We pass it back and forth until the choice becomes swallow, suffocate, or spit it out on the floor. I swallow, breaking away from her. My smart girl… she does the same. I’m so pleased, I even forgive her when she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.
Instead, beaming down at her, I say, “We taste good together.”
Better than any fucking cranberry.
TEN
SHOWER
NOELLE
Iwanted some higher power to save me. I guess there’s truth in that old saying—be careful what you wish for—because I got exactly that.
I gotSaint.
He tells me to call him Patrick. Even as he alternates between using my name, murmuring that I’m his Starling, and tacking on a heavy ‘sweetheart’ every now and then, he wants me to see him as something other than the experienced killer who puts men on their knees to execute them.
Then he put me onmyknees, giving me the choice of what to do when I was down there, and I want to believe him when he says that everything he’s done, he’s done for me.
He’s killed for me. He’s invaded my privacy and arranged it so that I’m trapped with him this Christmas. And, up until I discovered the truth… up until he stopped pretending and set a trap that I naïvely walked right into… I was almost glad to have the company. I thought he was handsome, and if I wondered ‘what if’, that’s nothing compared to learning that there was never going tobea ‘what if’. From the moment this man took an interest in me and my list that fateful day at the Aria Coffee Lounge, he’s considered me his—and it’s not only the snow and my missing keys that are keeping me from escaping.
Damn it. There isn’t a truth serum in the whole fucking world that would get me to admit it to him, whether he’s wearing an amused grin or a searching look as though he can see straight to my soul, but the idea that he is so obsessed with me—with plump, angry, bitter Noelle Halliday—is blunting the sharp edge of the knife that is Saint’s history as a Dragonfly enforcer.
I know I’m pretty. In my teens, I was self-conscious of my rolls, of the size of my tits, of how my ass was almost wider than the seat attached to my desk at school. I’ve always had hair to envy and a stunning face, but it took me until I was a little older and I realized that there are plenty of men who like a solid, thick girl that I started to own my sexuality. Ioozedit, and I liked it, and that still didn’t give those five fuckers anyright to touch me… touseme… the way they did that violent night.
When Patrick tells me I’m gorgeous, he says it with a solemnity that dares me to fight back. Fuck. For a man witheighteendocumented kills on his skin—which is probably a small portion over his twenty years as a hired assassin—he shouldn’t have the patience to put up with me when I don’t immediately play meek and mild. Honestly, that was never my style, and it took way too many cranberry Schnapps and a date rape drug for Charles Dutton to be able to control me in the first place. So I lost my spark after my assault. I’ve worked hard to get it back, and I’ll be damned if I let Patrick North snuff it out.
Only… that’s not what he wants to do. It sounds just as insane as he has to be, but I can tell. If it were all about overpowering me, he would’ve pried open my mouth and shoved his dick right inside without giving me any choice. Sure, he took over once I first initiated contact, but he waited until I’d made up my mind to give him my mouth like he requested, all while telling myself I needed to do this, I needed to give him his five stupid things if I want to erase this feeling of owing him for clearing my wish list with the poignant deaths of five terrible men.
Two hits down, three to go…
But here, his arms wrapped around me, the bleachy taste of his come mingled with something that is uniquelyPatrick—as icy as his surnameeven in a mouth so hot, I burned up from the inside out to have him kiss me as deeply as he did, passing his jizz between us—sharp on my tongue, I have to admit that I didn’t blow him because I was afraid of what he would do if I really did grab his erection and yank.
Now, I’m scared. Shit, I’m so terrified that I’ve reached the other side of it, approaching this situation as calmly as I can. He says he isn’t going to hurt me. I have to believe him for my own cracking sanity. Otherwise I’ll be walking around on tiptoe, waiting for him to decide that, this time, when he tells me to go to my knees, he’ll pull his gun out instead of his cock.
There’s nothing I can do. Patrick had the advantage of watching over me for the past year. I only really met him a handful of days ago. He knows how I think. Me? I’m at his mercy. Hecouldkill me, but since he seems to think I belong to him now… at least until I repay my ‘debt’ to him… I don’t think I’m dead. And, well, I’m basing that all on the last tattoo I found on Patrick.
A starling. A little black bird inked high up on his inner thigh, this man has tattooed astarlingclose enough to his junk that intimacy isn’t just implied—it’sdemanded.
He wants me. I don’t know why. I’m still struggling to believe this all has to do with that fateful day I fled into the Aria Coffee Lounge. For him to have watched me, to stalk me… cameras, I think, a shiver running down my spine, he hascamerassomewhere… to kill for me because my angry tears caught his attention… a part of me kind of wants to show him that Iamgrateful for this attention if only because he made it so that I was the last one standing—even if ordered me to my knees in front of him.
That’s why I kissed him on his cock. Why I took him in my mouth, sucking him off, taking everything he wanted to give, then passing it back when he ordered me to. Because he gave me a nickname that he promised belonged to me and only me, and he tatted it alongside his leaves of death and his loyalty brand tothe Dragonflies.
Because he told me that I didn’t have to, and whether that was some kind of fucked-up reverse psychology or not, Idid, and now he’s hugging me tight, and I have no idea what’s going to happen next, only that I’m almost excited despite myself to find out.
I don’t know. But Patrick?
Hedoes.
He’s careful to keep one arm around my shoulder even as he ends the embrace. Before I know it, he’s shuffling me toward the stairs, and by the time I begin to wonder if I should resist, we’re already heading up to the second floor.
I stiffen as we reach the first bedroom. If Patrick notices, he doesn’t say a word about it. He just keeps going until he’s led me to the bathroom, closing the door behind us.
Message received. He’s not letting me get away from him just yet, and he seems to have another shower on his mind. The bathroom slowly fills with steam as he turns it on. With a warning look that tells me to stay right where I am, he leans into the stall, testing the water with his wrist. He adjusts it without comment, testing it again.
Finally, when it seems to be the perfect temp for Patrick, he nods at me. “Get in.”
Excuse me? “I’m okay.”
