Fury on Fire (Devil's Rock #3)(13)

He still hadn’t dressed. His cock jutted out, hard and aching, the head flushed a hungry reddish hue. All for a woman whose face he hadn’t even seen.

Once upon a time, he could have been with a girl like her. He’d applied to a half-dozen colleges and planned to attend Texas A&M alongside Knox, who was there in his second year. Their lives took a different turn, however, the night they went after Mason Leary.

Now, a woman like her wouldn’t so much as touch him. He scoffed. She wanted to talk to him at his earliest convenience. He shook his head. Fuck that.

He avoided trouble. Ever since he’d been paroled he had managed to stay out of trouble, and he intended to keep it that way.

Granted, his impulse control was low when it came to women, but he hadn’t broken any laws. No, it was simply f*cking—trouble of a different sort, but the good it did him, the need it served when he slaked his lust in a woman’s body, far outweighed any risk he courted.

Suddenly the idea of meeting her was a sour concept.

He didn’t want to exchange niceties. Some sixth sense told him to avoid her, and he had long ago learned to trust his instincts.

She was his neighbor, so it wouldn’t be an easy matter to escape her. She was proper . . . what Uncle Mac would have called a lady. She was the type that would want to cuddle with any man to warm her bed.

His partners were women into casual sex. Women that didn’t mind shacking up with a former con. One look at this female told him that she would very much mind that. There was nothing casual about her. She probably only ever f*cked tax attorneys and men who played golf on Sunday afternoons—oh, and it wasn’t f*cking for her. It was making love.

Turning from the window, he grabbed a beer out of his fridge and marched upstairs to get dressed, deciding he would forget all about her.

He rubbed at the center of his chest where the dull, twisting ache was flaring up again. It was his earlier thought of Katie. It chased him like a fog that would never fully fade.

His cousin was dead and it was partly his fault. He knew he wasn’t to blame for her attack, but what he’d done afterward to Mason Leary . . . yeah, he was responsible for that. Killing Leary hadn’t been right. He knew that now. Not that he and Knox had set out to kill the bastard. They’d wanted him to admit what he’d done to Katie, but things had gotten out of hand. Especially once Leary started mouthing off and calling Katie dirty names.

Killing Leary wasn’t what Katie needed to heal. She had needed North and Knox to be around to support her. She needed them to not go to prison.

North had been closest in age to his cousin. She’d talked to him about everything. Confided in him. He still remembered when she had told him about her upcoming date with Mason Leary. She had been so excited, and he’d been happy for her. She’d tried on and modeled her outfits in front of him that night. They had both agreed that the blue shirtdress with boots was the way to go. The old familiar bile rose up in his throat when he remembered the state of that dress after Leary was finished with her.

North and Katie had a special bond, and he’d turned his back on her—abandoned her—when he and Knox got arrested.

The last thing she’d needed to hear was a judge pronounce them guilty for manslaughter and sentence them to prison. It had been the final cut. The thing that pushed her over the edge. As wrong as he was for taking Leary’s life . . . his greatest crime was what he had done to Katie.

A heavy sigh pushed out past his lips. As for Faith Walters, he needed to forget about her—pretend as though that house was still vacant and continue on with his life as usual.

Stopping, he stared at himself in front of his dresser mirror for a long moment—and did the exact opposite of that. He thought about his neighbor.

His cock was hard, the skin still flushed an angry red, tight and pulsing with hunger. Before he could quite think about what he was doing—or why—he wrapped a hand around himself. Lowering himself on the bed, he sank onto his back and pumped his dick, working it almost savagely from the base to the head, desperate for release . . . for something to take the edge off.

His eyes drifted shut and the image that rose in his mind was of a sleek body in an ass-hugging skirt. Long legs propped up on nude-colored heels. He saw all of that as he fisted himself. Thinking about her wasn’t hurting anything. It was simply a convenient image that got him off. That was all.

That was it.

He closed his eyes, feeling a flash of frustration at the vagueness of her face in his mind’s eye. He could envision parting those thighs well enough, but when he reached for her face, he had nothing. He went back to the memory of her body, the curve of her ass, the straight fall of her hair.

His breathing grew ragged and his balls drew up tight.

He visualized fisting those strands with one hand and gripping that ass with the other, his fingers digging into tender flesh. In his mind he was spreading her thighs wide and driving the swollen length of him into her. He came with a head-tossing groan. His spine arched on the bed as he shot out over himself, rattled in the aftermath.

He was certifiable. Just the thought of some faceless woman had him jacking off to the best release he’d had in months. This shouldn’t have felt so good. It shouldn’t have shattered him so much. Masturbating should not be better than the reality of an actual flesh-and-blood woman. Maybe he was tired of the women he’d been spending time with . . . maybe he wanted something else. Someone. Maybe that’s why nothing—no one—seemed to help take the edge off lately.