Breathe Me In (14 page)

She eyed me suspiciously, trying to take the towel away from me. “Sometimes, you’re really creepy. I can do that myself.”

“Creepy? It’s creepy to want to take care of you?” That was a problem. I wanted to hold her and help her and make her life easier, and she thought all of that was creepy. Hell, maybe it was. I didn’t know. I just knew that I wanted to be the guy that she could count on. I wanted to unburden her.

“Yes.”

I gave her a wry look and threw the dry towel in her face. “Then I guess you better get used to creepy.” I jumped back up to ditch the damp towel in the bathroom and wash my hands. When I returned to the living room, she was back in her leggings, though the torn panties were still on the carpet and she had no shirt on.

“That’s an outfit I could get used to.” I picked up my pizza slice again. “You hungry?”

“Yes.” She crawled on her knees to the coffee table and reached for a piece. “Sorry it’s cold.”

“Don’t be. I’m not.” I picked up a second piece.

“Are you just going to stand there naked and eat?”

“Yep.” I turned toward her and given that she was on her knees, my dick was enticingly close to her mouth. “In case you’re still hungry after that slice.” It was a joke. Sort of. I bit my piece with gusto and grinned down at her.

Anya rolled her eyes. “So tempting. Now can you get your limp dick out of my way, please?”

“Limp dick? Harsh. You know how to cut deep.” But I did move around the table and plop my satisfied ass on the couch. “If you give me about three minutes I can make it hard.”

Anya sat down next to me, putting her feet on the table. She took another bite of her pizza and wiped stray sauce off her lip. Which she then smeared on my leg.

“Nice.”

She giggled.

I liked that sound. She seemed relaxed, disheveled. She had just-been-fucked hair and a casual posture. Her leg was touching mine. I realized I had never heard her giggle before. It was a carefree sound.

“Do you want to watch a movie? What do you like? Horror?”

“Yes. I guess that’s why I like hanging out with you.” She gave me another grin. “It’s like one big horror show.”

That made me laugh. “You are just fucking full of jokes tonight, aren’t you? Smart ass.” I reached over and tickled her ribs, right under her perky small tits, where she had left all that flesh enticingly bare to me.

To my amusement, she squawked and hurled herself forward, trapping my hand between her waist and her chest. So I tickled her some more. She started flailing around and smacking at me, her shrieks turning into some sort of laugh/cry. It was hilarious and I started laughing harder. She tried to get away from me and I just followed her, pinning her down on the couch.

“Stop it!” she breathed, her face contorted as she pushed at me. “Get off me!”

“Not until you say Kane has a delicious cock.”

The look she gave me told me her thoughts on giving in, so I tickled her again, vibrating her whole body. She tried to crab walk her way out of my reach but I flattened her like a pancake so she was totally immobile. “Say it.”

Instead of repeating my words, she reached down and stroked me. “Oh, this cock?” she asked. “This big, gigantic, amazing cock?”

She was teasing and it was working. Damn, she’d definitely turned the tables on me. “Watch it or I will tear your leggings off like I did your panties.”

“I’m not going home naked.”

“So stay.”

“You know I can’t spend the night.”

“Yeah.” I did know that. “We have a couple more hours, right?”

She nodded and squeezed me with those aggressive little fingers of hers. “But I thought we were going to watch a movie.”

I started to shift lower on her, taking her leggings down inch by inch. “We can do that later.” I kissed the apex of her thighs, still damp from earlier. “Mmm.”

She sighed.

I wanted to enjoy the moment. Stretch it out. Because once I asked her what exactly she meant by owing money to drug dealers, I was pretty sure the night was going to head south. Fast.

But for now, there was just my tongue and her soft little cries of pleasure.

I shouldn’t let Kane do that again, that mysterious thing he did with his tongue that made me forget my name, where I was, and any problem I’d ever had. But the problem was when he did it, I couldn’t remember why I shouldn’t let him. It felt so good to give in, so good to let go. I let my legs fall apart and my head fall back. I was a little concerned about the no condom thing, but it was too late to do anything about it.

Diego and Sam and New York and my entire reality felt so far away when I was with Kane. It was like being in a dream when I had sex with him, because I’d never been that in tune with my body ever. I’d never felt that moment where you completely leave the world and surrender to your desire until Kane had coaxed it from me. He made me crazy with pleasure and I closed my eyes and let him do his thing. I didn’t fight it. I didn’t fight him. I just came in a completely relaxed way, a lazy, selfish, orgasm that didn’t require any thought or questing or fantasizing. It just showed up and it was amazing.

He was amazing.

With his mouth still hovering over me, I reached over to the table and grabbed my pizza and bit it. “Oh, my God, Kane. You are so good at that.”

He stared up at me over the length of my body. “Are you serious right now? You just took a bite of your pizza.”

“You make me hungry.”

Kane rolled his eyes and sat up. He reached for his beer.

“Aren’t you going to, you know.”

“You know?” He looked over at me in amusement, lifting my feet onto his lap. “You know what?”

“Do me. With that delicious cock.”

“I’m going to go get a condom and let you finish your pizza. Then yes, I will do you with my delicious cock.”

“Yay.” I took another bite.

Kane stood up and for a second, my breath caught. The way he looked at me… oh, my God. It was like he saw me. Really saw me. And liked me.

I scrambled to sit up. I couldn’t meet that gaze. I couldn’t let him see that I suddenly not only wanted him, I needed him. Or maybe that not only I needed him, I wanted him? I just knew that suddenly, without warning, he had become important to me for a whole lot of reasons and I wasn’t sure that was any good. Hell, I knew it wasn’t. It was dangerous.

“Who are you?” he asked. “What’s the real story, Anya?”

My body went cold and I got goose bumps. “What do you mean?” I averted my eyes and then I hated myself for doing that. I dropped my pizza and forced myself to look up at Kane.

“What’s with the drug dealer? You know I’m a cop.”

He was standing there, naked, hair falling in his eyes. I was naked for the most part too, my leggings only around one ankle. It made me feel vulnerable, whereas a few minutes earlier I had felt gloriously free. “It was Sam’s dealer. I never used. Ever.”

“How much do you owe him?”

“Five hundred.”

“Do you have five hundred?”

That made me snort. “I don’t have even fifty bucks.”

“What’s to prevent me from calling the cops in New York to have him picked up for possession and intent to distribute?”

He could do that and it would be the morally correct thing to do. But I had a hard time trusting the system because it had bit me in the ass so many times. “Because he’s not an idiot. He knows how to not get caught. And I don’t like to piss drug dealers off.”

“He won’t know it has anything to do with you.”

Kane was probably right. “Do whatever you need to do.”

“That’s not how this works,” he said. “If we’re going to do… this, we do things together. Discuss them. We talk. Tell the truth.”

He was making me uncomfortable. “Why do you keep implying that I’m lying? I’m not fucking lying to you.” Though I wasn’t telling the whole truth. Damn it.

“I don’t think you’re lying. But I don’t think you understand how dangerous these people are. You had drug dealers around the house with Asher and that scares the shit out of me.”

Time for me to leave before I lost my shit on him. “Fuck you!” Okay, too late. I yanked my leggings up and searched for my shirt. “You don’t think I know that it’s dangerous? You think I felt good about it? What was I supposed to do? I was pregnant before I even realized Sam was using.” I jerked my shirt on over my head. “So I’m an idiot. Stupid. A dumb whore for letting a guy fuck me without a condom and then getting pregnant before I knew jack shit about him.” Looking for my shoes, I found one and threw it at him. It bounced off his arm and to my satisfaction, he jumped a little. “Oh, you know, like tonight. I’m an idiot and I get everything I deserve.”

Kane picked up my shoe as it tumbled to the floor and held it out to me. He looked shame-faced. “That was my fault. I should have used a condom. I’m sorry. I don’t think you’re an idiot. I just worry about you, do you understand the difference? I’m upset because it scares me to think about what could have happened to you.”

It just sounded like judgment to me. “Can you drive me home?”

“Oh, my God!” Kane exploded. “Just stop!”

“No.” I threw my other shoe at him.

He caught it. “Anya. You can’t push me away.”

“Who says I can’t?” My anger was starting to dissipate and for some stupid reason I felt my lip start to tremble. I felt like I was going to cry. I wasn’t sure if it was because I was upset that Kane was upset with me or if I was upset because I knew I still wasn’t telling him the whole truth.

The corner of Kane’s mouth lifted and he took a step towards me. Oh, hell, I knew what he was going to do. I started to back up.

“Come here.”

“No.” I felt something a lot like panic creeping over me.

“Let me hold you.” His arms were already wrapping around me.

I put my hands up, onto his chest. I meant to push him away, but I never actually got around to it. Instead, I sort of sagged against him.

“You don’t have to be a badass all the time,” he murmured, kissing the side of my head. “Sometimes I can be the badass for you.”

That scared me more than anything. More than poverty. More than homelessness. More than asshole landlords and gun toting drug dealers. Trusting Kane was the scariest thing of all. Ever. Because that’s what he was asking me- to trust that he wouldn’t hurt me. That he wouldn’t abandon me. Use me. Leave me worse than he’d found me. I didn’t know if I could do that.

“You don’t owe me anything,” I said. “It’s not your job to protect me.”

“I kind of did agree to serve and protect. But that’s my job. You’re not my job. You’re my
want
.”

I wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe him so bad it hurt. It was an actual pain behind my ribs, like I’d been kicked in a bar fight. And I should know. I had been kicked in a bar fight once. “Why would you want me?”

Kane brushed my hair off my face and forced my head to tilt up. I stared at him from under suspiciously damp eyelashes.

“Why wouldn’t I? From the first minute I saw you I haven’t been able to get you out of my thoughts. I think about you all the time. I want to be with you. All of the time.”

He was confusing me, making me want things I couldn’t have. I wanted to be that woman in the park who other people saw as worthy of love. I wanted to be a mother who was able to just sit back and enjoy her child. And I wanted to be a woman who could laugh freely with a man knowing with every fiber of my being that he loved me.

But that wasn’t real. And I had no time for fairy tales. “I don’t know how to believe you,” I told him honestly, my voice hoarse.

His naked body was warm against mine, his arms strong, holding me. “I don’t expect you to believe me all at once. Maybe let’s just try and see where it goes.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I’m saying that not three weeks ago I was telling people I didn’t want a relationship, that I wanted to casually date, play the field. Be selfish for awhile. Then I met you and you blew that conviction out of the water.”

“So you mean my poorly executed plan worked after all?” I joked.

“Apparently.” He kissed me softly.

“Yeah, well, what I didn’t plan on was falling for you,” I said. “But I did. How dumb is that?”

“Very dumb. You could probably do better than me.”

That made me laugh. “Actually,” I whispered. “I feel really lucky. Like this is a weird dream.”

Kane pinched my arm.

“Ow.”

“You’re not dreaming.”

I rolled my eyes. “Thanks. I appreciate it. So what now?” I was feeling a little aimless and uncertain what to do. My usual method of relationship by bullying and/or men squatting in my apartment wasn’t going to apply here, so I wasn’t sure how to handle myself.

“You actually let me take you out to dinner sometime. And maybe like a movie. We take Asher to the fall festival at the zoo. You know, we date.”

I blanched. “Okay.” But I sounded nervous and he knew it.

Kane laughed. “Your expression is priceless. Don’t worry. We don’t have to start tonight. You need time to get used to the idea, I get it. Right now, we can just eat pizza and drink beer and watch a horror movie.”

“Am I still allowed to bite your lip and pull your hair sometimes? Or do girls you date not do that?”

“You do that. What other girls I’ve dated in the past have done is irrelevant.” He nibbled on my ear. “This is you and me.” Then he bit, just hard enough to make me wince.

It turned me on. “Good.” I could feel his erection growing against my hip. “So slam me against a wall or something so I know where I stand.”

He lifted me up under my ass cheeks and walked me back a few feet. “I’ve never been this easily manipulated by a woman. Ever. You should learn to take advantage of it.”

That made me grin. “I’ll work on that, thanks.”

Anya’s smile turned my fucking world upside down. I didn’t even know what I was doing anymore. How had I gone from dedicating myself to bachelorhood to standing in my living room doing everything in my power to keep Anya from crying? I wanted to protect her, fuck her. Love her eventually. I was falling hard and fast for her and I didn’t want it any other way.

As I pushed her up against the wall, I yanked her leg up over my hip and kissed her. “I’ll even let you choose the movie.”