The Token (#10): Shepard (9 page)

Marissa

Can't breathe.

Shepard shoves me to the root of his cock. And no matter how many times I've sucked men off—and there have been many, many times—I can never quite get past the sensation of drowning. Suffocating.

I've never had a man go down on me before.

The orphanage wasn't about my pleasure. It was about theirs.

Now, as the hot jets of his seed course down my throat, I reflexively swallow.

Payment,
he said.

My hands grasp his balls, and he tenses. That's when I know he's been grabbed before and not liked it.

It's been pain.

Finally, he loosens his hands from my head, and I lift my own, shaking from the intensity of my orgasms that still feel like aftershocks from deep within. Trembling from the first blow job I've given that I actually wanted to give, though the beginning was the roughest thing I could have imagined. It wasn't romantic. Anticipated. Predictable.

But the act was the hottest thing I've ever done.

Shepard's dark eyes are hooded as he surveys me. “I did fuck you.”

I frown, sitting back on my heels. I blink.

The hot water drums against the tub, landing on his softening prick. I move forward, lying on top of him, and my head rests on his flat belly.

I feel his heart beat against my cheek.

“Sex is not always intercourse, Marissa.”

I don't speak, but a tear rolls out of my eye and sinks like forgotten grief between us.

I sense his hand hovering over my head and turn my face to look up at him.

His hand drops, beginning to stroke my drenched head. “Americans. All of you think there must be penetration for the act to be intercourse.” His fingers gently pull my head back so that our gazes lock. “Tell me what we just shared is not sex.”

His dark eyes search me.

I
can't
. It was
so
sex to me. “I can't. It—us”—I feel my face heat—“was everything sex should be but hasn't been before.”

Shepard's eyebrows rise. “I suspect that is not the first time you've pleasured a man.”

My face hikes, my jaw hard. “It's the first time I
wanted
to.”

We stare at each other for a long minute.

“You have no family.” He states it like a fact. It should be. We're both orphans by our own admission.

I look away. “No.”

“Nor I.”

Our gazes hold again. Shepard straightens, and I move back on my heels. He reaches behind him and shuts the water off.

The drips from the faucet echo in the sudden silence.

He stands, holding out his hand.

I look up. Way up. My eyes travel from his balls to his muscled stomach and broad chest. His veins stand out like slick ropes beneath his smooth skin.

I swallow and take the proffered hand.

He yanks me to a stand, and our bodies slap together, damp—hot.

Shepard bends to the crook of my neck. He licks, pressing his lips against my throbbing pulse.

I moan, my head falling to the side, and his arms encircle me, his large hands spreading against my lower back.

“Why?” I ask breathlessly.

He pulls back, giving me a circumspect look. “
Pourquoi
?”

I nod. “You've admitted that you used to
be
these guys. Those guys that were going to take me.”

Shepard's smile is gentle, but he grabs my hips, his fingers biting.

“No.” He shakes me. “I am not they. I was a teacher of women, not a kidnapper.”

I push away and slip, and he catches me roughly. With ease, Shepard steps out of the tub and sets me on my feet.

“What's the difference?” I ask, stepping away from him and folding my arms beneath my breasts.

I was nude a minute ago. Now I feel naked.

Shepard eats the small distance I erected between us.

I back up against the wall, and the towel bar presses uncomfortably against my spine.

His strong arms run along my temples, his fists hitting the wall on either side of my face.

I give a short coughing yell of surprise, my eyes clenching shut.

“No.” He tips my chin. “You shall look at me when I speak to you.”

Oh God, oh God—I sucked his cock—I let him, this dangerous man, lick and kiss my most tender place. My most secret.

His grip tightens on my chin.

My eyes fly open.

“Better,” he says, his fingers going from crushing to soft in an instant.

“I can't be with a man I'm afraid of,” I say quietly.

He chuckles, releasing me and stepping away.

My body's cold without Shepard.

“These weak males who think to pass for men do not know what it is to
be
one.” Shepard gives a dismissive wave behind his shoulder.

I slowly follow him, grabbing a remaining towel off the bar as I go by and wrapping it around myself.

The view of his naked ass is all consuming, and I sort of wonder when I lost my mind. Was it when that Hugo creep jumped me?

Or when Shepard kind of kidnapped me?

Saved me.

Kissed me
there
. My face goes up in flames as I think about how I rode his mouth.

Apparently I don't even care we're most likely on the run for our very lives. That if this French mob catches up, they're going to kill Shepard for murdering the guys he was supposed to meet.

And for taking me.

They'll still take me. I know that now. They wasted one of their people on watching me until the time was right.
La famille
, as Shepard calls them, were banking on Shepard's help. They were
that
sure of him.

Thinking about the kind of absolute faith responsible for an unshakable assumption—because of the way they shaped him to play the kind of role he did—causes me to shiver. “And what makes you more a man than them?” I ask, totally baiting him.

He whirls. His cock, even flaccid, is something I'm beginning to entertain wanting inside me. Deep inside.

Shepard stalks toward me, a man so obviously dangerous, I'm unable to deny it, but I stay where I am. Trusting him without too much solid reason behind the impulse.

Trusting that Shepard didn't take me from my home only to harm me.

“Do not challenge me, Marissa Augustine. I am the only thing keeping you from
la famille
.”

My pulse quickens at his restating of the facts. “I know,” I say through clenched teeth, “but that doesn't mean that we're just going to fall into each other's arms. We don't know each other. I don't know if they're going to get me, anyway.” I throw my hands out.

He ignores my logic, sidestepping the fact that we absolutely just did fall into each other's arms.

“I can negotiate for you.”

My gaze drops to his dick again, and it's halfway to hard. “How can you get hard again?” It's a humorous question, my lips quirking.

His expression isn't. It's cold. Hard.

I frown. “Hey—sorry.”

“My prick is a tool. That fact was made excruciatingly clear from the very beginning. I can make my cock hard with a solid thought.”

My breath lodges in my throat, but I manage to ask softly, “Do I make you hard, Shepard?”

His smile is not real, but it stretches across his face. “Yes. I want to bury myself in your virgin pussy.”

I flinch at the coarse way he replies. “Is
that
what being a man to you is, Shepard?” I toss at him.

He closes the three-foot distance between us, jerking me against him. “
Non
. Being a man is having the restraint to resist a bounty that is for the taking.”

He shoves me away, and I stumble, catching myself on the couch behind me. My hands grip the edge of the scratchy fabric, and I glare at him.

He ignores me, yanking a zipper open at the top of a small suitcase. All black. Like his foul temper.

“You're being a
dick
.” I watch the muscles bunch in his shoulders and close my eyes at the memory of those shoulders lifting my hips so he could have better access to me.

Yeah. That's me. Wet and willing. Shame engulfs me. Shepard can't help that he was at the right place at the right time.

But why
save
me? Why kill those guys? It would have been easier to just let them have me and say no to their offer again. He told me he'd already said no for a year straight.

“And
your
conduct is so marvelous,” he declares, stabbing first one leg then the next through boxer briefs. They are a pale pink color.

I laugh.

His eyebrow crooks.

I point at his underwear.

“What are you laughing at?” He glowers, which, of course, makes me laugh harder.

That gets guys going. Laugh at their crotch. See what happens.

Shepard walks to me, gripping my shoulders. “What is so amusing?”

“You're wearing pink boxers.”

His grin is broad and immediate. Real.

I stop laughing.

Shepard's fingers slide down my bare arms, carefully avoiding my breasts. My nipples pebble instinctively as a river of gooseflesh breaks over my skin, following his caress.

“I am French. Our standards and fashion are not nearly as constrained as that of Americans. What did you expect? White?” He snorts, adjusts his considerable package, and faces away from me.

Standing, I slip my arms around his toned torso, the ropes of his scar rough underneath my cheek. “I'm sorry I was a bitch. I'm scared. And you've made me horny. A first.”

His hands tentatively cover mine. “Why have you allowed no men to conquer you?”

I laugh softly against his skin, and he shudders underneath my touch. “Conquer?” I snort. “That's so simple, I'd think you'd know the answer.”

“I could guess, but I choose not to.”

So I speak to his back. Every detail—all the smeared shame of what I couldn't control. The events that led me to who I am now.

Hard. Afraid. Strong.

Unassuming.

Fragile.

His chin sinks toward his chest as I end my tale, and I nestle my face between his shoulder blades. “Now you know how used I really am,” I admit. I hold my breath, awaiting his judgment.

It never comes.

“No more than myself.” Shepard turns me to face him.

I don't realize I'm crying until his thumbs remove the wet stains of my remorse.

His dark eyes find mine. “I made the choice. I would have told
la famille
no, again. The difference was, when I saw you, I felt something.” He brings our clasped hands to his chest above where his heart beats.

“I cannot be a soft man, Marissa. Too much of me has been fashioned by
la famille
. But the right woman could possibly fit what I am now.”

“What are you now?” I ask in a quiet voice, my eyes searching his. This man I've known two days. And in just as long, he's turned everything I know upside down.

“A man without purpose.”

“I know what I want,” I say, and I realize I shouldn't have said that last thing. Because it invites the question he asks next.

“What do you want?” Shepard tilts his head and reaches out, grasping my left breast, and an involuntary moan slips from between my lips.

His thumb swings to my nipple, and I cry out softly. Shepard pinches the stiff nub of flesh, catching my head with his other hand as it falls back.

“Marissa,” he says softly, his hot breath above my nipple. When his mouth sinks around the peak, I gasp.

“You,” I say.

“Say it. Say it,
mon chéri.
”

He lifts me, and my legs wrap his waist. His huge cock splits my labia and presses against my clit like a torch of flesh.

“I can't.” I won't admit how I'm feeling, even to myself.

I've already confessed all the sins of my past to Shepard, as if he's a priest instead of the corrupter of virgins with the French mob. But he's really not that man anymore.

Shepard's looking for absolution.

Like me.

Maybe, just maybe, we can find it with each other.

Shepard walks through a doorway with me clinging to him like a monkey. The bed fills my vision before he dumps me on its soft surface.

I bounce.

Shepard stands before me, all hard male. Only him.

Only me.

“I want you to fuck me.” I don't stumble over the words.