Page 50 of Fearless

Mercy, already dressed, shrugged into his cut. “Yeah.”

“Oh.” Jasmine puffed out her lower lip in a pretty pout and then reached toward him, arching her spine and moving with practiced, catlike grace, so her breasts and ass and all the naked skin in between was put to the best advantage. She came to sit on the side of the bed on her knees, hair falling around her shoulders. She looked up at him from beneath her lashes as she settled her hands on his belt buckle. “Don’t go. Not yet.”

She smiled and pressed her hand over the fly of his jeans. “Damn, you’re a big boy.” She leaned forward, so her breasts cushioned against his thighs. “Just one more time. Please?”

“Sorry, sweetheart.” He returned her smile as he stepped back. “I can’t start paying special attention to you. The other girls would get jealous.”

“Ugh. Mercy.”

He put his back to her and headed for the door.

The sheets rustled. “Is it true what they say?” she called after him. For the first time since she’d approached him in the common room earlier, her voice changed from its usual saccharine purr to something truer and sharper.

Mercy paused.

“Do you like underage pussy best?” Jasmine asked. “Or is it just Ghost’s daughter you get hard for?”

She was already scrambling backward across the bed when he charged toward her. With a strangled scream, she toppled off the far side and landed hard on her ass. She tried to get to her feet, but Mercy was on the bed and leaning down too fast for her to get away. He put one big hand around her throat and held her pinned to the carpet, not squeezing, just restraining.

He knew what she could feel, though, beneath the calluses on his palm and fingers: the strength. He wasn’t some awkward twenty-one-year-old anymore. He knew exactly how strong he was, and how best to put that strength to use.

Jasmine’s coal-ringed eyes bulged in terror; her mouth was a red hyphen in her now-white face. She breathed in jagged gasps that shook her breasts and bowed her back off the floor. Her hands lay limp beside her head. She didn’t dare move. Mercy could smell the fear in her. It was a good smell: fear. One he knew well.

“Understand something,” he said, voice low and even. “You may be the best fuck in this clubhouse, but that’s all you are. That’s all you’ll ever be. You’re a Lean Bitch. You’re a groupie. You give blowjobs in public. You disgust me.

“Understand this, too: I’d be perfectly within my rights to crush your windpipe right now. My boys out there, they’d help me chuck you in the river and not say a damn thing about it. You do not ever,ever, question a member like you just did. You do not ever suggest what you just did about Ava Teague.” He flexed his fingers the tiniest amount. “Got it?”

She managed to nod and squeak out something that almost resembled words.

“I don’t want to have to tell you that again.”

“N-n-no. Me neither.”

“Good.” He released her and righted himself, moving off the bed. She was still on the floor, gasping, as he let himself out of the dorm and closed the door behind him.

His skin tightened all over.What they say…People were saying it? People had noticed?

He’d known what was happening to him; he even thought he understood it. The way all his affection for Ava was being warped by the way womanhood was taking hold of her. It was twisted, and God knew he’d had enough of that in his life. It had been this darkness in his head, his growing attraction to her.

But he hadn’t thought it was something anyone else could see. He sure as hell hadn’t thought it was something the groupies were gossiping about.

Aidan and Tango were shooting pool over mugs of Bud in the common room when he entered. Dublin was glued to the TV and the Packers game.

“Beer?” Briscoe called to him.

“Yeah, that’d be good.” He sat on a stool with a view of both the TV and the pool table, in the middle of things.

Aidan lined up his next shot with a dark chuckle and said, “That wasn’t you I heard screaming, was it, Merc?”

“Nah, man. Imakepeople scream. Never the other way around.”

They all laughed at the sinister double meaning.

“Is Jasmine as good as she says she is?” Tango asked with more than passing curiosity.

“Better,” Mercy assured. “Especially if you put a couple drinks in her first.”

Aidan rolled his eyes as the cue ball clacked off the striped three, sending it into a side pocket. “I’m telling you, bro, you can’t keep wondering. Just walk up to her, ask her to go in back with you, anddo it. You don’t have to buy her wine and roses.”

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