“What’s wrong?”
I jolted out of my thoughts at the rumbling, annoyed sound of King’s voice. He stood in front of my table in the library office. It was surrounded on two sides by glass walls so I could see the students working quietly at their tables. Now, King was the only one left in the lull between class time and after-school study sessions. It wasn’t lost on me that our lovely librarian, Harry Reynard, had left me the office in peace when he’d realized I needed a little alone time.
It had been a long twenty-four hours, the longest of my life, so I didn’t hate myself too much for assigning a last minute in-class essay on Paradise Lost in my last period English class just so I could have fifty minutes to figure out what had happened in the parking lot between my estranged husband, the President of The Fallen MC and little ole’ me.
Even after the class ended, I hadn’t figured it out.
The silver lining of this was that I didn’t feel awkward around King even though I should have been blushing and fidgeting like a shy schoolgirl after what I’d let him do to me this time yesterday afternoon.
Still, I thrill of anxiety and the delicious echo of pleasure pulsed through me and tightened my nipples at being in the same room alone with him. King’s eyes ducked down to the sight but, surprisingly, his frown remained.
“What are you talking about? I dismissed class, you can take a walk or something before detention starts in ten minutes,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
Well, King, William showed up at school to make a scene but don’t worry, your crazy hot, insanely scary dad stepped in and, I think, claimed me like a piece of property so that my ex wouldn’t fuck with me anymore. That’s what’s wrong.
King’s eyebrows locked together, casting deep shadows over his glacial eyes. “Don’t give me that bullshit. Something’s been up your ass all day and I wanna know what it is.”
“How is that any of your business?”
A sneer twisted his beautiful mouth as he leaned forward on my desk, cornering me like a predator would his prey. “‘Cause if you tell me, I’ll take care of it for you.”
Gosh freaking darn it, I did not have the strength to deal with his strangely endearing brand of biker sweetness today. “King not only is it not your job as a student to take care of anything for me except your homework, I am also incredibly uncomfortable with the idea of you ‘taking care of’ anyone.”
Hurt flickered across his features, brief but stunning and wrong like a midnight eclipse.
“Just ‘cause I’m the son of The Fallen doesn’t mean I take care of every problem with my fists.”
Shame rose in my throat, a bitter and nauseating cocktail. He had never given me any indication that he would deal with his problems like that and especially after our heart to heart yesterday about people judging him as a brainless, violent thug, I felt sick for jumping to that conclusion.
“I’m sorry,” I said with my aching heart between my lips.
When he didn’t move, I placed a hand on one of his fists and ran my fingers lightly over the golden hair across his knuckles.
“That was wrong of me,” I continued softly. “I spoke hastily but honestly, it had nothing to do with my real impression of you.”
“Yeah, and what’s that impression like?” he asked, leaning down closer so that the tendons and muscles in his arms popped out in stark relief.
I licked my lips because I couldn’t lick him.
King’s eyes tingled like bee venom over my mouth.
My eyes skittered to the door and back to him.
Taking that as the sign it was, he reached out to slide his palm around the back of my neck under the thick fall of my hair. It felt oddly vulnerable, his big palm wrapped around my slender neck against my hummingbird pulse, his fingers slotted between the vertebrae of my spine effectively locking me in stasis so I was forced to look into his eyes and nowhere else.
“Tell me,” he urged.
“Okay,” I agreed. “I think King Kyle Garro is a man who plays at being a boy to dupe the dumb, a predator to scare the weak and a pretty boy to manipulate the trite.”
His eyes flashed and a low rumble worked through his throat. “And how do I act with Cressida Irons? Who am I to her?”
“You’re a King who makes her want to be his rough and tumble Queen,” I breathed out before I could stop myself, our whispered conversation lending a confessional tone to our words.
I couldn’t lie. I didn’t want to.
Damn the consequences.
“Screw detention, come with me right fuckin’ now,” King ordered roughly but it was the edge of desperation in his voice that had me dutifully following him.
It was only when he moved towards the labyrinthine rows of books in the back of the library and not the door that I came down from my King-induced high.
“No way am I doing anything with you in the freaking library.” I tried to tug my hand out of his hold with both of mine to no avail. “King!”
He ignored me until we were in the sweet, paper scented depths of the library, sequestered away in Row WXYZ.
“Oh my God,” I gasped as King turned on me.
He slammed me up against the shelves, anchoring me to the rows of books with his lean hips. His growl vibrated against my lips as he took my wrists in one of his big hands and pinned them above my head.
Before I could regain my breath, I tasted his. His mouth claimed me, searing the secret his apple poem had promised me into the delicate skin on the inside of my lower lip. He bit me there, scraped his teeth over it again and again until I writhed against him.
He broke away with a snarl to say, “You think just ‘cause you’re the teacher, I gotta follow your rules? Well, you’re wrong, babe. Between you and me, I’m the fuckin’ authority figure. If I gotta fuck you in the library to show you what’s what, I’m only too happy to fucking oblige.”
I licked my dry lips, fighting to remind myself why I should say no to this, to this inappropriate man in this highly inappropriate place but my sex was throbbing a heavy, steady beat that scrambled my good intentions. I rubbed my sticky inner thighs together to try to alleviate the ache but King stopped me by kicking my legs further apart with one booted foot. Before I could protest, his hand was between my legs, slapping the bare skin of my wet inner thigh so hard it stung then cupping my entire mound in his huge palm.
“This cunt is wet because of me. It’s exactly my depravity, my wrongness that gets these sweet juices flowing. You like me bossing your sweet ass around, don’t you?”
“No,” I said, but it came out breathy.
There was a haze around everything but King, his hand on my cunt, his breath on my face and his eyes, those huge pale blue moon eyes, boring into my face, daring me to lie to him.
They flashed at my blatant untruth. I gasped as two of his thick, callused fingers plunged beneath the placket of my underwear and curled inside me, pressing hard against my front wall. My knees collapsed at the intensity so that the only thing holding me upright was the strong hand pinning my wrists and the two fingers impaling me.
“You want to be dirty with me, Miss Irons,” he taunted me, drawing his tongue down the edge of my jaw until he reached me chin. I gasped when he nipped it between his teeth. “Can feel your pussy tighten around my fingers when I talk this to you. Looks like I’m fulfilling two fantasies by fuckin’ my hot as fuck teach in the stacks.”
I bit my lip to keep from groaning as he twisted his fingers inside of me, drawing out a pleasure so deep it made my legs shake.
“Turn around, hands to the shelf and don’t fuckin’ let go,” he ordered.
Instantly, I whirled around. I stood straight up and down but curled my fingers into the shelf just below my shoulders.
King’s laugh caressed my neck but he didn’t touch me. “Show me you want it, Cressida. Present that sweet ass for me.”
I tried to swallow my small cry of desire but my throat was parched, all the moisture in my body pooling between my thighs and leaking down to the tops of my stockings. Desperately, I jutted my bottom back, deepened my lean until I was at forty-five degrees.
“Better,” King praised me.
My gasp punctuated the deep library quiet when he grabbed both my hips and pulled me back further, right into the rigid length tenting his trousers. I panted against my arm as he pushed my back down then flipped up my skirt. He took a step back so cool air wafted over me and I shuddered, so turned on that a stiff breeze could have sent me over the edge.
“Look at that,” King murmured hoarsely. Two knuckles reached out to run down my crease from my asshole to my pussy. “So wet for her student.”
I bit my arm and groaned, shoving my hips back into him.
Heeding my unspoken plea, those fingers turned vicious and tore off my lace underwear. The pain it evoked made me break out into shivers and I was still recovering from the overwhelming hotness of the gesture when a hot tongue replaced the fingers.
I reared back into the sensation even though it embarrassed me to think of King on his knees behind me, his face buried in my ass.
A shockwave of pleasure throbbed through me as his nose brushed my opening and his tongue curled around my still sensitive clit. I threw my head back as he bit the sensitive skin on the inside of my thigh and pinched my clit hard between his fingers. The book titles in front of my face grew fuzzy and my legs began to shake. Vaguely, I heard the sound of a zipper being lowered then King’s long, tortured groan.
“Could come just from your taste,” he said, licking at the wetness that had trickled down my right thigh.
Simultaneously, he drove three fingers into my wet heat and sucked my swollen clit deep into his mouth. So easily, he tipped me humpty dumpty over the edge of pleasure and crashing into pieces on the other side.
“Fuck, my girl is so easy to please,” he said against the side of my thigh as the orgasm fragmented my thoughts.
Even through the delirium, I knew the words were praise and it spurred me on.
I thrashed helplessly against the books, sending some tumbling to the floor as his words combined with the fingers inside me and his mouth fused over my clit to make me come for longer than I thought possible.
King straightened from the floor, flipped my molten body over and upright then pressed my back against the books once more. He pushed his forehead hard to mine as he gently played with my wet pussy, careful with my sensitive clit now that I’d come.
“Really wanna fuck you, Cress.”
I twined my hands around his neck and dropped my head to rest against his shoulder. He smelled warm and male in a way that had my gut clenching. I wasn’t ready to condone out loud what we had done, what we were actively doing at that very moment, but after two mind melting climaxes, I somehow wanted him inside me even more than before. So, I pressed my lips to his thundering pulse in silent consent.
He rolled his head against mine. “Nah, not gonna happen like that. Meant what I said, babe, tired of you thinkin’ you can shut me out and keep me down. I get in, and I mean I get in with you, I need the words. I need you to give me that soft and sweet you got inside you. I want to hear my Queen beg for her King, you hear me?”
I squeezed my eyes shut but rubbed my nose against his because it was right in front of me and I found I couldn’t stop myself. God, but I heard him. There was almost nothing I wanted more than to wrap myself around him in that moment and into the next, to ride him now and later on his bike. To stand beside him the way I’d first imagined that day at Mac’s Grocer.
But reality had come crashing into my daydreams in a very real way just hours earlier and I just could not deal with declarations and possibilities that hung just outside my reach like Eve’s glistening apple.
“I had a really bad day today, King,” I admitted softly right up against his lips, which was somehow so much more intimate than just kissing him. “I can’t tell you what you want to hear. I can’t be who you want me to be to you. But this afternoon, after a really really bad day, all I wanted was to be here with you.”
There was a brief silence where our breaths tangled hot and intertwined between our open lips. I wanted to know what he was thinking, wanted to ask him if he was crazy and if I was crazier for embracing in the freaking library when we both needed to stay at EBA in a very real way, if we were delusional the way Eve and Satan were, for thinking that we could alter our reality to suit our desires.
Instead, I twined my fingers in his golden curls and gently pulled him to me, groaning into his mouth when his fingers flexed hard on my hips.
“Cressida?” Harry Reynard’s lilting British voice echoed through the rows of books. “You still in here? I bloody hope so because your purse is still in my office. If you’re back there reading come out and grab it, I need to lock the door and go home.”
I froze but King only buried his face in my hair and chuckled softly.
“Holding a wooden plank in my hands instead of the woman I brought back here,” he teased.
“Shut up and get off me,” I whispered harshly, shoving at his shoulder.
He continued to laugh but let me go.
As I straightened my clothes, I told him how things would go. “Okay, I’ll head out first and distract Harry while you sneak out…” I trailed off when I looked up to see King no longer in front of me.
“Gosh freaking darn it,” I mumbled, smoothing my hair frantically before making my way silently through the stacks.
When I got closer to the sitting area and the office, I heard male voices laughing.
“Yeah, Mr. R, what can I say, you know how I get when I’m readin’,” King was saying.
I peeked around the corner to see him leaning against the door to the office, blocking my view of Harry.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever met anyone who could read through an apocalypse, King, but if anyone could do it, it would be you,” Harry replied.
King shrugged. “You grow up readin’ in a loud, smelly, hot garage and you learn to shut shit out.”
“I imagine so,” Harry laughed.
It was clear to me that the two were well acquainted, which was interesting because Harry was the full-time librarian and didn’t teach any classes. If they were close, it meant that King spent an inordinate amount of time in Entrance Bay Academy’s two-story haven of books. For some reason that insight made my heart palpitate painfully.
“I heard you say Miss Irons left her stuff behind, do you want me to drop it by her classroom on my way to the parking lot?” King offered innocently.
“Would you mind? My wife gets a tad frustrated with me when I’m late for dinner since I’m the one who insists on eating so early.”
“’S no problem,” King said, heading into the office.
I took the opportunity as it was meant and snuck out of the office. I didn’t go back to my classroom, which was already locked up for the day because I was a coward and I couldn’t face seeing King again. I had a spare set of keys to the cabin in a little hollow alligator sculpture I kept by the front door and my car was still in the shop so, as I’d been doing for the last two weeks, I began the forty-five minute walk home.
I was passing along Main Street, enjoying the way the blossoms had begun to coat the streets like spring snow banks, when the roar of a motorcycle disturbed my thoughts. It wasn’t exactly a surprise when I turned around to watch it pull up beside me but it was when a man other than King emerged from the helmet.
He could have been a model. In fact, if he wasn’t, it was a criminal offense to women all over the world that he kept a face that pretty off of magazine covers and advertisements. Despite the full sleeve tattoos and the unmistakable Fallen MC cut, the guy was all prettiness with eyelashes like mink fur and gorgeous wavy brown hair he kept cropped short at the sides and overlong at the top.
Even before he opened his mouth, I knew he’d have a good voice, unfairly melodic for a man. “Cressida Irons, sup, girl?”
“Um,” I shifted on my high heels, wishing not for the first time that I’d gone back to my classroom to get the Converse trainers I usually wore to walk home. “Nothing, stranger. Just walking home from work.”
He nodded, swung off his bike and swaggered forward with a multi-ringed hand extended to me. “Name’s Nova.”
“It seems you already know my name,” I replied even though I shook his hand.
The grin he flashed me was practiced, a study in beauty and arrogance. “King sent me to give you a ride home. He wanted you to know he woulda done it himself but was needed at the Compound. He also wanted me to ask how the fuck you been getting home when your piece of crap car is still at the shop?”
I bristled. “I’ve been walking. You tell King if he didn’t want me doing that then he should have been working on my car so I could get it back.”
Nova crossed his arms and stared down at me. “That kid has been working on that good for nothing car every spare moment he’s got.”
“Oh,” I sighed, frustrated with myself. Why did I turn into a raging judgmental bitch the first second I was reminded of King’s biker status or faced one of his biker kin?
“Listen, I’m sorry. It’s been a really long, tiring day but that isn’t an excuse to be rude,” I apologized.
Nova’s face broke into an even more beautiful smile. “No worries, doll. Both King and Zeus told me you got spirit, not at all surprised to find they spoke the truth. Wouldn’t like you much if you didn’t.”
“They both told you?” I echoed dumbly.
“Sure. Zeus was spittin’ mad when he came back from pickin’ up Harleigh Rose from school and there you were bein’ fuckin’ accosted by your slime ball ex. That’s why King’s not here to take you home, he and Zeus are fixin’ to do something about that motherfucker.”
My eyes widened so far they hurt. “What?”
He laughed. “Don’t worry your pretty face about it. We got your back, girl.”
“I don’t need you to ‘fix’ the problem with William. It’s my problem and I’m going through the appropriate channels to fix it myself,” I told him firmly.
I trusted King not to do anything extreme but his father was another story.
Nova peered at me. “How’s that workin’ out for ya?”
I was silent because we both knew the answer to that question.
“Right, so, are we gonna stand here all day or am I gonna take you home?”
“Take me home,” I muttered mulishly as I followed him over to his bike.
He laughed then laughed even harder when he saw my expression of wonder as I took in his huge, sleek motorcycle. It was even bigger than King’s and had The Fallen insignia painted in dark green and white on the side.
“A girl who looks like you and can appreciate a good ride?” Nova said as he swung a long leg over his bike and waited for me to settle. “Easy to understand what’s got the Garro men all riled up. Doesn’t hurt that you look like a fuckin’ delicate little princess too.”
“Queen,” I corrected before I could think about it. “Like a Queen.”
He looked over his shoulder at me with new questions in his heavily fringed eyes. “Sure, like a Queen.”
I bit my lip and resolved not to say anymore but happily, I didn’t have to because Nova started his bike with a loud roar and took off towards my cabin. I pressed my cheek into his back and huddled against his back as the cold air whipped over me.
It said something about King that he would send one of his brothers after me even though he had to have been angry with me for running away. It probably pissed him off to realize that I’d been walking to and from school every morning too. I wondered if he would be at my door the next morning to drive me on the back of his bike and the thought made me sick and excited all at the same time.
“Queenie,” Nova said after he’d pulled down my driveway and come to a stop in my sloping front yard. “Please tell me this ain’t your place?”
I dismounted, pleased that I was getting the hang of it, and fisted my hands on my hips. “It is and before you say something mean about it, I’ll have you know, I’m very proud of Shamble Wood Cottage. I’m fixing her up myself.”
“Seems you could use a fuckin’ hand,” he grumbled, his pretty face creased as he took in the disastrous yard and the peeling paint. “Looks like a fuckin’ Halloween haunted house.”
I bit my lip but didn’t say anything because I had gotten a lot of trick-or-treaters that fall.
“Thanks for the ride, Nova,” I said, then it dawned on me and I laughed. “Casanova, right?”
He winked at me. “It’s that obvious I’m magic with the ladies, eh?”
“It’s that obvious your arrogance knows no bounds,” I quipped pertly, which made him laugh. “It seems to be a trait you Fallen men share.”
“’S not written in the handbook but yeah, it’s pretty common,” he said when he finished laughing.
“You have a handbook?” I asked eagerly, thinking I’d like to read it.
He laughed again. “Nah, biker’s aren’t really handbook kinda people, Queenie.”
I blushed at the nickname, loving it.
“Gotta go so get into the house and lock the door,” he ordered kindly.
I did as he asked but just as I was about to disappear inside, he called out, “And, Queenie, don’t think I won’t be tellin’ King that your car and your husband aren’t the only pieces of shit he has to make right.”
I frowned as he roared out of the drive and pet the doorframe of my cabin, murmuring, “You’re not a piece of shit. Ignore him.”