Chapter 10 Shower
TEN
SHOWER
NOELLE
Iwanted some higher power to save me. I guess there’s truth in that old saying—be careful what you wish for—because I got exactly that.
I got Saint.
He tells me to call him Patrick. Even as he alternates between using my name, murmuring that I’m his Starling, and tacking on a heavy ‘sweetheart’ every now and then, he wants me to see him as something other than the experienced killer who puts men on their knees to execute them.
Then he put me on my knees, giving me the choice of what to do when I was down there, and I want to believe him when he says that everything he’s done, he’s done for me.
He’s killed for me. He’s invaded my privacy and arranged it so that I’m trapped with him this Christmas.
And, up until I discovered the truth… up until he stopped pretending and set a trap that I na?vely walked right into…
I was almost glad to have the company. I thought he was handsome, and if I wondered ‘what if’, that’s nothing compared to learning that there was never going to be a ‘what if’.
From the moment this man took an interest in me and my list that fateful day at the Aria Coffee Lounge, he’s considered me his—and it’s not only the snow and my missing keys that are keeping me from escaping.
Damn it. There isn’t a truth serum in the whole fucking world that would get me to admit it to him, whether he’s wearing an amused grin or a searching look as though he can see straight to my soul, but the idea that he is so obsessed with me—with plump, angry, bitter Noelle Halliday—is blunting the sharp edge of the knife that is Saint’s history as a Dragonfly enforcer.
I know I’m pretty. In my teens, I was self-conscious of my rolls, of the size of my tits, of how my ass was almost wider than the seat attached to my desk at school.
I’ve always had hair to envy and a stunning face, but it took me until I was a little older and I realized that there are plenty of men who like a solid, thick girl that I started to own my sexuality.
I oozed it, and I liked it, and that still didn’t give those five fuckers any right to touch me…
to use me… the way they did that violent night.
When Patrick tells me I’m gorgeous, he says it with a solemnity that dares me to fight back.
Fuck. For a man with eighteen documented kills on his skin—which is probably a small portion over his twenty years as a hired assassin—he shouldn’t have the patience to put up with me when I don’t immediately play meek and mild.
Honestly, that was never my style, and it took way too many cranberry Schnapps and a date rape drug for Charles Dutton to be able to control me in the first place.
So I lost my spark after my assault. I’ve worked hard to get it back, and I’ll be damned if I let Patrick North snuff it out.
Only… that’s not what he wants to do. It sounds just as insane as he has to be, but I can tell.
If it were all about overpowering me, he would’ve pried open my mouth and shoved his dick right inside without giving me any choice.
Sure, he took over once I first initiated contact, but he waited until I’d made up my mind to give him my mouth like he requested, all while telling myself I needed to do this, I needed to give him his five stupid things if I want to erase this feeling of owing him for clearing my wish list with the poignant deaths of five terrible men.
Two hits down, three to go…
But here, his arms wrapped around me, the bleachy taste of his come mingled with something that is uniquely Patrick—as icy as his surname even in a mouth so hot, I burned up from the inside out to have him kiss me as deeply as he did, passing his jizz between us—sharp on my tongue, I have to admit that I didn’t blow him because I was afraid of what he would do if I really did grab his erection and yank.
Now, I’m scared. Shit, I’m so terrified that I’ve reached the other side of it, approaching this situation as calmly as I can.
He says he isn’t going to hurt me. I have to believe him for my own cracking sanity.
Otherwise I’ll be walking around on tiptoe, waiting for him to decide that, this time, when he tells me to go to my knees, he’ll pull his gun out instead of his cock.
There’s nothing I can do. Patrick had the advantage of watching over me for the past year.
I only really met him a handful of days ago.
He knows how I think. Me? I’m at his mercy.
He could kill me, but since he seems to think I belong to him now…
at least until I repay my ‘debt’ to him…
I don’t think I’m dead. And, well, I’m basing that all on the last tattoo I found on Patrick.
A starling. A little black bird inked high up on his inner thigh, this man has tattooed a starling close enough to his junk that intimacy isn’t just implied—it’s demanded.
He wants me. I don’t know why. I’m still struggling to believe this all has to do with that fateful day I fled into the Aria Coffee Lounge.
For him to have watched me, to stalk me…
cameras, I think, a shiver running down my spine, he has cameras somewhere…
to kill for me because my angry tears caught his attention…
a part of me kind of wants to show him that I am grateful for this attention if only because he made it so that I was the last one standing—even if ordered me to my knees in front of him.
That’s why I kissed him on his cock. Why I took him in my mouth, sucking him off, taking everything he wanted to give, then passing it back when he ordered me to.
Because he gave me a nickname that he promised belonged to me and only me, and he tatted it alongside his leaves of death and his loyalty brand to the Dragonflies.
Because he told me that I didn’t have to, and whether that was some kind of fucked-up reverse psychology or not, I did, and now he’s hugging me tight, and I have no idea what’s going to happen next, only that I’m almost excited despite myself to find out.
I don’t know. But Patrick?
He does.
He’s careful to keep one arm around my shoulder even as he ends the embrace. Before I know it, he’s shuffling me toward the stairs, and by the time I begin to wonder if I should resist, we’re already heading up to the second floor.
I stiffen as we reach the first bedroom. If Patrick notices, he doesn’t say a word about it. He just keeps going until he’s led me to the bathroom, closing the door behind us.
Message received. He’s not letting me get away from him just yet, and he seems to have another shower on his mind.
The bathroom slowly fills with steam as he turns it on.
With a warning look that tells me to stay right where I am, he leans into the stall, testing the water with his wrist. He adjusts it without comment, testing it again.
Finally, when it seems to be the perfect temp for Patrick, he nods at me. “Get in.”
Excuse me? “I’m okay.”
Patrick raises his eyebrows. “I’m sorry. If I gave you the impression that I was asking… no. This one’s for me. Strip, Starling. Get in the shower.” He pauses for a moment, then begins to shrug off his suit jacket. “We just did something dirty together. Now we’ll get clean.”
The way he says that… this time, he expects obedience.
Of course he does. Isn’t that one of his demands?
Lips, mouth, body, obedience… I still don’t have any fucking clue what he’ll expect from me for number five, but as Patrick begins to unbutton his shirt, his intent to join me under the shower spray clear, I know he won’t let me get away with refusing him this.
The Noelle of a decade ago would’ve freaked to think of undressing in front of a stranger.
Putting his dick in my mouth… yeah. I was going down on my high school boyfriend at fifteen, so that wasn’t a big deal.
But being so vulnerable as to see every imperfection, every flaw on a body it took me years to appreciate? I never would’ve.
And yet, tugging off my shirt and letting him get an eyeful of my double-d’s… watching the way he freezes for a moment before he grunts softly at the sight… gives me a sense of power that puts us on a more even footing for the moment.
He wants me. That much is obvious. He’s desperate for me, and if my body is all I have to use against my stalker, then I’ll wield it like the only weapon that I have.
While he starts to fumble with his pants, I make quick work of the rest of my clothes. Unlike Patrick, I don’t have the anal-retentive need to fold my clothes up and put them on the counter. I leave them on the floor before stepping under the spray.
I hiss out in pleasure as the warm water hits my skin. I slide the frosted glass door between us closed, watching out of the corner of my eye as Patrick bends down to retrieve my clothes. He folds them, naked as the day he was born, and adds them to his pile.
Then he pauses. He fingers the bundle of red panties that I’d been wearing. Through the gap between the edge of the door and the shower’s tiled wall, I see him furrow his brow, then remove my shirt from the pile.
I get a flash of his sculpted ass and the poinsettia on his back before he steps out of the bathroom, taking the shirt with him.
That he leaves the door open is a sure sign he plans on returning, but acting as though I couldn’t care less, I focus on getting clean so that I can hop out of the shower before he slips inside the stall.
Too late. I’m not even halfway done before he’s slipping open the door, joining me without another word.
I don’t know what to expect now that he’s here with ne.
A quick glance over to him as he crowds me into the stall reveals that his chest is heaving slightly, his cock already heavy and hard.
My breath catches in my throat as I imagine him pushing me up against the tile, lifting my leg up so that he can slam his erection right inside of me.
He wants my body, right? How else could he own it other than by penetrating me with his? Only that’s not what happens. When his hands finally come to rest on me, they’re tender. Gentle. Careful and kind.
And I might be more broken than I first thought because I… I don’t know what to do with such reverence from a man with more than figurative blood on his hands.
Grabbing the shampoo I brought from home, he washes my hair like I’m something fragile, thumbs pressing lightly at my scalp, fingers combing through tangles without tugging. He rinses, then repeats the process with the conditioner, slow and thorough, like this is something he’s practiced.
Like this matters.
I don’t understand it.
This is the same man who told me to kneel.
The same man who watched me do so with a small grin before giving me the opportunity to hurt him if I chose to.
And yet here he is, pressing his mouth to the side of my neck—not claiming, not biting—just a series of quiet kisses that feel way too worshipping.
I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. For the demands. For the blackmail.
For the taking.
But, no… all that happens is that, once my hair is clean and he turns me away from the spray, pushing the chin-length strands out of my face, Patrick peers into my eyes and whispers huskily, “Touch me.”