Prohibited (Tulsa City Sinners #1)

7. Ryan

Chapter seven

Ryan

She’d been sleeping a long time.

Ryan stood outside of the cell, watching her closely. Her back was to him, showing him the curve of her hip. How it rose and then dipped into the valley of her waist. He traced it with his eyes, wondering how it would feel to draw his fingers along that arc, dipping down to rise back up the slope of her ribcage, climbing each delicate rib like a ladder until he reached the crest of her unblemished shoulder. How his fingers might travel over her plush skin, down the sheer drop of her decolletage to where her plump, firm breasts rose from her chest like a luscious revelation, still trapped beneath her camisole.

He’d held her against him in the darkness of her bedroom. Adrenaline had been roaring in his ears, urgency driving him onward to act swiftly, mercilessly. One small mistake and his life was over. But everything had gone as planned. The chloroform had worked quickly, taking the fight out of her one second at a time as the clock ticked into precious minutes until she hung limp in his arms. Even with the danger of the situation, the thrill of his hunt couldn’t be staunched and he’d held her, cock pressing against her ass while he pressed his nose into the side of her head and closed his eyes. Savoring for just a moment those stolen kisses so many years ago. The nectar of her on his fingers. The scent of her smeared on his lips. The way the comma of her smile had curved. White teeth biting down on the swell of her lower lip with pleasure while he’d knelt between her thighs in the gardening shed.

Treacherous bitch.

Only half dressed, the shadows in the room draped over her skin like sheer lingerie, tantalizing him with what he could only barely see.

He’d had the sense to snatch a silken robe off of the foot of the bed and wrap it around her before hauling her out the door and down the stairs. Carrying an unconscious woman was suspicious enough. Carrying a half dressed unconscious woman was out of the question.

He acted with help, of course. He knew some of the staff. Knew how disgruntled they were and how willing they were to share some information for a handsome fee, to forget to lock some doors, to keep an eye out while he completed his unsavory task.

Every footstep through the mansion had been one of heart pounding terror. He could be discovered at any moment with the lady of the house held in his arms like a sleeping babe. But miracle of miracles, nothing went amiss. He stepped out the side door and down to the waiting car with his precious cargo. He slipped sideways into the back seat with her in his arms and Alex put the car into gear and hit the gas pedal before he had the door shut.

Now she was here with them.

It felt surreal. A dream manifesting. They’d talked and planned for days and days to get everything just right and the first part of the plan had gone just as they had hoped.

He squinted his eyes at her through a ribbon of cigarette smoke, a troubling thought occurring to him. The chloroform should have only lasted a couple of hours at most, but here she was, still sleeping without a care in the world, hours later.

He had tumbled into a few hours of fitful sleep on one of the couches in a side room of the Crystal and had woken, expecting to find her awake.

Yet, she still slept.

Had he used too much chloroform? That was a damnable thought. It made his heart leap in his chest while he fumbled to get the key out of his pocket. All this hard work and planning, just to kill her with carelessness before they could even get started.

He turned it in the heavy lock of the cell with a swift flick of his wrist and pulled the heavy door open. Alex had had this room outfitted in one of the tunnels adjacent to the Crystal in the event that he had to manage an unsavory drunk without alerting the police to the source of the trouble .

How convenient it turned out to be. They had tested it on numerous occasions to discover how well the sound traveled. It turned out, not at all. The loudest shrieking could only be heard as a glimmer at the far end of the passageway and disappeared entirely in the Crystal, even while it was quiet.

Ryan put the key in his pocket and walked slowly into the cell, toward the sleeping woman. The robe was draped over her now, a beautiful silk thing, embroidered with roses and filigree. The damn thing probably cost more than a hard working man made in a year. He sneered at it.

He stopped next to her, eyes trailing down the length of her leg, the expanse covered by the silk of her skirt, and the sheer silk stocking-covered flesh that appeared below the hem, which had ridden up past her knee. The stockings themselves were shredded in various places, red abused flesh showing through. He hadn’t done that to her.

Who had?

It wasn’t his concern. He pushed the thought away.

She was still luscious in all the right ways. Her stockinged feet looked tender, vulnerable, tucked together on top of the rough wool blanket. Standard Army issue.

He bit his lip to curb his desire to slice her stockings up and taste the tender, creamy flesh of her thigh. It wasn’t often he was presented with the opportunity to simply stand and observe the sleeping figure of a woman. He’d been with many. Had even loved one or two of them since their catastrophic love affair all those years ago. But none since he’d come back from the War.

His hatred for her snapped inside of him at the thought of it. The thought of everything she had managed to destroy for him. How was she the card that kept coming up in his life?

Well, now she was nothing to him. A means to an end. He buttoned up whatever urges were trying to pry his chest open and bent to touch her shoulder.

His mistake.

Her foot shot out and caught him right in the knee cap.

“Fuck!” The pain was like a shotgun blast radiating up and down his leg. For an instant, he thought she might have dislocated the goddamn thing. But that didn’t stop him from throwing his weight on top of her when she tried to scramble past him and out of the cell door.

She screamed, a loud, horrible sound of pure, unbridled rage. She turned underneath him like a demon cat, all ferocity and violence. Clawed at his face and kicked beneath him, but he pinned her with his hips and got both of her hands in the grip of one of his large hands. Something cool dripped down the side of his face and fell on her chin, her cheek. Brilliant crimson bursts of color. His blood. He was bleeding. The bitch had cut him open with her fingernails.

She shook her head back and forth and cried out in horror. He slapped his free hand down on her mouth.

They were both breathing hard, staring at each other from inches away. He’d forgotten how mesmerizing her golden brown eyes were with the heavy curtain of lashes and the slender wing of her eyebrows. For a moment, it stole his breath away. He hadn’t looked into her face with his waking eyes in over a decade. There were times when he thought he’d imagined the effect she had on him, that the passage of time had only exaggerated the sheer force of her presence.

He was wrong. His heart beat harder. His blood surged.

Slowly, her eyes widened. Her breaths came more slowly, but no less deeply as her eyes darted between both of his. Body gone rigid, likely from surprise. A horrible squeezing sensation rippled over his heart and through his belly. For one horrible instant he was sure he had made a mistake.

This was Evie.

His Evie.

And then he thought of his brother. White and blue from blood loss, his eyes dull. How frightened he must have been at the end. How he had suffered.

No, she wasn’t his Evie. Her father had unceremoniously fired him and made certain no one else in the city would hire him. Destroyed any chance he might have had at having a respectable life, and she didn’t give a shit. He’d sent her letters in the post and handed them off to the house staff, telling her that he loved her, that he wanted to see her. That he just wanted to say goodbye.

All of them went unanswered .

She had made it abundantly clear that he was beneath her notice, just a nobody. Someone she had used and tossed away like trash. Not good enough for her.

And then, betrayal to injury, she’d resurfaced after all this time as Walter Stanley’s paramour. Accomplice to the murder of his brother.

The former was cruel, the latter was unforgivable.

Ryan swallowed hard and gritted his teeth together, gathering his resolve around him like armor.

This was his idea. His idea. And he wasn’t going to allow an old fling fuck this up.

Between them, his cock was an iron rod that brought him a twinge of shame. He was suddenly very aware that she was in a state of undress. And pinned neatly beneath him. Her eyes widened as if she’d just noticed this fact, too, and she renewed her struggles, which caused her breasts to swell against the top of her camisole. He stared at them for a helpless moment, wanting to dip his head and caress the curve of each with his tongue. Disgust with himself and excitement at her terror warred inside of him.

She was a means to an end. He had to keep reminding himself of that. And she deserved everything she got now. But it wouldn’t serve his purpose to satisfy the lust burning him up from the inside out. It could very well compromise him.

He focused on her face, hardening his own. He forced himself to look at her, to remember who and what she was, pleasures of the flesh be damned .

“Shut. Up.” He said in a steady, even voice, their faces almost nose to nose. “I will tie your mouth shut if you don’t keep it shut on your own. No one can hear you except for me, and all you’re going to do is make me angry. And that’s not going to end well for you.”

She tried to say something into his hand, but he shook his head.

“Don’t. Don’t say a word.”

Then he moved his hand slowly away from her mouth and started to say something else when she brought her head up and smashed it into his mouth. In their current situation, she didn’t have enough leverage to get him good, but it still fucking hurt and shocked the hell out of him.

In his rage and surprise, she got out from underneath him like a slithering eel before he could get a good grip on her. Fury came down over his vision like a blinding red curtain. He caught her again before she could reach the door to the room the cell was housed in.

Shrieks penetrated the air like blades, but he hadn’t lied to her. No one could hear her scream. All the sound did was blow into the furnace of his temper like a bellows.

Well, perhaps she was going to need to be taught a lesson. He caught her around the waist and she fought him, scratching at his hands and trying to throw her head back into his face again. To no avail. He had the measure of her ferocity now, and if he wasn’t so pissed off, he would have been impressed. He put her over his shoulder and took her back into the cell like a sack of potatoes, spitting blood on the dirt floor as he went.

One of his hands was already undoing his belt. He whipped it out of its loops as he dumped her on the ground. She scrambled to kick at him, beautiful legs snapping through the air. She managed a kick so near his groin that he felt his balls draw up inside of his body. Reflexively, he slapped her. Not with a fraction of the force he could have managed, but it still made her head snap to the side. Shock overtook her, causing her lips to part and holding her prisoner just long enough that he had her hands together and bound with the belt before she could stop him.

He hauled her to her feet, ignoring her efforts to fight him and dragged her to the iron bars of the cell. With quick, steady hands, he had her tied to them in the blink of an eye.

Panting, he stood with the line of his body pressed along her back, both hands taking his weight against the bars on either side of her while he tried to calm the rage boiling inside of him.

“Fucking bastard,” she said. She turned her head and spit at him. Most of it missed, but a little bit landed on his face.

That little fleck of spit obliterated the last ounce of restraint he had. A dam broke inside of him and a river of boiling lava rushed through him, consuming every shred of sense in its wake. With both hands, he ripped her skirt off so that it fell in pieces around her, and then ripped down the girdle and the soft cotton drawers keeping her flesh from view, exposing her ass to the cool air of the cell. She screamed and tried to move away from him, but she was tied fast and there was nowhere for her to go.

“Ryan, please–” she said, voice rising with panic. “Ryan, please, don’t do this!”

The words coming out of her mouth were muted, distant. Just the sight of the sweet swell of flesh made him smother a moan and then sent another surge of lust tangled with rage through him.

His hand crashed against her bare ass with the force of a thunderclap.

She screamed, but it was a sound that held more shock and fury than pain. Too bad. He hit her again, harder. She screamed again, the sound sharpening into a cry of pain. It ground into him, drawing a smothered groan of pleasure and hatred from his lips.

“How dare you! RYAN!” She struggled against the belt. She tried to kick back at him, but it was useless, especially with her drawers caught around her thighs, binding them together. “You fucking bastard!”

He hit her again, and again. Punishing her for daring to speak his name. Punishing her for everything that she had done to him. Punishing her for even breathing when his brother lay in the ground, cold and dead. Harder and harder. So hard that it hurt his hand to strike her. Her screams transformed into wails that echoed off the walls of the earthen room and went straight to his cock like lightning bolts, urging him on and on .

Finally, he stopped. He put his weight against the iron bars again, pressing the weight of his body against hers again. Then, shaking with excess and unable to help himself, he put his nose in her hair and inhaled the scent of her body. The scent of the past, warm nights and caresses in the humid darkness. The scent of her fear, her sweat. They both stood there, panting.

At last, sense started to reknit itself inside of him, leaving him strangely exhausted though satisfied in the wake of the retreating river of his fury. He peeled himself off of her back and stumbled away from her. He tried not to look at her. Didn’t mean to look at her, but he did.

She was looking over her shoulder at him with wide eyes, an expression he couldn’t read. It wasn’t hatred. It wasn’t anger. It wasn’t brokenness. It was fear, yes. But fear mixed with something else.

Petal perfect lips parted, eyelids just a touch heavy.

“Ryan?” she said, her voice a moan. A touch of disbelief. Pleading. “Why?”

Shame began to invade him, a foreign and unwanted feeling, but it wasn’t stronger than the lust that came boiling up inside of him at a frightening temperature. Hot enough to scald him from the inside out.

The look in her eye. Did she feel the heat of it too?

He ignored the way the past clutched at his heart.

With shaking hands, he drew the key from his pocket and stepped out of the cell, locked the door with a swift flick of his wrist. Her voice, like notes of bittersweet music, hit the air after him like arrows, but he didn’t hear a word she said.

He closed and locked the door to the room behind him and traveled down the tunnel, lit by two burning torches, to the Crystal where he promptly crossed to the water closet.

Alex was standing at the bar, holding his hat in his hand. Just arriving for the day.

His lips parted in a greeting, then his eyes narrowed at the blood on Ryan’s face and the sheen of sweat on his chest showing through the open collar of his shirt as he bolted for the water closet.

Alex called after him, but Ryan disappeared behind the curtains and snapped the door shut behind himself. The fabric of his trousers caught as he yanked at the buttons. He groaned in frustration, the fever pitch of his need threatening to suffocate him. At last, he yanked them down and freed his erection. It bobbed once, obscenely hard and insistent in its hunger to be satisfied. Ryan had no choice but to oblige. He wrapped his hand around the head and began to jerk his fist back and forth in a familiar, urgent rhythm.

The sound of her wails rolled through him like a wave of heat over and over again, causing his balls to jolt and draw upward. He bit his lip until it stung to keep from moaning while he thought of the dark hand prints he left on her tender flesh, bright red against white .

The look she gave him over her shoulder, parted lips and drawn up eyebrows. Eyelids heavy. The sound of his name, falling from her lips like a song.

God, and what if he had just slipped his fingers into the garden of pleasure between her legs? Would they have come out bearing the nectar of the fruit secreted there? God, why hadn’t he? There was nothing she could have done to stop him. Nothing.

If she’d even wanted to stop him at all.

And he had left her tied there, humiliated. Naked from the waist down, her breasts pressing against her camisole. Just the thought of it made him shudder and filled him with such a surge of desire that he nearly choked on it.

Her final wail echoed through him as his seed spurted from him, sticky gossamer that only took a shadow of the shreds of his acute and hungry lust with it.

Dear God.

After he pulled his pants up and turned away from the toilet, he caught sight of himself in the mirror. Blood down the side of his face. Scratch marks splitting his forehead open around his eyebrow like a punctuation mark. His hair mussed like he’d been fucking her instead of fighting with her. The wild look in his eyes that was only just starting to abate.

He swallowed and wet a small bit of toilet paper that he used to swipe the dried blood from his face.

When he finished cleaning himself up, he stared into his eyes, wondering who the fuck was staring back at him. Then, he fixed his shirt, his collar. Shame flared up inside of him again when he thought of Alex, that Alex had seen him in that state. How much he probably enjoyed it. More shame came when he realized Alex had probably gone in there, that he had probably found her bound like cattle to a fence.

Not that Alex wouldn’t enjoy it. Alex enjoyed nothing as much as he enjoyed the pain and humiliation of others.

But there was something in him that didn’t want anyone–not Alex, not anyone–to know how much he enjoyed it, too.

He took a deep breath and steadied himself, the thought occurring to him that perhaps he shouldn’t have left her like a deer tied to a tree, an offering on a platter for a predator like Alex.

Then he looked at himself in the mirror again, steeled himself against that worry. Alex could do what he damn well pleased with her.

Ryan opened the door and went back out into the Crystal.