Heart of Darkness - A Standalone Bad Boy Romance Novel Read online

  Then he tilted his hips against mine, just a little. Just the smallest, politest gesture, but it was more than enough to feel his intention. He was rock hard against me. I gulped. Could that really be his…

  “You’re such an animal,” I laughed. And wasn’t he? Beating off my other suitors so he could… well, you know. He laughed with me, kissing the top of my head and stroking my hair, the full length of his tall body pressed against me.

  “Luckily, you’re an animal lover…” he whispered darkly.

  The thrill his words sent through me was so electrifying I felt my clit thump instantly. Here I was, a crazy hysterical woman with too many cats and a bad ex and a bruised face. And now I was wet. Very wet. Almost without thinking, I squeezed my legs together and tilted my own hips to his. Just a little.

  “I just can’t believe what just happened. I’ve never actually …it’s kind of shocking…” I blurted. “You’re such a badass, like you just… you really hit him so hard, and you …you defended me,” I said, my voice full of disbelief.

  I couldn’t imagine it. A macho man beating my asshole ex out of the house would have felt like a dream come true if I had ever had the audacity to dream up such a thing.

  He lifted my head to his and gave me a hard, serious look. His lips were so close.

  “Maddy, I would do it again. I mean it. I don’t want you to ever have to deal with that shit again.”

  I stood up on my tiptoes and sunk into his beautiful lips, and sighed, and felt my tears coming on again. I kissed him hard and deep, and he kissed back, cradling my head in his big hands.

  “Shhh… it’s over now,” he said tenderly. He didn’t realize that it wasn’t Alex who was making me cry. It was him.

  His tenderness disappeared and in one rough movement he raised his arms above his head and peeled off his shirt, dropping it behind him. When he lowered his arms again, the muscles of his immense chest settled and flexed a little, his caramel skin rich with tattoos. He pulled me in again for another kiss, and I felt him smiling against my lips.

  “That shirt was just getting in the way,” he mumbled, and I moaned my agreement. Firm hands went to the base of my spine and nestled there, then guided me around and down onto the sofa again.

  This was crazy. Dangerous. I had only met him once before, and he was a criminal, wasn’t he? Had I lost my mind? If he was the bad guy, then who had staggered out of my house a moment ago with a split lip?

  My head was in pieces.

  I obediently crumpled down onto the cushions, but held onto the kiss, unwilling to tear myself from his gorgeous lips.

  A few weeks ago, this man was nothing but a fanciful dream for me, a picture on a screen, a man that belonged somewhere else… and now we were so close I could smell the excitement in his skin, and feel the heat of his body as he kissed me more deeply.

  His hands pawed urgently over me, trying to find their way to my skin through my clothes. Closing both firm hands round my waist, he lowered his full, glorious weight down onto me, our hungry tongues still playing their delicious game, and I opened and exhaled loudly as his strong body pinned mine to the sofa beneath us. I wasn’t going anywhere. And so what if he was a ‘bad man’? So what if he was a brawling thug who had tattoos and a shady past? If it felt so delicious to have his strong hips pressing my legs open, did I even care?

  He planted a knee on either side of me, then rose up and gazed down at me, stroking his hands over every part of me, slowly, as though his fingertips were tasting me.

  He was twice the man Alex was.

  Fuck, he was twice the person I was. Both of my hands could fit into one of his. Two of me could fit against his broad chest, and his tongue was twice mine and easily kissed circles around it. He was so tall that he had to curl his spine to lean down and kiss me again.

  I hadn’t been with a man for a long time, but he was still double all my memories. Still more than enough man for me. Too big. Too tall. Too much.

  When my fingers went to his belt buckle, he watched me with pleasure, then pushed aside my hands and unbuttoned, unzipped, and peeled them away to reveal a thick, long knot in navy blue boxer shorts. I traced tentative fingers over him, guessing at the size and shape of his cock like it was a Christmas present and I had to try figure out what was inside.

  He was fucking gorgeous.

  He towered above me, straddling me like I was the next in line to be conquered. I wondered what dangerous situations his body had triumphed over, and what else these thick arms had done in their time. I wondered what parts he would use to tame me.

  I giggled at the prospect. I could scarcely believe that any of it was happening. He smiled down coyly at me, stood, then hurried to wriggle off the rest of his clothing, freeing a springy slab of cock from his boxers that was nearly thick as my arm and the same pink as my blushing face.

  I couldn’t help but stare.

  He kneeled down in front me and with gentle but determined hands, and set to work removing my clothes. I surrendered and watched myself become more and more naked under his expert fingers, his hard bobbing cock never far from my awareness. It thumped heavy against me once or twice as he rolled my jeans off and with them my now wet underwear.

  I was spellbound. His hard hands – still red on the knuckles from where they collided with Alex’s petulant face – were now so soft and careful over my skin. When I was completely naked, he contemplated my body again and smiled, and something ached in me. My arms crossed lightly over my soft belly. My usual shield.

  “I’m… I’m sorry. I know I need to lose a little weight,” I said. I felt like I had just spoken to him in a foreign language.

  “Lose weight?” He seemed confused.

  “Yeah, I’m sorry, I haven’t been to the gym in a while… anyway, I’m working on it,” I said, laughing anxiously. He gave me the same look, then leaned forward to kiss me, this time with more gentleness.

  He pulled back and stroked a hand over my abdomen, then carefully pried my arms away. My arms obeyed. It was so easy to do whatever his body suggested. I found myself dropping my hands to my sides again, and flopped back, naked and undefended. He looked at me. At last, after more gentle caresses, he said simply, “I don’t care what your body looks like. I only care about what it does…”

  His eyes caught mine and he flashed a devilish grin at me.

  “Well, all I’m really good for is caring for sick animals,” I blurted.

  “Not true,” he said. “Your tongue, for instance, is very good at doing this…”

  He leaned in for another deep, juicy kiss, and I returned his enthusiasm.

  “And I’m sure you’re good at other things, too…” he said, and stroked the curve of my belly and hips again.

  For some stupid reason, the tears came again, and soon two hot, stinging drops were rolling out the side of each eye and down into my hair. He leaned forward and kissed these too, and then put his lips against the ugly bruise on my face, whispering, “I’m sorry he hurt you.”

  I squeezed out the last of the tears and kissed him again, so he would stop speaking, or maybe so that I wouldn’t have to. We fell into a long, fluid embrace and his body caressed mine easily. He was gentle and sweetly patient, pushing me only a little at a time, caressing the tension and fear out of my body. But there was no doubt: we were going to do things. We were going to fuck. The thought alone made me giddy. Though my body melted under his touch, my heart was galloping furiously inside me.

  He was unlike Alex in every way.

  He didn’t look at me awkwardly, waiting for me to entertain him like a girl in a porn clip. He didn’t kiss my pussy for 4 milliseconds and then watch my face to see if I was screaming in raptures. In fact, everything he did wove an experience in my mind that I hadn’t even thought possible before. We were on some delicious, deep, dirty journey with one another, and it seemed obvious that Zack, knowing the way, would show me. Every step. He knew where we were going, and there was no hesitation. And no turning back.
r />   When he pressed the soft pad of his thumb against my clit and stoked me slowly, it was though he already knew it would send my head back and pull out moans from deep inside my throat. When he firmly parted my legs and pulled my hips down to better access me, he did it with perfect belief that it was what I wanted. Because it was. And when he took his thick cock in his hands and dabbed the head against the swollen-slick entrance of my body, he did it with the confidence of someone who already knew I’d be melting by that point and dribbling in eagerness all over him.

  And so when he finally breathed “just relax for me” into my ears with damp breath, I did exactly that, feeling that he was the obvious expert. Using strength from somewhere inside his strong thighs and hips, he introduced the tip of his dick into me, while both his hands clasped my waist and anchored me down.

  He was an animal. A wolf. Or a bear or a fox with nimble paws and quick eyes and a keen, mischievous nose. There was nothing for my body to do but follow his. I cried out a little as he pressed his girth into me, widening me up and touching me in a deep, dirty place that I had forgotten existed.

  I could hear his breathing as he slowly slid in deeper. The fact that I was visibly giving him pleasure only ratcheted up my own. He pressed all the way in, this mysterious stranger, this man I knew and yet didn’t, this convict, this man who had done enough wrong to be thrown into jail and yet whose entire body seemed designed for my ecstasy, right in that moment.

  “You like that…” he growled into my ear as he pulled back and stroked into me again. It was more of an order than a question. The width of his hips split my thighs apart and he drove himself all the way in again, with another strong, deep thrust. I could feel every inch of him. I could smell him.

  My body jerked and shuddered as he pumped in again, and then again, finding some delicious, dirty rhythm inside, fucking me with one long, smooth, hard stroke after another, right where I needed him.

  With legs wide I opened to his athletic body, melting under a torrent of frantic kisses and caresses. From his hips up he was gentle and thorough, his careful tongue and delicate fingertips touching me so delicately it almost felt like reverence. But below his hips …his cock was a blunt, forceful weapon. He was soon pounding wave after wave of bliss into my grateful pussy, and it was a bliss so deep it sunk right through to my bones.

  “You like that…?” he asked again, his voice hot in my ear.

  I moaned and bit down on his shoulder, anchoring against his barrel chest for the punishment I was receiving down below.

  “You fucking love that don’t you?” he growled, fucking me harder still, and this time I couldn’t help but cry out.

  “Oh, fuck yes… oh God…”

  I wasn’t myself.

  This kind of thing couldn’t possibly have been happening to me. Here I was, with this hot, darkly tattooed, gorgeous thug of a man, and he was all over me and everywhere and inside me, fucking me so sweet and deep with a cock that made me want to kneel down and worship it.

  His breathing abruptly changed. He pulled back and up a little, and his sweat-glistening torso heaved a little as he tried to calm his shuddering breath. Deep inside, I could feel him twitch and squirm, close to the edge himself. I watched in awe as he composed himself, closed his eyes and took a long, luxurious breath, something sexy twisting on his lips, half smile, half tormented grimace.

  “You know, I never asked you the same question,” he said, breath coming in jagged rasps. I could feel my own body tightening and swelling around him, the swollen folds of my body still reverberating from the relentless treatment he had given me just moments before. In that full, delightful pause, I felt like I could hear both of our hearts beating wildly.

  “What question?”

  I looked down as a wave of goosebumps flickered over his tan skin, and his brown nipples gathered to a point on his defined chest. He was truly a site. Rippled with muscle, his long torso led down into a sparse, black bush at the base of his cock. And to my delight, every last inch of that cock was now buried far up inside me.

  “You know,” he said, “…the question you first asked me. Are you a bad girl?”

  I smiled and gyrated a little against him, desperate for that stuffed feeling again, for the weight of his body tensing on top of mine. I certainly felt like a bad girl right now.

  I noticed his hands were clenched hard on the tops of my thighs. Rope-like tendons strained in his neck. Beads of sweat. He was pretty close to coming.

  “Me? A bad girl?” I said and pouted playfully. I squeezed my internal muscles all along the length of him and felt him twitch in response.

  “Hm, I just don’t know…” I said, realizing that with just the right movement I could easily topple him over the edge.

  The look he gave me was adorable. Pleading. Astonished. Painfully, beautifully turned on. Holding his gaze firmly in mine, I began to swivel my hips around the sexy, solid length of him inside me. He whimpered a little.

  “Oh fuck …stop or you’ll make me come…” he mumbled, and I could see him beginning to lose control. I smiled wickedly at him and swirled my hips again. His abs twitched and he shuddered hard in my arms, clenching his jaw down hard.

  “Oh fuck…”

  “I’m not a bad girl, Zack, I’m a very, very good girl…” I said, and curled my hips into him again, drawing him in even more deeply, stroking him inside with my hot body, so close to losing control myself. I quickly placed both hands under my butt, pushed up off the sofa and threw my hips up against him, taking him in right to the hilt and clenching hard against his delicious cock.

  I watched his eyebrows twitch as he gasped for air.

  “Oh fuck…” came the throaty growl, and with a helpless shudder, he came hard and all at once, scooping up my body and ploughing viciously into me with everything he had.

  I saw stars, and the room went white.

  He grunted through clenched teeth and pumped the last of his orgasm into me. I couldn’t hold on. My own orgasm hit me hard, and I tumbled slowly, a long, dizzying climax that felt like falling, like surrendering… I think I must have cried out, or bitten down on him, or clawed at his chest, or bucked and groaned like the animal that I apparently also was. I don’t know. I just know that in a moment he was crumpled into a hot mess on top of me, both of us panting, a warm buzz still fluttering between my legs.

  I heard him chuckle to himself, slide out the wet heft of his cock and give my ass a playful slap.

  “Yes, you certainly are a good girl,” he said. And even though he was standing there completely nude, dick red and bouncing between us, even though I was sprawled out on the sofa and laced with sticky white globs on both my thighs, and even though the room smelt of sex and we had fucked so hard I swear I smudged some of his tattoos off… I still blushed like a schoolgirl when he gave me a cheeky smile and lay down beside me.

  Chapter Ten – Zack

  “She’s… I don’t know, I just can’t describe her.”

  I didn’t usually speak to my brother about my love life, but let’s just say it had been a month of firsts and strange beginnings. And he did ask.

  My brother Ben and I have what I can mostly call an opportunistic relationship. We got along well enough… when there was time. Since he’s the eldest by five years, he could actually remember a time when my old man wasn’t a complete bag of shit, and once in a while liked to take it on himself to remind me how things hadn’t always been this bad, and that ma used to be happier, and things had been better before. At the end of the day, though, men don’t love women. Not really. He might as well have been trying to convince me that unicorns roamed the earth before I was born, but were conveniently all gone now.

  Growing up, Ben and I competed a lot. We were even competitive in the way we chose to act out after dad finally left and ma began what would be a decades-long repeat of the same mental breakdown every two years or so. We were different kinds of ‘bad’. Ben was already on his third marriage by the time I found Maggie, but the
joke was that my relationship with her went so bad so fast that I soon caught up to him in the “fuck up Olympics”, as we liked to call it in our teens. Competing with him wasn’t that much fun anymore, now that we were older and both of us had started to feel just a little beat down by life in general. Oh well.

  “What’s her name?” he asked me, and took a swig of beer. He was getting a little on in years, and I was still considering whether I should give him a hard time for that little pooch hanging over his belt.

  “Maddy.”

  “Oh, shit, her name’s Maggie?”

  “No, Maddy. As in Madeleine.”

  “Huh. Kind of creepy how close their names are. You got a type, huh?”

  “Nah, not really. Her and Maggie are like chalk and cheese.”

  “Is Maggie the cheese here?” he asked and cocked a goofy eyebrow at me.

  I laughed.

  “Well, let me put it another way. They’re like chocolate and …Brent crude oil. How’s that? Make it any clearer for you?”

  He chuckled and took another swig, then relaxed into that 1000-yard stare of his, adjusting his weight on the camping chair a little. It was getting dark and cold, and I began to wonder if I was just imagining mosquitoes buzzing round my bare ankles. I hated fishing. But my brother wasn’t the kind of man to just chat for no reason, and since friendly faces were thin on the ground since I was released, I had agreed to come along.

  “How is Maggie anyway?” he asked. “Spoken to her lately?”

  I hadn’t and I didn’t care.

  I had heard friends of friends mention that she might have moved out of state and had a kid, but when it came to our small town, that could have been anyone. I didn’t care where she was or what she was doing there. That chapter of my life had closed. I shrugged my shoulders and he nodded. At least Ben always knew well and good when to leave a topic alone. But he tried another one.

  “Your new girlfriend. She uh… she know about your little… incident?” he asked, not tearing his eyes from some distant point on the horizon, well aware that no fish in its right mind would be bothering us this evening. Here, I took a swig of my own.