Page 31 of Caged Bird

I ate her like she was the last meal I was ever going to taste. Like I was starving and she was a feast. Like I’d been waiting to do this for a decade. Because I had, ever since she’d first walked into my home on the arm of my brother.

I teased her little bud with the tip of my tongue, before opening my mouth to devour her pussy. I thrust into her with my tongue, fucking her in the way I would if I’d been willing to let my dick get involved.

But this woman knew nothing of being put first.

And I wouldn’t be my brother, using her body for his selfish gains. I didn’t want a thing from her, except her permission.

This was only about her. Getting her over a line she didn’t seem able to cross alone.

Her fingers came to her tits, and my dick nearly exploded, watching her tease her nipples while I tongue-fucked her pussy. I was so hard it hurt, and yet all I wanted was to taste her release on my tongue.

I laid her down flat on the bed, reaching up one hand to take over her breast, while plunging two fingers inside her with my other.

She gasped, and I looked up at her, over the thatch of hair on her mound, and gave her a warning with my eyes. “Be silent, baby,” I whispered.

I’d never called a woman baby in my life, and it wasn’t my right to call Fawn that now either, and yet the term of endearment had slipped effortlessly from my mouth on a growled-out whisper.

I was rewarded with one hand dropping to the back of my head, holding me in place between her thighs.

Like I would have wanted to go anywhere else. She was all I could see. All I could taste and smell, and everything about what we were doing, including the sneaking around while my brother was just downstairs, was turning me on.

Her thighs trembled around my head, clenching and releasing. Her pussy fluttered, and she threw an arm across her mouth, staring down at me, eyes wide but muffling the noises she so clearly wanted to make.

“Come for me, baby.” I slipped a third finger inside her and watched as she splintered apart.

Her back arched, the back of her head pressing deep into the too-soft mattress. I kept up the same pace, riding out her orgasm to completion and waiting for her to relax back onto the mattress, her eyes closed.

For the first time all day, the stress lines around her eyes relaxed. The clench of her shoulders and the hard set of her jaw disappeared.

I wanted to crawl into bed, wrap her in my arms, and tell her everything was going to be okay.

Except I couldn’t promise that.

So I slipped away in the darkness and went back to my room.

Alone.

And dreamed of doing it again, every night, for the rest of my life.

10

EVE

Echo handed me a towel as I stepped off the stage, and the cheers and whistles from the crowd died away.

I smiled at her gratefully but didn’t stop to chat the way I would have normally. I wiped the sweat and glitter off my skin, hurrying toward my office. The thumping beat from the DJ reverberated through my skull, but I didn’t even hear the words of the song or have any idea of who was scheduled to be up on the stage after me.

Augie leaned on the wall outside my office, arms folded across his bare chest, a pair of jeans fit snugly around his waist. “She’s good,” he called above the music, without any sort of greeting to me.

Which I wouldn’t have expected because that wasn’t how Augie rolled. He nodded toward the stage, and despite my reluctance to chat, I glanced over my shoulder.

The new girl we’d only hired last week was spinning around the pole, her sexy librarian costume mostly on the floor. A pearl choker still clung to her throat though, and she was somehow managing to keep black-framed glasses on her nose.

Augie wasn’t wrong. She had moves even Lyric couldn’t do, but she also looked sweet and innocent enough to be a kindergarten teacher. We all knew men lost their shit over the ‘sweet on the outside, freak on the inside’ act.

“She reminds me of Fawn.”

I glanced over at Augie, swallowing hard because any mention of Fawn had that effect on me. Even now, five years after we’d all watched the video of her falling to her death, her memory was always with me, never too far from my mind.

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