2. Passion and Pain - Rafe
Bacon sizzled in a skillet above the campfire. The smoky aroma would coax Alex out of the tent soon, and I needed to prepare myself to face her. Last night still bothered me. This wasn’t the first time I’d found her standing at the edge of the lake in the middle of the night.
I refused to overlook her nightmares another day, and the fact that she’d tried hiding them from me…I’d have to do something about that. I knew better than anyone how emotional baggage had a way of tormenting a person in their sleep.
Her nightmares weren’t meaningless. The average, well-adjusted person could explain away the occasional bad dream. But there was nothing average or well-adjusted when it came to Alex and me. There were reasons behind the shit haunting her in her sleep.
And those reasons twisted in my gut, shredding the guilt that already lived there, dueling with the anger over her secrecy. She would disagree with me, but her nightmares were my business because I’d fucked up too many times to count, leaving her damaged and insecure.
She didn’t trust my love for her.
We’d gotten nowhere out here in the middle of the woods. After drifting from place to place for months, always on the move, paranoid of someone coming after us, we’d needed to find some fucking downtime.
But seclusion wouldn’t fix what was broken. Enough time had passed to be sure no one was gunning for us. Zach had disappeared into thin air, not a whisper of his existence making its way through the underground circles Jax knew of.
And Shelton had found a new fighter to build his illegal fight ring around, so I didn’t think I was important enough for him to worry about anymore.
There was no reason to remain in hiding. The world waited, maybe not with open arms, but with grudging acceptance. Last time I talked to my brother, he told me he’d hired a lawyer to get my exoneration rolling. And the cabin on the island was a few weeks from completion.
Now we just had to go home and reclaim our lives.
If Alex had her way, we’d head straight for the aisle.
I would never find another woman who loved me more, who willingly accepted my need to dominate in every way imaginable. There was no question I loved her. I’d killed in her name, thirsting for justice as much as vengeance, but when it came to making our relationship legally permanent, I stalled.
She deserved better.
She deserved a man who didn’t get hard at the thought of choking the breath from her. There were only two things in this world that kept me sane, and fighting in the cage was one of them. The other was Alex. But having one without the other was a depressing existence—one I’d already tried.
I craved her howls of pain, needed the way a single glimpse of her jade eyes told me how she loved me with an intensity that bordered on obsession.
Returning home and getting married would change everything. I wasn’t ready, but my hangups didn’t matter if she was hurting because of it. She needed me to prove that I was in it for the long haul. Thing was, I didn’t see how a fucking piece of paper would do that. It sure as fuck hadn’t kept my mother from walking.
I heard movement inside the tent as I leaned over the fire and flipped a strip of bacon. A few seconds later, a zipper sounded. I didn’t need to glance at Alex to know she was standing mere feet away with her dark curls tangled from the onslaught of my fingers last night as I fucked the hell out of her. And her neck…
Fuck, I couldn’t not look now. Ignoring the sizzling food, I stared at her throat. Red splotches circled her creamy neck where my fingers had gripped her last night in the throes of sex and madness.
“Good morning, babe.”
“Morning.” Pulling her flannel close around her body, she sat next to me by the fire on the log we used as a makeshift bench.
Leaning over, I covered her mouth with mine. We’d kissed more times than I could remember, from soft and quick—like this morning—to long and deep and breath-stealing. The way never mattered, never kept me from wanting to push her to her knees and shove my cock between her luscious lips.
If it weren’t for the bacon on the cast iron skillet, demanding my attention, I wouldn’t be having these thoughts, because my dick would already be down her throat.
“Want me to get the eggs?” she asked.
“Sure.”
As I continued turning over strips of bacon, I watched her bend and open the cooler. She had no idea what the sight of her tight ass did to me. She was bare underneath that flannel shirt—just the way I liked her—and I went from thinking about her mouth to drooling over her ass in two seconds flat.
It had been a while since I’d fucked it. Anal wasn’t her favorite thing in the world, so I didn’t take it as often as I liked. But I wanted it.
After the way she’d been shutting me out, not to mention clawing at her skin again, I was inclined to take her ass whether she liked it or not.
She returned with her dainty hands full of eggs. As soon as the bacon came off the skillet, I cracked open all six of them. She divided the smoky strips of meat between two paper plates, and once the eggs formed a bacon-flavored scramble, we dug into our breakfast in comfortable silence.
This had been our life for the last four weeks since we’d hiked to this secluded spot of pine trees on the edge of a lake I loved and she despised.
More like feared.
We’d set up camp and had been fighting and fucking ever since. It was our aphrodisiac, our dance of push and pull. If we didn’t have a reason to argue, we’d find one.
Because that was how we worked.
Passionate arguments that led to passionate punishments.
The latter kept up both sane. She needed the physical pain to chase away her demons, and I needed to dole it out to chase away mine. In that aspect, we were made for each other.
Alex glanced at me, plastic fork halfway to her lips.
“What’s the plan today?”
We could hike, or we could fish. Or we could fuck. We could do all of that, and not necessarily in that order. But today, I had something else in mind. I pinned her with a dark look that never failed to make her wither. She swallowed her bite of eggs with a gulp.
“I’m in trouble, aren’t I?”
“You know the answer to that.”
One thing I loved most about my girl? She never withered for long. Setting her half-eaten plate of breakfast aside, she glowered at me.
“This is bullshit, Rafe. How many times have I begged you to let me in? To talk to me?” She crossed her arms. “It goes both ways.”
“You want to play, huh?” I threw my paper plate into the fire then grabbed her. I tossed her over my shoulder, and her pleas came out in high-pitched shrieks as I stomped toward the edge of the lake.
“Don’t you dare!”
She wasn’t using her playful I-want-you-to-take-control-even-though-I’m-protesting voice. She was all-out pissed, pounding on my bare back as I trudged into the water up to my knees. Shit, it was cold.
With a splash, I dropped her to her feet. Fighting her thrashing arms, I stripped her of that flannel shirt, satisfied once I had her naked and defenseless in front of me. After tossing her shirt to the shore, I grabbed her again, strode several feet into the water, and dove in with her.
We broke the surface at the same time, me shaking the drops from my hair as she sputtered her outrage. She kicked her legs and made for the shore, and I questioned the wisdom in teaching her how to swim.
“Try to get away from me and see what happens,” I warned.
She caught the seriousness of my tone, and it was enough to halt her movement. Whirling back to face me, she treaded water, her brilliant jade eyes spitting wrath in my direction.
Anger was beautiful on her. My woman was hot and sexy and gorgeous, but above all else, beautiful clear to her soul. A myriad of emotions wrapped around my heart, constricting the pump of blood, making me dizzy from the effect she had on me.
Some people tried to define love, tried packaging it into hearts and flowers in February and diamonds and white gowns on a day to remember. Love had no definition. It was the insanity that glued two hearts together, the possessiveness that gripped the soul, the inevitability that arrowed straight for the jugular.
Love had me fucking whipped.
“Swim with me,” I said, nodding toward the tiny island that called to me from several yards away. Maybe that piece of land reminded me of home, of security and comfort. Whatever the reason, I was drawn to it and had been since the day we found this private spot.
Alex hesitated, her gaze swinging between the island where I’d punished and fucked her twice already, and the illusion of safety on the shoreline of our camp. But safety didn’t exist outside my will, my arms, my way. She knew that, and like the smart girl she was, she kicked to my side and moved through the water with me, her naked body one with the lake she still feared on a base level.
The island wasn’t far, which was a good thing, considering her status as a beginning swimmer. We reached the patch of rocky land, and Alex stood, her toes sinking into the dirt of the shore, water dripping from her hair, sluicing between her tits. Her nipples hardened, and I envisioned taking a switch to them.
My dick went from shriveled from the chilly water to hard and throbbing at the thought of punishing her tits.
Find some fucking patience.
I had all day to make her bend, and bend, she would. I shed my shorts before herding her toward my favorite boulder, with its smooth, curved surface that welcomed her body perfectly. Twirling her around, I shoved her to her knees, and she draped the rock, her feminine form a vision of pure art as she hugged the stone.
“Let me come.” Her voice quivered, her legs trembled, and she parted her thighs by a few inches. I was tempted to sink my fingers into her pussy to find out how wet she was. My cock twitched at the idea.
It was a bad idea if I wanted to retain a thread of control.
“Letting you come will only defeat the purpose.” Testing several skinny branches from a nearby tree, I broke one off and planted my feet on the ground behind her.
Fuck, she was a goddess. She knew exactly what she was in for, but she arched her spine anyway, damp curls a sexy tangle down her back as she put her ass on display. The way she submitted broke me apart a little more each time.
I fucking needed to make her come, craved the breathlessness of her cries, the alluring rigidity of her muscles as pure bliss flooded the delta of her thighs.
“Please, Rafe.”
Last night had left her desperate. Not bringing her to orgasm was making me fucking desperate. But one glance at the red scratches marring her arm was enough to keep me from giving in. Those ugly streaks on her skin made me grind my teeth.
“You’re being punished, babe. Not pleasured.”
She took a deep breath, held it for several seconds, then let it out with a whimper. “I don’t know if I can hold back if you fuck me.”
“That’s why I’m gonna fuck your ass. You’d better get good and wet.”
She fisted her hands against the rock but didn’t protest even though I knew she wanted to. I closed my eyes, counted to ten for a sense of calmness that never truly came, and let out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.
Then I brought the switch down on her backside.