Hammer: A Dark Romance Read online

  I’m stuck, staring. My feet won’t move, not until he raises one arm, the muscles in his forearm flexing in a way that makes me flood, looks at me with that bright blue eye set below a thick brow, and crooks his finger.

  He doesn’t say a single word and I am on my way to him, crossing the floor like I’ve been hypnotized. I don’t know where to look. Every inch of him is a hot delight. I want all of him. All at once.

  When I am in reach, he extends that same hand and caresses me lightly, a brief brush of fingertips across my cheek. It has been a long time since I was touched by a man, and the last time I felt anyone’s touch, it was much rougher and much less wanted.

  Jake is the most attractive man I’ve ever had a chance to be with. Every night, men ply me with compliments while I supply them with alcohol. I could have any of them. Sometimes I’m tempted, but I refrain. It’s not safe to sleep with men you meet in bars, especially not the bar I work in.

  “You’re beautiful,” he says softly.

  That compliment has been slurred at me dozens of times tonight, but it’s different coming from him. He’s real. Real fucking hot. He’s a mistake waiting to be made.

  “Thank you.”

  This is usually where a man gets all up on me, pressuring me and I start getting that tight, uncomfortable feeling that I’m not going to be able to get away without having something taken from me. Jake isn’t like that. He makes me feel wanted without being overwhelmed. I almost wonder if he knows what’s happened to me in the past. He’s handling me as if he does. Or maybe he’s just a gentleman and not an asshole. It’s probably about time I met one of those.

  He lets me come to him, and instead of being yanked without regard against a hard body that would fuck any wet hole it found, I am allowed the luxury of letting myself sink against his body, his big hands sliding over my back and up and down my spine in a long caress as his mouth meets mine, his kiss powerful and yet caring. We’re relative strangers to one another, but I feel a connection with him that is only growing stronger by the moment.

  Is this what love feels like when you finally find it? I don’t know. Chemicals are rushing through me, bringing desire and lust and all the most dangerous feelings I can experience. I try to keep my head about me, but I can’t. I am full of him already. He consumes my thoughts as well as my body as his hands sink down to cup my ass and pull me up hard against him, my pelvis meeting his. I can feel the hard ridge of his cock against my lower belly, and the hot bare line of him presses against me. My jeans ride low, and I feel the head of his dick grinding against my belly. Fuck. I want them off.

  I wrap my legs around him, letting him pull my ass against his hips. We’re dry humping like teenagers, making out with a lustful fury that makes my head spin.

  Jake carries me into the bedroom, lays me down on the bed and keeps kissing me, pulling my jeans off over my hips, taking my panties with them and tipping my shoes off my feet until I am naked from the waist down. My blouse and bra don’t last much longer, ripped and pulled from me until he has me just as naked as he is.

  “You’re so damn beautiful,” he growls, kissing down my neck to my collarbone, down between my breasts and then paying special attention to each of my nipples until I am arching against his massive muscular body, writhing with a filthy need only he can fulfill.

  “I want to be inside you,” he breathes against my ear, his fingers sliding between my thighs to tease my lower lips. I’m soaked. Have been since he stepped out of the shower looking like a god.

  “I want you,” I moan back, holding on to him, my fingers curling in his hair as he toys with my pussy lightly, teasing me with little strokes and caresses. I hump the air like a dog in heat as he gets ready to take me. Pulling a condom from the nightstand, he rips the wrapper with his teeth and jams the ring over his cock, rolling it down the thick shaft all the way to the base. I feel a wild pang of irresponsibility that I won’t feel his cock skin to skin inside me, but at least he’s not reckless.

  Then he’s over me, his body arched, muscles rippling as he slides his cock to my entrance and lets it rub there for a few seconds, kissing me passionately, roaming my body with his hands, riling me up into a desperate state in which I squeal and moan against his lips. I need him. I need this release. There is so little in this world that feels good to me, but I know this will.

  “Fuuuuuckk...” he moans as he starts to press inside me. It’s tight at first. I haven’t had sex in a long time, but I’m ready for him as he pushes in with a powerful surge. He splits me open. Makes me his. Gives me everything I wanted, but still I let out a wail that makes him still immediately.

  “Are you okay? Did I hurt you?” He’s stroking my hair back from my head so tenderly, looking down at me with real concern.

  My eyes fill with tears almost immediately.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” I assure him immediately. “It’s just been a while...”

  And nobody has ever given a fuck if I’m okay, I don’t add.

  He holds himself inside me, his hips powerful, his shoulders bearing his weight easily. He’s basically planking with the tip of his cock inside me, displaying easy strength along with his care.

  This is the most intimate encounter I’ve had in a long time. Stranger sex tends to be sordid rutting, no real connection, just working out the instinct of lust on one another. But with Jake, he holds me, he looks into my eyes, every thrust seems to mean something, an attempt to get closer to me.

  And all of a sudden, it is almost too much. My pussy is wrapped around him so fucking tight and even with the condom, I feel his heat inside me, spreading me, making me whole.

  His palm meets my ass once, twice, three times, jolting my pussy onto his cock and making my bottom burn. I let out a whimpering moan and grind my pelvis against him, pressing my clit against the hard ridge of his pubic bone, getting myself off on his dick with abandon.

  “Fuck. Yes. Fuuccckkkk, yes!” He starts to swear and rut with even more intensity, and I feel his power. He’s so big, and so impossibly strong. Compared to him, I am utterly weak. That fact only makes me wetter as he slams his cock in and out of me, the room full of the lewd sounds of our mating.

  I’ve had sex before. Lots of times. But not like this. I’ve never felt my entire body and mind be commanded so completely by a man. Usually I’m thinking about other things while I’m being fucked. Laundry. Bills. Next week’s shifts. Jake obliterates every thought that isn’t about him as he pushes my legs up toward my head and slides that thick club of male flesh in and out of my hole, fucking me with a rough power that leaves me writhing on his sheets.

  He puts one hand down, covers my left breast and pins me there, his other hand on my right leg, spreading me wide, giving himself full access to every inch of my pussy. He’s not just fucking me. He’s dominating me completely. He’s claiming me for his own, and all I can do is lie there and react to him, my arching hips and clenching pussy the only contribution I can make to this hard session of love.

  I am crying out incoherently. I don’t even know what I’m trying to say. My words are just one long moan that might be his name, or a prayer, I don’t know. I am so hot, so flushed as he keeps plunging in and out of me, the hand at my breast sliding down to my pussy so his thumb can strum my clit to an explosive orgasm that makes me shriek like a wild animal as I cream his cock, jerking and wriggling all over him, setting him off like a firecracker.

  He swoops down on me, his lips crushing mine, his cock buried deep inside me, his hips jolting with orgasm as he comes inside me.

  “Holy shit,” he swears softly, pressing a kiss to my forehead. “You were fucking amazing.”

  “Back atcha,” I moan softly.

  Jake stands up from the bed, his hand at the base of his dick. He goes to the bathroom to take care of the condom. I slip out of bed and start looking for my clothes. My underwear has gone missing somewhere.

  “Where are you going?” He appears in the bathroom
door, still completely naked.

  “You don’t want me to leave?”

  He raises his good brow at me. “You mean, am I kicking you out of bed? No. Unless you want to go.”

  I don’t want to go. I want to be wrapped up in his arms, held against his big, powerful body.

  “I mean, I guess I could stay.”

  “Good,” he smiles, getting into bed and patting the mattress next to him. Nothing about this man is expected. I snuggle down next to him and I feel the kind of security I haven’t felt since I was very small. He’s so big and so muscular. He wraps an arm around my waist and snugs me in against his body.

  I am asleep before I know it.

  Chapter Two

  “What the fuck is that?”

  My morning begins with the almost the same question my night started with, but for much more disturbing reasons. There’s an almighty banging and crashing coming from through the bedroom wall. I know what’s on the other side of that wall. My apartment. And I’m not there.

  We both come to the same conclusion at the same time. Someone is in my place, tearing it the fuck up. It sounds like someone let a zoo loose in there.

  “Stay there,” he says, vaulting out of bed. He grabs something from under the mattress as he goes. Something dark and lethal.

  “Is that a gun?”

  “What do you want me to take over there? A stuffed toy?”

  “I don’t want you taking anything over there. Call the police!”

  “The police aren’t coming quick enough to do anything about this, sweetheart,” he says, yanking pants on and nothing else.

  “Don’t take a fucking gun! If you shoot someone you’ll go to jail.”

  The banging is only getting louder. They’re really ripping my place apart. Fuck. Jesus. It had to be today, didn’t it. It couldn’t be any other fucking day.

  He stops and looks at me, hands on his hips. “Why aren’t you surprised by this? Why don’t you want me to use a gun? Do you know who is over there?”

  It’s gone quiet next door, just in time for me to tell him something very untrue.

  “...no?”

  The lie is only just out of my mouth when Jake’s front door comes flying open, propelled off the hinges by the boot of a man I know all too well. Jesus Christ. We’re going to die.

  * * *

  Jake

  I see the door come off in slow motion and my training takes over. I’ve already put the gun down thanks to Jazz’s weird reaction, but that doesn’t make me any less dangerous to the three men who just made the huge fucking mistake of pouring into my apartment. The first one rushes toward me. I step to the side and his throat meets my outstretched forearm. He goes down like a sack of shit with a nasty cracking sound as he hits the floor. I don’t have time to check on him before the other two come at me at the same time.

  I drill every damn day for situations like this, and before my fighting career, I trained even harder in the military. This is amateur hour thug bullshit and it ends with all three of them on the floor. A pulse check reveals that two of them are just out of it. The first guy has no pulse that I can find. He hit the floor damn hard. He might have severed his spine when he hit my arm. I guess the autopsy will show the medical cause of death, though the real cause of death is being a stupid asshole.

  I refuse to feel bad for killing a man who tried to attack me and the woman I’m with for no reason. I’ve done that many times before under combat conditions, and this feels just like those. Once a man comes into your home, he loses the right to breathe as far as I’m concerned.

  Crouching beside the unconscious men, I start going through their pockets. I want to know who these guys are.

  “You okay?” I glance up at Jazz. She’s just staring at me expressionlessly. Probably in shock, but I’ll take it. It’s better than her screaming and calling attention to us. This building is a dump and people mostly stay out of one another’s business, but there’s still the chance someone has called the cops.

  “Uh...”

  She’s staring at the dead guy. The other two don’t seem to be worth her attention, but she can’t take her eyes off this one. I suspect she knows him. I’m pretty damn sure she knows what just happened, and why. She’s sitting on the bed, the sheets pulled up to her chin. She looks scared, but not surprised. I’ll question her later. Right now, I know I’m not getting anything useful out of her. She has the stunned look of someone in denial. You can’t deny what you didn’t already know though. In split seconds of observation, I’m more certain than ever that she’s involved in whatever the hell this is.

  I start going through the guy’s pockets. I have to know who these people are.

  “Jesus,” I swear under my breath as I pull a police badge out of his pocket. I turn it over in my hand, hoping that it’s fake, but there’s a weight to it that tells me it isn’t.

  I just killed a cop. And if the other two guys are cops as well, which stands to reason, I beat up two other cops so badly they’re not going to be talking for a while. Maybe not walking again, either. There goes the self-defense argument. Nobody cares about personal rights when cops are involved.

  I’m still technically in the right. They’re not wearing uniforms. They didn’t shout police when they came in here. But when the state presses charges, nobody is going to care about that. Back when I used to pay attention to the news there were stories about cops shooting people in their own homes, usually when they’d gone to the wrong house. Jazz and I were maybe ten seconds away from being one of those stories just now. And that makes me wonder how many of those stories I read were truly the tragic accidents they were made out to be. These fuckers wanted to hurt her.

  “What’s going on, Jazz? Who are these guys?”

  She transfers her stare to me and shakes her head wordlessly.

  I keep looking for information. Next, I find phones. The first two don’t have anything interesting on them, but the dead guy has one on him. I use dead guy’s thumb to open it and as I scroll through I find something very interesting. Naked pictures. There’s endless albums of different girls, some naked, some fucking dead guys, some fucking other guys, some fucking more than one guy at a time. They’re so dirty, it almost looks like he downloaded them from a site, but they have that shitty quality when you take something with your own phone, and they’re in the camera album. I don’t recognize any of the girls, or the guys until...

  I look up from the phone and straight at Jazz.

  “Why are you on here?”

  Her pictures aren’t as explicit as some of the others. She’s standing naked, like she just got out of the shower and maybe didn’t know there was a picture being taken of her. Then in the next image she’s looking directly at the camera and removing all doubt that she didn’t know. She doesn’t look happy, but there are several more taken after that and she’s obviously cooperating, though there’s nothing sexy about a dead-eyed stare of barely veiled loathing. She hated this guy, but she was pretty obviously fucking him.

  He’s dead, but I wish I could kill him again. She’s mine. I knew she wasn’t a virgin, but meeting the ex this way is, well, probably the worst possible circumstances.

  She shakes her head quickly, dark strands falling into her eyes. “I don’t know.”

  I just killed a man to save her, and she’s fucking lying to me.

  “Jazz,” I growl. “I need to know why a dead cop has you on his phone. And I need to know it right. Fucking. Now.”

  She gives a little shrug. “I mean, I guess we used to date.”

  “You guess?”

  “Yeah, I mean, I suppose.”

  Why the hell is she being so evasive? This guy brought two of his friends to hurt her, and he had no qualms about breaking into any apartment he felt like. He was coming for her. I can understand why she doesn’t care about him being dead, but I don’t understand why she won’t tell me who he is to her.

  Before I can interrogate her further, I hear footsteps down the hall. I need to
get that fucking door back up before someone comes by and sees all this chaos. I stand up, grab the door, and push it into its frame as best I can. It’s not perfect, but it will stop prying eyes from seeing what is now basically a murder scene.

  This is serious. It needs to be dealt with seriously.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I bite the question out as I turn around and see her getting ready to leave.

  She pauses midway through putting her panties on. “Uhm, getting dressed?”

  “Not now, you’re not. Right now, you’re telling me what the hell is going on.”

  “I don’t know what’s happening.”

  “Jazz...” I stride over to her. I’m not letting this go, or her go, until I know what the hell just happened. “Why is there a dead man on my floor?”‘

  “Well, you killed him, I guess. I mean, he deserved it. Don’t feel bad.”

  “I don’t feel bad,” I tell her. “I want to know why. Who is he? Why were they in your place?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Yes, you damn well do. And stop putting those damn panties on.”

  “Why? Do you want to wear them?”

  She’s sassing me. A dead cop on the floor, her naked pictures on his phone, and she’s fucking giving me attitude. She doesn’t understand how much adrenaline is charging through me right now. My muscles are swollen with it, my mind is racing. I am in fight mode, and she is not helping.

  “I don’t think they’re your color,” she says. “These are hot pink and you’re probably more of a blue... Ow!”

  Her scream comes from getting her bare ass smacked, hard. Her lace panties tear in my hand as I yank them off her body. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but she’s going to tell me what just happened and why. I’m not taking some sassy one-liner for an answer.