Wild Hyacinthe (Crimson Romance) (12 page)

“Hi yourself,” I said, striding over to the dumbbell rack and grabbing a ten-pounder in each hand. I spent a lot of time working out in my room at home before I abandoned my crazy-ass mother, since it kept my frustration with the horrid circumstances at bay and distracted me from thinking about boys. I couldn’t afford gyms or personal training, nor could I keep exercise equipment in the house with my mother’s tendency to destroy things at random, so I resorted to pushups, crunches and running most often.

But I wanted to impress Asher with my strength, since it was the only thing I had to compare to him in any way: my physical fitness. I carried the ten-pound dumbbells to the center of the room, planted my feet shoulder-width apart facing him and started to mirror his curls.

His eyebrows shot up, impressed. Relief and pride surged through me as the burn in my arms started, and the exertion helped soothe some of the fiery need in my core as his presence turned me on with crushing force.

We pumped iron like that for a while, his eyes wandering down my cleavage, to the bottom of my sports bra and exposed abdomen as I started to sweat. He checked me out slowly, as if taking in every detail, and I did the same: admiring the cuts of his abs, and the lines of lean muscle that rippled in his shoulders with each motion. Even his legs were solid muscle like the most impossible body-builders, but on Asher’s frame the muscle fit naturally. He wasn’t
too
ripped, but he was ripped. Not too huge for his body, but huge enough to dwarf my figure. And working out with him, the taste of his energy in the air, burned off some of the irresistible need to pounce him and beg him to take me.

I didn’t want to be desperate. I wanted to be sexy for him. And I wanted to be relaxed with him, like we were on his couch. Hell, I just wanted to be with him in any way I could. My whole world was flipping upside down, my goals switching direction at a rate so fast I could hardly keep up, and everything pointed to Asher.

He finally hummed, satisfied, and returned his dumbbells to their place on the rack. I took the opportunity to slide in front of him and put mine away first, brushing my ass against him and delighting in the cool sweat of his abs along the back of my arm. He stopped as I did, his breath catching, and he reached around me to put one of his dumbbells away. He let his hands fall to rest on my hips.

I sighed with pleasure, and it was over too soon as he straightened and motioned with his finger in a circle around the room. “Cardio. Let’s go.”

His bossy tone was playful, and I broke into a sprint so fast he had to catch up with me, and soon we were jogging beside each other at the same pace. I shamelessly checked him out every few seconds as we ran, and he did the same. I smirked at him when our gazes met, and his eyes were serious, dark, and eager.
Yes.

When we were both sweating from head to toe, he led me to the punching bag and jabbed it once, hard, to demonstrate. “Hit it,” he said.

I grabbed his hand on the retrieval of the punch. “What happened?” I demanded, running my fingertips over the bloodied white tape around his knuckles.

He let me hold his hand and clasped my fingers as I did, wincing. “I’m a kickboxer. I punch things. Sometimes, I bleed.”

I shook my head with disapproval that he’d hurt himself in any way, marring his perfection, and kissed each of his knuckles through the tape. “You sure have a violent side, Asher.”

“I prefer the term ‘aggressive.’”

His cocky attitude pressed away my worry, refueling my desire. “Aggressive is hot.”

“And you’re supposed to be hitting a bag right now.”

No way. It was the perfect opportunity to pick his brain for all these juicy details—the way he viewed himself, how he ended up personal training when he had the money to spend every day in a new country, if he wanted. “Do you fight in a ring?”

“No, I just train and body-build. Muay Thai and Capoeira are my favorite martial arts, but I pump iron and cross-train with a few sports here and there, too.” He chuckled. “They asked me to coach the U of M Duluth campus football once, but I’m not much for instructing teams, so I suited up and knocked the players down a bunch of times to toughen them up instead.”

Asher the juggernaut. I giggled. “Do you take steroids?”

He stammered with surprise at the boldness of my question.
Filter, Aria!

“Do I—no, I don’t take steroids, but I’m flattered that you would think so. This guy,” he thumbed himself, “is 100% superior Chain genetics.”

I grinned at his feigned arrogance and grabbed his forearm, running my thumb up and down the ripples of muscle there. “What’s this muscle called?”

“Brachioradialis,” he said without missing a beat. He made a fist and the flesh hardened under my grip, and it was all I could do to hide a sigh of delight. “That’s a mouthful,” I said, pressing and releasing one of his prominent veins as he flexed.

“The most useful muscles always are.”

I laughed. “Your biceps are ridiculous, Asher. You really don’t take steroids?”

“No, none. I eat a lot of red meat and potatoes and exercise for hours every day.”

“I suppose you have time to do that, with all the money.”

He shrugged and glanced away. Oh, no. I shouldn’t have said it. I remembered how isolated he must feel by the wealth and shook my head.

“To get to this size by your age, I just can’t imagine it. You must work out really hard.” I wrapped both my hands around his bicep as he flexed into my grip once more. Damn. I wanted to touch more of him, and as a grin pulled on the corners of his lips, I decided to keep admiring him and get that playful mood of his back into high-gear. I couldn’t touch my fingertips to each other with my hands around his arm; there were easily five inches of space between them. Holy hell!

Asher watched me stare in awe. “I suppose I have gotten bigger, lately. Gypsy noticed a dramatic increase in my size when I hit seventeen. I guess I’m just a testosterone machine.”

I drew a deep breath at the mention of testosterone, and squeezed him tighter. “I’d like to bite this sometime.”

He lifted an eyebrow with excitement. “So bite it.”

“No, not here. I’d like to bite it while you’re braced on your elbows above me, in your bed.”

He groaned and closed his eyes, and I delighted inside at the way I could make him picture it. I ran my hands up to his neck and stroked the muscle on either side above his collarbones. The bulges filled my palms.

“Trapezius,” he said, his voice low as I moved my thumbs in circles, massaging.

I knew what it was, but I loved the way he said it, told me the parts of himself I couldn’t help but touch. “I’d like to see how pumped this gets when you’re fucking.” Did I say that? I mentally high-fived myself for my fearless advances. This one-eighty I’d made with my courage blew even me away, and I wondered what Asher might be thinking as I gave in to impulse and abandoned my restraint.

He swallowed hard, his heart pounding between us. I trailed my hands down his pectorals and pressed my cheek to his chest, feeling his heartbeat, his sweat cool on my heated face.

Asher wrapped his arms around me and imprisoned me there against his heart, and the moment felt icy and sweet, somehow forbidden yet impossible to resist. He rested his chin on top of my head and inhaled deeply, and I felt him harden as I pressed closer. I turned my face and kissed his chest, letting my tongue slip out to taste him.

He let me go, then, and stepped away. “You’re supposed to be hitting a bag right now.”

I ignored him and walked around to his back, checking him out, stroking his incredible skin. “I’d like to scratch you back here sometime,” I said, letting my fingernails just barely bite into his flesh. “But you might sweat too much when we fuck. So I’d just hold on tight for the ride, I suppose.” Something powerful quivered in my voice, and as I spoke the fantasy aloud, I realized how badly I needed it, and how soon I’d snap if I didn’t get it. Sex with Asher. Good God, this desire was powerful . . . more powerful than I’d realized desire could be.

He groaned again, so I slipped my hands around his waist and traced his lowest ab cuts that dipped into his shorts with my thumbs. “These must be the fuck muscles,” I whispered, though I knew I should stop. I couldn’t resist, and it was as though my voice wasn’t under my command anymore. It was commanded by something too strong inside me, burning from somewhere between my most intimate wants and the needs of my soul. “I want these hips slamming against me, Asher. I want you between my legs.”

He spun around and snatched my chin with his fingers. His jaw tensed as he stared into my eyes, and I almost couldn’t function . . . his gaze was so dark. And then he kissed me long and hard, crushing my lips and then softening as I parted to slide my tongue along his lower lip. He tasted and tempted me, entering and departing me, and released me too soon. I moaned with emptiness.

“Hit the bag, Aria,” he ordered, and I knew I shouldn’t argue. His voice was heavy, loaded with insistence. I was pushing his boundaries, and though he wasn’t budging yet, I could see in his eyes—and shorts—that my boldness turned him on.

I threw a lame punch into the leather and then reached for him again.

“No, no!” He put his hands up. “I’m a professional trainer. I don’t make out with clients.”

“So you just help them get off at breakfast?”

“I’ve only done that once,” he said, shaking a teasing finger at me. “And you’re not my client outside of the gym.”

My eyebrows shot up. “Asher Chain, that’s terrible logic!”

He circled around the bag to get some space between us. “I didn’t inherit any logic from my parents. Gypsy got all that. I got the temper and the lust.”

“Oh good,” I said. “I seem to lack logic lately, too.”

He growled playfully at me through clenched teeth. “Hit the damn bag, Aria.”

I punched it with a force that wouldn’t maim a butterfly.

“Come on!” He wound up and planted a solid jab into the bag, knocking it off balance. I stared as it returned to its original position. “Get mad at it.”

“You don’t make me mad. You make me feel alive.”

His gaze softened a bit, and my heart swelled at how true my own words were.

“That was hot, though,” I continued. “Can I see that again?”

Asher rolled his eyes and planted ten solid strikes into the middle of the bag, huffing with controlled, practiced breath and retrieving his fists by his face every punch.

I stuck my thumb through the waistband of my workout shorts, dragging them down. His eyes followed. “Clearly, you’re the angry one here.”

“I’m easily angered when I want something at an inconvenient time. I’m an instant-gratification kind of guy.”

“Most rich men are, from what I’ve read. But aren’t you into waiting these days?” I batted my eyelashes with feigned innocence.

“Holy shit, Aria, quit being so cute! You’re distracting the hell out of me.”

“Am I?”

“Hit the fucking bag. Get mad at it. Something has to make you mad.”

Maybe I was pushing him too far. He wanted to work out, and I should respect that. It was his passion. But how could I hit when I was feeling so enamored by this flawless, confusing man?

What made me mad? Sounds echoed in my memory—my mother’s voice, her cries, her screams. The other noises that followed, noises that meant I was responsible for things far too big for my heart to handle. Noises that meant I’d face the worst kind of heartbreak simply because she didn’t care at all about any of us, as long as I was useful to her.

Asher didn’t need to know those things. How could I tell him that some people were simply vile human beings? And that I came from one of them?

“Kittens.”

He blinked. “What?”

“Kittens piss me off.” Oh, crap, what a lie. I hoped he wouldn’t ask for an explanation.

“Kittens,” Asher repeated.

I nodded, digging deep inside myself to summon some amount of truth within the lie. “They’re so fucking cocky. You prioritize them, you care for them, and then they’re all, ‘clean up my feces and I’ll pretend to catch mice for you, but really I’ll just lie around meowing and wrecking shit.’”

His eyebrows drew together as he listened to my rant.
Probably questioning my sanity.

“You don’t think little, fuzzy, ragdoll kittens are cute?”

He was goading me, or perhaps trying to search for the truth in such an obvious lie, and I took the bait. “Hell no! They’re not even pretty. You’d think they would be, by the name, but they look like they got hit in the face with a shovel. Cute things are never all they’re cracked up to be.”
Yet you miss them when they’re gone, so bad it’s like your heart is falling apart,
I didn’t add.

“Why do kittens make you mad?”

I flexed my hands at my sides, vibrating with restraint. I hated my own dishonesty, but Asher couldn’t know the true things that tortured me inside, the emotions I tried to leave behind at home. It was all too ugly. “You think it’s going to want to cuddle. But then it cries all night long and won’t eat the food you buy it and barfs on your favorite shirt and as soon as you manage to doze off, you’re up again because it’s digging into something it shouldn’t or sticking something dangerous in its mouth.”

Asher’s eyes darted back and forth between mine, and I wondered if he was hearing more meaning than I meant to show him. Crap. I had to spin this story back on a believable track. I’d rather he think I was mentally unstable than know the monster of a past I was trying so hard to abandon.

“You know what the kittens do eventually? Just to piss us off?”

He planted his hands on his hips and let an adoring smile touch his mouth. “What do the kittens do to piss us off?”

“They bury their shit with their paws and walk on your fucking pillow. What kind of friend, feline or human, does that? Even dogs have the sense to keep their paws out of their shit and off your pillow. And then you see the dirty little kitten footprints trailing all the way from the litter box to your bed and you know, Asher, you
know
there are microscopic little particles of cute-kitten shit on your pillow. All over
everything
, too, because they dig like gross little freaks in their pissy litter boxes, kicking up all the dust. How cute would you find me if I shit on your pillow? Or wiped my ass with it? Would that be fucking cute?” My heart pounded as I ranted, as smells and loneliness and frustration wafted back to me through memory of a childhood that was overwhelmed by sorrow and responsibility.