He held me.
Not an MC princess of a notorious motorcycle club.
Not a slightly trashy but rockin’-it university student with a juvie record.
Not a murderer.
Not even Harleigh Rose as anyone else knew her.
Just Rosie, stripped of her thorns and even of her petals, just a seed of self.
And he held her preciously, protectively and patiently as if he would do it forever and never fade or fail.
That, he knew, and I could just now admit, was what I craved and what my Dom Danner gave me.
“Have you always been a Dominant?” I asked after he’d unshackled me from the cuffs, carted me into his arms and laid me in his bed.
He was straddling my prone, heavy body, his hands covered in vanilla scented massage oil, strong fingers slick and powerful against my back as he worked me over.
I didn’t need the massage. I was already boneless, the stress wrung out of my body like dirty water from a sponge, but I knew he needed to care for me after using me so roughly.
“I was fourteen when I had my first real crush on a girl named Brittany Goodman. I liked her neck of all things, the graceful, pale white column of it exposed by her short hair. I pictured it adorned with bruises from my hands and lips, by my teeth biting into her and holding her down as I fucked her. How pretty it would look marked as mine.” I could feel him shrug into his hands as they smoothed over my triceps. “It freaked me the fuck out at first, but by the time I got around to fuckin her, I’d done enough research to know the urges I had were kink.”
“Did you fuck her like you wanted?” I asked, deeply curious about his sexual history because he’d always kept it so goddamn quiet.
“No. I bit her nipples a little, gave her a hickey that didn’t even begin to quell the need in me to conquer and dominate, but they say your first time is never that great.”
I laughed at his dry comment and turned my head so he could see my smile. “So, how many submissives’ have you had?”
“Eight.”
“Including Laken and Diana Casey,” I asked, giving into the jealous impulse.
He leaned down to press a kiss to the center of my spine, then pushed my hair off my neck to place another at the back of that. “Diana’d never done it before. She tried, but she didn’t love it and it showed. Laken’s got a submissive personality and she’s a biker chick, she was willing to go there with me so yeah.”
He felt my body stiffen beneath him.
“Hush, my thorny Rose, don’t go sharp on me after what we just had.” He dipped farther forward to run his nose from my ear down the slope of my jaw and then lifted my chin with one finger so he could kiss me softly. “You are perfect for me. The only woman who could ever give me what I really need. Who could let me be the gentleman cop and the dirty Dom I need to be in order to be me.”
“Yeah?” I whispered against his lips.
“Yeah. And I’m the only one who can give you what you need. Let you be my wild rose, bristling with thorns and red as blood, but also the soft flower, delicate under my touch and easily plucked between my fingers. I’m the only one who you give that kinda tender to.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, so happy he understood without me having to find the words to explain it to him.
He smiled against my lips then leaned back to grab the towel beside him and clean off my back. Then he rolled me under the covers, got up to turn off the lights and joined me in bed. Hero took his cue to join us and curled up over our tangled feet.
I smiled as I fell asleep, forgetting that even though I was safe in Danner’s bed, there was more than one monster waiting outside the front door to devour our love.
When I opened the door to my apartment to grab more clothes the next evening after spending the day hanging out with Wrath at the clubhouse while Danner went to the station to work, I felt the heat of explosive anger trapped like a dormant volcano in my home.
Zeus was there.
Sitting on the same chair he’d occupied at our family breakfast two months ago, only this time he was sitting in the twilight, his head bowed, hands clasped loosely between his spread knees as he leaned into his thighs.
“Haven’t been home in months, haven’t been answerin’ calls and when Cress came down to get some shit for ’er store last week, spent three hours waitin’ outside for you to get home after class, but ya didn’t. So, I got on my bike came down an’ waited. Saturday, so figured you’d be home at some point. Got here at nine this mornin’ and when you didn’t show, I figured I’d do a drive-by of the Berserker compound, just to check on an impulse.”