Shane (The Mallick Brothers Book 1) Read online

  The thick material of both our jeans, though, was preventing any kind of completion, just building to the painful need for release. Shane’s hands left my breasts for a moment, but only because he was snagging the material of my shirt and yanking it upward and off me. There wasn’t even a hint of hesitation as his hands went around my back and released the clasps of my bra, baring me to him completely.

  “Fuck,” he said, shaking his head with a small smile. Then his hands went to my ribs and pulled me forward by them, his lips closing around one of my nipples, making my sex clench hard and a rush of wet to soak my panties. Then his teeth nipped into it, making my head fall back on a loud moan. I pushed my hips forward again, trying to ease the ache, and letting out a grumble that made Shane’s chest rumble as he chuckled. He moved across my chest for a moment, lavishing over the other nipple, before raising his head and watching me for a second with heavy eyes. “Had about enough?” he asked oddly, making my brows draw together before his hands moved over to the fly of my jeans, freeing the button and zip. “Ready to stop playing around?” he clarified just a second before his hand slipped inside my pants and panties, wasting no time with more teasing. Thank God, because I was pretty sure I would combust if he did. “Fucking soaked,” he groaned, sliding his finger up my pussy and finding my clit easily.

  “No, don’t,” I whimpered when his finger left my clit and slid lower.

  “Shh,” he demanded softly, his fingers stroking up my lips, all my nerve endings feeling more sensitive than they ever had before.

  “You said you were going to stop playing around,” I said, my hands digging so hard into his shoulders that I was sure there would be crescent-shaped bruises there from my nails for days.

  “No. I asked if you were ready to stop playing around,” he clarified. “I didn’t say I was. I’m enjoying the fuck out of this.”

  “You’re a…” I started, getting annoyed. But then two of his fingers slid inside me unexpectedly, pinching just the slightest bit from my dry spell. But his fingers crooked immediately, raking over my G-spot with expert precision. “Fuck,” I hissed, exhaling hard.

  “Now I’m done playing around,” he said, voice deep and full of promise.

  “About time,” I said, needing to have the last word.

  His fingers kept moving over my G-spot as his thumb moved up and started stroking side to side over my clit, making my pussy clench tight as my breathing got more ragged.

  Shane’s gaze rose to my face, watching me intently, his eyelids heavy. “You gonna come for me, baby?” he asked, moving his fingers faster as I buried my face in his neck, trying to suck in air through the tightness in my chest. “Tell me.”

  “I’m going to come for you,” I told him, feeling the pre-orgasm clenching.

  “Good girl,” he said, low, sexy.

  And just like that, I came.

  My orgasm slammed through me, an intense, deep, rapid pulsation of pleasure that had my voice catching as I cried out his name.

  “Oh my God,” I gasped as the orgasm subsided, one strong aftershock shaking my body almost violently as his fingers stopped moving. He kept them inside of me though, just a casual, familiar kind of intimacy I hadn’t expected from him.

  “You shaved,” he said a minute later, making me push up and look down at him.

  “Ah, yeah,” I said, inwardly cringing that he had ever felt me any other way.

  “Shame. It was cool to have something different. Most women wax that shit bare.”

  “Including this one,” I said with a small smile, telling him things he already knew seeing as his hand was still in my panties. “That was a fluke.”

  His fingers slid out of me, then slowly out of my panties, and finally out of my pants, landing on my thigh and giving it a squeeze as I dropped my hips down and became intimately aware of the fact that he was still as hard as a rock.

  He must have seen the realization in my eyes because he shrugged a little. “Don’t worry about…”

  “See, I’m not one of those women who gives as good as she gets,” I said, pausing for a bit of dramatic effect. “I give better,” I said with a smile as I slowly slid off his lap, going down on my knees in front of the couch. I looked up as my hands slid up his thighs, taking a certain thrill in the look of desire in his eyes.

  I wasn’t one of those women who only gave head begrudgingly. It wasn’t a special events and on my period pity thing. I genuinely enjoyed the power that came from knowing a man you loved, cared about, or just found irresistible was fully at your mercy, that their pleasure was owned by you.

  I liked that.

  I got off on that in a way.

  Besides, why the fuck even bother doing it if you didn’t give it your all, you know? I heard once that enthusiasm over technique made for the best head. It was something I put to test at a very tender age and found incredibly accurate. Over the years, my technique grew to match my enthusiasm so I had no doubts that Shane was about to get the blowjob of a lifetime. And I was more than a little eager to see what kind of reaction I would get from that.

  My hands found his button and zip, making short work of them, not even pausing before I reached inside his boxers and freed his cock.

  And, see, sometimes what you feel through layers of clothing, yeah, it doesn’t do the real deal justice. This was one of those instances. Shane’s cock, well, suited the rest of his oversized body. I closed my hand around him, maybe a little bit amazed when my fingers didn’t quite meet my thumb. See, I’d had a fairly active sex life and I’d seen a few shapes and sizes and lengths. I’d never had a cock that I couldn’t close my hand around.

  Maybe a bit turned on again, thighs clenching together to try to ease that ache, I stroked him to the base with my right hand and held him there, moving inward to trace my tongue over the head. I licked up the bead of precum and lubed up the head for a minute before closing my lips around him. I paused for the barest of seconds before pushing down, taking him fast and deep, choking hard once. I tucked my left thumb into my fist and squeezed hard, an old trick I learned from a girl in high school to suppress the gag reflex, and looked up at him. If there was even a tiny shred of reality to be found in porn, it was that guys liked to look at your face when their cock was down your throat.

  Crass? Sure.

  Dirty in all the right ways? Abso-fucking-lutely.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Lea,” he growled, looking down at me. His hand landed at the base of my skull, gathering all the hair there into a fist, watching me intensely as I started sucking him fast, unrelenting, not giving him a second to have his orgasm ebb.

  His ragged breathing, his hard exhales, his moments of holding his breath completely, and his occasional grunts spurred me on, letting me focus past the discomfort in my jaw and neck. “Lea, fuck, if you don’t want…” he started to warn.

  But I did want.

  So I moved faster, twisting my head as I sucked him until his fist pulled my hair hard enough for me to see white as he cursed out my name and I tasted his release flood my mouth.

  I released him a minute later, pulling his boxers back into place and moving up to straddle him again, feeling just a bit victorious.

  “Well you aren’t a liar.”

  “What?” I asked, confused.

  “You give better than you get. Fuck if you don’t give better than I’ve ever gotten.” I smiled, huffing onto my fingers then rubbing them against my shoulder, making him chuckle. “Why the fuck have you been fighting this so hard?”

  I sighed, sliding off his lap and taking my feet. I reached down and worked my zip and button back into place, fetched my bra and shirt, then slipped into them. “It’s complicated.”

  “Oh, fuck off with that. There’s nothing complicated about wanting someone.”

  Except when you have a track record of wanting the wrong kinds of guys who steal months or years of your life with their shit.

  The problem was, I didn’t trust myself anymore. I didn’t believe I had wha
t it took to make the right decision about who I should and shouldn’t avoid. I think when you’ve made the wrong decision more than a handful of times, it’s hard to believe you are even capable of making the right one, in telling the decent guys from the ones who will fuck you over.

  I was kind of at the point where I figured if I wanted someone, then that was all the proof I needed that he was bad for me.

  Such was my track record.

  I’d never liked a nice guy.

  I’d never fallen for someone who worshipped the ground I walked on.

  Hell, if they did that shit, I would probably forget they were all down there worshipping the ground and accidentally trample them.

  I would chew up and spit out a guy like that.

  To put up with my personality, I needed someone with some spirit, with a willingness to call me on my bullshit. And guys like that, well, they were usually your typical alpha male types: bikers, dealers, hired muscle, mob guys, gang members. Maybe you could throw in your occasional mechanic, construction worker, or ex-military guy too. I’d know. I had dated them all.

  “Lea…” Shane called and I caught myself staring at one of the shelves stacked with paper and toner, lost in my own thoughts.

  “What?” I asked, hearing a mix of tiredness and defeat in my tone. If I wasn’t mistaken, he picked up on it too.

  He watched me for a moment with those piercing blue eyes of his before nodding, standing, and zipping up. “Alright. I’ll drop it,” he said, brushing past me, his fingers touching my hip for the barest of seconds and it felt way too good for just a chaste contact, as he made his way to the door. “But I am holding you to Saturday night. I’d tell you to put on something sexy, but I think you could inspire a restaurant full of hard-ons by showing up in a fucking sack. So wear whatever. I’ll pick you up at eight.”

  With that, he walked out, closing the door behind him.

  I took a moment to pull myself together, to try to stop my mind from charging off in a thousand different directions at once. I gave it a good couple of minutes to let Shane leave the building before I walked back out to my desk, sitting down, and putting the phone back on the cradle. We had been in the back for almost an hour. Shane was going to have a hefty bill on his credit statement at the end of the month.

  I brought my hands up, resting my face in them for a long moment, trying not to think about the date that weekend.

  Tried.

  Failed completely.

  I wasn’t even sure the last time I had a real date. That just never seemed to be the way it went for me. Most of the time, I met a guy through someone or at a bar or whatever. If there was a strong enough connection, we just immediately started seeing each other. There was never any drawn out anxiety about the upcoming first date. I never had to worry if my dresses were fancy enough. I didn’t have a churning feeling inside, wondering what the hell we would have to talk about for hours over the course of a meal.

  Especially because there wasn’t much I could talk about. My past, pretty much from birth until a couple weeks before I started at Fee’s place, was pretty much off-limits.

  Maybe it was good that I had some time to freak out. That gave me the chance to come up with ways to tell the partial truth in a clever enough way that it wouldn’t come across as part false.

  It wasn’t exactly a great way to approach a date, but it was the only option I had.

  My past had to stay in my past.

  If I tried to let even the story of it leak into my present, yeah, I figured it would come charging back in and would no longer be my past anymore.

  That, well, it wasn’t an option.

  Because if I lived through that happening, I would live to regret it.

  Living, that is.

  I’d be made to be really, really sorry that I still had breath in my lungs.

  There wasn’t even a question about that.

  So I had just under three days to figure out how to become a really good liar.

  EIGHT

  Lea

  Saturday morning meant waking up tired because I didn’t sleep well, then drowning the tiredness in enough coffee to make a college kid cramming for finals cringe. Then I fumbled around my apartment unsure what I was supposed to do with the whole of my day. Normally, I’d just veg out for a while then run errands. But, nerves like a live wire inside, I didn’t feel up to going in and out of stores. Instead, I took every last item of clothing out of my closet and hemmed and hawed exactly how dressed up I was supposed to get for the date.

  It was around three when I heard a knock at my door, immediately making my heart fly into my throat until I reminded myself that none of the ghosts from my past would knock gently; they would tear down the fucking door.

  I moved through my apartment a little tentatively, sure it was one of two people. One, Barney. But he usually announced himself when he knocked. Or, possibly, it was Shane. And I had an irrational surge of insecurity and indignation at that. He wasn’t supposed to show up when I still had half-up, half-down hair and yesterday’s smudged eyeliner that didn’t want to come off thanks to way too much setting spray. He was supposed to see me all dolled up at five to eight and not a freaking minute before then.

  “My arms are breaking out here!” Fee’s voice called through the door, making me jerk back, a slow and confused smile toying at my lips.

  “Fiona?” I asked, slipping the locks and pulling open the door.

  And, sure enough, there she was. Her arms were breaking because I was pretty sure she had the entirety of her wardrobe in her hands along with a giant rolling suitcase on the floor beside her. “So I heard that you have a date tonight,” she said with a sly smile.

  “Word travels fast in this town,” I said, reaching for the rolling bag as she moved into my apartment.

  “In this family,” she corrected. “I didn’t, however, get the details. Hunter said it was none of my business. But, well, when does any self-respecting woman ever settle for an answer like that?” she asked, dumping all of the clothes on the pile I already had on my bed. “The problem is, the Mallick men are stubborn and stick together in shit like this so I left Hunt with the girls and came to the source.”

  “You don’t watch the cameras at work at all, do you?”

  She turned back to me from where she had been making a beeline for my fridge. “The cameras?”

  “Yeah, I figured you would have been all over it when you saw Shane show up a couple nights ago.”

  To that, her smile went a little wicked as she pushed her long beach-wavy blonde hair behind her shoulders. “Shane came to work? Did you guys do it on the desk or something?”

  I snorted. “Um, no. We went somewhere without cameras.”

  “Come on. Details,” she demanded, going back to my fridge. “How old is this Chinese?” she asked, reaching for the containers.

  “Last night.”

  “Perfect. You can’t have a girls day without shitty food. I mean, that’s what I hear anyway. I haven’t had any girl friends before.”

  “I know the feeling,” I agreed. I had a few casual female acquaintances, but my friends were generally of the masculine variety.

  “I think girls like us have a hard time with friendships in general. But it’s even harder with women. We’re…”

  “Prickly?” I supplied, making her head jerk to face me, lips parted a little, brows drawn together.

  “Did Shane tell you about that?”

  “About what?”

  “About the prickly thing with me and Hunter.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head, having no clue what she was referring to.

  “Oh,” she said, her smile slow and almost a little blinding. It was a smile of a woman who had known darkness and found her way to the light. Women like that, they smiled like the sun. One day, I hoped to smile that way too. “Then it’s even more awesome that you used that word,” she said, ripping the metal handles off the to-go cartons and sticking them all in the microwave together. “So. Wh
at are you wearing tonight?”

  “I hadn’t really gotten that far yet.”

  “Good. I figured as much. See, the thing is, I like clothes. And I really like going-out clothes. With three little kids, I don’t get out much anymore. I think it makes all my old going-out clothes sad. So I figured I would bring them over here and you could show them a night out on the town.”

  I smiled at that, not quite sure what ‘going-out’ clothes meant to Fee because she was standing in my kitchen in a tight red snakeskin miniskirt, a black tank top that was wrapped around her chest and stomach like a bandage, and black stiletto sandals that had to have been at least five inches. I had never seen the woman looking anything less than like she stepped out of a fashion magazine. “I think your clothes might be a little tight and short on me,” I confessed. Though we were somewhat similar in the hip, boob, and ass department, I was taller and just a smidge wider.

  “Even better,” she declared as the microwave beeped. “So,” she started, back to me as she looked around in my cabinets for plates which she found and started heaping food onto. “What happened in the place with no cameras? Do I need to have anything professionally cleaned?”

  I snorted at that, shaking my head. “We haven’t had sex.”

  “Yet.”

  Yeah, well, I couldn’t argue with that. The way things were going, I was pretty sure Shane and I were going to do it eventually. Hell, maybe sometime during our date.

  “Yet,” I agreed, taking my plate and following Fee who had, in just five minutes, seemed to make herself completely at home in my apartment. She pushed some clothes out of the way and sat up at the top of my bed, legs cocked to the side so she could balance her plate on them, and looking around.

  “It’s not as bad as I thought it would be from the outside,” she said, gesturing with her fork. “I know Shane says he has reasons to keep it all crackhead-chic but I don’t think it would kill him to slap a coat of pain on the insides at least.” She turned to me then, green eyes a little more intense. “You don’t really live here, do you?”