couldn’t answer, but I was taking her moan as an affirmative.
“Bet you’d like it more if I was playing with your pussy,” I told Chloe on a downward glide that had my eyes closing, it felt so fucking good. “Or better yet, swing your ass up here and sit on my face. I’ll eat you while you—”
The last of my suggestion died when Chloe took me deeper, the head of my dick hitting the back of her throat. Pleasure snaked up my spine, and once again I was in danger of blowing.
“Fuck,” I grunted. “Warning, baby, you keep that up, playtime will be cut short.”
She took my warning as an invitation to test my control and doubled her efforts. She went from going at a torturously slow pace that teased and edged me closer to orgasm but would take a while to get me to come, to a race to suck me off at a world-record speed.
“You swallow?” She shook her head but then changed her mind and nodded. “Pop off and finish with your hand.”
I was inching closer, and she was still sucking.
“Chloe,” I warned, grabbing a fistful of hair in preparation to pull her off.
With one more glide up, she pulled off but did not use her hand to finish me off. She scrambled to her knees, yanked her skirt up to her waist, moved astride me, and slammed down on my cock.
My hands went to her hips, my neck arched back, every muscle in my body tightened, and I pulled up the most gruesome images I could while I grunted, “Do not move.”
“Ryan,” she groaned.
“Don’t fucking move.”
“I have—”
“Baby, if you so much as breathe wrong, I’m gonna come. Sit there like a good girl and do not fucking move.”
I felt her shiver, and even that tiny movement threatened to unman me.
“Chloe,” I snapped.
“If you don’t want me to move, you can’t call me a good girl,” she panted.
Despite battling the looming orgasm that had yet to fully recede, I couldn’t stop my smile.
“Does that turn you on? You wanna be daddy’s good girl?” I teased.
I heard her suck in a breath, I felt her pussy flutter, and Jesus, I was teasing her, but I’d totally be down to play it that way.
“Shirt off, Chloe.”
Without hesitation, her hands left my chest and went to the hem of her shirt.
As soon as it cleared her head, I issued my next directive.
“Bra.” She reached up, flicked the clasp open that held the cups closed in the front.
Just that small amount of movement coupled with her full tits now on display put me right back to ready to come.
Further testing my control, one of my hands left her hip, shoved the dangling material out of the way, found her pebbled nipple, and rolled it between my thumb and forefinger.
“Next time you blow me, you’re doing it with my hand between your legs.”
“Okay,” she agreed on a breathy sigh.
“Now hands on the pillow next to my head,” I instructed.
“You’re bossy for someone who was supposed to lie there and let me have my way with you,” she noted. However, she did so, following my orders.
“That was before I knew how good you were with your mouth.”
“I don’t think my mouth has anything to do with it. I just think your supreme bossiness can’t be denied.”
She wasn’t wrong, but I’d fought the good fight and had given her what she wanted until she sat on my dick.
“You’re right. It was you working my dick with your mouth, getting me seconds away from blowing, then deciding instead of jerking me off, you wanted to finish a different way. That’s when you changed the rules—you go, then I go. Never the other way around.”
“Bossy.”
“Tell me how that’s a bad deal for you? It’s me who needs to have this ridiculous conversation to claw back from the edge so I can get you off instead of me being a two-pump chump.
And I can’t believe I have to remind you of this, and doing so is a serious hit to my ego, but we’re having this conversation while you’re sitting on my cock. ”
Since she was close, even though it was dark, I saw her smile.
Finally that knot in my gut that tightened hours earlier loosened.
“I think you and your ego are good.”
There was no way not to be good with her beautiful face staring down at me with a catlike grin on her lips. But I was about to be better, a whole lot better, and so was she.
I flipped her to her back, pulled out a few inches, and drove back in.
“How about we stop talking and get down to the part where you scream my name?”
“You’re the boss,” she moaned.
Damn right I was.