Dirty For Me (Motor City Royals) (4 page)

“Sure you are. You’ve got a death grip on that purse of yours and you’re sitting in that seat like if you move it’s going to eat you alive.” His head turned, his eyes a gleam of silver. “Or maybe it’s me you’re worried about. People usually get mad when they’re afraid.”

He’s not wrong. It is
him
you’re worried about. Though not for the reasons he thinks . . .

She gave a laugh that didn’t sound as natural as she hoped. “Why would I be afraid of you?”

“I shoved you up against a wall. Tried to make you fight me. You were afraid, pretty girl, don’t try to deny it.”

Her jaw was tight with denial anyway, even though of course he was telling the truth. She had been afraid, just like she was afraid now. But she didn’t really want to think about why that might be.

Tamara refused the thought. “Well, what do you expect?” she said. “You’re a complete stranger. I don’t know you from a bar of soap. And one minute you’re offering me a lift home, the next you’re shoving me against walls.”

“I’m not apologizing for it.”

“You should. Being an asshole isn’t a good way to drum up business.”

His head turned again, his gaze sharp, gleaming. One corner of his long, beautiful mouth curved. “Calling me names now? Shouldn’t you be minding your manners?”

She gritted her teeth. Yes, that’s exactly what she should be doing. Her parents had brought her up better than that and as her mother had always told her, manners went a long way.

All she had to do was ignore the fact that the scent of him kept making her feel hot and restless. Rein in her awareness of the powerful muscle of his thigh inches away from hers. Of the long-fingered, blunt-tipped hands on the steering wheel.

No, damn—no looking at his hands.

“You’re right,” she said stiffly. “That wasn’t polite. I apologize.”

He laughed and the sound trailed down her spine like a velvet-covered finger. “You’re just fucking with me now. I’ve been called worse, believe me.”

“I’m sure.” Despite herself, her gaze was drawn inexorably back to his hands on the steering wheel, hypnotized by those long, scarred fingers.

“I wasn’t drumming up business anyway,” he went on, seemingly not picking up her
don’t talk to me
vibes. “I was only proving a point.”

“By being threatening and intimidating?”

“Yeah. You needed to feel how vulnerable you are.”

“Right, so I would know how stupid I was?” She tore her gaze resolutely away from his hands. “If so, point made.”

“It’s not about you being stupid. It’s about being able to protect yourself.”

“I can protect myself just fine.”

“Like you did back in that hallway? That’s why you accepted my ride, right? Because you could protect yourself and weren’t afraid standing around out there on the sidewalk by yourself.”

Anger roiled in her gut. She didn’t want to have this conversation with him. It picked at an old scab, one that was painful. One that had been healing very well on its own. “Violence is not the answer.”

“You think it’s about violence?” He gave her another searing glance. “Pretty girl, it’s about control.”

* * *

She stared at him like he was insane. Well, whatever. He wasn’t wrong. People who spouted all that anti-violence bullshit generally had no appreciation of the realities of life. It was all violence as far as he was concerned and pretending otherwise was just putting your fucking head in the sand.

What mattered was the control. In life, in the fight. Control of your actions, your decisions, your emotions. Every damn thing you did. Because once you lost control of yourself, you were fucking meat. He’d learned that lesson very early on.

That’s what he enjoyed about his fights. They were a carefully controlled burn-off, allowing him to let a little of the darkness inside him out, in a place where everyone knew the rules. Where there were no surprises. You either won or you lost, there was nothing in between.

Because you couldn’t fight the darkness. Everyone had it, everyone. Possibly even her.

But then what would she know? She was fucking money from head to toe. She reeked of it. Polished and perfect, she probably had never had to fight for anything in her whole damn life.

Christ, why was he pushing her again? If she didn’t want to join the class, she didn’t want to. He sure as shit wasn’t going to force her.

What he was going to do was take her home—if the address she’d given him was indeed her home and he suspected it probably wasn’t. Then he’d go back down to Gino’s for this evening’s fight, let off some of the steam that had been building up inside him.

Silence fell inside the car. She didn’t ask him any more questions, withdrawing into herself, hiding behind the walls he’d seen in her cool, dark eyes.

If she’d been a different woman he might have found that intriguing. But she wasn’t a different woman. She was the kind he’d never touch, not in a million years. Not after what had happened to Madison.

Christ, if he wanted pussy there’d be plenty of it at the fight anyway. The girls there never asked for his number afterward. They were as happy to fuck and run as he was.

They were drawing up to the address she’d given him, some nice-looking Midtown brick building with a café at street level and apartments up top. The gentrification had well and truly happened here, nothing like the first stages that were going on down in Royal Road, his own neighborhood. There were a few things that had been revived, an old warehouse—much like his shitty gym—that was now a nightclub. An abandoned row of stores that had been converted into a restaurant and café. The old building housing Rachel’s tattoo studio that she was looking to turn the rest of into an art gallery. Yeah, it was happening all right. Part of why he’d stayed in Detroit when common sense should have told him to get out and get as far away from the city as possible. Because, fuck, if Detroit could rebuild itself, come out good as new, then so could he.

Slowly he drew the Trans Am up beside the curb and stopped.

She began to fiddle with her seatbelt. “Thank you. I appreciate the trouble you took to—”

“I know this isn’t your real apartment,” he interrupted, not wanting to hear all her polite bullshit. “So I’ll wait here until the taxi to take you home arrives.”

Her hands paused a moment. Then she looked at him, her gaze unexpectedly direct. “Why are you doing this? I mean don’t get me wrong, it’s very nice of you, but I’m sure you don’t give every woman you meet a ride home. Why me?”

So, she didn’t protest about the apartment thing. This really wasn’t her place. For some reason her clear lack of trust rankled, even though he hadn’t given her any reason to trust him.

“Why not you?” Zee leaned back in his seat. “Or don’t you think you’re worth protecting?”

Color rose in her cheeks, but she didn’t look away. “You’re perfectly happy ferrying complete strangers around then?”

Women didn’t normally ask him questions like this one did. The girls who hung around the ring wanting fighters were looking for hard muscles and rough sex, not anything more. And he was fine with that. He didn’t want anyone trying to get to know him, trying to see past the curtain. He hadn’t spent a good ten years putting his past behind him and turning himself into someone else for nothing.

This woman though . . . There was a challenge in her question, even if she didn’t realize it herself. And the fighter in him wanted to answer it.

He could smell her though, that expensive heavy, sensual scent. And he remembered the feel of her, the tense muscle of her thigh as he’d held it. She looked all class, sophisticated and cool, like fucking caviar wouldn’t melt in her mouth. But she hadn’t felt cool. Her body had been so goddamn hot it had nearly burned him alive.

She was still looking at him, watching him, so pretty and perfect in her designer clothes.

A deeply buried grief shifted inside him, the edges of it sharp even after all those years.

“Get out,” he said shortly, because those edges still had the power to cut him right down to the bone. “And don’t let me see you wandering around Royal Road again, especially if you have no idea how to get yourself safely home. Christ, girls like you . . . You’re a fucking liability.”

Anger flared in her eyes. “Oh, don’t worry.” Her voice was stiff, cold. “I have no intention of going there ever again, believe me.” She fumbled again with the seatbelt. The thing had always been tricky to open and she clearly wasn’t having much luck with it.

He cursed. “Hang on. Let me undo that for you.”

“No, it’s okay. I can—”

Ignoring her, he leaned over to unfasten the clasp for her.

And then realized his mistake.

The scent of her hit him like a punch to the jaw, the drowned-flower smell now overlain with something else. Something like . . . musk. And damn, she was so hot. All the tugging she’d been doing had pulled the belt even tighter, which meant he was going to have to half lean over her in order to get it free.

She pressed herself into the seat as he did so, as if she were trying to escape out the back of it, and he could hear the sound of her breathing. Short, hard pants. And she was trembling. As if she was terrified.

He looked at her, unable to help himself.

But it wasn’t fear in her gaze.

It was something else.

S
he didn’t know what the hell was happening to her. One minute she was furious, desperate to get out of the car and slam the door in Zee’s arrogant, scarred face. The next she was fighting for breath as that hard, muscular body of his leaned over her to get at her seatbelt. And it wasn’t anger lighting a fire in her blood, but a deep, dark hunger that had seemingly sprung out of nowhere.

Okay, not nowhere. The attraction to him had been pretty much instant the moment she’d seen him in the gym. But she’d thought she could ignore it, that she could keep it under control the way she kept everything else under control.

Yet now he was looking at her with those tarnished silver eyes of his, like blades so sharp there was no pain as they slid under her skin. And she didn’t know why that made her so afraid, because it wasn’t like the truth about herself was imprinted on her soul or anything. Sure, the eight years she’d spent applying herself, aiming hard for success, wasn’t nearly enough, but once she’d gotten a place at her father’s firm, once she’d realized the potential her parents had seen in her, then maybe it would be.

But Zee didn’t know that. Zee couldn’t see that. So why did the way he looked at her make her want to throw up her hands and shield herself?

“What?” she demanded, her voice hoarse, hating the strange desperation clawing up inside her. Hating the way she felt so vulnerable, especially in front of a complete stranger. God, how she loathed feeling so out of control.

He said nothing, only looked at her. He wasn’t touching her anywhere, but he had one hand on the side of the seat near her thigh, the other reaching across her to pull at the belt on the doorframe. And he was so freaking close, his face inches from hers.

“Stop looking at me.” She couldn’t get a breath. Why couldn’t she get a breath?

“You’re not scared.” It wasn’t a question, more of a flat statement.

“What? What’s that got to do with anything?”

“You’re trembling.”

Oh crap. So she was. “Because you’re leaning over me like an asshole. Unfasten the damn seatbelt and let me get out.” She tried to stop the little tremors shaking her, but it was impossible.

His gaze dipped, settling on her mouth for a moment before moving down, and in its wake she felt a wave of heat prickle all over her skin. Like he’d moved his hand over her, stroking her. Her nipples were getting hard, pressing against the fabric of her T-shirt, a hollow kind of ache gathering way down low inside her.

“I don’t think that’s why you’re trembling.” His gritty, husky voice was even rougher.

He was going to touch her. Oh God, he was going to touch her. And if he did . . .

“I have a boyfriend,” she blurted out, the words shaky.

His gaze lifted to hers again and, quite frankly, that wasn’t any better than when he’d been looking at her body. “Do you? He not look after you well enough?”

“Of course he does.” Robert looked after her very well. The last time they were in New York, he’d brought her roses and taken her out for dinner.

“Pretty girl”—Zee’s silver gaze searched hers—“your nipples are hard and you’re shaking. And I’m gonna take a wild guess here that it’s not him you’re thinking about right now.”

She could feel her cheeks blazing, embarrassment ricocheting through her. But she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of being right so she didn’t look away. “How would you know? You know nothing about me.”

“No, it’s true. I don’t. But I know when a woman’s wet for me. And you are, Tamara Lennox, I can smell it.”

Oh hell.

Tamara shut her eyes, as if by not seeing him, she could somehow pretend he wasn’t there. But the crude words were resonating inside her, calling to a hidden part of her, a dark part she’d thought she’d excised a long time ago.

And he was so close, so very, very close. The underside of his wrist nearly brushing her thigh. The wide stretch of his chest inches from hers, the black cotton of his T-shirt molding to his body so she could almost see the hard muscle beneath it. The dark, wicked spice of his scent. The way he was leaning over her, looking down at her, intimidating her.... No, intimidating wasn’t quite the right word. More like . . . overwhelming her with the sheer force of presence. And with the dirty, dirty things coming from his dirty, dirty mouth.

“I don’t want you,” she said, as if by saying it aloud that would make it true.

“Yes, you do.” There was heat in his voice, lazy and soft. “Boyfriend or not, I think you’re dying for me.”

“I don’t
want
to.” She opened her eyes, staring straight back into his.

He hadn’t moved, yet it felt as if he was even closer now. Inescapable. Overwhelming.

Bizarrely, all she could think about was Robert saying good-bye to her at the airport, about how she’d waited for his usual kiss, but he hadn’t given her one. And she’d felt . . . relieved.

“I don’t wanna want you either,” Zee said. “But the way you smell is making me crazy.”

“S-so let me out.” Dammit, she hated that stutter. “Let me out and we never have to see each other again.”

He didn’t reply immediately, the silence becoming hotter, thicker.

Then he said, “Or, we could give each other a little relief first. Then you get out like you said and we never have to see each other again.”

A little relief . . .

She sucked in a breath. “Did you miss the part where I said I had a boyfriend?”

“I don’t give a shit about your boyfriend. Do you want me to fuck you? Yes or no?”

Such a crude word for it and yet now that he’d said it, she couldn’t get it out of her head. Getting in the backseat with him, having his hands on her, having him inside her . . . A hard, violent, scarred stranger, taking her roughly.

It was wrong and it was dirty, and most importantly of all, it was out of control. And it pretty much went against everything she’d been trying to do for the past eight years.

The expression on his face was tight, his eyes all lit up with the same kind of hunger that was turning her inside out. A hunger she’d never seen in Robert’s eyes, not once. Her boyfriend didn’t look at her like this, like he wanted to eat her alive.

Even the last time they’d had sex it had been . . . perfunctory, for lack of a better word. And that too had made her glad, though at the time, she hadn’t been able to put a finger on why.

She was conscious of a certain shock moving through her. She’d met Robert at a party given by her parents and they’d introduced her to him. They’d encouraged her to date him and she had because he was in all ways perfect for her and they liked him.

But he’d never been her choice.

“It’s your choice,” Zee said, uncannily echoing the insidious thought lurking in her brain. “But you’d better choose soon. I’m usually a patient man, but I’m kinda not feeling it right now.”

Her body ached like it hadn’t been touched in years, her heart beating wild and fast in her chest. And she was scared. Not of him, she knew that now, but of herself. Of what she wanted. Of the restlessness pacing about inside her soul, a need to reach out and grab hold of the energy that crackled around him, take it for herself.

The need to not, for once, keep it under control.

Tamara swallowed. “Make me,” she said, consciously imitating his earlier words to her.

Something flared bright in his eyes, the challenge she’d flung at him being accepted.

Then he lifted his hand from her seat belt and took her chin in his hand. The touch of his skin on hers was a shock that drove the breath from her body, made her go still in her seat. Then he turned her head to the side with a firm pressure. She trembled, unable to stop, staring out through the driver’s-side window as he kept her head turned, every single cell of her body awake and aware.

Zee bent and she felt his breath whisper over her skin, the heat searing. Then she felt the brush of his lips and the firm pressure of his teeth closing around the tendons of her neck.

She jerked against the restraint of her seatbelt, a sharp sob escaping her as a burst of sensation overloaded every nerve ending she had. And just before the bite crossed the border from pleasure into pain, he eased back, his tongue licking over her skin, rough as a cat’s.

Tamara shuddered, her breathing wild, his fingers holding her head to the side.

“Last chance to change your mind,” he murmured against her throat. “Before I take us somewhere more private.”

She shook her head, unable to speak. Because she wasn’t going to change her mind. It was too late for that.

Zee said nothing, releasing her chin and moving back to sit in his seat. He started the car again, pulling away from the curb, and five minutes later he’d found a dark little alley to park in.

Tamara tried not to think too much as he turned off the engine, then leaned over and casually pulled open the clasp of her seatbelt. But a raw and quite frankly terrifying excitement had her in its grip, and she didn’t know what to do with herself.

“Get in the back,” Zee ordered, his voice full of rough heat.

And she did, awkwardly and without grace in all likelihood, twisting until she was sitting in the backseat, waiting for him.

Then he was in the back too, his arm catching her around the waist and hauling her over to sit in his lap, her back to his chest, so she was facing the driver’s seat.

God, he was so hot, the feel of his body under hers hard and strong and powerful.

“Don’t wanna make this obvious,” he murmured, his arm tightening around her waist. “So let’s pretend you’re just sitting there, waiting for someone.”

She tried to nod, but then his mouth brushed over the back of her neck, sensitive skin left bare by her ponytail, at the same time as his hand moved to the button of her jeans, deftly undoing it. Grabbing the tab of her zipper and jerking it down.

“I’ve never done this before,” she heard herself say in a high, breathy voice, the words coming out of her before she could stop them. “With someone I don’t know.”

“Well, I have.” His hand was resting on her stomach now. “Don’t worry. I’ll make it real good, I promise.”

Maybe the fact that this was obviously not new to him should have bothered her. But it didn’t. If anything, it was a reassurance that at least someone here knew what they were doing because she sure as hell didn’t. And clearly she didn’t. Two hours ago she’d only just met him and had disliked him intensely. Now here she was, in the back of his car and she was letting him screw her.

She could barely believe it was happening, let alone that she’d agreed to it.

But then his hand moved, pushing down beneath the waistband of her panties and all thought, all her nervousness and doubt, vanished utterly.

His fingers found her clit, brushing gently over it, and she stiffened as jolt of intense pleasure knifed straight through her. “Oh . . . God . . .” Her hands gripped on tight to the hard muscles of his thighs beneath her. She felt like she was burning up, like she was sitting on an open flame.

His hand moved again, his fingers easing down over her aching flesh, finding the entrance to her body and pushing inside. And a hoarse noise escaped her, a choked sob, pleasure like a bonfire building high.

“I knew it.” His mouth brushed her neck again, his fingers easing out of her, then pushing back in again. “I fucking knew you’d be wet for me.”

Her hips were moving helplessly against his hand, and she didn’t feel awkward or nervous anymore. She felt desperate.

“Hold on to the seat in front of you and lean forward.”

She obeyed without thought, trembling all over again as he removed his hand from between her legs, then shoved her jeans down, taking her panties with them. There was another pause, the sound of fabric shifting. His breathing was harsh in her ear as the crackle of foil filled the car.

“Lift up.” The words were bitten off and taut.

She did so, shuddering. And then his hand was back, sliding over the bare skin of her butt and beneath her, between her thighs, spreading her, while the other hand rested on her hip, urging her back down onto him.

A long, low moan tore itself from her throat, the press of his cock stretching her wide. Because he was big and she was so damn close to the edge. She gripped tight to the seat in front of her, pressing her forehead against the headrest, and closed her eyes, her breathing wild.

“Ah . . . that’s good.” His voice was rough and raw, his hands on her hips now, holding her painfully tight, his cock buried deep inside her. “So fucking good.”

His hips flexed as if he was testing the fit of her and she groaned at the friction, so close to coming already all it would take was another movement like that and she would go over. “Zee . . .” His name a broken whisper. “Don’t. I’m nearly . . .”

He ignored her, flexing his hips again, and this time she did come, the orgasm crashing over her without warning, a rush of blinding pleasure that had lights bursting behind her eyes.

“Now,” he said, his voice dark, gritty, and hot through the roar in her head. “Let’s do this properly.”

And his hands tightened on her hips and he held her there as he began to thrust in earnest, hard and sure and deep, each one shoving her forward against the seat in front of her, making her cry out, her knuckles white on the leather. Because it was almost too much. Almost too intense.

Every part of this was wrong. The sounds of his flesh sliding into her and the rough, growling noises he made as he thrust. The raw ache in her pussy and the exquisite friction of his cock. The way her forehead kept being pushed roughly into the seat in front and the thick, musky smell of sex.