5. Wendy
Wendy
The damp heat between my thighs throbs in time with the erratic thud against my ribs.
Rough denim grinds into my hip,branding me even through the denim of my jeans, still hanging open where he snapped the button loose.
My spine stays pressed flush against the oak of the checkout counter.
The amber lamplight casts long, distorted shadows across the front of the Vinyl Vault.
My knees are useless. If his hands weren't gripping my hips, holding me upright, I would slide right down to the worn oak floorboards and disintegrate into a puddle of ruin.
Tyler.
The name rings in the quiet shop, louder than the Fleetwood Mac record spinning its final grooves a few feet away.
He dropped his cover. He stripped away 'Tom from Portland' and handed me the only true thing he owns—and then he gave me the hardest orgasm of my life with nothing but his thumb and a command.
I’ve survived Crimson Hollow for years by keeping my head down, my mouth shut, and my walls high. I watched the town rot. I watched the Syndicate corporatize extortion. I paid my dues and swallowed my pride to keep my mother’s sanctuary open. I never asked for help. I never let anyone in.
Then a lethal, coffee-scented stranger walked into my soft rock section, and gravity simply reversed.
His chest rises and falls in harsh, jagged pulls against my breasts.
His jaw locks, the muscles ticking under the dark scruff lining his cheeks.
He stares down at me, his eyes stripped of the polite, unassuming mask he wears for the street.
This is the real man. Dark, a coiled spring of calculated violence wrapped in a flannel shirt.
He just promised to slaughter the Tuesday Enforcer for looking at me.
He just claimed me against a cash register.
He thinks he can just barge into my carefully guarded life, rearrange my cellular structure, and take over.
And the terrifying, intoxicating truth is, he can. I’m letting him. I want him to.
"Tyler," I say.
The syllables taste like smoke and iron. It fits perfectly in my mouth.
A ragged groan tears from his throat at the sound of his real name.
His grip tightens on my hips, his thumbs digging into my skin, dragging me a fraction of an inch closer so his erection presses a blunt line against my stomach.
Heat crawls up my neck. The friction of his jeans against my soaked underwear is an agonizing promise.
I push off the oak counter. My legs shake, trembling with the aftershocks of the climax he dragged out of me, but I lock my knees. I reach out and grab the thick fabric of his shirt. I don't give him a chance to speak. I don't give him a chance to step back into the shadows of his mission.
I pull.
He follows instantly. No hesitation. No questions. A predator tracking his chosen mark.
I lead him away from the front windows, away from the neon glow of the streetlights bleeding through the glass, away from the street where the Silver Serpent Syndicate runs their administrative reign of terror.
We cross the shop floor. The scent of old paper sleeves and warm vinyl dust hangs thick in the air, a familiar, comforting blanket that has protected me since my mother died.
But right now, the only thing grounding me is the overwhelming scent of dark roast coffee and male aggression radiating from the man stalking behind me.
We reach the back of the shop. The beaded curtain hangs in the doorway, a flimsy barrier between the public trap and my private world.
I push through it. The beads clatter together, a sharp, chaotic sound in the silence.
Tyler steps through right behind me, his broad shoulders brushing the doorframe.
He fills the small space, sucking all the oxygen from the room.
My sanctuary is cramped, and he shrinks it just by standing in it.
The mattress on its low frame—the bed I’ve slept in alone since the funeral.
Estate-sale boxes I keep meaning to sort, stacked wherever my grief left them.
My mother’s thrifted lamp, its shade gone yellow as old newsprint, throwing a hazy circle over the battered record player on its milk crate and the B-sides I only play after hours.
The 1920s boards breathe their faint cedar up into the room, and under it, unmistakable, the sharp tang of my own arousal.
I drop his shirt. I walk over to the milk crate. My hands tremble slightly as I pull a dusty sleeve from the top of the stack. A B-side. The songs that didn't make the cut, the raw, unpolished tracks the world wasn't supposed to hear. The honest ones.
I slide the black vinyl from the paper sleeve. I set it on the turntable. I drop the needle.
A sharp pop, a hiss of static, and then a slow bassline fills the small room, vibrating through the floorboards.
I turn to face him. Tyler stands perfectly still in the center of the room.
The dim lamplight catches the hard lines of his face, the bruised purple of his knuckles, the unyielding set of his shoulders.
He’s watching me with a dark, obsessive intensity that makes the wetness between my thighs slick anew.
"No covers in this room," I say. My voice is steady, stripping away the sass, the defense mechanisms, the armor. Just the raw, terrifying truth. "You leave the lies out there. If you're in here, you're Tyler."
His jaw flexes. A muscle jumps in his neck. He doesn't nod. He doesn't agree with soft words or empty promises.
He acts.
His hand drops to the hem of his flannel shirt. He rips it upward, pulling it over his head in a sharp, violent motion. The fabric lands silently on a stack of cardboard boxes. He isn't wearing an undershirt. My mouth goes dry.
His torso is a map of violence. Thick slabs of muscle layered over a broad chest and a washboard stomach.
Faded silver scars cut across his ribs, jagged and brutal, telling stories of a life steeped in danger.
Cipher-wire patterns wrap his left pectoral, intersecting like crossed telephone cables, opening into a hand-of-cards motif down his bicep.
Five face cards. Five different kings. He’s scarred, lethal, and devastatingly gorgeous.
I cross the small distance between us. I lift my ink-stained fingertips. I drag them along the inked wires across his pec, slow, tracing where the cables knot and split. The yellowed lamp catches the green chips at the edge of his irises—the part of him no cover could ever hide.
I follow the wires down to the cards on his bicep. King of spades. King of hearts. King of diamonds. King of clubs. A joker-king.
Every face is wrong.
Every face is scratched out where the eyes should be. Deliberate. Surgical. A bone-deep deletion under the skin.
The breath punches out of my lungs. I understand without him saying a word. Every cover he ever wore had a face on it. None of those faces were his. The wires bind them all together—the only thing he carries that’s his own.
He lets me trace them. He doesn't speak. His chest rises and falls under my fingertips, slow, controlled, watching me see him.
Then he reaches around to the small of his back. A metallic click sounds in the room. He pulls a black handgun from a concealed holster tucked into the waistband of his jeans. He sets the weapon on the small wooden nightstand beside the mattress with a sharp thud.
The cover is gone. The weapon is laid bare. He’s stripping away every layer of the performance.
His hands move to his belt. He unbuckles it, the metal clinking in the quiet room.
The button of his jeans pops. The zipper rasps downward.
He kicks his boots off, shoving the denim down his powerful thighs, stepping out of them.
He kicks them aside. He stands before me in nothing but dark boxer briefs, the thick bulge of his erection straining against the cotton.
One last layer between us, and he still looks more honest than any man I’ve ever seen.
The single lamp catches every faded scar, every line of ink, every knife and bullet history written into his skin.
He isn’t the harmless cousin from Portland.
He’s a man somebody forged an entire paper trail to hide.
Nobody builds a lie that seamless alone.
And he’s looking at me like I’m the first thing he’s wanted for himself in longer than he can remember.
He doesn't ask if I'm ready. He doesn't check my boundaries. He stalks toward me, closing the distance in two long strides.
His hands grip my hips. He lifts me off the floor.
A gasp punches out of my throat. My feet dangle in the air. He carries me to the mattress and drops me onto the center of the low frame. I bounce slightly against the worn springs. Before I can scramble backward, he follows me down.
He hooks his fingers into the open waistband of my jeans and strips the denim down my legs, my soaked panties dragged along with it tossing them onto the floor. I’m exposed from the waist down. The cool air of the room hits my wet, aching pussy, and a shudder rolls through me.
He doesn't hover over me. He doesn't pin me on my back.
His hands grip my shoulders, turning me onto my side. He lies down right behind me, his body molding against my back. We’re spooning, but there’s nothing sweet or gentle about this. It’s a tactical alignment. A total capture.
His solid chest presses flush against my spine, his heat radiating through my thin shirt. His thick thigh slots between my legs, separating them wide, holding my knees apart. His left arm bands around my stomach, clamping me against his body, locking me in place.
I’m trapped against him. His hot breath fans across the sensitive skin of my neck, the rough scruff of his beard dragging against my pulse point.
"Mine," Tyler rasps, his voice a gravelly command in my ear. "No covers. No running. You belong to me."