Chapter 20
Gage
If only Ami knew how I’d thought about doing this to her.
All last night, after I left her apartment.
All through the sleepless hours of the night before I finally gave up on trying to sleep and called in my favor with Tracker.
While we rode to Orlando. The whole time I was interrogating and tattooing that fuck’s face.
After, when I left him tied to the chair, his new title inked into his forehead in black, blocky letters.
I can’t claim to be any kind of artist. All the way home, while the rain pelted me and the wind howled around me.
I didn’t feel the wet or the cold. Not when I thought of Ami.
How I’d find her. Go to her. Set her free.
How I’d make her mine, even if I had to pursue her for an entire lifetime to make it happen.
I went home to change, to get my shit together and let the rain let up before I drove to Jacksonville.
I was shocked to find her curled up on my doorstep like a drowned rat, fast asleep.
She looked so peaceful, her lashes resting on her cheek, her cherry bow lips parted in slumber, her skin pale, but her cheeks flushed, that I wasn’t going to wake her. I was going to unlock the door and carry her inside, when her eyelids fluttered open.
She cares.
I wouldn’t have dared to believe it, but the naked terror in her eyes when she shoved into the house, when she demanded to know where I was and what I’d done, rocked me to my core.
Maybe she thinks I murdered the bastard. She doesn’t want me to throw my life away for her and I’m honored, but I need to know it’s more than that.
I want her. I fucking attack her mouth, suckling her lips, nipping them, and soothing the sting of my bites away with my tongue before I plunge it into her mouth and stroke hers until she’s a moaning mess, her hands digging into the front of my jacket, just so she can stay upright.
I like her like this. Her legs like water, her hips digging into the bulge at my jeans, which are skin fucking tight thanks to the rain, her heat melting into me and mine leaching back, warming each other.
She said she was ready.
The sincerity in her eyes tells me that she was telling the truth.
I want her so badly that I feel less than human. I feel like a fucking animal, out of control and wild with need. I don’t just want to claim her body. I want to possess her heart and soul. I want to devour her. I want her coming all over me.
And this time, she wants it too.
“Gage,” Ami pants, when I tear my mouth from hers. She paws at my clothing, trying to unzip my jacket, but her hands are shaking so bad that she can’t even get a hold on the zipper.
I look down at her and nearly come all over the front of my jeans when she slants her head and I see her blown pupils.
Her lips are ravaged, red and swollen from my kisses.
I can still taste the copper of her blood at the back of my throat, from where I nipped her.
Her chin is red and raw from the rasp of my stubble against her delicate skin.
It makes me want to rub my face all over the rest of her, until she’s glowing everywhere like a fucking lightbulb.
I attack her clothes, my hands sure and steady, divesting her of her soaked t-shirt and then peeling her jeans down her legs.
They don’t come easy, but I’m rough and I overpower them until they’re in a balled up heap on the floor.
I let out an animal groan when I take in her black lace bra and panties.
A matching fucking set and far too sexy to have been under those casual clothes she had on the whole time.
The bra is flimsy, all lace and no underwire. I bend and take one of the straps in my teeth, biting hard and tearing at it until it snaps.
Ami gasps and digs her fingers through my hair.
She doesn’t protest the rough way I grip the rest of the bra and tear it from her chest, even though it probably stung.
Instead, her hips slam into me, searching, yearning, aching.
She nearly purrs when she rubs against the bulge in my jeans again, dry humping me through my clothes.
Fuck.
I’ve never experienced anything so fucking hot in my life. Ever. Period. And she still has her damn panties on.
An oversight that I quickly correct by hooking my fingers in the waistband and ripping them roughly down her legs so that they half tear, half slide away.
Either way, they’re definitely ruined, just the way I like them, because underwear on her should be fucking illegal.
As should any other clothing she chooses to wear.
“Bedroom, now,” I bark, even though she has no clue where it is.
Ami lets out a little yelp when I swat at her ass and charges ahead.
I let her take the lead, enjoying every single second of the way she darts anxious glances down the hall and makes a sharp turn.
She pushes open the guest bedroom door first, but I shake my head when she glances back at me and she scurries to the next door.
Bingo.
She shoves it open, but doesn’t get far before I grab her around the waist and spin her roughly, slamming her up against my chest. Her mouth locks with mine, tangling and warring, swallowing each other’s moans and breathing for each other.
“Take your… clothes off,” she pants when she tears her mouth away.
“Only because you asked me so nicely.”
I stalk over to the bed and deposit her on it.
She hits the mattress so hard that her back bounces off of it, but she doesn’t break eye contact.
She watches every single move I make. The way I unzip my jacket and shed it like it’s weightless, even though it’s sodden and weighs three times what it should.
Her eyes track my movements as I hang it on the peg at the back of the door.
Her gaze is so hot it’s like a firebrand as I peel my t-shirt off from the bottom up.
I rip at my jeans, eager to get the soaked, cloying denim the hell off.
I never thought about it all day. The discomfort.
I had my mind on other things, but now that Ami is naked on my bed, her legs spread just enough that I can see through them to my prize, which is pink and glistening, I want those clothes the hell off and the faster, the better.
I kick out of my boots and peel the wet denim off.
Her eyes widen, like she’s forgotten that I don’t bother with boxers—a habit I developed as a kid when my so-called parents never had the money or the inclination to provide me with proper clothing.
It carried on with me and after so many years of not wearing any, I find it uncomfortable and unnecessary now, when I can obviously afford it.
“Want to do this right,” I rasp, teetering so close to the edge of complete destruction. “Want to spread your legs and taste you until you’re coming and thrashing against my face. Want to take my time with you, warm you up proper, get you ready for me.”
“No,” Ami whimpers, slashing her head from side to side, the exclamation point at the end of her protest. “I just need you. In me. Right. Now.”
My cock agrees, springing up until I’m staring down at the head, as it’s so hard it’s standing straight vertical.
“Ami,” I groan, her name like a prayer. “If you talk like that, this is going to be over far before you want it to. I might not even make it inside you. I’ll come all over those pretty tits and those gorgeous nipples instead. ”
Her body jerks violently and slowly, she parts her legs so that I get a full view of exactly where she wants me.
There is nothing shy or hesitant about her now. Nothing that speaks to her being a victim of sexual assault. Her hand is folded over that tattoo on her stomach so that I can’t see it. Her eyes are locked with mine and I see no fear or hesitation. Nothing other than naked, unabashed desire.
“Maybe I want you to. Maybe I want to take you in my hand and jack you off until you come all over me.”
“Ami…”
She blinks, and her face flushes, like she’s afraid it was too much.
“No. Don’t do that. Don’t be ashamed. Don’t…
don’t go back there. Back to that place of fear and powerlessness.
Take it back. Take it all back. You can do anything to me that you want.
I’m not pretty. There isn’t an inch of me that isn’t scarred up.
I am who I am and that’s not fucking much, but every bit, every single bit of me, is yours. ”
I want to hear her say it. I need to hear her say it. To come to me willingly.
It might have happened overnight, but I know better than that. She’s been fighting, trying to piece herself back together ever since it happened. She’s had enough time to think about me. About us. About what coming back here meant. About what facing me could mean.
She didn’t just come to this decision over the past eighteen odd hours since I left her.
She knows that I’ve done something. She doesn’t know what it is, how bad it was, but she knows I was willing to give up my freedom for hers.
She knows that now, that now she’s free.
That now, whatever lingering guilt or horror remains, I’ll be here to fight it off for her.
To defend her. To protect her. To make her mine in every sense of the word.
But I need to hear her say it. I need her to tell me she wants me.
With her words, not just her body. That she’ll take me as I am—scarred, broken, nothing more than my name and the club I belong to.
And her. Because even when she wasn’t here, she was still a part of my heart and what was left of my tattered soul.
She unfurls herself from the bed, slowly, when she realizes that I won’t come to her. That I need her to walk across those few feet separating us. She looks like a goddess, her pert breasts on display, her nipples like dark, ripe cherries straining for me, begging me to suck and bite them.
She’s glorious.
And when she takes my hand in hers and presses an open mouthed kiss to my palm, I know that she’s mine.
I fucking know it.
But then she raises her head and stares at me with eyes shining like twin obsidians. She blinks hard and her fingers curl over mine.
“I’m yours,” she breathes. “But… before we fuck the pain and the horror and the years away, after we strip each other down until it’s just our hearts and our souls, I need you to tell me.
Tell me what you’ve done, because if I give myself to you, I can’t bear for you to leave me. To disappear. To be taken from me.”
The look on her face, the brutal trust in her eyes, slays me.
I want to tell her the truth. I want to tell her everything, but I know how she’ll take it.
I don’t want to hurt her anymore than she’s already been hurt.
So I do the only thing I can do even if it makes me asshat number one.
I just hope that I can make it up to her soon.
That I can come clean and hope that she’ll understand why I did it.
Not just because I want to get in her panties, even though I do.
It’s because she needs this as much as I do, and it isn’t just about sex. It’s not just something physical.
I bend the truth.