Mind Games - A Bad Boy Romance With A Twist Read online

  “That’s exactly what it means, cupcake,” I hissed. She pulled her head away and avoided my gaze.

  “Now, don’t be like that. I know you’ve never been with a real man before, but don’t stress your little head. Who knows, you might even like it.”

  I stood again.

  “Now get on your hands and knees,” I barked. She flashed me nervous eyes. Even through the heavily tinted sunglasses I was wearing, I could sense her apprehension. See every little muscle in her neck and arms twitch in anticipation. Carefully she positioned herself on the floor, her bare knees pressing red into the floor.

  “Now, your father owes me a lot of money,” I said, and slowly started to unbuckle my belt. “So you be a good girl and don’t you dare cry out, ok?”

  “Please be gentle,” she blurted, but I only laughed.

  “Gentle? Who said I wasn’t going to be? Sweetheart, when I’m done with you, you’ll be thanking me and asking for more. Trust me…” I unzipped and looked down at her, her hair hanging in a curtain over her eyes. “You ever seen one of these, honey?” I said, and unpacked my thick, stiffening cock.

  She shot me a defiant stare, but it soon melted into a look of sheer panic as she realized that this was really happening, and I was about to nail her like I owned her.

  Bang!

  We both spun to the source of the noise. Before I realized what was happening, she had scrambled to her feet. My hands flew to zip up and I realized: the next bang on the door would break it.

  “You in there Miss Smith?” yelled the voice on the other side of the door, and in an instant another bang sent it flying open, smashing into the wall behind it. She screamed, and somehow I found myself standing in front of her, arms outstretched.

  A man filled the doorframe, a weapon poised in his hands. He scanned the room, glared at Nora and then let his eyes rest on me, and then further down below the belt.

  “What the…?”

  In a flash Nora threw her leg out and sent her foot kicking into his wrist. The gun went tumbling from his hands before she grabbed a wooden stool beside the door and brought it crashing down over his head. The stool almost crumbled over his immense bald skull, and he turned to her with a look part rage and part amusement that she had thought that would stop him. His black, beady gaze on her was all I needed to lift my fist and bring it swinging into his face, punching him hard in the split second he looked away and at her.

  He staggered backwards, scowling, and by the time he’d gathered his senses I was ready to lunge at him again. My fist already rang out with pain from the collision with his nose, but after the third or fourth strike, I could no longer feel the knuckles, and I hit harder, and harder still. We both tumbled into the room, him grappling and holding onto my suit, but I rolled him underneath me, pinned his shoulders with the points of my elbows and tried to evade the shower of punches he was sending into my jaw and chest.

  Face red, he roared and spun out from under me, got back on his knees and delivered a wallop so hard it made my ears whine. I tried to open my eyes, but my head was spinning. I realized the weight on my neck was his thumbs, pressing down on my throat as he strangled me.

  “The fuck are you, huh? Who are you working for? Did Dean Cane hire you?” he hissed into my face as he squeezed the air from my throat. Over his shoulder I could just make out Nora’s horrified face.

  He didn’t recognize me.

  He thought I was a bodyguard, or some kind of hired muscle.

  Just as the light in front of my eyes sputtered and began to go dark, and I felt the air inside me go stale and leave me, a shot rang out. Instantly, the grip round my neck relaxed, and the blood came rushing back to my face, making my eyes sparkle and my head hurt. I staggered to standing, coughing and sputtering as I tried to understand what was happening.

  Then I saw her.

  The barrel was still pointing at the guy’s leg, which was now gushing black liquid from a hole just under the kneecap. She held the weapon like it was a part of her body. Her expression was calm, with nothing but the faintest curl on her top lip to suggest that she’d nearly just killed a man. Heart pounding madly in my ears, I looked at her, and then him, and then her again. He passed out and flopped onto the carpet. For some reason, all I could think about was that day we’d spent at the fair, and she’d shot clean, black holes right through the bullseye again and again.

  “So you really would make a good assassin,” I breathed.

  “He was hurting you,” she said simply, and lifted wide eyes to look at me. We both noticed the giant blood spattered all over the front of my crisp white shirt. A car alarm had gone off outside and brought us to our senses. The gun simply dropped from Nora’s hands and she darted round the room to collect our bags.

  “We have to go,” she yelled. “Now!”

  No time to think, I looked down at the body and then quickly reached inside his pocket to pull out a wallet, then grabbed the gun she’d dropped.

  We both ran out into the car park, feet crunching the gravel beneath. My throat burned badly but I couldn’t worry about that now. I scanned around for a sign that anyone else had come with him, but saw nothing. Nora jumped in the driver’s seat and I threw out bags behind. Before I had even slammed the door closed she had turned the ignition and was now pulling the old clunker in a big arc round and out of the carpark. Several people had wandered out of their rooms and stood on the railing, dazed, watching us leave.

  We sped off and I turned to look out through the back window just in time to see the old woman from the front desk race out of the reception room, shaking her fists. I couldn’t contain a laugh at how ridiculous the whole situation was. Maybe I laughed because I was stunned to still be alive, or because I was imagining what homespun country insults she was hurling after us and the dust cloud we left. Maybe I laughed because somehow, in the space of twenty or so seconds, Nora had morphed into a ballsy badass fit for a Chuck Norris film.

  The car’s groaning suspension bounced us around as we hit the tarmac of the road and sped off. I looked down at my grizzled knuckles, and at the blood on my shirt. I had worn this very shirt to countless important meetings, in pristine boardrooms, in front of men that earned more money than the bulk of humankind could if they lived 500 years. And now it was drenched in the blood of a hitman I could only assume had been hired by my father. I smiled with the knowledge of what that meant. He must be really scared.

  Nora kicked the car into higher and higher gears until we were screaming along the highway faster than I thought was possible. The same blood on me had somehow, in the scuffle, transferred to her. Maybe you’ll think it’s a crazy thought, but let me tell you: she looked beautiful. She was a vision in white and red, like a wicked valentine, and her dark eyes stared straight ahead at the road.

  “I underestimated you,” I said.

  She drove on, not turning to look at me.

  “I didn’t know you could fight like that,” she said, and glanced over at me.

  “Neither did I.”

  “I’m sorry it’s come to this,” she said.

  But I wasn’t. Though my breath had nearly been squeezed clean out of me and though my entire body ached and twitched from pain, I had never felt more alive. Reality around me seemed so thin and malleable all of a sudden. Had I always been capable of wrestling a man like that? Had I always had that hot rage in me, so close under the surface?

  “I hate thinking of anyone hurting you, ever,” I said. She smiled, then glanced over at me. In that brief moment, I saw it: she was turned on. And when I saw she was, it was only another brief moment to realize that I was, too.

  Before I knew what was happening she had spun the steering wheel to the side and braked hard, bringing the truck off the road and into a few bushes on the verge. She pulled up right into the shrubs, turned off the engine, then threw herself at me. She kissed me urgently. And just as I understood to kiss back, she had already pulled her lips away and was frantically tearing at her trousers, and turning
around to offer her bare ass.

  “I need you to fuck me,” she cried. “Now!”

  My head spun, either from lack of oxygen, or from the sheer hunger I felt in her grasp as she put my hands on her and ground her hips into mine. I was instantly hard, and didn’t need any encouragement. I merely unzipped, still horny from our interrupted game only a little while ago, and released a hard-on so stiff it was sore. She leaned back into my lap, steadied her arms against the dashboard and quickly guided her dripping pussy onto me, all at once slipping inside her. I gasped out loud and pulled the strip of her underwear to the side, relishing the sight of her pert ass now bouncing up and down over my shaft.

  We shouldn’t have been doing this. Not now. We should have been driving as far away and as fast as we could. He’d be coming after us, or somebody else would. But the moment had swept us both away.

  I couldn’t believe how easy it was to slip right into her, and to begin fucking like there was no other place for my cock to be, nothing else for our bodies to do but this. I lay back and let her do all the work, stroking me feverishly up and down with her hot, quivering little hole, the scent of her excited body filling the pickup and driving me wild.

  I could feel when she was about to come. I could hear that distinctive change in her breath that told me that she was getting closer. I could feel the delicious, wet warmth all up deep inside her that told me that she was about to burst all over my cock. I came hard and fast inside her, growling and biting down hard on my jaw. She followed and melted on top of me, hungrily swallowing up my shaft and puling it deeply in for just one more deep, juicy thrust. Her hips bucked hard against my groin, and I held her close as the orgasm ripped through her and left her slick little muscles convulsing inside, all along every inch of my cock. It had only been about a minute.

  I didn’t kiss her afterwards.

  We didn’t hold each other.

  This scene, this game, was a primal one. We fucked like animals, covered in still-warm blood and humming with a kind of adrenaline that only the real fight for survival can bring. Using one another’s bodies for carnal release, pounding hard into one another and crying out with how good it felt to fuck without words, without decency, without mercy…. I slid her off and she went awkwardly back to the driver’s side. My Nora. My lovely, dirty, crazy, perfect dream woman.

  “Get dressed,” I said. “We have a lot of work to do.”

  Chapter 9

  Myth: When you have money, you can protect yourself with the best legal counsel

  Reality: It’s only the really wealthy that need the best legal counsel in the first place

  “Are you OK?” she said, for the thousandth time that morning.

  I didn’t know what to say. Was I OK? You could argue that the moment we two met life stopped being OK. It was many things, this little adventure we were on, but ‘OK’ wasn’t one of them. So I tried to smile at her and carried on driving.

  “It’s just that… I don’t understand why we have to go back at all. We were running away like our lives depended on it, and now we’re heading back?”

  “I told you, we need to meet Charlie. We need to talk about the way forward with this case, we need to--”

  “I mean, I don’t understand the real reason,” she said, cutting me off.

  I looked over at her, relaxing in the passenger seat. I had no idea where Nora and I would eventually end up, but this is how I would always remember her: the sun and wind in her hair, her legs tucked under her and her gaze loose enough to take in the flat landscape all around us.

  “You don’t let up, do you?” I said, laughing.

  “Come on, give me some credit, if I didn’t know you by now…” she said, again with that naughty glint in her eye.

  “I told you. It’s… I can’t describe it. There was just something about what happened in that room. Something about it was so… real. It wasn’t a big decision I made. I just knew that I had to stop running.”

  “From him.”

  I sighed.

  “Well, yeah, from him. But it’s more than that, Nora. I don’t know. Seeing how you… you just took that guy, you just dived right in there and…”

  “So it’s my fault?” she teased.

  “Well, kind of. You’re inspiring, Nora. Don’t give me that look, I mean it. My father has had this hold over me for so long, you know? But trying to get at him, trying to use you to…” I stopped, unable to continue. We hadn’t spoken about any of this since that day we fought in her home, seemingly four thousand years ago.

  “I get it. You don’t have to say anymore.”

  “But I want to. Nora, you know how sorry I am, don’t you? That’s what I’m trying to explain to you. That you showed me something. That that whole stupid plan wasn’t a way to get back at my father, but just another way I was letting him control me.”

  She nodded.

  “I said you don’t have to explain. I know your dad. I know what it’s like. And I know that you didn’t know what you were getting yourself into,” she said and gave me a wink. I looked over at her, and the gorgeous way her hair hung in twisted ropes around her cheekbones.

  “That’s for damn sure,” I said, and she smiled.

  “All is forgiven. Seriously. I just hope you’re sure about this. You said yourself that if Jeff Cane wanted to have me murdered he could organize it in a heartbeat.”

  “And that’s exactly why we should go back and face this shit, once and for all,” I said.

  Charlie would let us know how my mother was settling in. My father not only had a fleet of politicians, officers, officials and judges under his thumb, he controlled the very devices, the very informational platforms that 90% of the country used to live their lives. The perennial rumors about my father’s involvement with the Russians was no rumor. If the people who adored him and bought his lame ass biographies knew just exactly how he was using their data, there wouldn’t be enough federal and international law to punish him properly with.

  But as powerful as he was, I had still had my own hand to play, and that hand was an unassuming woman in overalls and messy hair, who had a testimony against him that would make even a handsomely bribed judge lose his faith in humanity. But we had to be quick. Once he caught wind of our plan, we’d be scrabbling to protect ourselves. We had to act fast. And I was done letting Charlie handle it for me from afar. Isn’t that something my dad would have done? Paid some fool to take care of his life for him while he stayed comfortably off on the sidelines? No, I was done with comfort. Done with money and manipulation and bullshit. Yesterday I had fucked a woman soaked in the blood of a hitman hired to kill her. And she hadn’t been scared. In fact, she had almost laughed in the face of it all. Why couldn’t I?

  We arrived at the location Charlie had described. Nora and I laughed about how difficult it was to find your way around the world without using a GPS, without PortalMaps guiding you. But we managed.

  ‘Rose’s Country Stall’ advertised three kinds of pie and had a couple dusty jars of marmalade and relish for sale. The place seemed deserted except for a pair of mean looking men huddled in the corner at a table laden with several rounds of empty coffee mugs. They’d either just finished arguing or were about to start.

  “Good afternoon.”

  I spun to see Charlie behind me.

  “Charlie, you dumbass, it’s been too long,” I said and shook his hand warmly.

  “Why’d you only ever get in touch when you’re in trouble, huh?” he said.

  “Lucky for you, that’s pretty often. This is Nora,” I added and he took her hand.

  “Wow, the blonde’s really working for you. From following the news I have to say I was expecting… uh…”

  Nora smiled at his awkwardness. She had this effect on people. She was the kind of pretty you had to do something about. She had the kind of raw sexuality that made you feel slightly dirty just to have caught her eye.

  “Come on, let’s sit down,” I said.

  Nora and I wai
ted for him to speak, like we were two runaways who had been cut off from civilization and now needed to be brought back into the loop again. Which is of course exactly what we were.

  “She’s fine,” he said, choosing his words. I smiled. “In fact,” he added, “that mother of yours, sheesh, now that’s a lady you don’t mess with. She has ten times the energy I do.”

  “It’s all that country living,” I said.

  “Right? Anyway, the place I’ve got her set up in isn’t much, but it’s safe, and the judge and I had a big, uh, chat the other day, so I’m sure there won’t be anyone coming around to try and, uh, talk your mom out of it.”

  Charlie wasn’t intelligent, but he was smart. Since I had met him in grad school I had always marveled at his ability to embark on almost all of life’s most prestigious pursuits, and be completely mediocre at all of them. He had been homeless as a kid but worked his way into law school, where he graduated in record time, but bottom of his class. He had been at different times employed by all the most glittering law firms in the country, but only in the lowest capacity. He lived in midtown Manhattan, but in the cheapest, most rundown apartment there that money could buy. Charlie was a shit lawyer, no doubt about it. But that meant that he could fly under the radar, under that web of big time connections my father had weaved. His mediocrity was exactly what allowed him to sit here across from us right now, our last shred of hope in this mess.

  He leaned forward on the table, clasped his hands together and looked at us seriously.

  “So, for now your mom is in safe hands and I’ve been preparing her for the stand. She’s a champ. But I’ve been doing all the digging you’ve asked me to do and… well, it’s a lot worse than you thought.”

  I looked at Nora, who was in turn looking at him intently, as though she was impatient for him to get to the point. She was good at playing a naughty schoolgirl begging to be corrupted. She was good at the role of cheating slut, good at playing the vixen and the seductress, even good at playing the innocent virgin. I had seen her be all of these women and more. But I was beginning to see that this role suit her best: tousled, edgy outlaw, the woman who could kick ass, take names, and wear false eyelashes while she did it. It suited her.