Two Cuts Darker Read online

  He bit harder, testing her pain tolerance, and only let up when she finally released a low moan. He hadn’t broken the skin, but she’d likely have some bruises. “Especially my own.”

  “Good to know.” She squeezed his thigh with her other hand, deliberately pricking her nails into his skin. “I’m not squeamish.”

  “Harder,” he growled against her neck.

  Her nails dug into his thigh, a delicious pain in contrast to her grip on his dick. Pressure spiraled higher inside him, locked behind a towering dam. Every muscle ached. He wanted to sling her up on the bed and thrust into her, but he’d gone down this road before. Either she’d end up terrified and crying, or he’d end up humiliated when he couldn’t get off, or worse, he’d unload in seconds because she dared to give him closer to what he needed than any woman he’d ever met.

  Her nails pierced his skin and every nerve ending in his body lit up. Blood. His scalp tingled and tiny hairs rose up all over his body as if he’d stuck his finger in a light socket. Surging up out of the chair, he shoved her back against the edge of the bed and jammed his dick into her mouth. Too hard, too much, and his brain screamed at him to slow down, but all his circuits were blown. He braced on one hand on the mattress, trapping her beneath him against the bed. He didn’t thrust, he couldn’t. He was too deep down her throat. She clawed at his thighs, giving him more blood and the dam inside him burst loose.

  He let out a roar, shaking with each spurt of release. His knees gave out and he fell across the bed. At least he was off her now. She could run for help. Or shoot him. Yeah, that sounded better. She ought to just shoot him and be done.

  Breathing hard, she flopped down beside him and wiped her mouth. “See?”

  He blinked at her stupidly, trying to get his brain to work. So much blood had flooded south that he probably had permanent brain damage.

  She laughed and gave his face a sharp pat on the cheek that jarred his teeth together. “I like you dangerous. The rougher the better. But next time, I’m going to bloody you even more. See how far I can push you.”

  His cock twitched, already more than interested in taking her up on that offer. His eyes widened and she laughed again.

  “I guess you won’t need long to recuperate.”

  “You don’t know how rare this is. Sex doesn’t typically come easy for me. Pun intended.”

  Her husky laughter vibrated up and down his spine. “Me neither. Which is why we’ll be great together.”

  He mustered enough strength to sit up and scoot back against the pillows. She sat up too, still fully clothed but with swollen, puffy lips and tousled hair that screamed sex. “I’ve never been able to come without bleeding, but blood drives me so out of control that sex has always ended badly.”

  “I like a man out of control and dangerous. I like to feel like I’m really in danger, and I like the sex to be rough. The problem usually is that I fight back too hard and scare the guy off before we get very far. When I was at Quantico, I used to go to the bad part of town and pick up the roughest, meanest-looking guy I could find. I’d deliberately get myself into trouble and then start to resist. I know that wasn’t the nicest behavior on my part, but I justified it by telling myself those kinds of men were would-be rapists anyway. I was teaching them a lesson, maybe saving another woman who couldn’t fight back. But it never worked out for obvious reasons. I don’t want to be attacked, even though I like the adrenaline and fear. I want to know safe too. I know, that doesn’t make sense.”

  The thought of her being sexually assaulted made his stomach twist. There were way too many assholes in the world to play that game. “I used to do the same thing, only not for sex, exactly. Just a release of the tension that builds inside me. If I don’t do something, it’ll tear me apart. That’s why I left home so early and joined the military. I had to get away before I seriously hurt someone I cared about.”

  “That’s why you’re such a good killer.”

  He grimaced but nodded. “Yeah. I take that tension, the need for danger and pain and blood, and use it for something good. Well, if you trust our government to make good decisions and send us after the truly bad guys, then yeah, I’m doing good.”

  She laughed wryly. “Governments fuck up way more than the average person ever will. How did you find out? About the blood, I mean.”

  He rolled his left forearm over on his stomach. Thin white scars laddered up and down his inner wrist beneath the ink. He could barely see hints of the old scars, but they blazed in his memory as if still bleeding and raw. “When I was little, my father used to take me along on what he called special outings. It was our secret, and he made me promise not to tell anyone, especially Mom. He’d break into someone’s house, tie them up, and get a cup and a knife from their own kitchen. Then he’d fill a cup with their blood and drink it. In broad daylight. With a seven-year-old kid watching until the victim bled out.”

  She paled and reached out to squeeze his hand. “Jesus.”

  “By the time I was ten, he wanted me to drink too.” He closed his eyes, concentrating fiercely on the metal door he’d constructed inside his mind to block those horrible memories. “When he handed me the knife, I was so scared I fumbled it and cut myself. He yelled at me not to leave a single drop of my blood, so I licked it away and kept my mouth over the wound until we left. I never could draw someone else’s blood, but he seemed satisfied if I cut myself and tasted my own blood. At least for a while.”

  “How’d you get away from that?”

  “Mom noticed the cuts and demanded I tell her what was going on. While Dad was at work the next day, we left with my little brother. We changed our names and moved to a new city. It was rough, but I’d hug her at night and cry because I was so glad we were away from him. I never saw him again, but I couldn’t shake the memory of my blood. The taste. The pain. The fear. I started getting into fights at school, and the more I bled, the better I felt. I’d deliberately pick a fight with the biggest playground bully with the hope that he’d bloody me. Eventually I got too good at fights and I didn’t bleed enough. That’s when I started going out in search of bigger prey.”

  “Punks on the streets.”

  “Yeah. Drug dealers. Gangs. You name it.”

  “What about sex, though? How’d the two blend together?”

  A rancid, coppery taste in his mouth turned his stomach. Not good blood, but old, rotten memories. Fear of his father. Fear that his father would turn to his little brother and drink him. Or his mother. If he ever told anyone, that’s what Dad had promised to do. “I haven’t talked so much in years.”

  She softened her firm grip on his hand and twined her fingers with his. The cop holding hands with the bloody assassin. “Good.”

  “I went out looking for a fight and found a guy forcing a girl in an alley. I kicked the shit out of him, but he managed to bloody my mouth with a lucky punch. She ran to hug me and kissed my cheek, clinging to me as I got her away. I got my first hard-on that night. My dreams were filled with fights and blood and girls from then on out. I had girlfriends off and on, but it never lasted long. I was an asshole because I wanted the girl to get mad enough to hurt me. Then I always felt like a rapist creep if I tried anything.” He dragged his gaze up to her face and smiled. “Your turn.”

  She shrugged. “I like rough sex or a forced seduction kind of scene, as long as I can fight back, which sounds perfect for you.”

  “But why?”

  She picked at a loose seam on the ugly hotel comforter that had to be just about as old as her. “Does there have to be a reason?”

  “If you want me to risk touching you again, then yeah, I want to know if there’s anything specific behind that need. Because that kind of shit can hit the fan in a hurry if I don’t understand what I’m dealing with.” When she didn’t answer right away, he shifted tactics. “You’ve got a real hard-on for br
inging down human traffickers. Are the two related? Were you ever kidnapped and forced for real?”

  “No.” She sighed heavily. “But my sister was. I was ten. She was thirteen. Some pedophile picked her up walking home from school and used her to make child porn. By the time the police found her, she...” She shook her head.

  “She wasn’t ever the same again,” he guessed softly.

  “The school labeled her as troubled. She got into drugs, wild parties, sex with just about any guy who’d have her. Her therapist said it was her way of trying to reclaim her sexuality and owning it for herself, but it put us all through hell worrying about her. She ran away from home when she turned seventeen. Got arrested for turning tricks. Cops found her dead in an alley when she was twenty-one. Drug overdose.”

  “So now you’re on a grand mission to kick human traffickers’ asses and save as many women as you can.”

  “Yep.”

  “And if you can defeat a would-be rapist in bed...?”

  “It’s not like that. Maybe in the beginning, but not now. I just like the fight. The power I feel.”

  “You don’t want to be helpless.”

  “Never. And you want to be hurt.” She met his gaze, her eyes heavy-lidded and dark with arousal. “I can hurt you and won’t care. You can let me fight and won’t care. What could go wrong?”

  Shaking his head, he snorted. “Plenty. Either one of us could go too far. I don’t care to have my dick cut off, and I’d certainly rather take a bullet in the skull than ever feel like I raped you.”

  “So we negotiate. No knives. No guns.”

  He laughed softly. “I never said no knives.”

  “So you liked that little cut I gave you in the side.” She ran her gaze over him as she’d done earlier. This time she wasn’t looking for injuries but rather where she might give him a new wound. “I thought you did at the time, but I wasn’t sure. Is that why you followed me?”

  “Partially. You aroused my curiosity too. I wanted to know who you worked for.”

  They looked at each other, so close he could almost hear her heartbeat. Almost smell her heat. She wanted him. That alone was miracle enough that he was willing to try. “So how do we call things off if they get out of hand?”

  “Broken arrow,” she whispered. “That’s our code word.”

  “Imminent destruction. I like it. Either one of us can call it off at any time. No questions asked.”

  “Deal.”

  Pulling her hand free, she stood, eyeing him like he was a rabid wolf. But she didn’t play the role of a nice meaty steak. She licked her lips and gave him a heavy-eyed look that made the hairs rise up on his arms. “Now it’s my turn.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Vincent

  Without any warning, she lunged across the bed and came at him. Instinct sent him rolling to his feet, but she bounded right up and flew at him. She didn’t pull punches either. She’d trained at Quantico, at least for a while, and then joined an international policing agency. She knew how to protect herself and how to bring a bad guy down. She swung at his face with her right hand, and jabbed at his ribs with her left. She must have expected him to lean away from the blow, because when he pushed into her fists, her eyes flared and her mouth opened on a soft sound that made him want to taste her.

  She packed a wallop for someone not weighing much more than one hundred thirty, maybe one forty, pounds. His lip smashed on his teeth, giving him the first taste of blood. Energy pumped through his veins, increasing his strength and speed. He could smell her shampoo, her clean clothes, the faint sweat on her skin. They were in the tropics, after all. Even in a tank, she’d sweat. That woman-in-heat smell made him burn to be between her thighs. To taste her core and smear her scent all over him.

  Ignoring her fists, he used his larger bulk to back her toward the bed. When she tried to dance aside, he grabbed her arm and used her own momentum to sling her around against him. Now she went wild, pummeling with her fists, using her nails to scratch at his shoulders. She arched her back and shoved her palms against his chest so hard she flipped backward and tumbled onto the bed.

  God, I can’t wait to get inside her and see if she still fights so hard.

  He started down after her but a hard kick in the ribs sent him wheeling to the side. She’d managed to hit the same slice she’d given him earlier. It split open and started bleeding again. His leg caught the nightstand and the lamp tumbled off with a crash. The room went darker with only a small light gleaming in from the bathroom, but he didn’t need to see her to find her. He could hear the soft pant of her breathing. She tried to kick him again, but he trapped her thigh against him and jerked at the laces until he could wrench her boot off. She kicked him with her other foot, trying to push him away, but he ignored the thumps, until she arched up off the bed, slung her thigh over his shoulder, and tried to pin his head between her knees.

  Letting a grin soften his face since she wouldn’t see it, he took the opportunity to slide up her body and dropped his weight against her core.

  “Hello, beautiful. Looks like I’ve got you right where I want you.”

  She punched him in the face so hard that he could feel the blood flying from his mouth. Hopefully she didn’t break his nose. It would definitely be embarrassing having to explain to her boss why his eyes were black and swollen shut. She finger-punched him in the throat and he suddenly couldn’t breathe. Wheezing, he didn’t stop her as she scrambled out from beneath him. He let her get almost to the edge of the bed. Then he grabbed her feet and jerked her back beneath him, coming down on the backs of her knees to hold her down. He managed to get her other boot tugged off before she remembered which thigh had taken the bullet earlier in the night.

  He had to give her credit. She fought dirty, no-holds-barred. She jammed her thumb down on the bandage and ground the wound so hard that his vision wavered and he couldn’t stop the groan. “Fuck, that hurts.”

  “Good,” she retorted.

  “I’m just about done playing with you.” He caught a handful of her hair and jerked her head back, stopping her attempted escape yet again.

  “Good,” she repeated, even pissier if possible. It made him laugh, even when she managed to rake a bleeding scratch down his forearm.

  He pulled her up on all fours long enough to grab the front of her shirt and haul it over her head and back behind her head, keeping her arms in the sleeves. A couple of hard twists and he had her hands effectively bound behind her back.

  She didn’t like that. Not one bit. Snarling and fighting, she pitched beneath him. “Fuck you. Let me go, you bastard. Bondage was never part of this!”

  But she didn’t say broken arrow. So he didn’t undo the tightly bound shirt. Instead, he cupped her breast, sliding his fingers down to circle a very hard nipple. “Yeah, this isn’t turning you on at all.”

  She slammed her head back, trying to catch him in the face.

  Ducking away, he slid to the edge of the bed, even though she immediately scrambled toward the door. He’d left his blades on the nightstand. Hopefully they hadn’t fallen to the floor along with the lamp, because he was afraid of what he might find under the bed in this cheap-ass hotel. In the dark, it took him a moment to find one of the knives.

  Then he went after her, a silent, slow stalking like a lion. She managed to roll off the bed to her feet. Running awkwardly, she headed for the door.

  He padded after her and waited until she reached the door. She had to turn around and bend down to get her hand on the doorknob. Which made it ridiculously easy to snag her hair again and lead her stumbling back toward the bed.

  “Where are you going, beautiful? I’m not through with you yet.”

  “I’m through with you.”

  He pushed her down on her stomach and planted his forearm across her shoulders, pinning her o
n the mattress. He kicked her thighs apart and made himself nice and comfortable against her ass. Fully erect, he even let out a groan and rubbed his erection against her. Keeping her head pinned, he loosened the shirt on her arms and made a slit in the side so he could pull it free.

  “Don’t you dare cut my jeans, motherfucker, or I’ll kick your balls so deep into your own ass you won’t shit them out for a week.”

  He was tempted to do it anyway just to see what other threats she might come up with. But he appreciated her ass in them too much to ruin them just to make it easier to get inside her. Instead, he laid the blade on the bed in front of them, just out of her reach. She’d be able to see it. The silver glinted in the darkness. Then he pushed off her enough to get his right hand beneath her pelvis. He yanked open her jeans, but they were too tight to drag down one-handed.

  “Condom,” she whispered, braced on her chin so she could keep her focus on the knife. “Right front pocket.”

  He jammed his fingers down into the specified pocket and retrieved the condom, holding the corner of the wrapper in his teeth so he wouldn’t lose it.

  She braced beneath him, her muscles gathering. She knew very well that he’d have to let up the pressure on her shoulders so he could use both hands on her jeans. Exactly why he’d left the blade on the bed in easy reach.

  Pushing back off her, he seized a handful of jeans in each hand and jerked the material down her hips. She lunged forward, using her momentum to actually help him wriggle the tight denim down. Her fingers scrambled for the knife. He dragged her panties down, jerked at her jeans hard enough she fell forward. Leaning back down to press against her calves, he smoothed his right hand up the back of her thigh, over the curve of her buttock. Skin, warm and living and soft. It’d been so long since he’d touched another living person without the intent of killing them.

  She twisted beneath him, her arm slinging in a hard arc with the blade in her hand. He threw himself back but the knife cut across his chest, deep enough he sucked in a hard breath. A red haze slipped down over his vision. Her skin gleamed, and her eyes flashed with courage and determination, even though they burned with desire. He’d jerked back enough that she’d managed to roll over beneath him. Her hair was a wild tumble, her pants halfway down her thighs, though she still wore her bra.