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Authors: Mimi Harper

Tags: #Itzy, #Kickass.to

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BOOK: The Damaged One
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Chapter
Six

 

 

Augustus escaped—finally—when Dou
g’s wife came over and asked Doug to help her out in the kitchen. Augustus gave the woman a grateful smile. She smiled back, her eyes lingering for a second as she and Doug walked away. Augustus bit his lip, mildly ashamed of the thoughts that ran through his mind, before he took their lead and made his way out of the crowded party.

Cool air took his breath the moment he stepped outside. Cool for April. He walked briskly to where his rental car was parked on the street.
It was a quiet neighborhood, the kind Augustus remembered from his one trip to the suburbs as a kid. His grandparents used to live just five blocks to the east. He wondered if they were still there, if they knew what had happened to their daughter, their grandchildren.

He doubted it. He doubted they even cared.

Augustus pushed the button on his rental’s remote to unlock the door. As he stepped off the curb, he caught sight of her leaning against a car across the street. There was some hesitation in the simple wave she tossed in his direction when she saw him there.

“Miss Distraction,” he said as he crossed to her. “Thought you were hot to get out of here.”

“I was. But my friends had other plans.”

“That’s a pity.”

Color rose to her cheeks again as he studied her face.

“Do you need a ride?” he asked, images of her wrapped in the white sheets of his hotel room bed flashing through his mind.

She hesitated again, her gaze moving down the street behind her. “I called a taxi.”

Augustus’s car beeped, letting him know he had waited too long to open the doors. He gestured toward it. “I’m right here. I could get you home before the taxi even shows up.”

She smiled. It was an amazing smile. He studied her face, again taken by the easy beauty in her features. She was so unlike most of the women Augustus had known in his life. She was beautiful, but it was like she had no clue. She didn’t toss her curls to make them frame her face in a more alluring style. She didn’t tilt her head to make sure the meager light fell perfectly over it. She didn’t even wear makeup, he realized, to enhance the perfection of her face and hide the flaws.

She had no idea just how beautiful she was.

And it made something he had thought was long dead ache deep in his soul.

“I don’t even know your name,” he said on a sigh.

A funny confusion came into her eyes. She studied his face, as though searching for something that should have been there, but wasn’t. Her lips parted softly, as though she had something she needed to say, but then she bit her bottom lip and looked away, something like sadness bowing the edges of her shoulders.

“I, uh,” she started to say. But then some guy came bounding out of the house, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt that would have been more appropriate in a high school class, yelling something. It sounded like Toni.

“You know him?” Augustus asked.

She grabbed Augustus’s arm. “You still want to give me a ride?”

She practically dragged him across the street, yanking open the door to his rental like an anxious mother yanking open the cell door that imprisoned her child. Augustus looked back at the young man who was running toward them now. “Wait,” the guy yelled, gesturing at Augustus with an intense urgency.

“Let’s go,” the beautiful woman said beside him.

Augustus glanced between the two before finally climbing into the car and quickly popping it into gear. He had learned a long time ago it was better to please a lady than to satisfy his own curiosity.

Chapter Seven

 

 

“Ex-boyfriend?”

She stared out the windshield, a muscle in her jaw flexing. “Something like that,” she said.

Augustus slowed for a stop sign. “So, which way?”

Toni, or whatever her name was, glanced at him, her muscles relaxing somewhat. “Sorry,” she said. “Thank you for getting me out of there.”

“No problem.”

She leaned back into her seat. “You can just drop me off up here if you want,” she said, gesturing toward a strip mall.

“I’ll take you home.”

She studied his profile as he eased the car through the intersection. “You are determined, aren’t you?”

He glanced at her. “I’m trying to be a gentleman. Since I don’t do it often,” he said with a grin, “you should take advantage.”

“Okay.” She gestured toward a sign for an upcoming highway on-ramp. “Follow that to Katy. I live just off the first exit.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Augustus tried not to look at her as he used his mirrors to check the road behind him. He switched lanes, his hands tight on the wheel. He needed to concentrate, but it was growing increasingly impossible. He could smell her. A soft, floral scent that grew stronger each time she moved. It made his cock strain against his slacks.

“So how do you know Doug
?” she asked.

“His ad company did some work for my software company. Helped with a campaign to launch a new app.”

He felt her eyes on him, but still he couldn’t trust himself to look at her. He gripped the steering wheel tighter as he merged onto the highway and urged the car to reach the appropriate speed. It always calmed him, controlling a machine traveling at seventy miles an hour. Power. Control. All things he had never had enough of.

“Pierce-Martin?”

Augustus did glance at her then, surprised to hear the name of his company on her lips. “How did you know?”

“You guys are the ones with that app that allows users to edit video as its filming. Genius.”

Augustus inclined his head slightly. “We thought so, too.”

She ran her hands over her thighs, the movement caught in Augustus’s peripheral vision. He watched, again that strain pushing at his slacks. He bit his lip as he forced his eyes back to the road ahead of him.

“You work at Magick?”

She nodded. “Yeah, for a little over six months now. I actually consulted a little on your campaign. But most of it was done by the time I got there.”

She slid her hands over her thighs again. A nervous movement. What Augustus wouldn’t give to place his own hands on that soft, silky skin. He bit his lip, trying to concentrate on the traffic, the curves of the road. What was it about her, what was it that drew him in so completely from the first words? Yeah, he found most women attractive, but his need, his arousal usually came later, with a few touches, a few kisses. Never before he had done more than simply touch her arm.

“What do you do at Magick?”

“I’m a creative director. Mostly just sit in an office and draw pictures.”

“Don’t discount talent. I couldn’t draw a stick figure if my life depended on it.”

She laughed, a sound that was like the tinkle of church bells. Augustus glanced at her again. Beautiful.

A few, quiet moments passed. It should have been awkward, but somehow it wasn’t. Then she was pointing to the appropriate exit. As Augustus followed the direction of her pointing finger, he frowned. “There’s nothing but warehouses out here.”

“Yeah,” she said, as though it wasn’t unusual.

“You live here?”

She gestured at a smaller warehouse tucked between an oil field trucking outfit and an empty field. “There.”

“I know it’s unusual,” she said as they climbed out of the car. “But I needed a place with a lot of space and this just seemed to fit the bill.”

She pulled open a large sliding door cut into the side of the building, smiling down at him from her perch on concrete ramp. “Come see.”

It was an invitation he wasn’t about to pass up. Augustus climbed the ramp, shaking his head at the small flower bed just beginning to bloom between the ramp and the long concrete pad that had once served the trucks that made their deliveries here. A warehouse. He couldn’t imagine anything less like home.

But that was before he stepped through that door.

Someone had gone to a great deal of expense to make the place
livable. The floor was covered in laminate wood planks that shone in the dim light of night coming through the high windows. There was a thick brick wall that separated the space into two. On one side was a working artist’s studio with dozens of easels set around a work station that featured heavy oak cupboards and a double sink. The other side boasted a huge gourmet kitchen with appliances Augustus didn’t even recognize, a large living room, and an inviting bed tucked into the back. The furniture was contemporary, expensive microfiber and leather. A television hung from the wall that was three times bigger than the one in Dave’s gaming room back in L.A. book, magazines, even what looked like a cashmere afghan, were scattered around the living room. It was comfortable, the kind of place Augustus could imagine warm family scenes unfolding in.

It made him nervous.

The owner of this amazing apartment, or whatever it was, had crossed the room and was leaning back against the long counter that partitioned the front edge of the kitchen from the rest of the room. “It’s something, isn’t it?”

“Did you do all this?”

She shrugged. “My stepdad’s an architect. He helped.”

Augustus nodded, his eyes still taking in the simple décor, the recessed lighting, the mixture of oil paint and floral perfume that seemed just right. And then his eyes fell on her and it was like everything else just fell away.

He crossed the room and took her wrists in his hands, locking them back against the edge of the counter. She looked up at him, her eyes round with emotion. He thought he saw fear, and that made him hesitate for a moment. But then she bit her bottom lip, the pink tip of her tongue barely visible as she licked it. A desire to taste what she was tasting overwhelmed him.

Damn…he wanted her.

Chapter
Eight

 

 

“You don’t do this, do you?” he asked, pulling her lip from her teeth with his index finger.

“I told you, I’m not a one night stand kind of girl.”

“And what kind of girl are you?”

She bit her lip again. He pulled it away again. He cupped her chin in his hand, forcing her to keep her eyes on his even as she tried to study her toes instead.

“What do you want from me?”
she asked in lieu of an answer.

He shook his head slightly. “What does any man want from a beautiful woman?”

She raised her hands, letting them float between them for a moment before she pressed them against his chest. He thought for a second that she intended to push him away. Instead, she moved closer to him and pressed her lips lightly, awkwardly, against his.

Augustus slid his hand around her jaw and into her hair. He pulled her closer as he pressed his tongue against her lips to encourage her to open to him. She responded immediately, opening with a sweet sigh that bathed him in her
breath. He rushed inside of her, his tongue tasting, touching, everything she was willing to offer. It was like silk, the feel of her palate against the tip of his tongue, the inside of her cheeks, the edges of her perfect teeth.

She tasted him, too. He could feel her tongue straining, reaching around him to caress the corner of his mouth, the underside of his probing flesh. She sighed, her hand sliding up his chest to stroke the heated skin of his throat. Waves of pleasure chased themselves down his spine at the feel of her, the taste of her.
Honey. That was what it was like. Burying his tongue in a jar of honey. Only the taste was different, hotter, like a tangy curry sauce.

His one hand slid deeper into her hair, tugging her mouth as close to him as physics would allow. He pushed his other hand down her side, over one of those amazing hips. She took that final step that placed her within a hair’s
breadth of his body. At the same time, he moved forward, pressing her back into the edge of the kitchen counter. There wasn’t an inch of her body that wasn’t against his, a breath she took that he didn’t feel, didn’t taste.

Following his lead, she slipped one hand into the hair at the nape of his neck. The other hand she boldly lay on his ass, pressing hard to keep his hips tight against her smaller, seductively rounded, belly. He grunted against her lips as he rolled his hips, pressing his much too heavily clothed cock against her. He twisted slightly, finding the firmness of her hip bone a perfect resistance to take just a fraction of the need from his aching body.

“Oh, hell,” he whispered as he released her mouth and dragged his lips over her jaw. He drew just the tip of her ear into his mouth, nibbling at the tender cartilage until she grunted against the front of his shirt.

“Do you like that?”

A blush darkened the exposed skin along the back of her neck. Augustus couldn’t help the soft chuckle that slipped from his lips as he ran his tongue down, tasting her skin from the top bump of her spine to the tiny hallow at the base of her throat.

Her hands caressed the skin over his cheeks, pulling his head tighter against her throat for a brief moment before she pushed him back. She captured his lips, plunging her own tongue inside his mouth so quickly he nearly bit the gentle muscle. Instead, he pulled it deeper inside of him, sucking it like the most delicious candy he had ever had.

“Where did you learn to do that?” she asked when he released her.

“You don’t want to know,” he said as he pushed a lock of hair from her face.

Her eyes dropped. She pressed her forehead to his chest. Her breathing was irregular, a soft whistle that made his heart jump with the need he could feel behind it. He ran his hands over her back, pulling her close again. She was his, ready and willing. He had enough experience that he could read that with his eyes closed and his hands tied behind his back.

And he intended to have her.

But just as he lifted her face with a fist under her chin, he saw something. He had seen it before, but it hadn’t registered. Or, maybe, he simply had not wanted it to register.

A stack of mail sat on the counter just a few inches from her seductive hip. A large manila envelope with
a label that was big enough to read from the moon. Toby Voss, it said.

Toby Voss.

Not Toni.

It was like ice water rushing through his veins.

“I should go.”

“But…” She looked up, confusion in her eyes. “I thought this was what you wanted.”

“So did I,” he said.

Augustus stepped backward, nearly tripping over
his own feet in his haste to move beyond touching distance. She watched, the confusion only increasing.

She whispered his name and something else, something he couldn’t hear. But he was sure it was so
mething he didn’t want to hear.

He ran from the room like prey running from its predator.

BOOK: The Damaged One
8.67Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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