Page 83 of Cruel Games

“Fuck,” I whispered against her lips as her hands wound around my waist, crawling up my back to dig those claws into the sensitive skin of my shoulder blades. Her soft moans, I swallowed, covering her noises with my own to save her embarrassment later, should she regret this.

I, however, never would.

“You’re crazy,” I mumbled, kissing along the side of her jaw, nibbling on her ear even as she arched into my embrace, her nails clawing higher, hips rocking against me as I slipped a leg between her knees and gave her something to grind on.

“You made me this way,” she whispered back, walking backward as I caged her in against the side of the car.

“I’m not sorry,” I snarled in response, my hand feeling across the door of the car for the damn handle. “Fuck, Ivy, you?—”

Her hands left my shoulders and back, and panic rose in my chest at the thought that she might duck out and leave me here wanting. That she might take that bat to me next.

Instead, as I kissed the side of her throat, nipping andsucking at her tender skin, she used her hips to maneuver us to the edge of the door and her hands found the handle, yanking it open with a quickness.

We fell into the backseat of the car, her hands on my shirt, ripping it in half with her bare hands. There was no time to lament the loss of a good flannel, though, because as the buttons popped off the front of it, she snaked her hands in the sides, her soft touch teasing my sides as I growled into her shoulder, needing more than what she was giving me, but afraid to be too greedy.

The last thing I wanted her to do was stop.

THIRTY-TWO

IVY

Yes.

Thiswas what I’d been missing for weeks now.

Ever since I’d fucked them in that warehouse, my body sang for theirs, but I’d stuffed that yearning deep down where I thought it would never see the light of day again. I thought I’d buried it deep enough not to succumb.

All it had taken was one accidental embrace and that look in Dingo’s eyes like he wanted to bring me the world and lay it at my feet, and I was a goner.

And now I was on my back in the backseat of the stolen car, with a dead man just feet away from us lying on the concrete in a pool of his own blood, and all I could think about was whether or not I wanted to let Dingo fuck me for real, or if I’d be satisfied with just making out. Or if he even deserved to take pleasure from my body.

He’s the enemy,I told myself.You can’t do this. It’s wrong.

But that part of my brain that knew that, the part of me that recognized the rationality and pleaded with me to not take the step too far to come back from, was conveniently offline now. It was uninterested in answering now that I needed it.

So the part of my brain that still craved human touch took the steering wheel and veered so far off course that it blew my mind.

“Ivy, I?—”

My hands crawled over his shoulders from beneath his torn flannel shirt and dug crescent-shaped marks into the skin there, marking him as mine. “Shut up,” I growled, “and make me come.”

Dingo needed no more words of encouragement and no further instruction. The man’s hands moved from my shoulders to my waist and slipped up under my crop top, his thumbs finding my nipples to tease as I moaned shamelessly and arched into his touch. He played my body like a musical instrument, dragging whole chords of sound from my lipsin the form of moans and sighs and pleas that strung together in unintelligible chunks.

All I knew was I needed more,more,and I needed itnow,not later. My legs wrapped around his calves, and I used them to leverage myself and lift my hips against his, needing the friction in the worst way.

Something about the act of killing turned me on, made me thirsty for confirmation of life. I needed the pleasure as I came down from the adrenaline rush, needed to feel alive even as I crashed.

And right now, Dingo seemed more than ready to give me whatever I wanted.

With a snarl that would have made Coyote proud, he yanked his hands from my tits and started working on my pants, his fingers fumbling over the tight denim.

“I wish we didn’t have to rush,” he breathed against my stomach as he crawled down my body, my legs falling apart for him to settle between. “So much I’d like to do to you.”

I didn’t reassure him we could take our time later. I didn’t like to lie, on principle. The truth was just such a better policy than falsehoods. There was no getting confused or forgetting what you’d told someone. It was all cut and dry and out there.

“The others will start wondering if we got lost soon,” I said instead, hating the words as they left my mouth. I hated myself more for hating them, too. I didn’t want to want him; hell, I didn’t want to want any of them. But the longer I spent in their presence, in their home, taking over their lives bit by bit, the more I felt like I’d found a new purpose. A place to belong. Finally, people weren’t looking at me like I was a freak. I didn’t have to play at normal for them, didn’t have to pretend to like customers or coworkers, didn’t have to be nice. I didn’t need to cover my real feelings with socially acceptable masks to keep them from discovering how I really thought. How twisted I truly was.

Because they were just as broken as me in all the ways that mattered.

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