Read Thresh: Alpha One Security: Book 2 Online
Authors: Jasinda Wilder
Thresh: Alpha One Security: Book 2 (31 page)
You
kiss
me.
With mesmerizing, hypnotic passion, you kiss me. Rough becomes gentle. This, perhaps more than the kiss itself, stuns me. The tenderness is exquisite. You kiss me delicately. Skillfully. You kiss me, and you kiss me, and I am breathless. Your tongue whispers against my lips, slips gracefully between my teeth and tangles with my tongue. Your palms play against my back and your fingertips dimple my flesh, sliding lower.
What is happening?
Your sorcery, it is not this affection. This is some new magic. Some new witchcraft.
The kiss, your kiss, Caleb, it is like nothing I have ever felt in my life. You kiss me as if you’ve been waiting for all of eternity to kiss me, as if you are starved for my lips, thirsting for my mouth. You clutch my back and hold me to you as if you are terrified to lose me. And your hand, clutching and crushing my jaw, loosens. Gentles. Glides up, over my cheek, past my ear, and into my hair. You lean into me, until I am bent backward over your palm, and I am held up by your strength alone.
There is no breath, with this kiss. No thought. Nothing. Just this kiss.
“God, Isabel. Isabel.” You whisper this against my lower lip. It is a breath only, so low I might have imagined it.
It is a plea, that whisper. A broken, pain-barbed plea.
What does it mean? I cannot begin to understand.
You break the kiss and stagger backward as if wounded. Your eyes are shadows. Haunted. As if for the first time in all the years I’ve known you a curtain has been pulled aside, and I am suddenly truly seeing the contents of your soul.
For a moment, then, you are Jakob. A young boy abandoned to fate, abandoned to the cruel streets of New York. I see the truth in the tale you told. You wipe your mouth with your wrist, brow wrinkled in confusion. Eyes coruscating with agony. You are sixteen-year-old Jakob, the whore-boy. The drug addict. The plaything.
And it is Jakob who kisses me once more. Who with hesitancy and tenderness unzips my dress. Plucks open my bra. Slides off my panties. It is Jakob who divests himself of his clothes. Who presses his skin against mine.
I am wrapped up, woven into a spell, tangled in the fabric of a lie engineered out of truth. It is Jakob who lifts me off my feet, carries me to my bed. Lays me down.
Who kisses me,
and kisses me,
and kisses me . . .
It is Jakob.
And God, Jakob is something I cannot resist. He has Caleb’s power, skill, and relentless hunger, but with a tenderness and vulnerability only Jakob could possess. Confusion and hatred and loathing and disgust boil in some secret cauldron within my soul, but Jakob’s fiery touch sears it away. I know this touch. It knows me. Knows my body, knows how to bring me to writhing need with but only the whisper of a fingertip against me, just so.
Jakob, Caleb, the names tangle. The vulnerability in your eyes is at war with shadows. Violence is an oil slick across the gentility in your features.
Fuck, I am lost. I am drowning.
You stare down at me, and you let me see something in you. Some hint of a soul. And it is a soul at war. A soul in pain. You kiss me with that pain, and it is jagged. Your breath is rough and ragged as you lave kisses over my breasts. As you finger my opening and drive me to moans as only you can. You drag a thick finger through my wetness and caress me to orgasm, and you kiss me as I whimper. While you are kissing me, while I am whimpering and clenching and writhing and shaking, you thrust your hips, and you enter me. And when your hip bones clash against mine, you break the kiss and you fix your embattled, pain-racked eyes on mine. Your eyes do not leave me as you push into me. Do not leave mine as you withdraw. Your face takes on the expression of a man in utter agony. As if you are ripping away a mask surgically implanted on your skin. As if you are ripping open your soul and letting me see the gaping wounds life has left in you.
You make love to me as if it hurts to do so. As if the pleasure of being inside me is too much, and thus is pain. Exquisite torment. An agony of ecstasy. That term is much bandied about, but when it really occurs—a true agony of ecstasy—the reality of it is hellish to witness. Such overpowering bliss, it is an overload. A too-long hit of pure oxygen to dying lungs. A feast of rich food on an empty, starving stomach.
Your hips piston against mine. You are levered over me, staring down at me as you drive in and out of me like a madman, like a man possessed. I hold on to you and try to pierce the wildness in your eyes, try to see into you, try to catch some glimpse of who you are and why you’re doing this, what it means.
You moan, brokenly. Tortured groans. Your manic, fucking thrusts falter with intensity, and you release inside me. You are not blinking, not even breathing now, thrust deep, spasming. Hips fluttering.
A groan escapes you. The sound of a shredded soul.
Your forehead lowers to mine.
You are gasping, each outbreath a grunt, a moan, a groan.
“Isabel.” That whisper again.
As if my name is an incantation. A prayer to an unknown god.
A time without measure, seconds, minutes. I do not know.
And then you lift your head, seek my eyes. Looking for something.
“Caleb?”
You flinch as if struck. Shudder.
And then
you
kiss
me.
Slow. Deep. Sweetly, even.
You touch my face. My cheek. Fingertips fluttering over my eyelids, tracing the contour of my nose. Memorizing.
You pull away, and look at me once more.
And then I watch as the mask clicks into place. I can almost hear the
clink-snick
of the armor plates touching and fusing.
And I wonder . . .
Did I speak the wrong name?
Jasinda Wilder
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1: FANCY
Well…fuck.
This sucked.
Woozy from the crowbar I’d taken to the back of the head, which of course came with a splitting headache straight from Satan’s own asshole, I was disoriented and felt sluggish. Chemical sluggishness though, which suggested someone had either roofied me—and if it was a woman, she shouldn’t have bothered; I’d have fucked her without the drugs—or someone had tranked me. Which wasn’t the brightest idea, TBH. Because I was slowly coming out of it, and what with the headache, and the fact that I was hungry, didn’t exactly spell rousing games of charades and shuffleboard, once I got my bearings and figured out who I had to hit.
I tried to blink, but that didn’t accomplish much; either there wasn’t anything to see, or I was blindfolded.
I focused hard, which hurt. Tried to subtly flex my muscles, tested my toes and fingers and wrists, tried to see if I was simply bound, or drugged into paralysis. I had feeling in my limbs so I knew I wasn’t paralyzed. The bad news was my wrists were tied; the good news was my ankles weren’t bound, and they hadn’t gagged me, either. Stupid move—I can fuck you up with just my feet, let me tell you. I learned Muai Thai in Thailand, from some seriously scary little motherfuckers, the kind of dudes who go out and kick trees just to toughen their shins.
I kept my breathing slow and steady, something I did out of long habit. I listened hard; I heard nothing that gave anything away. The floor was cold and hard underneath my shoulder, my hip, and knee. I was pretty sure it was a cement floor. I was lying on my side, hands bound in front of me—another mistake.
I kept listening, but there wasn’t much else to hear yet. Definitely blindfolded. Now that my faculties were returning, I could feel the blindfold around my head, felt like a folded bunch of cloth. It would be easy enough to remove when I was ready.
Staying still and quiet I kept listening, focusing on breathing slow and steady as if I was still out. The bonds around my wrists were zip-ties, and they were wrenched tight to my skin which, while painful, was actually good news. Zip-ties were plastic, which meant their overall tensile strength wasn’t that great. One hard wrench of my arms, or bash them against my knee like I was trying to break a thick stick, and they’d be gone. It would take me ten seconds max, a number I quote from experience.
I was about to start the process of determining whether to play this out a bit longer or start my escape when I heard a muffled whimper. Female, close by.
“
Pssst
,” I hissed.
“
Gnnnhhh?
” Definitely a chick, definitely gagged.
“Keep still. Pretend you’re still knocked out. No matter what you hear, no matter what happens, keep playing possum, got it, babe?”
“
Ugh-oo, doh gah ee ay
.”
I stifled a chuckle; she sounded
pissed
, and if I was anything like a decent translator of pissed-off, gagged females, she said something like
fuck you, don’t call me babe.
Better for her that she had a bit of spark. If she could cuss me out while bound and gagged, it meant she had spark, which meant spirit, which meant whatever was going on, she wasn’t as likely to flake out if shit got weird.
I tried to think back and remember; what was the last thing I remembered?
Some shitty dive bar in…Denver? Maybe. After Nevada, Thresh had gone to find that doctor chick he was so hung up on—which I understood because, seriously, that chica had curves for fucking
days
, and she’d pushed back at Thresh, which was the fastest way to get to him short of reaching into his shorts. Plus, all that exotic Islander skin, and that thick fucking hair? No wonder Thresh wanted to take her for a tumble. I’d hit it, if he hadn’t had dibs. And no, we weren’t so juvenile as to call dibs out loud, but when you spent enough time hunting tail with your bro, you know when he’s interested, and you don’t go after that chick, even after he’s done.
So…Denver dive bar, alone. I’d been on the prowl, going slow on the drinks, ready for any sign of my two favorite activities: fucking and fighting. I’d gotten a whiff of some kind of sweet floral perfume while exiting the head, and followed the scent to an out-of-place honey with a tight body and a serious attitude problem—in short, my kinda girl.