CHAPTER 4
“Stay.”
The word left my mouth before I’d fully decided to speak it. Marcus froze mid-step, his duffel bag still dangling from his fingers, his bruised face caught between hope and disbelief. Cole’s hand remained steady on my thigh—a grounding weight, a silent question.
“Stay,” I said again, clearer this time. “But not how you’re thinking.”
Marcus’s throat worked. “What does that mean?”
“It means you sit on that stool.” I pointed to the barstool nearest the register—the one with the torn vinyl seat and the wobbly leg that Cole kept meaning to fix. “And you watch.”
The word landed in the silence like a stone in still water.
Marcus blinked. His gaze flicked to Cole, then back to me. “Watch.”
“You heard her.” Cole’s voice was low, roughened at the edges. He hadn’t moved from between my thighs—still on his knees, still close enough that his breath ghosted across my skin. “Sit down, Marcus.”
“Cole, I—” Marcus ran his free hand through his disheveled hair. “I don’t know if this is a good idea.”
“Neither do I.” Cole pressed a kiss to the inside of my knee. “But Mara knows what she wants. And I trust her.”
The duffel bag hit the floor with a muffled thump.
Marcus crossed to the stool, his footsteps slow on the reclaimed wood planks, and lowered himself onto the torn vinyl.
The seat creaked under his weight. He set both hands on his thighs, knuckles white, and looked at us with an expression that was half reverence and half terror.
“There,” he said. “Happy?”
“Not yet.” Cole turned his attention back to me. His dark eyes held mine, searching for hesitation. Finding none. “You’re sure about this?”
Was I sure? I was naked on a bartop that cost more than my car, my thighs still slick from the orgasm Cole had coaxed out of me, while his estranged brother watched from a stool ten feet away.
The alley door was unlocked. The pendant lights blazed overhead, illuminating every inch of my exposed skin.
Anyone could walk in—a customer who’d forgotten something, a liquor distributor making a late delivery, a stranger off the street.
The danger of it made my pulse quicken. Made me wetter.
“I’m sure,” I said. “Fuck me, Cole. Right here.”
Something shifted in his expression. The careful control he wore like armor cracked just slightly, revealing the hunger underneath—a man who’d spent decades rescuing everyone else and was only just learning how to take what he wanted.
He rose to his feet. His belt buckle clinked as he unfastened it, the sound obscenely loud in the quiet bar. Marcus inhaled sharply, and I watched his hands tighten on his thighs.
“Eyes on her,” Cole said, without looking at his brother. “You wanted to see. So keep your eyes on her.”
“I’m looking.” Marcus’s voice had gone hoarse. “Jesus Christ, I’m looking.”
Cole freed himself from his jeans. The sight of him—thick, hard, the head already glistening—drew a sound from my throat that I didn’t recognize. Need, raw and unpolished. He positioned himself between my legs and ran the tip of his cock along my folds, not entering, just teasing.
“Tell me what you want,” he said. “Be specific.”
My hips rolled forward, seeking friction. “I want you inside me. I want your brother to watch you take me apart. And I want—” I paused, catching my breath. “I want you to come first this time.”
“Bossy.”
“You like it.”
“I do.” He pushed in, just the head, and held there. “I really fucking do.”
Marcus made a sound in the back of his throat—a strangled groan that he tried to swallow. I glanced at him. His knuckles had gone white on his thighs, and there was a visible strain in the crotch of his jeans that he was doing his best to ignore.
“You okay over there?” I asked.
“No.” He laughed, a short and breathless thing. “No, I am very much not okay. But don’t stop.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
Cole thrust deeper, and my attention snapped back to him. The stretch of him filled my senses—that first slow slide, the way my body made room for him with that ache that was just on the pleasurable side of pain. My back arched against the bartop. The pendant lights swam.
“There you go,” Cole murmured. He’d braced one hand beside my head. The other gripped my hip, thumb digging into the soft flesh just above my hipbone. “That’s it. Take all of me.”
He gave me a moment to adjust, then began to move.
The rhythm he set was nothing like the frantic coupling of the night before.
This was slower. Deliberate. Each thrust a full sentence instead of a hurried word.
I could feel every inch of him entering me, the drag against my inner walls, the press of his pubic bone against my clit when he bottomed out.
My hands found his shoulders. My nails dug into the scarred skin there. “Cole—”
“I know.” His forehead pressed against mine. Sweat dampened his hairline. “I know, sweetheart. Just breathe.”
From the stool, Marcus exhaled shakily. “She’s—you’re so—fuck.”
“Don’t talk to her,” Cole said. His voice was steady despite the exertion. “Don’t talk to her unless she asks you something. You’re here to witness.”
“Witness what?”
“What it looks like when someone gives themselves completely.”
Cole pulled almost all the way out. Then he drove back in, harder this time, and the angle shifted so that his cock dragged across that spot inside me that made spots dance at the edges of my vision. A moan tore out of my chest, and I heard Marcus’s breath catch in response.
“That,” Cole said. “You’re witnessing that.”
The rhythm intensified. Cole’s hips snapped against mine with a force that scooted my body up the bartop inch by inch, and his bicep flexed beside my head as he kept himself from crushing me.
The reclaimed walnut had warmed beneath my back.
The pendant lights cast shifting shadows across the ceiling, and the bar’s nighttime hum—refrigeration, ice machine, the occasional click of the backup generator—provided a mechanical counterpoint to the wet sounds of our bodies joining.
A bead of sweat rolled down Cole’s temple and dripped onto my collarbone. Neither of us moved to wipe it away.
“Look at her,” Cole said. It took me a moment to realize he was speaking to Marcus. “Look at her face when I’m deep inside her.”
Marcus shifted on the stool. The legs scraped against the floor. “I’m looking.”
“What do you see?”
“I see—” Marcus swallowed audibly. “She’s in another world. Somewhere else.”
“She’s right here. She’s more present than either of us have ever been.” Cole slowed his pace, grinding against me in a way that made the pressure build behind my pubic bone. “Where are you, Mara?”
“Here,” I managed. “I’m here.”
“Tell me what you feel.”
“Full.” The word came out broken. “Stretched. Like I was made for you.”
“You were.” He kissed the corner of my mouth. “Every inch of you was made for every inch of me.”
Marcus groaned again—louder this time, less restrained.
When I turned my head to look at him, his face was flushed beneath the bruise, and his right hand had crept toward his lap.
He wasn’t touching himself, not yet, but his fingers were curled around his own thigh with the desperate grip of a man fighting a losing battle.
“Don’t,” I said.
His hand stilled. “What?”
“Don’t touch yourself. Not unless I tell you to.”
Cole’s rhythm faltered for half a beat. Something flickered across his face—surprise, maybe, or approval, or the heat of discovering a new facet of someone you thought you already knew. He resumed his pace without comment.
Marcus, meanwhile, looked like I’d just asked him to hold his breath underwater. “You’re serious.”
“Dead serious.” My voice was steadier than I expected.
Cole was still moving inside me, still stroking that spot that made coherent thought difficult, but something about the situation—the three of us in this empty bar, the unlocked door, the sheer audacity of it—had sharpened my focus instead of dulling it.
“You came back because you couldn’t look away.
So look. But keep your hands where I can see them. ”
Slowly, as if moving through syrup, Marcus returned his hand to his thigh. Both hands now, palms down, fingers splayed. The bulge in his jeans was unmistakable.
“Good,” I said. “Now watch your brother fuck me properly.”
Cole made a sound that might have been a laugh. “Properly?”
“You’ve been holding back. I can tell.”
“I was being gentle.”
“I don’t want gentle.”
His eyes darkened. “What do you want?”
“I want you to stop treating me like something that needs to be saved and start treating me like something that needs to be ruined.”
The word hung in the air. Ruined. It wasn’t a word I’d ever used before—not in this context, not with this meaning—and something about saying it aloud sent a shudder down my spine that had nothing to do with the temperature of the bar.
Cole’s jaw tightened. “Turn over.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Turn over.”
I obeyed before my brain caught up with the command.
He pulled out of me—a slick, obscene sound that made Marcus hiss through his teeth—and helped me flip onto my stomach.
The bartop was just wide enough to accommodate my body if I kept my arms tucked close to my sides.
The wood was cooler against my breasts, my belly, the sensitized skin of my inner thighs.
Cole’s hand landed on the small of my back and pressed down. “Now. Where were we?”
“You were going to ruin me,” I said, and the words came out muffled against the walnut.
“Right.” He lined himself up and thrust back inside, and this new angle hit an entirely different set of nerve endings. Deeper, somehow. More invasive. My gasp echoed off the brick walls.
“Fuck,” Marcus whispered. “Fuck, Cole, the way she takes you—”
“Quiet.” Cole’s command was absolute. “You don’t get to narrate. You don’t get to participate. You’re a fly on the wall, Marcus. Flies don’t talk.”
I laughed breathlessly. “A fly on the wall with an erection.”
“She’s right.” Cole’s hips slammed against my ass, and I felt the jolt of it through my whole body. “A very well-endowed fly.”