Kaeden Read online

  “Maybe not,” he replies quietly, taking another sip. “Listen, Fiona Wilkes, I’ve had one hell of a day, but I’m not about to bore you with it. I don’t need much from you except for you to bend over and pull that skirt down, and those tights, too.”

  My mouth falls open, my jaw feeling like it might detach and slam into my chest. Strange sensations dance over my body, and they’re not all bad; suddenly my nipples are hard, my pussy tingling like crazy. I curl my toes and then forcefully uncurl them.

  “Excuse me?” I say, trying to ride the outrage alone and leave the other stuff behind. “I … I’m not that sort of girl, actually.” I fold my arms. “If that’s why you brought me back here, you’re out of luck.”

  He narrows his eyes: emeralds at night, seeing right through me. A trailing ghostly finger runs up my spine between my shoulder blades. I repress a shiver.

  “Right,” he says. He puts the whisky bottle on the floor and moves the table with one hand, without standing up. It’s not a big table but it still takes two waitresses to move it. He just brushes it aside like it’s a toy. He moves his stool closer. I don’t move away; don’t shout for help. “Are you sure about that?”

  He places his massive hand on my leg, on my thin tights. He’s warm, pressing against my thigh. He slides his hand higher and higher.

  “Eh?” He moves under my skirt and even further up to my panties.

  “No!” I snap, which takes a way bigger effort than it should. I jump to my feet and take a step back, my pussy on fire now, half of me screaming to leave and the other half screaming that I should never have leaped away from him. Dual emotions war within me, with neither winning.

  “No?” He laughs. “No, really?”

  He moves slowly, his eyes locked on me. We’re playing a strange game here. He’s not forcing himself on me, but he’s not being a gentleman either. He presses his body against mine, the leather of his jacket crushing my breasts, and then reaches down and grabs my ass cheeks. He digs his fingers into my flesh, kneads it, almost, and then he turns me around and presses his groin into my ass. His cock is hard. I can tell that even through his jeans. Hard, and huge.

  “No,” I whisper.

  “Really?” He laughs again, darkly. “What about this, eh?”

  I find myself bending forward as he hikes up my skirt. I know I shouldn’t be; I know I should leave and be as good as my word. But his cock feels so good pressed against the thin fabric of my panties and my tights. What feels even better is the dangerous feeling in my chest, the sounds outside of the patrons and the other employees, the knowledge that this is not allowed. My pussy aches terribly, driving away all other sensations.

  He peels my tights away slowly, his breathing getting quicker when he exposes my ass.

  “Fucking hell,” he growls, rubbing my bare ass with his rough, callused hands. “You sexy little thing. Aren’t you?” He grabs my ass hard now; I know it will be red later.

  “Yes,” I moan, and then spit out: “No, no, yes, no!”

  “Stick that ass out even more.”

  I find myself doing what he says without thinking about it; it just feels so good, too good. I stick my ass out, arching my back as he pulls my underwear down around my knees. There’s something incredibly naughty about how he just bunches it all around down there, without taking it off. Illicit.

  “You’ll take this fucking cock,” he says, his belt rattling softly as he unbuckles it. “Won’t you?”

  “I’m not that sort of girl,” I whisper. But my pussy is so, so wet. My nipples are so hard and my chest is so tight. “I …” He slides his finger inside of me; it just slides right in, I’m so horny for him. “I …” He pushes it deep, deep, deep.

  “Won’t you?” he growls.

  “Yes,” I whisper-moan. “Yes, yes.”

  I look over my shoulder just in time to see him spit on his hand and rub it over his cock. I don’t see his cock as he pushes forward, but I feel it: so massive that at first there is only pain. But he doesn’t care. He just thrusts inside of me and lets out a shaky growl, grabbing onto my ass cheeks and sliding in even deeper, and then out, and then in … he pounds into me like no man ever has before. He’s nothing like the anxious boys in college. He fucks me like an animal.

  And I ride him like an animal. The pain passes in a flood of heat, the space between my thighs so hot it feels like there’s a balloon filled with boiling water down there. Every time he drives his huge cock into me, the balloon gets closer to bursting. I catch glimpses of his serious face, his intent eyes, but mostly my world is just a bucking blur of motion. I grind my hips down on his cock, his balls slapping into my clit, and then—

  Then I’m not exactly sure what happens, only that my legs are trembling and my arms are trembling and everything is trembling. The water balloon bursts just as he lets out a final growl and slides out of me; he’s buckling up his jeans as I’m still coming, standing there with my fingers on my clit, rubbing furiously because I don’t want the orgasm to end. The memory of his cock is so fresh inside of me that it feels like he’s still there. His come slides down my thighs, dampening my panties and my tights.

  When I finally stop trembling, I turn to find him at the door, watching me. I open my mouth to speak—with no idea what I’ll say—but before I can, he opens the door just enough to slide out, closing it behind him.

  I stare at the door for a long moment, wondering if he’ll return. Then I pull up my underwear.

  3

  Fiona

  “He just left you there like that?” Jocelyn gawps at me over the rim of her cocktail glass, tilting her head as though trying to work out a particularly difficult problem. I’ve known Jocelyn since I was a little girl; now all our old friends are out of Austin, some out of Texas, and it’s just me and her and a few high-school girls we politely nod to in the supermarket. She’s wide-hipped and brown-haired, cute and smiley. She’s the sort of friend whose eyes make me wonder if I’m doing the right thing; she has a best friend’s gaze. She pulls her brown poncho around her shoulders tighter, though the room is warm. “Did he rape you?”

  “What?” I laugh, sipping my cocktail. All day yesterday, after it happened, and all day today, I’ve asked myself many questions, but not that one. “No, it was nothing like that. It was just—sure, it was wilder than I’m used to, but …” I find refuge in the cocktail glass, sipping slowly so that I won’t have to justify myself.

  Jocelyn kicks her legs out, resting them on the puffy footstool, staring at the TV which plays a reality show on low volume. “Yeah, that’s one way to put it. Wilder. Wildest. What the hell? How does that even happen? I’ve never been going about my day and had some crazy giant biker man just walk up to me and … weren’t you scared?”

  “Yes,” I admit, leaning over to refill my glass from the cardboard cocktail box. “I guess I was. Yeah. But … I don’t know. I was excited as well.”

  “I’ve got to say, Fee, I don’t know about this. I know you hate it when I play mother—just as much as I hate it when you use that phrase—but doesn’t this seem like the time it would be appropriate? I mean, he just … he just grabbed you and bent you over and …” She winces. “You said you were saying no.”

  “At first!” I snap, getting irritated now. I lock my gaze on hers. “Listen to me. It. Was. Consensual. So please stop bringing that up.”

  “Okay.” She nods briefly. “But that doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it, does it? You’ve never done anything like this before. Unless college changed you more than I guessed.”

  I roll my eyes, sipping my cocktail. It’s got vodka in it, and strawberries: sweet and bitter, all at once. “I can assure you that I did not spend my year and a half in college getting fucked by bikers in storage closets.”

  She giggles. “Well, okay then. But I still don’t understand it.”

  “Maybe I was bored!” I cry. “What else am I supposed to do to entertain myself? Wipe down tables?”

  “It doesn’t sound
like you were entertaining yourself. It sounds like he was entertaining himself.”

  “Fine.” I shrug. “What’s the difference? The result is the same, isn’t it?”

  “I guess so,” she murmurs.

  “It’ll make good material for my novel,” I offer, which is part of a long-running joke that I quit college to write the Great American Novel, whereas in reality my novel is a slowly-gathering pile of words that sometimes makes sense and sometimes does not. “I can write a whole chapter about the big bad biker man. Maybe I’ll even title the book: The Big Bad Biker Man.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” she says, without a hint of humor. “I know you’ll tell me not to worry, but can you at least promise me that you’ll be careful?”

  “Are you a virgin?” I throw at her.

  She sits up, as though the words really strike her. “What?”

  “Are you a virgin? It’s a simple question.”

  “You know I’m not.” She lifts her chin high, as though her sexual history is beyond reproach. Which it is, mostly. “And I know that you’re going to bring up Bradley Harper, simply because Bradley Harper and I engaged in extreme BDSM activities. But that was not the same, because we agreed beforehand on what was going to happen. You just … did it.”

  “Fine,” I say. “But isn’t just doing it the fun part, at least sometimes?”

  “Look, as long as you enjoyed it that’s fine by me. I just want you to be careful, that’s all. Did you see the news recently? All those dead Mexican men? They’re saying that has something to do with motorcycle gang violence. You don’t want to get mixed up in all that.”

  “We had sex, JJ. He’s not going to take me into battle!”

  “He better not! Or he’ll have me to answer to!”

  We move onto different topics of conversation as we deplete the cardboard cocktail, and then Jocelyn leaves after helping me to clean up. I turn up the volume on the reality show and half watch it, and then go into my bedroom—walking over mounds of clothes I’ll clean up tomorrow morning—and sit at my desk. My old laptop hums and cranks to life and then I type up 422 words (exactly) and try to write a few hundred more. My fingers freeze and my mind turns hollow, and I leave the laptop and throw myself onto my crumpled sheets.

  “You worry too much, JJ,” I mutter, as I often do. People say you shouldn’t talk to yourself, but I’ve never seen the harm in it. Growing up an only child of a foster family, talking to myself was always useful. “I know what I’m doing …”

  I roll over and grab my book from the bedside table. I try to read but I’m too tipsy and tired and distracted: distracted most of all. Anytime I manage to focus on the words, Silence rises up in my mind, anything but silent. I hear the unbuckling of his belt and feel his massive cock between my legs, a rod of fire scorching up through me.

  I close my eyes … and wake up in the dead of night with my apartment buzzer slicing through my still-sleepy head. I lean up and rub the sleep from my eyes, wondering if I’m still dreaming. I glance at the old digital clock. Four a.m., and the apartment buzzer is blaring the way it does when Jocelyn comes by on a Saturday with one of her famous peanut-butter cakes. I walk on groggy legs to the intercom and press the receive button.

  “Hello?”

  Nothing: a gust of wind, a car horn far away, but no voice.

  “Hello?”

  Knock-knock, from right in front of me, from the interior door of the apartment. I swallow, wondering if Jocelyn’s words were not so ridiculous after all. What if this is some motorcycle club related stuff? What if … I take the metal baseball bat from beside the door, heft it, and most of all, wonder if it comes down to it, what I’ll actually be able to do. I’ve practiced swinging it a few times, but crushing a trained killer’s head in? I would laugh if the fear was not turning my tongue to heavy metal.

  “Who’s there?” I ask, hand on the lock.

  Knock-knock.

  I open the door slowly, ready to slam it again at any moment. Then I see him, smirking at me with that dark, shadowed look about him. Somebody has turned the lights off in the hallway and he hasn’t bothered to turn them on. His grin gets even wider when I open the door the rest of the way, so that he can see the baseball bat.

  “Ah,” he says, reaching forward and taking it from my hand as though a toy from a child. I couldn’t hold onto it if I wanted to, he’s so strong. He places it on the floor, leans it against the wall, and then swaggers into the apartment. I’m forced to back up as his massive bulk hounds me into the room. “Nice place,” he mutters, closing the door quietly behind him.

  “You can’t just …” I wish I had better control over my emotions sometimes. In college I read lots of books about mindfulness and control, but I was never able to attain that yogi state that seems so powerful. Instead my heartbeat is my master, my tingling nipples, my dry lips, my aching head, the cacophony of feeling blaring constantly within every part of me, as he hounds me further and further into the apartment.

  Soon we are at the couch.

  He looks me up and down. I’m wearing pajama shorts, silk, that fall just below my butt. And a vest: pink, with no bra. It’s only when his dark green eyes devour me that I realize how nearly naked I am.

  “You always dress so sexy, eh?”

  “I don’t exactly expect a big scary man to come visiting, do I?” I toss back, glad I at least can muster full sentences now.

  “Fine.” He shrugs. Everything is No Big Deal for him. “Come here.” He grabs me and lifts me off my feet like I’m made out of air, handling me as easily as I’d handle a small screw. He places me on the couch so that my head is hanging off the edge; everything is upside down; his belt—which he is already unbuckling—is at the bottom of my topsy-turvy vision.

  “What are you doing?” I whisper, talking far more difficult from this position.

  “I’m going to fuck your face,” he says, and then brings his ginormous cock out into the lowlight. It’s so, so big, the biggest cock I’ve ever seen, with veins running down the side and a bulging head. His hand, which is as massive as the rest of him, covers only half of it.

  “You’re going to what?”

  “You heard.” He leans down over me. “Rub that fucking pussy as I do it, Fiona.”

  I open my mouth to tell him to go to hell, but then he slides that cock into my mouth and I no longer want to tell him anything of the sort. Instead I open my mouth wider, taking him all in, and ask myself how this can make me so crazily horny. Before I allow myself to think, I slide my hand down my belly and under my shorts, finding my clit. I rub it fast as he slides his cock in and out of my mouth. I gag, cough, choke; spit and pre-come spill down onto the floor. Silence doesn’t make any noise except a few quiet grunts, his eyes fixated on my hands working under my shorts. He leans across and yanks the shorts down, exposing my pussy.

  “I’m going to come in your mouth,” he says, breathing really heavy now. “And you’re going to come for me as well.”

  I tell him yes, but my words are stifled by the bulk of him. I taste salt as his pre-come spills out even quicker, but most of all I feel the blazing between my thighs, my fingers no longer my fingers: something else, another force, detached from me. When the orgasm approaches, it’s almost as though his cock pounding ruthlessly into my mouth is somehow connected to the movements of my hand; we synchronize. And despite how wrong this is, how potentially violating—or perhaps because of it—the orgasm comes with more violence than any ever before.

  I somehow stop myself from biting down (bad idea!) as the waves of pleasure burn through me like wildfire. I squeeze my legs around my hand and let out a final gasp: a gasp which is filled with his shooting come, salty and thick, forcing me to swallow.

  He backs away, already buckling up his jeans.

  I lie there for a moment, feeling used and abused and yet still hornier than hell, and then something snaps in me.

  I sit up, wheeling on him as I pull up my shorts. I wipe his come and my spit from my mouth and gl
are at him. “What’s your name?” I demand. “If we’re going to do this, I want your fucking name.”

  He tilts his head at me, surprised. “Kaeden Jackson,” he says.

  “Okay then, Kaeden Jackson. Next time you want to do something like this, you’ll buy me dinner. Do you understand? We’ll have dinner and wine and you’ll pretend to care when I tell you the funny things my colleagues say at work, and when I talk to you for fifteen minutes about this one girl I knew once who was a real bitch, and—and things like that. Do you understand?”

  It feels strange to be shouting at this giant looming over me, but the quality of his smile changes. It’s no longer a smirk. It’s more genuine. “Fine, that works for me. I’ll take you to dinner. Goddamn. Day after tomorrow. I’ll pick you up. You’ve got some fire in you.”

  He looks like he might say something else, but then he paces from the apartment and leaves just as discreetly as he arrived. Almost like it was a dream.

  4

  Kaeden

  “You reckon this is a Nine Circles spot?” Shotgun peers once again down his rifle, that look on his face that tells me he wants to say something but doesn’t know how to bring it up. I know he’d like me to bring it up for him, but I’m not in the mood for any bullshit. It’s been a few days since that shit at the warehouse and the Nine Circles have been one step ahead of us the whole damn time.

  “Maybe,” I reply, peering down my own scope. We’re crouched down behind what looks like an old outhouse, across a dusty patch of desert, scoping out a bar that looks like something out of a Western. It’s empty as far as we can tell, except for a single light that shines from the attic. Could be nothing; probably is nothing. “We’ve just got to sit here and see if any turn up.” I sigh; this isn’t the best part of the outlawing life, the constant waiting.