Shredded: An Extreme Risk Novel: Flirt New Adult Romance Read online

  Shit. Fuck. Goddamnit. She’s working herself against my cock, and if I don’t stop her soon, I’m going to come before we ever really get started. I haven’t done that since I was thirteen and losing my virginity in the back of Becky Martin’s parents’ car, and I have no intention of letting it happen now, no matter how hot Ophelia gets me.

  And she’s got me hot. So hot I can’t breathe without pain, just as I can’t imagine walking away from this—from her—until I’ve had my fill.

  Putting my hands on her hips, I lift her up until she’s sitting on the counter, her beautiful breasts only inches from my mouth. I know I should take the time to strip her bra off, but I can’t wait. Not now, when her hard little nipples are tempting me to touch and taste and take.

  Bending down, I press a hot, openmouthed kiss over her right nipple before pulling it—lace bra and all—into my mouth and starting to suck.

  “Z.” She calls my name even as she arches her back, pressing her breast more fully against my mouth.

  And that’s when I lose it completely. I shove her bra down, not even bothering to take it off as I pull her nipple back into my mouth and suck. She tastes sweet here, too, and I can’t get enough of her.

  I bite softly, relishing the way her hands tighten in my hair as she whimpers my name. Her hips are moving wildly as she sits on the counter, and I know a touch from me will send her spinning right over the edge. I start to give it to her, to press the heel of my hand where she needs it most, but for the first time in my life I’m not in a rush for the prize.

  Yes, I want to slip inside her. Yes, I want to feel her come around me. Yes, I want to lose myself in the sweet oblivion that comes only with sex. But at the same time, there’s so much I want to do to her, with her, that I’m not ready to jump to the money shot. Not yet, anyway.

  So instead of rubbing her to orgasm, I pull back. Take a second to breathe, to calm down. As I do, I reach around behind her to unfasten her bra, then slide it slowly down her arms.

  She moans a little, jerks against me, and I run my hands up and down her back, trying to soothe her frantic movements. It’s hard because there’s a part of me that wants nothing more than to fall on her sweetness and take and take and take.

  “Z?” She raises her head, looks at me questioningly.

  “Wrap your legs around my hips.” I press a soft kiss to her mouth when she complies, then slide my hands under her hips and carry her to the bed.

  “I want to see you,” I say, reaching for the lamp next to the bed after I deposit her on the bed. The small light she switched on when we entered doesn’t provide nearly enough light to satisfy the need I have to explore every inch of her.

  “No,” she says, her voice suddenly devoid of the huskiness I’d heard in it just moments before. She puts a hand over mine and stops me from turning on the lamp.

  I freeze at the urgency in her voice, then turn back to face her. “What do you mean?

  What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” She unfastens her jeans, then pulls them down her legs. “Can’t we just do it like this?”

  Red flags are popping up all over the place, but at the same time, Ophelia’s fingers have delved beneath the waistband of my boarding pants and she’s got my cock in her soft little hand. I know I need to think, know I’m missing something important here, but it’s damn hard to focus when she’s pumping me off.

  “Ophelia. Wait.” It takes Herculean effort, but I put my hand over hers, try to get her to stop, just for a moment. Just so I can figure out what’s happening.

  She wants no part of waiting, though. Instead, she yanks my pants and underwear down to my calves, then watches impatiently while I kick them off after my boots. I reach for her, try to pull her against me so I can kiss and stroke and touch all the places I’m dying to explore, but she slides right through my hands and onto her knees—right between my legs.

  My eyes nearly cross when she rubs her thumb across the tip of my cock and then, before I can even begin to recover from that, she’s leaning forward and pulling me into her mouth.

  “Fuck!” Once again my hands tangle in her hair, but this time it’s as much about finding something to hang on to as it is about angling her mouth where I want it. Because, if I’m honest, Ophelia doesn’t need any help. She knows exactly what she’s doing as she slides her tongue along the underside of my cock. As she hums deep in her throat. As she polishes the head of my dick with the very tip of her tongue.

  “Ophelia, baby.” I can’t believe how close I am, or how fast she’s gotten me here. I tug at her hair, try to get her to listen so I can warn her that—

  For one second her eyes meet mine, and I freeze at the control in them. Gone is the dark forest green of her arousal, and in its place is a hard malachite that is all calculation, all cool reason and determination.

  It doesn’t make sense. When we were in the kitchen, she was into it. I know she was into it. I could feel it in the way her body moved against mine, hear it in the desperate little sounds she made deep in her throat. Hell, I could see it in the frantic beat of the pulse at the base of her neck.

  So what the hell happened? How did she go from completely turned on to just going through the motions? And, more important, why?

  She’s still going down on me, and while it feels good—obviously—the desperate heat of my own arousal has died as quickly as hers did. I know some guys don’t give a shit about whether the girls they fuck get off, but I’ve never been one of them. I may do a lot of girls, and I may not call afterward, but I always, always make sure they get something out of it, too. Otherwise, I might as well just use my hand.

  “Ophelia, stop.”

  She doesn’t listen. She sucks me deep into her throat, circles my dick with her tongue. Despite my best intentions, I flex my hips and drive my cock deeper into her mouth as an electric current of sensation shoots down my spine.

  She makes an encouraging sound in the back of her throat and the vibrations set every one of my nerve endings on fire. My vision gets blurry and the driving need for release is a powerful drumbeat inside me. She’s good at this—really good—and part of me wants to just say fuck it and go with it. She obviously doesn’t have a problem with it happening.

  Except, when I force myself to focus—when I shove the mind-numbing, knee-weakening pleasure back and just look at her—I can see the way her hands are shaking. I can see how tense she is. And before she looks down, I can see the glassy sheen of tears in her eyes.

  That does it. I’m finished. “Ophelia, stop.”

  Once again, she doesn’t listen, but this time I tug at her hair until she gets the message and slowly slides me out of her mouth.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks, her voice hoarse and raspy from how deep she’d just taken me. “Don’t you want to finish?”

  “What I want,” I say as I sink to the ground beside her, “is to know what the fuck is going on here.”

  Chapter 8

  Ophelia

  I freeze at the demand, which sounds incredibly compelling when spoken in that sexy, yes-I-sold-my-soul-to-the-devil voice of Z’s. I don’t want to answer him, don’t want to say anything to him at all, but he’s not exactly in the mood to take no for an answer.

  His hand comes to rest on the bottom of my chin and then he’s pressing up, forcing me to meet his eyes whether I want to or not.

  “What’s going on, Ophelia? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” It’s a knee-jerk reaction, the answer I always give to that question even when it isn’t true.

  Like now. I’ve rarely been less fine in my life, and the truth is, I don’t even know why. It was just a blow job, after all. Just sex. It had to happen again sometime, with someone. Why not now? Why not with Z? It’s not like he matters. It’s not like any of it matters.

  “Really?” He cocks a brow. “Because you don’t look fine and I just don’t get it. You were into it. I know you were into it. And then … then you just weren’t anymore.”

&
nbsp; I was into it. I wasn’t expecting to be, but it was hard not to get turned on with the way Z was touching me and kissing me, the way he paid attention to every single freaking thing my body did. Like he was looking for a road map to make sure I enjoyed it as much as he did. And I was enjoying it—a lot. At least until I remembered Remi. And the bet. And all the reasons I wasn’t supposed to like what was going on.

  “What do you care?” The words slip out before I have a clue I’m going to say them. “As long as you get laid, as long as you win that stupid bet, why the hell do you care what’s going on in my head anyway?”

  He stumbles back on his heels, his face blank with shock—and something else I just can’t place. “You know about the bet?”

  “Damn right I do.”

  “And you were going to sleep with me anyway?”

  I try to look away, but he’s still got a firm grip on my chin. It kind of pisses me off, the way he thinks he has the right to touch me so proprietarily, and part of me wants to lash out. To knock him on his ass. But the more reasonable part acknowledges that I did just have his cock in my mouth, so he probably thinks that gives him some rights over me.

  As if.

  “Ophelia?” he prompts when I don’t say anything.

  “Yeah, I was. So what?” This time I shove at his hand until he lets me go. I can’t handle being this close to him, can’t handle looking into those eyes that have gone so dark that I can barely distinguish the pupil from the iris.

  Standing up, I grab my jeans and yank them up my legs. Having this discussion is bad enough. Having it when I’m nearly naked somehow makes it a million times worse.

  After I find my turtleneck—hanging from the top of one of my lamps, for God’s sake—and slip it on, I turn to see that Z pulling up his own pants. I grab his shirt from where I took it off in the kitchen, fire it at him. Now that things have turned ugly, I can’t get him out of here fast enough.

  Except Z seems in no hurry to leave, even after he yanks his shirt over his head. Instead, he walks over to where I’m standing and leans against the tiny bit of counter space I actually have in this place. I try not to look at him. The last thing I need to remember is Z kicking back in my kitchen, his arms and legs crossed in a pose that screams, Yes, I’m king of the fucking mountain, and I know I’m sexy as hell, too.

  For long seconds he doesn’t say anything and neither do I. Then again, there’s not much to say, is there? He bet he could fuck me and I was prepared to let him win that bet because I knew it wouldn’t mean anything. It doesn’t say a whole hell of a lot good about either of us, does it?

  When he finally does speak, it’s just one word. And though I should have been expecting it, I’m not, and I don’t have an answer—at least not one I want to share with him.

  “Why?”

  I don’t answer.

  “Ophelia?”

  I shrug, still refusing to look at him. I figure eventually he’ll let it go and just walk away. It’s what he’s known for, after all. It’s sure as hell what I’d do if I was in his place.

  But it turns out Z’s got more sticking power than most people give him credit for, because he’s not budging. In fact, when I look at him out of the corner of my eye, he’s practically grown roots.

  “I don’t know, okay?” I finally tell him. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “Bullshit.” He spits the word out.

  “Excuse me?” Now I do turn to look at him.

  “That’s bullshit. You’re a smart, savvy woman, Ophelia. I’ve only known you a little over twenty-four hours and already I’ve figured out that you don’t do anything without a reason.”

  “Maybe I just wanted to sleep with you.”

  “Yeah. Because we both saw how well that worked out,” he says with a snort. “Why don’t you just tell me the truth?”

  “Why don’t you just let it go?”

  “Because I never let anything go.” He pushes off from the counter, slowly closes the distance between us. “And because I can see that whatever’s going on in your head is eating at you.”

  I start to laugh it off, to tell him how ridiculous he’s being, except he chooses that moment to skim his fingers gently down my face.

  I jerk at the caress, pull back. He follows me, his eyes filled with a compassion I never thought to see from him. It hits me like a blow, sends me into a tailspin of emotion and agitation that I don’t know how to recover from. I can deal with derision. With hate. With anger. Even with indifference. But with compassion? From someone as broken as Z? I don’t have a clue how to deal with that.

  So I do the only thing I can do. I lash out, using the truth like a club. “You really want to know why I was going to sleep with you?” I ask him, my voice a particularly nasty blend of bitch-meets-asshole.

  To Z’s credit, he doesn’t back down, doesn’t turn away, even though it’s obvious now that he won’t like the answer. “Yeah. I do.”

  “Fine. Whatever. The truth is, I invited you in, I decided to sleep with you because I knew you wouldn’t give up. I knew you’d keep coming around, bugging me, for the next week, and I just couldn’t deal with your shit. So I decided, screw it. The best way to make sure I never have to see you again is to fuck you. Once you get what you want you’ll be out the door so fast you’ll leave skid marks on the linoleum.”

  For long seconds he doesn’t move, doesn’t blink. I don’t even think he breathes. Then, just when I don’t think I can take it anymore—when the silence stretches between us like a piece of barbed wire pulled past its limit—he says, “You were going to have sex with me to get rid of me.”

  I toss my hair, look him straight in the eye. “Your reputation precedes you.”

  “Yeah. I guess it does, doesn’t it.”

  He doesn’t say anything else. Instead, he bends down, picks up his boots from where he’d kicked them earlier during our mad rush to nakedness, and walks straight out the door without another word. No Fuck you. No Go to hell. No Have a nice life. Nothing but the sound of the door closing behind him as he heads for the stairwell.

  It’s exactly what I wanted him to do, exactly what I needed him to do. Which is why it makes no sense when I sink to the floor and cry for the first time in eleven long, hell-filled months.

  Chapter 9

  Z

  “You planning on getting up sometime soon?” The question is delivered with a kick to my bed hard enough to move the thing half a foot across the floor.

  I ignore both, choosing to operate under the assumption that if I play dead long enough, Luc will just go away. It worked with both Cam and Ash yesterday, so I see no reason to change things up now.

  Except Luc’s the stubborn one—he always has been. It’s why he’s a ranked snowboarder when his riding has always been more about not giving up than it’s ever been about natural talent. It’s also why I’m not surprised when he reaches a hand out and shakes me roughly. Once, twice, then a third time, so hard that my teeth actually rattle together.

  Pain explodes behind my eyes, and I want to tell him to get the fuck away from me. But interaction of any kind will just encourage him—we’ve been down this road enough for me to know the rules—so I grit my teeth and imagine what I’ll do to him if I ever manage to drag myself out of this bed. Which I’m not planning on doing anytime soon, but still. It passes the time.

  After what feels like an eternity, I hear footsteps walking away from the bed, and I finally let myself relax, just a little. Three down, zero to go. It should be at least a day before any of them comes back and tries to drag me out of bed again. Which means I have all day to drink myself into an alcohol-induced coma.

  Figuring I should probably get started, I crack my eyes open—just in time to see Luc throw the drapes open on the wall across from my bed. Light floods the huge room, blinding me and kicking the pain in my head up about a million degrees.

  “Luc, you fucking asshole. Close the damn curtains!” I grab a pillow and fire it across the room at h
im, then immediately regret it because now I’ve got nothing to hide my head under.

  “So you are alive. We were beginning to wonder.”

  Desperate now, I burrow deeper into the covers so that I can pull the comforter over my head. But not before I flip him off.

  “Nice,” he says, right before he starts beating on the glass door like it’s a fucking drum set.

  I throw the covers back, start to climb out of bed. The pain’s worth it if I actually get to strangle the motherfucker—

  “Stop, stop. Please!”

  Luc and I both freeze at the unexpected sound of a female voice coming from my bed. Before I can do more than sink back into bed, a head covered in long red curls peeks out from under the covers.

  “You son of a bitch!” Luc launches himself at me, and I’m so horrified I don’t even bother to try to defend myself.

  Don’t let me have slept with Cam last night.

  Don’t let me have slept with Cam last night.

  Please, please, please, by all that is holy, please don’t let me have slept with Cam last night.

  “God, you guys are loud. Isn’t anyone allowed to sleep in around here?” As her whole face finally manages to make its way out from under the covers—making her voice a lot less muffled than it had been—I nearly collapse in relief.

  Not Cam. Some girl whose name I don’t know and whom I don’t remember at all. But not Cam. At the moment I’m inclined to be thankful for small blessings.

  Luc must figure it out at the same time I do, because he comes to a screeching halt a couple of feet from my bed.

  “Who’s this?” he asks as he looks down at the redhead, who I have to admit would be pretty cute if she didn’t have enough mascara smeared under her eyes to make her resemble a raccoon.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Nice,” he says again, rolling. “How much fucking weed did you smoke last night, anyway?”