Better When He's Brave

His eyebrows shot up to his hairline and he lifted both of his hands off of my skin.

“Give her to me.”

Once I did, he was going to have to keep her. My beast made of gentleness and compassion was made to fit perfectly against his beast made of hardness and fight.

Chapter 14

Titus

I COULD COUNT THE number of people I had willingly talked about my father with on one hand, and I shared blood with two of them. I never talked about my parents, about where I had come from or how I had ended up where I was now. I didn’t like to think about it. Those memories made me feel like a fraud, like a fake, like a phony. It didn’t matter how dedicated to the law I was, how focused on helping others, or how much of myself I devoted to trying to make a difference in this godforsaken place. Underneath it all I was no different from Bax or Race. Hell, I was actually just as cold and just as manipulative as Nassir when it came right down to it. I hurt others to get what I wanted, and I did it without remorse, because the truth of the matter was I would do the exact same thing over again if that was the only way out I had.

Reeve talked about the beast inside of me and she was right. The basic parts of who I was still had huge chunks of that angry kid with a killer for a dad and a drunk for a mom making me the man I was today. There was still a little boy that was hungry because there was never any food and scared because he had a little brother he was never going to be able to take care of properly. And while I tried to hide it, tried to keep it all locked away, the more time I spent on the streets, the more time I spent with this woman who understood the darkness and despair, the closer to the surface those angry memories climbed.

She was sitting on top of me, one of her hands hard and insistent in my hair as she pulled me closer to her mouth. The other was yanking on the already loose knot of my tie and violently tugging at the buttons on my shirt. I never knew impatience could be such a turn-on.

I didn’t touch her. This was her show. Her turn to take what she needed to take, and I would gladly give it over. Even though the front seat of the GTO didn’t offer enough room to do the kinds of things I would really like to do with her. She had thus far shown no fear, no stopping point, no edge of hesitation when we came together. That just made me want to push her more and more. It was an addictive element to sex I had never experienced with anyone else. Granted no one I had ever been to bed with matched me the way she did. No one took everything I had to give and then asked for more. I think she was the only human being that had ever seen the real me. He wasn’t very attractive in all his greedy, insatiable, and grasping glory, but she never once looked away.

Just like she wasn’t looking away now as each of her hands grabbed one side of my shirt and pulled. Little plastic buttons pinged off every interior wall of the car and bounced off the glass. She wrestled the fabric out of the top of my pants and ran her hands over my stomach where my abs contracted as she switched and used the edge of her nails to lightly scratch the skin.

“I love how strong you are.” Her fingers climbed upward and tripped lightly over my chest and across my collarbone. I sucked in a breath as she used her index finger to scrape over the flat of my nipple, and wondered if this is what it felt like when I went after her. “You seem unbreakable.”

I sat as still as stone as she switched her attentions to the other side. I could feel my blood getting thick and starting to pool below where she was sitting across my lap. The interior of the car felt like it was a million degrees and all I could see was the endless dark of her oddly colored eyes. She leaned forward and her hair slid like dark satin across the skin she had exposed.

“Everyone has a breaking point.”

I sounded gruff and really had to concentrate on getting the words out because she leaned forward and her lips hit right below my ear on my rough jaw. Her teeth started to nibble and her tongue lapped a long wet trail all the way up behind my ear where she breathed, “I would love to see you when you reach yours.”

She curled a hand around the back of my neck and rubbed her cheek against mine. When I let my monster have at her, it took in giant mouthfuls, gobbled her up, and tried to burn as fast and as hot as the pleasure would allow. She wasn’t kidding when she said hers needed to be soothed. Every move she made was deliberate, erotic. We touched everywhere and somehow it was more intimate than all the times I had been inside of her over the last month. She brushed her chest against my own and I decided the playing field needed to level out a little, so I hooked my hands under her shirt and lifted it up off over her head. Her hair fell back down around us like a dark curtain and I grabbed her face so I could kiss her. She blinked at me with big eyes and smiled.

“You are the only one that sees it, over and over again. You were the breaking point from the moment you walked in the door to tell me you helped Novak grab Dovie. I wanted to be disgusted, to hate you, but I didn’t. I thought you were beautiful and resilient. You seemed so misguided and lost, and even then I wanted to get you naked and fuck you on my desk.”

Her face lowered to mine and our lips touched just a tiny bit. One of her hands skated down the center of my chest and landed on my belt buckle. I reciprocated by popping the clasp on the back of her bra and pulling it out of my way.

“You should’ve tried. I would’ve let you.” The words danced across my lips and somewhere in the center of my chest an animal howled in delight. That was what was missing in my life. Someone that appreciated all the sacrifice, the hard choices I had made to become the man I was, but who could also appreciate the fucked-up kid I had been.