On the Edge of Love (Mama's Brood Book 1) (9 page)

Wow
. The aroma and sheer volume of food made Sabrina’s stomach grumble indelicately.

“You, uh, you wouldn’t happen to have seen Zeus?” Mama asked as the tray changed hands. Sabrina nodded toward the bathroom door.

“He’s in the shower.”

Sabrina walked over to the table near the bed’s headboard and placed the tray on it, marveling at how strong and well-balanced the other woman must be to have carried the tray down to them. She picked up a slice of bacon and bit into it. Perfect, she thought as she closed her eyes, savoring. She hadn’t bought bacon in months. She opened her eyes and turned to see Mama still in the doorway. The other woman’s face had lost the kindness of moments before. She looked hard and threatening.

Sabrina frowned, reminded that just because Almaya had brought together a group of killers and called them her Brood didn’t mean Sabrina should drop her guard around these people, around Mama. No, not Mama. Almaya, she thought, remembering what Zeus called her. She needed to use the other woman’s name to keep emotional distance. It was too easy for a motherless woman to seek nurturing in older females who showed a kindness. She’d done it before. Never ended well. She couldn’t even blame such foolishness on the ignorance of youth if she did it again.

“Did he hurt you?” Almaya asked, eyes never leaving the open door to the bathroom. The water to the shower shut off. Almaya was angry.

Oh
. Realization dawned. She thought Zeus had… “Oh no. He didn’t do anything wrong.”

“He did something wrong.” Almaya pointed to the open door connecting her room to Zeus’s. “I locked the door when I left. He knew he was supposed to stay on his side of it.”

Zeus strolled out of the bathroom wearing only a pair of white boxers. He stopped in front of Sabrina, took the rest of her bacon out of her hand, and popped it into his mouth, smirking at Almaya.

“You
wanted
me to stay on my side of the connecting door. Didn’t say I would.”

“You have a shower in your own room, Zeus.”

“I like hers better.”

“They are the same.” Mama’s words were staccato. She walked across the room toward them. Her stride would have been menacing if she wasn’t so small. Almaya picked up a piece of bacon from the plate Sabrina had designated as hers and bit into it as if the bacon were the antidote to her frustration with Zeus.

Sabrina picked up the other plate, the untouched plate with all its bacon intact, and walked to the foot of the bed. She was starving, and she didn’t feel like sharing. She didn’t care if it was selfish. She hadn’t eaten in…

“Hey, what time is it?” she asked, then shoved a forkful of eggs in her mouth.

“It’s about eleven thirty,” Almaya said, sitting on the side of the bed. “I was going to let you sleep longer but didn’t want you to starve. I know you haven’t eaten since yesterday afternoon.”

Almaya reached for another piece of bacon on the plate Sabrina had left for Zeus. He growled, actually growled, before he snatched the plate out of reach. Almaya made an impatient sound in her throat and turned toward Sabrina.

“I want you to make yourself at home here, Sabrina. After you’ve finished eating, have Zeus bring you back to the front room and I’ll show you around. Some places you won’t have access to, but the majority of my home is yours to use freely.”

Sabrina nodded, and Almaya stood, sending Zeus a warning look before she left the room.

Zeus brought the tray to the foot of the bed and placed it between them as he sat down. “You shouldn’t trust her,” he said, picking up his glass of orange juice.

“You seem to.”

“I tolerate her. Is that what trust looks like?”

“No, I think it requires more than tolerance.”

“If you say so.”

“For example, I tolerated Aaron, the security guard at work, but I never trusted him. As it turns out, my instincts were correct. I tolerated him, but I definitely did not trust him.”

Zeus folded the thick slice of ham and consumed the large chunk of meat in two bites.

“Hungry?”

“You might want to be careful about what you eat and drink around Almaya. She drugged your drink last night to make you sleep.”

Sabrina froze midbite while Zeus continued to eat. “Excuse me?”

His gray gaze darted toward her and away as he spread butter and jelly over his toast. “They don’t trust you either.”

“They don’t… What the fuck? I didn’t ask them to trust me.”

“They don’t.”

“I didn’t ask them for anything except that they take me back home.”

“They won’t.”

Her stomach turned, resentment and dread souring the little food she had just eaten. She wanted to push the food away, rejecting the two-faced cow who had just smiled in her face as if they were trusted friends. “She could have just locked me up in one of the rooms or a cell. I’m sure there’s a cell or a dungeon somewhere in this underground asylum. Hell, I could have had a concussion…or been allergic. Did she even consider that before she pumped some drug through my system?”

Zeus shrugged.

How could he be so calm about this? Yesterday he had been willing to kill a man for making her tear up; now he sat there stuffing his face like some muscle-headed bovine.

“What do you know about them anyway?” she snapped.

“They pay well.”

“How big is the organization?”

“Don’t know. I’m not fully a part of the team, just filling in for Cizan.”

“Should we even be eating this food?”

“You should if you’re hungry.”

“Aren’t you worried about being drugged?”

“No. Last night they took the path of least resistance with you. Makes sense. If I hadn’t told you, you wouldn’t have ever known. No harm, no foul. Why are you so mad?”

Un-fucking-believable.

“You know when I told you it wasn’t okay to overlook other people’s needs because you wanted to fulfill a need of your own? Well, it’s not right for them either. By taking me, drugging me, keeping me here, they’ve amazingly proven to be less trustworthy than you.”

She tried to ignore the fact that again she’d almost succumbed to the idea of belonging, of connection. Betrayal and disappointment attached themselves to those idiotic ideals, and Zeus, of all people, had had to remind her of it.

“Sometimes, like with a kid, you have do things they don’t like because it’s in their best interest,” Zeus said.

“Are you saying I don’t have the sense of a child?”

“Not if you’re going to bitch about it. It’s just what the nuns used to preach to us when they were trying to guide us toward good.”

“Yeah, and how’d that go over with you?”

“Didn’t.”

“Exactly,” she said.

She needed to leave Mama’s House and make her way to her own home, or hide out close to it until it was safe to go back. She knew how to take care of herself, and her history of hiding from Ernesto would help her remain on guard if this Kragen or anyone else came after her. She had fought to create this life for herself, and she would fight twice as hard to keep it. Mama’s House, these people, the peace she had awoken to was a lie. She just had to remember that.

She continued to eat because she would need her strength to get through this.

“Where do you live, Zeus?”

He shrugged, remaining silent. She stayed quiet as they ate, watching him relax the longer silence reigned. She passed him her last two slices of bacon and her toast. She’d eaten most of her ham but placed the remainder on his empty plate as he watched her with still-hungry eyes. He ate the last of her food without saying thank you; not that she truly expected him to.

“Like me better than before?” he asked when she stood and took the tray to the table by the bedroom door.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“But you shared your food with me.”

“And you didn’t even say thank you.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

He lay on the bed. “Now can we have sex?”

“You’re out of your mind,” she said, plopping down on the side of the bed. “For real. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone as single-minded as you.”

“You probably never will. That’s just how it is. You have sex with me, the compulsion goes away, and we won’t need to do it ever again, won’t even have to talk to each other ever again. That’s the best part.”

“You know, I’m sure this is your best attempt at seduction, but even with all this suave finesse, I am not going to have sex with you.”

He grunted. “You will.”

She shook her head, falling back on the bed as well. The crown of Zeus’s head lay near her abdomen. Maybe it was her imagination, but she could feel heat radiating from his head, warming her side. She might not like him, trust him, or appreciate his obsession with having sex with her, but she had to admit, if only to herself, that her body did like having his near.

“I should head upstairs, explore this new home I’ve been relegated to,” she mumbled.

“You have to make your bed first.”

“Excuse me?” she exclaimed, turning onto her side, legs tucking in as she curled up, propping her head on her hand, her body forming a half circle above his head. “I’m not making the bed. I didn’t even sleep in it. I slept on you.”

“It’s your bed. I made mine.”

That might have been well and true, but she didn’t even make her own bed on a regular basis. It was an activity better left for the weekend…or when Randy came over to watch videos. “Let’s compromise. We’ll make it together. It’ll go faster that way.”

“I’ll help you only if you help me take the edge off,” he said, tilting his golden head back at an angle to look up at her. His mercurial gray eyes glinted.

“There’s no edge, Zeus. We’re both lying on a comfortable bed, full from a good meal, relaxed, and having the closest thing to a normal interaction we’ve had since we met.”

“To hell with that. I’m on edge. You help me, and neither of us has to deal with a situation we want to avoid. You don’t help me, you make the bed by yourself.”

He turned on his side, angling his body parallel to hers as he reached his big paw of a hand out to rest on her hip. He stroked and massaged the area of semiexposed flesh, making everything from her breasts to her clit throb and vibrate with intense, unrelenting need.

“Don’t be afraid, Sabrina,” he said as he stroked just above her womb. “I’ll make it feel good.”

He
would
make it feel good, that horny part of her agreed. She gritted her teeth, fighting lust, and glared at him. “First of all, I’m not afraid of you, I—”

“I know. You’re not afraid of anything, are you?”

“No,” she whispered, losing the strength of her conviction. Jesus. The heat his hands created inside her was too much. It was because she hadn’t had good sex for an eternity, she told herself. The bad part that controlled the need between her legs responded quick and certain.
You know he will make it good. So good.
Her vagina clenched as images of him inside her played out in her mind.

Zeus sat up on the bed and patted his lap, smiling at her with burning anticipation. She felt her heart blink before resuming its heavy pace. He had the gray-eyed grin of a shark gliding toward an unsuspecting seal from the fathoms below. “Come on, brave girl. Climb aboard.”

Abandoning all good sense, she crawled over and straddled his thighs, conscious of avoiding the bulge straining against his boxers. Once she settled her weight, he gripped her ass and wedged her center tight against the hardness she’d been attempting to avoid.

Her heart was beating so fast she couldn’t catch her breath. This intoxicating insanity was dangerous, she knew, but its allure was too great, the feeling it brought too necessary, a pyromaniac with an inferno blazing all around her, and she was too mesmerized with the feel of him to leap to safety.

“Zeus…”

“Just a kiss. One little kiss to persuade me to make the bed. Afterward we’ll take the dishes upstairs and everything will be neat and tidy all over again. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Life neat and tidy, no messy complications?”

Was that what she wanted? She didn’t know. She couldn’t think beyond the throbbing between her legs.

“I want—”

“I know what you want. I’ll give it to you.”

She draped her arms over his shoulders, felt one of his hands snake up her back, pressing her toward him until her breasts flattened against his chest. She tightened her hold, his lips hovering only a breath away from hers.

“I just want to taste you,” he murmured. His gaze fixated on her lips. “Just one taste.”

She leaned forward and pressed her lips against his. Lightly, barely. They breathed each other in with rapid breaths. His lips rubbed against hers in an almost nonexistent caress, yet her hips surged against him, her vagina clenching and unclenching spastically as if to compel him into its hot passage.

He licked her lips, suckled them lightly, then with more force. Growing need reflected in his urgency, fueling her own. He growled, fisted his hand at the back of her head, his grip on her hair enough to cause tension that wasn’t yet pain. He tilted her head back and devoured her mouth as if it was his long-awaited dessert. She moaned under the onslaught, her hips instinctively grinding against the one thing she knew could ease the tension building in her body.

He emitted an animalistic, urgent sound. His fingers slipped inside the waistband of her pants, finding her liquid center heated by the fever he was creating. She bucked, crying out, fingers gripping his shoulders, as he pushed two fingers inside her, filling her, stretching her. His lips never stopped devouring. His thumb found her clit and pressed, rubbed unrelentingly as his fingers pumped deep, over and over, until her whole body erupted in rapturous convulsions that caused her raw screams to fill the room. Lord, he’d made her come completely undone in minutes. Laid bare and trembling from the swift force of it. This was madness. It was better than peace. She couldn’t remember feeling so satisfied, sated.

“Come back, Sabrina,” Zeus said. “We’re not nearly done.”

Her mind registered that the waistband of her panties was circling her thighs just beneath the curve of her butt. Zeus’s hand gripped his exposed penis as he shifted her with the other. She could feel the wide head slip against her, then press into her entrance.