Better When He's Bad (Welcome to the Point #1)(58)
“You can clean it up, but that doesn’t change what it is, Dovie.”
“Are we talking about the apartment or you, Bax?”
I moved my finger down so I could run it across the plush pout of her bottom lip. “Either or. I’m not going to ever be a good guy, Copper-Top.”
She caught my hand in her own and it made my blood go hot when she put a soft kiss right in the center of my palm. “No, you’re not, but that doesn’t mean you always have to be a bad guy either. Why can’t you just be a little bit of both?”
Because for me it had always been all or nothing. Just like this situation with her. I could keep tabs on her, make sure everyone knew that I would jack them up if they messed with her and that they’d better not lay a finger on her, but no. Instead I was having a hard time figuring out where she started and I ended, and she was starting to look like a reward for all that I had missed in the last five years. Just like everything else in my life, going all in meant when it went bad, and when it was all over, there was a good chance it would leave me wrecked. I didn’t want to think about it anymore, didn’t want her to keep looking at me like she saw more to me than there was, so l leaned down and kissed her. I didn’t have to think about right or wrong when she made everything better.
CHAPTER 12
Dovie
THIS WASN’T WHAT IT was normally like when we were together like this. There was a level of intensity in him, a strand of danger that would have scared me had I not seen the struggle he was fighting in those fathomless eyes. I didn’t know if it was the location, the chat with his brother, or the idea that Lord Hartman was heartless and all shades of evil that had him so impatient and edgy, but whatever it was, I could feel the lash of it across each part of my flesh that he exposed with rough hands. He was trying to make a point, to teach a lesson. Only I don’t think he knew which one of us was supposed to be learning it, so instead of fighting him, instead of adding fuel to the fire, I just went still. I was naked and he was still fully clothed, a position I seemed to find myself in a lot around him.
I laid my hands flat on the clean sheets I had just put on his mattress. I kept my eyes locked on the swirling black void in his eyes and refused to move, to give him any kind of reaction as he moved over me. His mouth was too hard, his hands were too rough, and it was the first time since I decided I could handle the trouble he represented that I actually felt like I was in over my head. I had just learned I had narrowly escaped a professional hit on my life thanks to dear old dad; Bax should be coddling me, trying to soothe me. Instead he was trying to push me, trying to scare me into begging him to stop. I wasn’t going to play his game, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of winning it either.
I felt the scrape of his teeth across the sensitive skin of my neck as he bent over me. He pulled his shirt off by the collar and I fixated my gaze on the pulse thundering at the base of his throat. I wanted to kiss him, to let him know it would all be all right, but I wasn’t going to lie to him. If he kept this up, as soon as it was over, I was leaving this apartment, leaving all the darkness and danger that was Bax and taking my chances on my own. I knew Race wouldn’t let me down. I just had to stay alive long enough for him to let his plans play out.
The hard planes of Bax’s chest pressed against the soft curves of my own. My body reacted. How could it not? I wanted him, had wanted him from the get-go, and now that I knew the way he used his mouth, the way he used his hands when he wanted to bring pleasure and light instead of pain and darkness, there was no way my ni**les weren’t going to perk up, no way my skin wasn’t going to pebble in arousal, and no way my core wasn’t going to go slick and hot when he gathered both of my lifeless hands in his own and pulled them up above my head.
He used his jean-clad knee to force my legs apart and settled himself in the cradle of my hips. I just stared up at him, pleading with my eyes for him to stop. He wasn’t Shane, he wasn’t Bax, he was just a cold stranger who didn’t care that this was all wrong. I focused on the star on his face. It should be ugly, should make him look ridiculous, but right now I felt like it was my only navigation in a pitch-black sky.
He was waiting for me to stop it, waiting for me to tell him to do the right thing. I could feel him shaking, and not because he was turned on, but because he was forcing himself to hold on to me, to threaten the tenuous threads of the fabric that was holding us together. He was quaking in such a way that had those chains inked around his wrists been real, they would have been rattling and clanking together. I didn’t utter a protest when he pressed his lips to the crest of my cheek and drew them along the ridge until he reached my mouth. I was going to have bruises around my wrists from how hard he was holding me, and I could feel his heart thundering against my own.
His lips settled firmly over mine. It wasn’t a kiss so much as it was an assault. I was pliant. I was still. I refused to give him what he wanted, even when I was tempted, because it felt so good when he ran his tongue along the sealed seam. I wanted him, just not like this.
His chest heaved and billowed against mine, and belatedly I realized the normally insistent erection that was typically trapped between us by this point was missing. He didn’t want to be doing this any more than I did, but I wasn’t going to stop him. He had to stop himself, or really, all there was in Shane Baxter was badness, and whatever part of him I thought I saw when his guard was down, when he kissed me, when he looked at me like I was his reward, was only going to be a figment of my imagination.