Untouched (19 page)

“I . . . The stupid thing is that I didn’t even get all the details. Cade, who is . . . just . . . such an asshole, didn’t want me to find out because he didn’t think I could deal.”

“Well, he’s just crazy, because clearly, fleeing into the night with a gallon of ice cream and giving your virginity to your brother’s mortal enemy is dealing just fine.”

“Har. Har. You’re heavily concerned with this virginity thing, aren’t you?”

“Don’t change the subject on me, Mitchell.”

“We’re putting a bookmark in this portion of the conversation and we will return to it later.”

He shrugged. “If you insist.”

“I do.”

“What did you fight about?”

“Specifically about them not trusting me. About them choosing to lie to me to protect me, which I think is condescending as hell.”

“Okay, and what did they lie to you about?”

She blinked, furiously, and to his horror, a tear slid down her cheek. “They were . . . trying to hide the fact that my father . . . had another daughter.”

“Another daughter? One not with your mother, obviously.”

“Obviously,” she bit out. “And they wouldn’t give me any more details. I overheard them talking and . . . she wants to come and visit us, but Cade didn’t want her to. Because heaven forbid my life be spoiled by reality.”

“Reality is overrated,” he said. “But secrets . . . especially the kind that everyone knows but no one will talk about, those are worse. Because you feel them. I was the kid your half sister is. The one no one wanted to talk about. Of course, since it was my mother who had me, there was no hiding me.”

“I don’t want secrets. It . . . it sucks, Quinn. I don’t want to think that my dad cheated on my mom. I don’t want to face the idea that he knew he had another child and somehow, even though he took care of us, and loved us, he was able to justify never seeing her. Who wants to deal with that? Who wants to know it? But if it’s true, then I don’t deserve to believe something different. To have memories that aren’t even real. That isn’t fair. It makes me feel like an idiot. They think they were protecting me. But how is letting someone believe a lie protecting them?”

“They thought they were doing the right thing.”

“Well, maybe. But now I just feel like . . . I was telling you about how great my parents were. How wonderful my father is. And I feel like the biggest fool on the planet because it was all such a lie. What I thought. Who he was. How could the man I remember ignore a child for . . . for . . . I don’t even know how old she is.”

“Maybe you should go and talk to them.”

“I tried, but Cade is digging in and insisting I don’t want to know, even while I’m standing there telling him I do.”

“Maybe he wishes he didn’t know.” Quinn wasn’t particularly in touch with emotions, but if there was one thing he did know about, it was being the subject of a secret. It was having everyone know your secret shame and whisper about it behind your back.

So he knew. He knew just how destructive secrets could be. How the wrong revelation at the wrong time could destroy a family. And why a man who had other children would sometimes close the door in the face of his son, a son who so desperately needed someone to accept him, to save the life he’d built on lies.

Quinn knew all of that.

“Maybe,” she said, tugging on a lock of dark hair.

“And maybe you should go home and talk to them.” Why the hell was he prescribing her a moment of “Kumbaya” and hand-holding? It didn’t make any sense. None at all. He should be enjoying the family discord, except one thing kept him from total enjoyment: Lark.

She was hurt. And he didn’t like it.

“I’m not going home,” she said. “I have work to do.”

“I’m the boss. I can send you home.”

“You agreed to give me a scorching affair.”

“Did I?”

“Getting into bed with me last night signified a nonverbal agreement to conduct a scorching affair with me, as I had suggested only a moment before.”

“Is this a . . . binding . . . nonverbal agreement?”

“Yes. Binding. I didn’t write contract law.”

He crossed his arms. “I didn’t sign anything.”

“You spooned me. All night. That’s as good as a signature. Any lawyer would take my case.”

“So, I’m now contractually obligated to engage in sex with you,” he said.

“Scorching sex. In various locations.”

“They can’t get too varied—I have fifteen teenage boys coming to stay at this facility at the end of the week.”

“Then we only have a few days to be varied.”

He stabbed his waffle with his fork. “How long do you see this affair lasting?”

“How long are you staying here?”

“A few weeks, I expect.” But she would be done with him before he left. About the time she realized what he was willing to do in order to get Cade to clear his name. She might be mad at her brother now, but Quinn doubted she would appreciate him putting her family into dire financial straits.

“Then . . . until then?”

“Now we come back to the bookmark,” he said.

“Do we?”

“Yes. This is sex for me. I already told you that, but at the time, I didn’t realize how little experience you had.”

“I have experience.”

“I have blood on my bedspread and a lingering trauma that beg to differ.”

“I mean, I’ve . . . okay, I was a virgin, obvs, but it’s not like I had no experience.”

“What are we talking here? Second . . . third base?”

“What are the bases anyway? I always wondered. Second is boob action and third is like . . . is it oral, or a hand job? Or anything south of the belt line, so to speak?”

“Tell me about your experience.” Weirdly, he wanted to knock the guy who had given her her “experience” in the teeth. He liked being the only guy. There, he’d admitted it. He was an asshole, so it shouldn’t be that big of a surprise.

“Well, there was this guy. Aaron. Underscore. 234.”

“Wait, what?”

“That was his name. Handle. Whatever.”

“His handle? What was he, a trucker?”

“A recruit. In our clan. For zombie killing.”

“Wait, what? You didn’t know him in real life?”

She looked down at her lap. “Not exactly.”

“And how did you . . . gain experience with him?”

She bit her lip, her brown eyes far too wide and far too innocent. “This is the, um . . . cybersex . . . I mentioned last night.”

“Oh, really?”

“Don’t sound all scandalized. You and I had phone sex.”

“True, we did. But he’s the only experience you’ve had?”

“So what if he is?” she said, craning her neck and looking down her nose at him before taking another bite of waffle.

“I find that very interesting.”

“Well, cuz you’re a man. Men are predictable about things like this,” she said around a mouthful of waffle.

“So I’ve heard.”

“It’s boring,” she sniffed.

“I know, baby, I know I bore to you orgasm.”

“Ha. Ha.”

“So,” he said, setting his fork down, “what do you do with cybersex? I’m a Luddite, remember? Did you send pictures?”

“Oh. No, I would have died. We just . . . told each other what we looked like and . . . and went from there.”

“I need an example,” he said, shifting in his chair, embarrassed by the fact that he was actually getting hard anticipating her giving him some examples.

“You know . . . you don’t need an example.”

“I do, Lark. I find myself very jealous that this guy was on the receiving end of your dirty talk skills.”

“You do not,” she said.

“My masculine pride demands satisfaction.”

“Liar.”

“Tell me.”

Her cheeks turned read and she gnawed on a piece of waffle that was dangling from the end of her fork, then set it back onto her place. “I might have lied to him.”

“What about?”

“Well, I told him I’d done it before. Lots. Cuz I’m hot. And then I told him I had on a thong. Which I didn’t. I don’t own a thong.”

“You should get one.”

“Shush. I am telling a story. Anyway, then it was the usual, my cock is so hard for you, baby, et cetera.”

“Typical.”

“Right?” Her blush deepened, even while her tone stayed casual.

“And you got off with him?”

She looked down. “Yeah. It was easy. He said to imagine him doing certain things to me, and it was up to me how to . . . to . . .”

“Touch yourself.”

“Yes,” she said, looking at him now, her eyes a little defiant. “So, there. I have experience.”

“Sorry, that doesn’t count.”

“What? That’s not fair, you can’t say my experience doesn’t count. I have it. And what’s more, it was purely physical. Virtual. Whatever. It was only for sex. I used him. He was very sad when I was done with him, but when I was bored with him, I was bored with him. I feel no emotional attachment to him whatsoever.”

“You don’t ache for him when your fingers stroke your . . . keyboard?”

“No,” she bit out. “Not in the least. So go ahead and make your point, but recognize that I have a fork sitting near me and I will stab the fleshy part of your hand with it if you get too proprietary and . . . bleah, brotherly.”

“Fleshy?” he looked down at his hand and pinched the place between his thumb and forefinger. “That is not fleshy.”

“Missing the point.”

“Actually, you’re missing the point, and making mine really easily. You don’t know as much about sex as you think you do. You were a virgin last night. You’ve had sex once. Sex tends to make virgins a little bit crazy. Even I remember that.”

She rested her chin in her hands. “What was your first time like?”

“Off topic. But it made me a little emotional, and I never am. Which means I’m a bit concerned about you.”

“How old were you?”

“Fifteen.”

“Dear Lord.” She straightened, looking appropriately horrified. “You’re a slut.”

“Yeah, kind of.”

“Well, I’m twenty-two, so I think I’m a little more mature than a . . . ew, you were too young.”

“I’m inclined to agree with you. I was seduced by an older woman. Who may not have known how old I was.”

“Quinn Parker, you are a bad boy.”

“I told you that. You seemed all right with ignoring it. Or maybe you like it.”

“I kinda like it, I won’t lie.”

“But you don’t see the reality of it. You see the fantasy. And for women I’ve taken to hotel rooms for one night? The fantasy is fine. I’ve done that—I need you to know that. I’ve spent a couple hours at a time with women I barely knew, screwed them, left, never thought of them again. I’m that kind of guy. I don’t do romance. I don’t do relationships.”

“What’s this?” she asked, looking around the kitchen.

“Waffles,” he said. “And that’s it. I’m not going to fall in love with you, and that has nothing to do with you. It’s me.”

“I appreciate your honesty.”

“I know it’s important to you.”

“It is.”

“I’m not going to protect you. I’m not going to lie to you. But I’m giving you a disclaimer. I need you to know that what I said to you, what I reminded you of last night, is still true.”

“Well, Quinn,” she said, leaning back in her chair, arms over the back of it, her breasts thrust forward into prominence, “I thank you for the warning. No love, no marriage. I get it. And you keep reminding me of what you told me. Well, has it occurred to you that maybe I don’t want love or marriage? I don’t, Quinn. Not now, not with you.”

“Then what do you want?”

She stood up and leaned over the table, her hair falling forward and shielding them from the outside world, her lips a whisper from his, dark eyes so deep he wanted to get lost in them. “I just want to fuck you.”

Chapter Thirteen

Quinn Parker had never been accused of being a gentleman. But he knew that there were certain ways you treated a lady. And when a lady asked for something as nicely as Lark just had, he knew it was downright ungentlemanly to turn her down.

So he did what any gentleman in that situation would do. He hauled her onto his lap and started kissing her. Deep and long, his tongue sliding against hers. He speared his fingers into her hair and came up against a nest of tangles, but he didn’t care.

Because he was kissing Lark. And no matter how bad of an idea it was, he couldn’t bring himself to stop. Couldn’t find any motivation to.

She wanted him. He sure as hell wanted her. And he was going to have her.

He said a brief prayer of thanks, one he had a passing concern might be blasphemous, for the condom he’d put in his wallet, and for the fact that he had his wallet in his back pocket already. Because he didn’t want to haul her upstairs and hunt for protection. He didn’t want a bed. He didn’t want to wait. He wanted whatever surface they could find here, and he wanted it now.

“You need to invest in skirts,” he said, shifting them both so that she was lying back on the table and he was over her, between her parted thighs. “Think how much easier that would be.”

“We’re in the kitchen,” she said, her eyes round.

“Did I not get an order for varied locations? I thought I was contractually obligated.”

“It’s the daytime.”

“And I’ll get to see you.” He unsnapped her pants and tugged them down, moving himself out of the way when the position of his body started to impeded his progress. “Are you sore?” he asked.

“No. But you weren’t willing to take my word for it last night.”

“Apparently I’m selective about these things.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a condom, tearing the top off, freeing himself from his jeans and rolling it onto his length. “My chivalry just ran out.”

He put his hand between her legs and pushed a finger inside of her. She was slick, ready for him already. He added a second finger, just to be certain. The last thing he wanted was an outpouring of screaming and swearing again.

Well, actually, that would be fine, if it wasn’t pained screaming and swearing.

“Ready?”

“Yes, Quinn. Yes, please.”

That was almost too much for him. Enough to make him lose it then and there, before he ever got in. He gritted his teeth and pushed inside of her.

Dammit. She was so tight. So hot. He didn’t know how he was going to survive this. Somehow, in the few hours since they’d made love, he’d forgotten how it was. He’d forgotten just how intense it had been.

He’d forgotten that this little virgin had given him the best sex of his entire life. He’d thought he’d made that up. He’d thought, in the bright light of day, it couldn’t be possible. Because honestly, it had been awkward. And it had scared at least five years off of his life when she’d obviously been in so much pain. And the blood had scared off maybe three more.

So bearing all that in mind, he hadn’t really believed it was possible that she was the best he’d ever had.

But she was.

She arched beneath him and he realized his error in not taking her top off. He didn’t have access to her breasts. Those perfect pink breasts. But he didn’t want to struggle with her top right now either, because that would mean breaking his rhythm, and that, honestly, might kill him.

Slender legs wrapped around his hips, pulled him in harder. “Good?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, her voice a whimper. She hadn’t cussed at him. She hadn’t said “ow.”

He pushed deeper into her and she let out a short, sharp sound.

“Good,” she said, as if knowing what his next question would be. “So good.”

He increased his pace, watching Lark, her eyes closed tight, her head thrashing back and forth, her body arching into him, moving up to meet him with each thrust. The sight alone about did him in.

And then he felt a wave go through her body, her internal muscles tightening around his cock, stealing every chance he had at rational thought, stealing all of his control, and pushing him over the edge into the abyss.

He grunted, an actual grunt, like an animal, as his orgasm thundered through him like a stampede. He hadn’t been able to hold it back. Hadn’t been able to hold anything back because, for some reason, Lark Mitchell made him lose his mind.

As the haze faded, pleasure receding into the background, he had a concept of how much of an ass he looked like. Standing there at the table with his pants undone, inside a half-dressed woman, with his front door unlocked.

He looked like a man who hadn’t been able to wait. A man who had been half out of his mind. And that’s what he was.

Sobering. Like a bucket of ice water over the head.

He looked down at Lark, who was flushed, her lips deep pink, swollen. She looked dazed, which made him feel a little bit smug, but she also looked a little nervous, which made him feel like a terrible person. A defiler of innocents.

Damn that newly discovered conscience.

“Just a second,” he said, dashing for the half bath just off the kitchen to dispose of the condom before straightening his jeans and doing his belt back up. When he went back to Lark, she was dressing, tugging her pants on, doing a kind of one-legged hop as she did.

“Lark—”

There was a knock on the door that was closer to the punch of a battering ram than a polite request for entry.

“Lark,” he started again, and the battering ram slammed against his door again. “Just a second,” he called. “Stay here.”

She nodded, straightening her clothes and smoothing her hair with unsteady fingers. She still looked recently kissed, and thanks to the high color in her cheeks, pretty recently full-on tumbled, but he wasn’t going to tell her that.

He went to the door and jerked it open. “What?”

If the realization from a moment ago had been a bucket of ice water over the head, this was a block of ice thrown into his face. It wasn’t employees on his doorstep, or a religious faction with tracts. It was two very large, very suspicious-looking men that he happened to know were related to the woman he’d just defiled—that was the word he’d settled on earlier—on his kitchen table.

And in the split second it took him to register who they were, he could see the flash go off in Cade’s eyes. And suspicion turned to the desire to commit cold-blooded murder.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Cade growled, advancing on Quinn, not waiting to be invited in.

And that was all the time it took for the flashbulb to go off in Cole’s head. And then he had two men looking at him like they wanted to kill him.

“I live here,” Quinn said. “And I’m not sure what makes you think you’re the one with the right to just walk in.”

“You know good and well why,” Cade growled. Yes, the other man had a limp, but he also had a brother standing behind him who was just as big and just as angry. “You’re Longhorn?”

“What do you think, Sherlock?” he asked. If he was going to die, he wasn’t doing it meekly.

“Where is my sister?” Cade bit out.

Quinn hadn’t expected Cade to move so quickly, considering his limp, but it turned out he was pretty damn fast, and before Quinn could respond Cade had him by the back of the neck, ready to introduce his head to ground if Quinn made a wrong move.

Cade was lean—Quinn probably outweighed him by a good twenty pounds, thanks to muscle mass—but Cole was a house, and between the two of them? It was better to avoid bloodshed.

“I swear it, Quinn, I don’t care very much about my life at the moment, and that puts you in a damn dangerous place,” Cade said, his voice a low growl. “So if I were you, I’d start talking. Where. The hell. Is my sister?”

“She’s right here, asshole, what are you doing?” Lark came out of the kitchen just then. The damn woman was trying to get him killed.

Cade released his hold on him and looked at her, and Quinn could feel the other man thinking, putting all the pieces together.

Shit.

“What are you doing here?” Cade asked.

“I work here,” she said. “And obviously, you already figured that out, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“I hoped to God it wasn’t true,” Cade said. “You work for him?”

“Yes, for him,” she said, her voice trembling, arms crossed beneath her breasts, chin thrust upward. “Looks like we’re both good at keeping secrets. Oops.”

Cole’s lip twisted up into a snarl. “You bratty little hypocrite,” he said. “You were keeping this from us? And you have the nerve to get all up on my ass for not telling you about dad?”

“Totally different. One only needed to affect
my
life and
my
choices; the other was something that concerned me, and was hurting someone else so you could protect me. It’s different.”

“How is it different?” Cole asked, advancing on her.

“I didn’t know I took a job with Quinn when I first signed. I didn’t know who Longhorn Properties was either. Surprise, it was him, but I’d signed the contract already.”

It was a nice stay of execution, the three of them going over fine details. Quinn wasn’t complaining. He wasn’t looking forward to what was going to happen when Cade’s very slow deductive reasoning skills took him to the obvious point of conclusion.

“And you didn’t think to ask me for help?”

“I didn’t
need
help. I had a job. So look at it from my perspective. Either I break the contract and I owe him money, or I work like I’m supposed to and he owes me money. And, I might add, if I owed him, it’s money I don’t have, so it would have been you paying him. I walked into an impossible situation and I did the best I could.”

Cade crossed his arms over his chest. “What the hell do you call the situation we’ve been in? Im-damn-possible. Sometimes you make a bad choice. And since you should know that, I expect better, more adult behavior than what you treated us to last night. Act like a baby and I’ll damn well continue to treat you like one.”

As Lark looked between him and her brother, Quinn called himself a villain a thousand times over. Because she looked so torn. So anguished. So angry. And it was his fault. If he’d never touched her, at least she would only be defensive over her position as his employee. Not over the fact that they’d had sex no more than ten minutes ago.

And then the attention was back on him.

“Where did you stay last night?” Cole asked, his voice suddenly turned to ice, the question directed at Lark, his eyes resting on Quinn.

Quinn looked at Lark and tried to send a quick, telepathic plea for her not to get too defiant. She didn’t get the message.

She looked at her brother directly, her eyes glittering. With rage. With tears. With determination. “Here.”

Quinn expected Cade to question her on what that meant, since they’d been standing there talking for the past few minutes. So the impact of Cade’s knuckles on his jaw was unexpected. Unexpected enough that he lost his balance and fell into the wall, the side of his head striking the corner of the doorway.

“Shit.” He held on to the side of his face and felt around inside his mouth with his tongue for missing teeth. Thankfully, there weren’t any, but he couldn’t see straight.

“Did you touch my sister?” Cade grabbed him by the shirt collar and slammed him against the wall. He was still too dazed to fight back. “You sick fucker. Did you touch my sister? It wasn’t enough for you to mess me up, but you had to . . . for what? Because you’re pissed that you got caught cheating?”

He wanted to be defensive. He wanted to get mad and defend . . . his honor? He didn’t have any. But hers, maybe. The thing was, that was what had happened. He’d been pissed and he’d plotted a way to get back at Cade, and even though that wasn’t why he’d slept with Lark in the end, the result was the same. He was still standing here, with Cade’s knuckle-print on his face, having divided their family.

And yeah, his head hurt like hell. But Lark was going to be hurt too. That was the part he couldn’t reconcile. The part that made his gut ache.

But it was Cade’s fault. In the end, it was Cade’s fault. And he’d be damned if he thought of it differently. To hell with standing here and taking punches. He wasn’t the one laying down false accusations. He wasn’t the one ruining a man’s life because of his own stupid grudge against someone for not being friendly enough.

Yeah, Cade was like everyone else. He’d looked at him, and he’d seen the bad blood.

“I didn’t do anything to you,” he ground out. “I wouldn’t waste my time trying to beat you by sabotaging you.”

“So show me who did it, Parker. Who on the circuit? Everyone else is my friend.”

“Or everyone else bothers to fake it and pretend they like you. It’s a competition. Grow up, dumbass, none of us were friends. I just didn’t play games.”

“You’re wrong about that. We are all friends. We just didn’t like you. Now I’m only going to ask you one more time before we kick the ever-loving shit out of you, what did you do to my sister?”

“Stop it,” Lark said. “I mean really, stop it. You insulting . . . horrible . . . go away.”

“Lark, did he hurt you?” Cole asked.

“Get out,” Lark said.

“Us?”

“Yes, you,” Lark said, directing her anger at her brothers. Just how he’d hoped.

No. This wasn’t the plan anymore.

Does it matter? It’s what’s happening
.

“How could you do this?” Cade asked, the question directed at Lark. “How could you work for this bastard, come hide out with him just because you got mad at us? How the hell can you stand there and as me to get out? I sacrificed for you. I feel more like a parent than your brother and the whole time you were . . . shit, I don’t even want to know.”

“Did you ever stop and think maybe this isn’t about you, Cade?”

“How can it not be? You go around trying to tell us how smart you are, and I can only assume you’re either stupid, or you don’t know who this guy really is.”

Silence fell between them, thick with anger. Lark’s cheeks were pink, tears pooling in her eyes. Quinn didn’t know if she was going to dissolve or explode.