Black Heart (Cursed Hearts 1)

“You marked me, you prick!”

He frowned at her. “Are you sure? Because I really can’t recall doing that.”

Her hands clenched by her sides as she prayed for patience or a baseball bat to beat his ass with, either would be welcomed at the moment. She tilted her head to the side to expose the mark. Not that she really needed to do that since no one else had seemed to be able to miss it, much to her embarrassment.

“Oh yeah, so I did. Sorry,” he said, not sounding sorry at all. No, he sounded and looked smug, very smug.

“Everyone at work saw it!” she snapped. Damn if that didn’t make him look even smugger. “Some of them asked if I had a run in with a vacuum!”

At that he laughed.

Laughed!

“It’s not funny!”

He laughed harder.

“It’s not!”

Sighing, he reached out and ran a finger over his mark. “Come on, it doesn’t look that bad.”

*-*-*-*

It did. It really did. There was no way that Hank was going to be happy about this.

She stood there fuming, looking so damn upset that he couldn’t help but feel a little bad about what he’d done. Not that he regretted ruining her date, because she was his and really, by this point, she should have realized that, but about embarrassing her at work. He reached out to take her hand in his only to have her pull it out of his reach.

“Look, I know you’re pissed. Why don’t you come in here and we’ll talk it over and order some food. Then if you’re still angry, you can kick my ass, okay?” he suggested with a hint of a smile, praying like hell that he could fix this. He wanted to spend the night holding her in his arms, not fighting over petty bullshit.

Marty eyed him for a moment before her scowl disappeared and a sunny smile took over her features, making him understandably nervous. “That sounds great. Let’s go,” she said, seeming pleased as she stepped past him and walked inside.

Well, that was easy. A little too easy. He’d expected to have to beg, apologize, and ultimately chase her down and drag her back. Ignoring every instinct in his body that was shouting for him to run for the hills, he stepped back and closed the door.

The lock clicked just as he was shoved against the door and his arms were swiftly brought behind his back. He heard and felt the handcuffs before it registered in his mind that he was seriously f**ked. Damn, he forgot about Hank teaching her how to take down an unsuspecting criminal when she was five, you know, just in case she happened to come across one on the playground.

*-*-*-*

Tristan turned around to face her, grinning. “Is that all you have for me, baby?”

“That and more,” she promised with a pleased tone that let him know that she truly thought she’d won. She really should have known better than that by now.

He shook his head, sighing. “I’m really disappointed in you, baby.”

“Are you going to continue to call me that?” she asked in a bored tone.

One eyebrow arched up in challenge. “Are you going to take these cuffs off?”

“No.”

“Then yes.”

She watched him as he carefully moved to sit on the floor. “If you’re going to handcuff a man,” he paused to shoot her a look of warning, “and you better not be thinking about handcuffing any other men.”

She rolled her eyes at his assumption that they were together. “Make sure that he isn’t a cop with a shitload of extra handcuff keys lying around the house.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she said with a shrug.

He frowned up at her when his butt hit the floor. Even as he spoke he bent his legs to loop his arms under them to bring his hands in front. Now she couldn’t very well allow that.

“What doesn’t matter?” he asked, the last word leaving his mouth in the same instant that she lowered herself onto his lap, straddling him and effectively trapping his arms behind his back.

She pushed him down, knowing that with his arms behind his back like this that he wouldn’t be able to stop her, or at least, not easily. He landed with a thud. “It doesn’t matter, because I’m not going to give you a chance to retrieve a key until I’m done with you.”

*-*-*-*

Tristan took a moment to consider his predicament while his eyes ran over her spread legs, at the skirt that was hiked up, the hard ni**les that were straining against her blouse up to the face of the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. He felt his lips curve into an appreciative grin. He could think of a hell of a lot worse situations to be in than lying beneath the woman that he loved.

“Do your worst, baby. I’m all yours.”

Marty returned his grin, which made him a tad uneasy, but not enough to roll her off of him and end this game. “Oh, you can count on it.”

“Ah, lad, I know this is generally a good start to a  p**n  and all, but I have a really bad feeling about this,” Shayne said, looking both amused and nervous at the same time.

Tristan rolled his h*ps suggestively beneath her and watched as her eyes glazed over. “The only thing I can count on with you like this is getting hard.”

Nothing on earth could have shocked him more than her grinding down against him as she leaned down until their lips were barely a few centimeters apart. “That’s exactly what I want.”

All thoughts of acting unaffected shot out of his head at that declaration. He leaned up and captured her lips with his own. She eagerly returned the kiss while she continued to grind against him. He swallowed her moans of pleasure as his h*ps rolled up to meet hers. The pain in his shoulder from having his hands cuffed behind his back was forgotten as was the pain from having their combined weights pressing the cuffs into his skin. All that mattered was the woman on top of him.

“I need you, Tristan,” she whispered against his mouth, breaking the last strand of resistance that he’d been holding onto.

“You have me. I’m yours,” he promised, because he was, always had been and he’d been a f**king moron to fight this hold she had over him.

She stopped kissing him and moved back just far enough away so that she could look at him as she asked, “No matter what?”

There was no hesitation whatsoever. “No matter what, Marty. I’m yours, always have been.”

For a moment she looked like she was going to cry and he definitely did not want that. He leaned up and captured her lips again, thrusting his tongue into her mouth. She met him stroke for stroke as her hands roamed through his hair, over his neck, shoulders and chest.