Darkness Bound (4 page)

“Fire him!” Jack scoffed. “Oh, no way! I’m getting my money’s worth! Well, Nola’s money’s worth, anyway.” When both the waitress and Hawk stared at her as if she’d lost her mind, Jack said happily, “Oh, never mind, it’s all good. Thanks for the tequila, I’m probably going to need it!”

Jack downed the shot in one gulp, savored the burn, set the glass back on the table, and smiled broadly at both of them.

A male escort! This was going to be so much
fun
! No strings, no attachments; he’d leave afterward without all that awkward
Uh, I’ll call you
BS. As long as he had condoms—plenty of them—she was good to go.

The waitress turned and fled. Jack happily watched her go, then said to Hawk, “So how exactly does this work? Do I need to tip you afterward or anything, or is that all taken care of?”

That lazy, seductive smile from before had turned to a mean-looking scowl, which Jack decided was utterly adorable. God, she couldn’t wait to get her hands on him. Just look at those arms! Those abs! That bulge in his jeans! She almost hopped up and down in her seat with excitement.

This way, she could be absolutely free. She could let herself go. There would be no consequences, no ugly recriminations, no relationship whatsoever. She hadn’t a single hesitation about the ethics of bedding a male prostitute—it was called the oldest profession in the world for a good reason, and they were both consenting adults, and he was
beautiful
—she wasn’t worried about the possible dangers of having a strange man in her hotel room because Nola would have paid a high price to ensure the quality of the merchandise, and the safety and total anonymity of the transaction. In fact, she’d probably had an extensive background check run on him and made him sign a nondisclosure.

The cherry on top of this delightful sundae of sin: there would be exactly zero emotional entanglements. She’d wake up tomorrow morning and he’d be gone, never to be seen again, and she’d be on a plane on her way back to the States.

Her glee was only briefly marred by the cold pinch of anxiety she felt every time she thought about having sex. With an efficiency born of years of practice, Jack ruthlessly squashed that feeling before it had a chance to flower into fear.

Hawk growled, “What the hell are you talking about? And who’s Nola?”

“You’re right: we should stay to the script. Stay in character, I
love
it.” She grinned at him, more excited than she’d been in years.

“Are you drunk?” He enunciated every word, glaring daggers at her all the while.

She sighed and rested her chin on her threaded fingertips. Looking him right in the eye, she softly asked, “How are you going to fuck me first, Hawk?”

All the blood drained from his face.

It rushed back in with a speed that left blotches of red high on his sculpted cheekbones. He stood abruptly, looking angry, hot, and scary, and pulled her just as abruptly out of the booth with a hand wrapped firmly around her upper arm. He leaned down and hissed into her ear, “All right. You wanna play?
Let’s play
.”

Then in a very caveman move that made her squeal in delight, Hawk picked her up, threw her over his shoulder, and headed for the front door.

This broad was seriously deranged.

He’d never seen a woman do a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn the way this one had. One second she was glaring at him as if he was a carrier of the plague, the next she was asking him how he was going to fuck her.

Still hanging over his shoulder as he made his way down the corridor to her hotel room, her thighs grasped firmly under his arm and her little feet kicking out in front of him, she chuckled to herself and said happily, “And just look at this
ass
!”

Then she actually spread both her hands across his rear end and squeezed.

What the hell?

He didn’t know how he’d lost control of the situation, but he had. And now he was about to take it back.

“Key,” he snapped as he stopped in front of room 204.

“Back pocket of my jeans,” she whispered, sounding all sexy and breathless with anticipation.

Had that waitress put something in her drink? Had she been roofied? That would certainly account for her strange behavior . . . or maybe she was bipolar. Though he hadn’t read that in her file. Not that he’d paid much attention to the file’s contents; a cursory skim had told him all he’d needed to know.

Or so he’d thought.

He dug the key from the pocket of her jeans, turned it in the door handle, entered the room, and kicked the door shut behind him. Then he flipped Jacqueline off his shoulder, set her on her feet, and backed her up against the wall.

Her eyes widened as she stared up at him. Her lips parted, and for a brief moment, he thought she might be afraid of him.

She blew that thought from his head when she moistened her lips and said, “Okay. Here’s the deal: I want the full monty, Hawk. I want every trick you’ve got. Don’t hold back on me, now. This doesn’t happen to me often, so make it memorable. Make it . . .
dirty
.”

Then she rose up on her toes, wound her arms around his neck, and put her mouth on his.

Sweet mother of
—she tasted like tequila and green apples and a sweet, delicious ripeness that was just
her
. He lost himself almost instantly, pulled into her taste and scent like a swimmer pulled into a riptide. He allowed himself to just luxuriate in the kiss, in the soft heat of her body pressed against his, in the low, small sound she made deep in her throat.

She mewled as he crushed her tighter against him, and again as he slid his hand up her body and squeezed her breast. Small and firm and perfect, they were the breasts of an athlete, and he longed to take a nipple into his mouth. He wanted to drift on this current of pleasure forever. He wanted to drown in it—

Hawk broke the kiss and pulled back, startled by the force of his reaction to her. He never wanted to drift, or
drown
, in a woman. He never let himself get close. But if she could drag him under with just a kiss . . .

No more kissing
, he told himself firmly as he stared down at her. She was breathing heavily, her eyes were soft and drowsy, and he smelled the fragrance of her arousal like perfume in the air, delicious hot readiness that made every part of his body ache with want.

“Damn,” she whispered, leaning into him, “you taste like Christmas morning.”

He hadn’t had a woman so completely ready and unabashedly carnal in, well . . . how long? She wasn’t second-guessing herself or him; she wasn’t holding back, that was abundantly clear; she was ready for anything he wanted to give her.
Anything
.

God, that was sexy.

She’s an evil wench
, he reminded himself. When a spike of anger shot through him as he remembered the part she’d played in getting those anti-Shifter laws passed, he pulled her head back with his hand fisted in her hair.

She looked at him with big, enthralled blue eyes, her fingers twisting into the front of his shirt. “Oh—are you going to be rough? That. Is. So.
Hot
.”

“You like it rough?” he growled, staring down at her with what he hoped was a murderous glare, digging his fingers into her bottom.

She responded with a soft, happy sigh. “I like
you
, however I get you.”

She
liked
him. That did something strange to his stomach. Before he could spend too much time pondering why he cared that this cold-hearted, bigoted, despicable excuse for a human being liked him, she was talking again.

“Let’s get you naked, stud muffin. I want to see my birthday present.” She tugged his shirt from the waistband of his jeans and flattened her hands over his stomach.

Stud muffin?
Present?

Several things clicked into place, and he had to bite down on his tongue to keep from laughing.

Oh, this was too, too good. This was better than he could have ever expected.

His gaze fell on the Canon with the telephoto lens on the nightstand beside the bed, and with a thrill of victory he realized that
now
it was better than he could have ever expected.

Because the downfall of
New York Times
senior war correspondent Jacqueline Dolan was going to be
epic
—

And caught entirely on film.

The noise she made was loud, animal, and incoherent. It tore from her throat as her back bowed into an arch against the bed and every single muscle in her body clenched.

“You like that, don’t you, Red?” Hawk said in a throaty murmur. When she moaned her approval, he added a second finger to the first.

It had taken him all of ten seconds to get both of them undressed and on the bed, and her into a very compromising position that involved his hot, demanding mouth and fingers, and her spread legs.

“Please!” she gasped, writhing against his hand. “Don’t stop! Don’t stop!”

She was too close for him to stop. If he stopped now, she’d have to kill him.

He chuckled. “So bossy. If you want me to keep going, you have to tell me what you want, Red. I want to hear you say it.”

Her hips bucked as his fingers pressed deeper inside her. “Mouth—please—lick me—suck me—oh God!”

Her gasped plea ended as he lowered his head and took that most sensitive little nub of nerve endings into his mouth again, and sucked, hard. Then with both hands spread under her bottom, he lifted her up and ground his mouth against her. She came in an explosion that felt nuclear.

She sobbed his name, clenched her fingers into his hair, and came again.

Time spun away. The room faded out. All her awareness shrank to the space of a few inches, to his tongue and teeth and lips, the low, approving growl that rose in the back of his throat as her hips undulated uncontrollably in his hands.

Worth every goddamn penny!
she thought, delirious with pleasure.

Jack collapsed back against the mattress, twitching with aftershocks, her thighs trembling, dragging air into her lungs in deep, ragged gulps. Hawk looked up at her from between her spread thighs, sent her that beautiful, lazy, self-satisfied smile, and said, “I think someone needed that.”

Someone did. Someone
so
did.

Still panting, her limbs liquid and her body covered in a sheen of sweat, Jack laughed weakly and coaxed him up her body with her hands tugging on his broad shoulders. He crawled up the mattress to her until they were face to face and he was looking down at her in smug satisfaction like a big game hunter who’d just bagged an elephant.

She said, “Don’t get too cocky, yet, tiger. We’re just getting started.”

In a lightning-fast move she’d practiced a thousand times, over years of self-defense classes, Jack threw her weight to the side and pushed him over with her hands spread on his chest, using his size to her advantage to throw him off balance. He flopped back against the bed and bounced once. The look of shock on his face was absolutely priceless.

Straddling him, Jack tossed her hair to the side, leaned down, and kissed him.

His reaction was so strange.

First he dug his fingers into her hips. He inhaled sharply, leaned up into her, and kissed her back as if he were starving and she were a ten-course meal, but then broke away just as the kiss deepened in intensity. He stared at the bedside table as if he couldn’t bear to meet her eyes.

Jack turned his face to hers with a gentle finger on his jaw. They
stared at each other silently for a moment, and his gaze was wary, strangely conflicted. With a little twist of bittersweet recognition, Jack understood.

“It’s too personal,” she whispered. “Right?”

She’d shocked him again. She saw it in the sudden, unmistakable darkness in his eyes, in the way his entire body tensed beneath her.

An unexpected rush of tenderness filled the normally hollow space inside her chest. Tenderness for him and for humankind in general, for all the ways people had to compromise themselves to survive because life was such a cruel, cold bitch. What terrible circumstance would drive such a beautiful man—an obviously intelligent man—to sell himself like this? He could probably be a supermodel if he’d wanted to, but here he was, in bed with a total stranger for some undisclosed sum, whoring himself out for a buck.

Really, all jokes aside, how
sad
was that?

Jack abruptly felt dirty, and ashamed. She spread her hand over his cheek, seeing him in a totally new light. He wasn’t just a hot piece of man ass. He was a
person
.

A person she’d just used.

Hating that her sense of morality had chosen this particular moment to make an appearance, she muttered, “Well, shit.”

Jack swung her leg over and awkwardly climbed off him. She sat facing away from him on the edge of the bed, her arms wrapped around her waist, wanting nothing more than to take a shower, get dressed, and run out of this room, never to return.

Looking at the wall, she said, “It’s okay. I understand. In fact, we can just . . . this was great, but you don’t have to finish the whole . . . you know. We can stop now.”

Silence. His gaze on her back, tangible as touch. Then he said, “Wait—are you feeling
sorry
for me?”

Like she thought: smart. Or at least not totally dense.

But she didn’t have time to ponder that because she found herself flat on her back on the bed again with a furious Hawk staring down at her, both her wrists clamped in his hands and pressed down to the pillows, his body heavy and hard atop hers, pinning her down.

“Don’t you
dare
feel sorry for me!” he snarled, his voice and face filled with barely leashed fury.

Her stomach tightened with the simultaneous realizations that he was a lot bigger than her, he was dangerously angry, and this had the potential to get ugly, fast.

She glanced over at her snub-nosed revolver on the dresser near the door, where Hawk had tossed it with a laugh when he’d discovered it tucked into the waistband of her pants. He’d murmured an amused, “Annie Oakley, hmm?” and tore off the rest of her clothes, and she hadn’t bothered to think it might be wiser to keep it somewhere within reach—

“Forget about the damn gun, Red! I’m talking, and you’re gonna pay attention. If you still want to shoot me after I’ve said my piece, I won’t try and stop you.”

Despite the strangeness of that statement, it made her feel a little better. She bit her lower lip and stared up at him, waiting.

He spat, “I wasn’t some neglected child of alcoholics who grew into an adult with no self-esteem and a drug problem, or whatever other stupid idea you
assume
must be the reason I’m in this room with you right now. I know exactly what I’m doing—I always have and I always will. I only do something if I
want
to do it, and this is what I wanted, or it wouldn’t have happened. No matter what circumstances brought us together,
I’m. In. Control.
And I don’t want your pity! Do you understand me?”

Scary-beautiful. Her first impression of him had been exactly right. And he was definitely right about being in control, because at that moment it was impossible for her to move with his bulk pressing down against her and her hands bound by his.

That thought made her hyperaware of their nakedness, of all the tiny details of his body against hers. Her breasts crushed beneath the hard expanse of his chest, his heart pounding against hers, little tickles from the hairs on his legs, his strength, and the hardness of his body . . .

The hardness between his legs, throbbing hot against her thigh even as he glared bloody murder down at her.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. I’ve never done this before and I felt . . . I felt like it wasn’t fair to you. It seemed like . . . when you kissed me . . .” She moistened her lips, cursing the heat in her face and the hitch in her voice. “Like it upset you. I hated that, and I thought . . . I thought maybe—”

“I know exactly what you thought,” he interrupted, still angry but calmer, his tone more even than before. “But you’re forgetting something important.”

Jack swallowed, waiting for the proverbial hammer to drop.

A hint of a smile curved his lips. “I’m a guy. For a guy, this is pretty much the dream job. I get
paid
to do the thing I love most; it doesn’t get better than that.”

Relieved that he seemed mollified by her apology and appeared to be letting the moment pass, and simultaneously amused at his deadpan joke, Jack pressed the smile from her own lips and asked him seriously, “If this is a job, that means I’m your boss, at least for tonight . . . right?”

His brows quirked. He shifted his weight atop her, pressing his pelvis down with added pressure so that his erection dug deeper into her thigh.

In a voice more breathless than she would have liked, Jack said, “Well, I have a few
tasks
I’d like you to complete,” and squirmed beneath him.

“Oh no.” His small smile grew wider, his eyes grew dark. “You tore up your boss-lady card when you were attacked by a case of conscience. I’ll be calling the shots from here on out.”

Before she could scream or move or even breathe, Hawk had flipped them both over and was perched on the edge of the bed with her body spread over his bent knees and her behind in the air, as she stared down in shock at shag carpet the color of the inside of a rancid avocado.

He said, “You might want to find something to hold onto,” and slapped her on the ass so hard she couldn’t even scream.

The second blow remedied that.

She shrieked and bucked, desperate to get away from the stinging pain that kept raining down as he continued to spank her mercilessly, his forearm pressed against her back and his hand fisted in her hair so she was utterly helpless.

“The more you struggle, the longer this lasts. Your choice.”

It went far, far beyond sexy or playful; this was serious. This
hurt
. Her toes clenched into the carpet, she grabbed onto the edge of the nightstand and tried to drag herself away, but he was much too strong. Nothing worked. He spanked her again, and again, rhythmically, striking one side of her bottom, then the other, then down her thighs, then back to the starting point.

“Stop!” she gasped between cries of pain. “Please—Hawk—no—I don’t like this!”

“Stop struggling, then,” he calmly replied, and she knew with absolute certainty that that was the only way this was going to end. She stilled, squeezed her eyes shut, and bit back the sob that wanted to rise in her throat.

The moment she stopped moving, he stopped the torture and began to gently rub her behind, soothing her flaming flesh with feather-light strokes. “Good girl.”

Jack was abruptly furious.

“What the
fuck
!” she yelled, craning her neck over her shoulder to look at him.

“Another thing.” His other hand tightened even more in her hair so her head was immobilized. “You have a dirty mouth, and I don’t like it. If I hear one more curse out of you, you’ll get spanked again, but this time I won’t hold back. Understood?”

Hold back? He’d been
holding back
? Jesus Christ. But he was staring at her with hard eyes and a clenched jaw, awaiting an answer; because she couldn’t move her head to nod, she tried to communicate with her eyes that she hoped he rotted in hell while she said between gritted teeth, “Yes.”

He slid his palm across her burning behind and lightly stroked her between the legs. She jerked and gasped as he slid two fingers inside her.

“And don’t tell me you didn’t like that, little liar. You’re soaking wet.” His voice dropped as he pressed his fingers deeper and she unsuccessfully tried to smother a moan. “You wanted it dirty, remember?”

“Hawk—please—”

“On your knees, Red.” He deposited her on the floor directly in front of him so she was kneeling, staring directly into his spread legs and the enormous erection standing at attention between them.

Holy cow—the
size
—

He grasped her head between his hands and forced her to look up at him.

“You’re going to make it up to me for your little pity party,” he said, gazing at her hotly. His face was flushed, his eyes were bright with unmistakable lust. “Aren’t you?”

Staring up into his eyes, something inside her just melted.

Yes, she was still pissed about the spanking because she wasn’t into pain and this was her birthday dammit, but also, yes, she did want to make it up to him. She knew she’d insulted him, and she couldn’t exactly figure out why it should matter that she’d hurt this cocky gigolo’s feelings, but guessed it was just a little old-fashioned courtesy, a vestige from her mother’s long-ago teachings about manners and the right way to treat others.

Even if he was your paid whore.

Perhaps especially if he was your paid whore.

Holding his gaze, Jack nodded an emphatic
yes
.

He nodded back, gently stroked her hair off her face, and smiled at her with an oddly contented look in his eyes, as if she’d just made him very proud.

She didn’t pause long enough to examine why his approval should send such a wash of warmth through her veins. She just leaned forward, grasped the hard length of him in her hand, and slid the engorged head of his erection into her mouth.

When he moaned and his entire body was wracked by a violent shudder, Jack also didn’t bother to examine more closely the high, sweet thrill that sang through her, pure as sunshine. She just applied herself vigorously to making it up to him, and let the questions of ethics and manners and her own uncharacteristic, wanton reaction to this beautiful stranger fade from her mind.