On the Edge of Love (Mama's Brood Book 1) (31 page)

Soon fatigue and the weight of too many emotions refusing to be repressed sent her into a restless sleep. She dreamed she was alone in dark nothingness, floating untethered until lightning split the sky, blinding her, burning her up in its electric heat. She woke to Zeus’s hand between her legs and his mouth sucking on her neck. He slowly worked his way down her body until his mouth replaced his hand. She grunted, moaned as he turned voracious in his hunger. Hips bucking wildly, Sabrina hollered as a searing orgasm ripped through her.

But Zeus wasn’t done. His large hands anchored her waist as his mouth continued to work against her core, forcing her to come again. She was a shaking, twitching mess by the time Zeus rolled onto his back, breathing slow and even.

He had just flung her soul out of her body and scattered her essence over the heavens as if it were stardust, yet he lay beside her as if the experience were no more eventful than watching leaves fall.

Sabrina attempted to get up, but Zeus’s large hand reached over and pressed against her stomach.

“Reciprocate the favor,” Zeus said, his voice guttural as he pulled her hand to his throbbing erection. “It would be rude not to.”

She just barely contained the snort of laughter as he pretended the social graces mattered to him. “I can be nice.”

“Show me,” he demanded. “Show me how nice you can be.”

Sabrina watched him steadily, challengingly, before lowering her gaze to his denim-encased erection.

“Get naked,” she ordered, stripping away her bra and tank top.

Zeus swiftly shucked out of his pants and sprawled over the bed, legs and arms spread wide like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. His penis was thick and long, and she could literally see it pulsating before her.

She knelt between his thighs and shifted back, sitting on her heels as she massaged the area around his groin—rock-hard lower abs, thighs, hips.

“You ready for this, big man?” she asked, hands transferring to her breasts, squeezing them together, massaging them, kneading them as she waited for his response. He made a guttural sound that was indecipherable in any language other than the language of desperation.

Leaning over, she used his dick as a breast massager…or her breasts as a dick massager. “Zeus,” she said, breath hitching as her nipple collided with the slit in his penis that bathed her areola in his precum.

“Now,” he gritted out as he reached for her head.

She reared back, escaping his grasp, and, lightning-fast, reached and fisted the base of his dick so tightly he bucked, yelling out. She used her thumb to press against the flesh in the center of the mighty structure.

“Sabrina, please,” he growled.

She smiled with only one side of her mouth and pumped him balls to head, her grip mercilessly firm and barely able to encircle his thickness. “That’s it, Zeus baby. I want to hear you beg.”

“I won’t—”

She bent over and took him as far down her throat as she could, pumping him with her hands and mouth, massaging his sac, lapping at the base of the head. He muttered insensibly. When she increased her pace and let her tongue dance over his heated flesh, he gripped her head and begged for her.

He held her head firmly, and she felt his shaft swell just as he roared and released, gushing bursts of semen down her throat. She lapped at him until all traces of his seed were gone, leaving him breathless and trembling beneath her long after he’d come.

He pulled her up and on top of him, holding her securely.

“What did you do to me?” His voice was a hoarse whisper.

Parting gift, she thought as she closed her eyes and stroked his collarbone. She rested there until she felt him slip into a deep sleep.

“Sweet dreams, Zeus,” she said as she carefully slipped out of his hold and rose off the bed.

She opened and closed drawers until she found what she was looking for, then tiptoed to her bedroom. She grabbed her blades and sheathed them as she dressed, sticking two ornamental chopsticks through the bun she twisted on top of her head. She put on her shoes, and, slinging her bag over her shoulder, crept down the hall and out the front door, locking it behind her.

She walked out into the wild darkness and took a steadying breath.

“I’ve just taken out the baddest thing around here,” she whispered to the things waiting in the darkness. “Any of you furry-assed bastards want to fuck with me, I will gut you,” she said, her heart pounding. She prayed she didn’t have another encounter, mostly because it would eat into her escape time.

The forest remained silent, and she turned on the flashlight. As quietly as possible, she made her way to the driver’s side of Zeus’s Charger and pressed the remote. Quickly she climbed in and softly shut the door behind her. She secured her seat belt and turned the key in the ignition, nervously looking to the front door, half expecting Zeus to burst through at any moment.

Squashing a wave of grief, she wheeled the car down the path. She couldn’t waste time mourning Zeus. Not now. Once she was far enough from the cabin, she turned on the headlights. When she heard something that sounded like an enraged grizzly’s roar, she sped up, more afraid of what was coming after her than the dangers of the road that lay ahead.

* * * *

Zeus jerked to wakefulness the moment he heard the roar of his engine coming to life.

Sabrina.

He leaped out of the bed and stomped bare-assed through the house. He reached the front door and pulled it open just as the red taillights blinked out of view.

Rage was a whirlwind whipping around him, beating away all emotion except the betrayal and violence that fed it. She’d left him. Sneaked away when he’d decided she was meant to stay. He’d expected her to be there when he’d never wanted or needed another person to be there for him.

He gritted his teeth and walked back to his room; cold determination settled over him with each step. Never again, he thought as he pulled on and fastened a pair of jeans. Reaching for his gray suede boots, he laced them to his feet and slung on a T-shirt before strapping down with metal and walking out the back door toward his shed.

Just like a woman, he thought. She’d abandoned him as quickly as his Algerian mother had abandoned the pale, gray-eyed infant boy he’d once been. But unlike his mother, Sabrina was bound to him in this lifetime and the next. He’d teach her what it meant, along with some other much-needed lessons about loyalty and fucking boundaries. He couldn’t believe she had taken his car.
No one
drove his car but him.

Zeus went still after opening his shed, sensing danger. He pulled his blade, the compulsion to kill rebounding after all the days of being dormant. He scanned the darkness. Had it been Sabrina’s presence that had calmed the need to kill?

Blade in hand and thumping against his thigh, he stalked the periphery of the shed. He inhaled deeply, scenting something wild and big. Probably bear, he dismissed. He went back in the shed and got two more small weapons, securing them, as he’d already done with his favorite blade, inside what looked like wounds and damaged flesh on his body. Only Dominic and the man who made the silicone prostheses for Zeus knew the damaged flesh wasn’t real.

After pushing his Suzuki outside, he locked the shed up again and got on the bike. When it roared to life, he peeled off through the woods. He accelerated, imagining that he was balanced on the edge of a blade aimed straight in Sabrina’s direction. There were only two routes she could take once she hit the main road. He headed down the mountain in the direction they had come, hitting over a hundred miles per hour, until he saw the faded illumination of red taillights. He cut his headlamps and sped on in the dark until there was about seventy feet between him and his car.

He followed her to a run-down motel on the outskirts of Big Sur.

Cutting his engine, he watched from a distance as she walked to the motel’s office. He could make out the long-whiskered guy with stringy, shoulder-length, dirty-gray hair. She gave him a credit card, and he gave her a key card. Zeus waited in the dark as she drove his car to the back of the motel, only to see her come back to the front and slide the key card into the corner door farthest from the front office.

He drove his bike forward, following the direction she had driven his car, and parked next to the Charger. He paused when his phone vibrated, and leaned against his bike as he reached for his mobile with no intention of answering it. He looked at the display, and Sabrina’s name was illuminated. She’d betrayed and abandoned him, and she was calling to say what, you’re a sociopathic rude fuck and I couldn’t stand being around you any longer?

He wanted to crush the phone, but instead he stared at it as he tried to rein in his rage. The phone stopped vibrating and went black. He looked up to the starless sky. He didn’t know the best way to deal with this situation, and for the first time, the spirits in his blades were unnaturally silent.

The phone vibrated once, indicating Sabrina had left a message.

There was no real point in listening since he would be in her room soon. Yeah, he wanted to yell at her for taking his car, for leaving his protection, leaving him. He wanted to fuck her into submission. He wanted her to tell him what he needed to do to make her stay, but he had a feeling none of it would happen if he went in and handled things the way he normally handled them. Sitting sidesaddle, with his legs crossed at the ankle, he retrieved Sabrina’s voice mail.

There was a long moment of silence, followed by her voice.

“
Hey. I know it’ll be a while before you get this message, but…um…thanks for the blades. I hope you don’t mind that I kept them
.” Another pause. He fought the urge to walk to the door and… “
You’re a good man
.” He frowned and looked at the phone as if it had morphed into Jesus on the cross. “
My mama would’ve described you as a man with a few issues but nothing a little loving couldn’t take care of. I can’t be like that
.” What the hell kind of sense did she make?
If you care for someone, you’re not supposed to leave, are you? “I can’t afford to see if her advice will work out this time. It’s never worked before. As much as I call you crazy, I know your biggest problem is thinking you can do, say, and have anything you want. You really need to work on that.”
He could hear the dry smile in her voice. Pleasure rumbled through his chest.
“I’ve called the Brood and told them where to pick me up so you don’t have to worry about my safety. Your job is done. I do care, my blade-wielding sociopath. Oh, don’t be mad about your car. I’ll call again and let you know where to pick it up. Bye, Zeus.”

He listened to the message four more times, and when her voice went silent the last time, he’d convinced himself the idea of keeping a woman in his life only a few hours at a time was genius. The moment he was compelled to keep one forever, look what happened. Chasing her down in his own car because she didn’t want to be like her mother. She has to learn to butch up, he thought as he walked toward the front of the motel. He wasn’t letting her go.

Zeus stood beneath the shadow of a tree and watched until the lights in her room went dark. He waited another forty-five minutes, walked to the door, and illegally let himself in. Moving through the dark, he stopped where she lay faceup on top of the bedcovers wearing her T-shirt and jeans. Her bra and shoes sat neatly on the worn wooden chair next to the window.

“A part of me believed you would let me go, you’d finally be through with me, but another part, that instinctual part, knew you would find me.” She spoke through the shadows separating them.

Zeus pulled out a blade and whirled it through his fingers as he looked down at her. He recalled the first time he saw her on the warehouse floor, remembering the unholy lust that had compelled him to touch her even then. There was no longer a part of her that he hadn’t touched.

Ignoring her attempt at conversation, he cut a thin strip off the bed’s blanket, and he tied her hands to the rickety wooden headboard. Sabrina remained silent, angling her head to the side as she watched him. He pulled off his jacket and boots. The rest of his clothes soon followed. Kneeling on the bed, he lifted the bottom of her T-shirt and sliced it up the middle, laying her breasts and taut abdomen bare.

She thought she could take the sight of her luscious form away from him and he would just let her? He undid her pants, gently pulling them down her legs. “Mine,” he proclaimed. Her body was his. And he kept what was his.

He eased himself over her, covering her chest to chest, groin to groin. “Open for me,” he said, resting his temple against her forehead and settling his lower body firmly between her parted legs.

“Zeus?”

“Huh?” he uttered before capturing her mouth with his. He felt wrenched wide open when she kissed him fiercely, holding nothing back, taking him, making them inseparable again. He lost himself in her, felt her jerk her arms against the headboard they were bound to.

“You don’t leave.”

“Zeus…”

“Never again, Sabrina,” he warned before crushing his mouth to hers, not willing to listen to anything that wasn’t a confirmation of the words he had just uttered. “Say it.”

She moaned but didn’t say the words he needed to hear. He continued to pleasure her, stretching her tight inner muscles until her sobs became the sweetest penance. “I won’t leave. I won’t. Never again.”

He came so unnaturally long and hard inside her he knew the blade spirits had to be binding them together in this life and the next. “You’re mine,” he said as he shifted and unbound her wrists, knowing nothing made in this material world could link them as completely as the spirits had just done. He collapsed onto the bed, exhaustion a hundred-pound cement block pulling him into the deepest fathoms of sleep.

“And you’re mine. Forever. God and your spirits protect us,” she muttered.

He hugged her to him as he fell into the depths, feeling a sense of utter completion.

Chapter Sixteen

Maxim woke to repetitive banging. The vibration resonated as if his head were submerged under sand. He peeled back eyelids that felt gritty against his eyeballs and looked around the room to see the latest Sabrina replica sleeping in a tight ball at the foot of the hotel bed. He briefly wondered if she was dead but recalled the restraint he was forced to wield due to circumstance and injury.