I tried to shrug but King was holding me too tightly.
It took me a moment after we left the group, after I’d banked my anger and my resulting badass biker babe in training pride, to realize that King hadn’t said a word to me.
Nerves danced in my throat. “King?”
“Quiet,” he ordered.
I swallowed thickly and wondered for a moment if I’d acted entirely inappropriately. I knew holding a woman, however bitchy, against a wall was not normally appropriate behavior but I had reason to believe it would be acceptable in the new biker world I inhabited. So, it occurred to me that while I probably hadn’t acted inappropriately, I could have angered King by telling Paula that he was my man and I was his old lady.
When we reached King’s room (he had one because he was the Prez’s son even though it was biker only), he pried open the door, dropped me on my feet, then slammed a palm against the door to shove it closed.
Then he was on me.
I could taste the hot, metallic anger on his tongue as he used it to sear the inside of my mouth with his possessive, plundering kiss.
He ripped himself away from me after a minute and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. I stood mute against the wall, watching as he glared at me, his chest heaving.
“King?” I asked in the same little girl’s voice I used to apply to William and my father when they were disappointed in me.
I couldn’t help it even though I hated it. King’s wrath was squeezing the new life out of me, devolving me into the Cressida of old who avoided conflict at all costs.
“Are you fuckin’ kidding me with that shit, Cress?” he demanded.
“Um, you mean fighting Paula?” I confirmed then winced. “I know it wasn’t my finest moment but—”
King stepped forward to slam his palm against the wall just beside and above my face so he could lean down into me. “Why the fuck is it that I always hear you tellin’ other people how you feel ‘bout me but you can never tell me that shit to my face, huh?”
I blinked into his face.
He continued, “First you tell the girls at Eugene’s that I changed your life just by breathin’ and made you leave your husband and I didn’t even know you yet. Then you get in some bitch’s face ‘cause she’s disrespecting you but more, ‘cause she’s disrespecting me and you shout in her face that I’m your man and you’ve never even fuckin’ told me that?”
“King, honey—” I tried again, reaching out to place my palms flat on his chest to soothe him.
It didn’t work and I knew it wouldn’t when I felt the hard knock of his staccato pulse against my fingers.
“Been layin’ it out for you since the first time I called you babe, Cress. I fuckin’ lied to you, skipped classes when you know how much I wanted to be at that school, just so I could have a chance at you. Even when you took that away from me, when you judged me for my brotherhood, when you told me to stay the fuck away from you after I told you I was your student, I kept at you. Wrote you poems that might as well have been penned in my own blood, you cut right at the heart of me. Can see it in your eyes, you’re addicted to me, can feel it in that sweet body of yours that you crave me. Wouldn’t hurt to hear it from those lips that you want me even half as much as I want you.”
Wow. I closed my eyes as his words sunk in, sobering me in an instant. Had I really been so remiss? It seemed so obvious to me that I was more than just in love with him, that I lived and breathed only when he was near. How could I have failed to mention that?
It was an easy question to answer actually.
Because I’d been afraid.
I swallowed thickly because I still was. “How can I trust you with how I feel when I don’t even know what you want from me? What am I to you, King? A hot cougar, a plaything, a power trip? You’re asking me to risk everything.”
“I am,” he said immediately, leaning even closer so that I could hear his words in my ear, feel them against my mouth and see them scrawled in his bold, block print across his eyes. “And I’m not asking you to do that because you’re a fuckin’ hot lay. I’m asking you to risk everything to be my partner, to stand by my side and rule The Fallen men of Entrance, to lie, cheat and steal, to breathe my fuckin’ breath, take my kisses and my cock and reign with me. Be the Iron Queen to my Fallen King.”