him for how good it felt to watch her lips form that word, one simple sound that erased a future of lonely decisions and replaced it with companionship and shared responsibility.
Ours.
"Damn right," he confirmed, and sealed the bargain with a kiss.
Before You Leave Sector Four
Beyond Control is the second book in the BEYOND series. It's preceded by Beyond Shame (available now) and followed by Beyond Pain (coming later in 2013)
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Beyond Pain
Rachel was dancing again.
From her vantage point behind the scuffed bar, Six had a decent view of the stage even with men standing three deep on the opposite side. A lot of them were tall fuckers too, the kind who'd usually tower head and shoulders over Six, but the floor behind the bar was high enough to put her at eye level with even the biggest brutes. O'Kane--or someone close to him--clearly understood the advantage height could give a bartender who had to face down a room of horny, drunk thugs.
Usually those drunks were crowded around the bar, jostling for booze or position or attention, but Six hadn't poured a single shot since Rachel's act had started, and she didn't think it was the novelty of having a new dancer that held these men captivated.
No, it was the fact that Rachel had lost her damn mind. She was grinding to the music as she peeled off layer after layer of perfectly respectable leather to reveal the white, lacy garments beneath. Men stared slack-jawed as she rocked and swayed and ran her hands over her body, lost in a haze that fascinated and repelled Six in equal measure.
She was an object to these pea-brained cavemen, nothing more than the picture they'd hold in their heads when they stumbled back to their hovels and took their dicks in hand. The way they watched her should have made her weaker. Lesser.
It should have. But these men crowding the stage were nothing to Rachel. Flies to be swatted away if they got too close. Grubby children with their noses pressed against the dirty glass of the bakery, dreaming of something they could never have while hunger gnawed in their guts.
Rachel was oblivious, and somehow that turned the men into the weak ones. The ones who were less than.
Six saw it over and over, every time an O'Kane woman took that stage. Power in the place of helplessness, pride where she would have felt nothing but shame. There was a secret in these women that went deeper than the ink around their wrists, and sometimes she thought if she watched for long enough, she could unlock it for herself.
Of course, watching could be uncomfortable for other reasons.
Rachel slipped her fingers beneath the ruffled edge of her underwear, and Six turned her attention back to the bar. The low throb of the bass rhythm was harder to ignore, its steady beat vibrating up through the floor. In Sector Three, they'd made do with passable musicians beating on secondhand instruments, but the heart of Sector Four was a marvel of miraculous old tech.
Maddox had shown her the speakers that lined the walls, but Six still had a hard time believing that such bone-rattling sound could come from those tiny, unremarkable boxes. The O'Kanes seemed to take their luxuries for granted, but some days she felt as slack-jawed as the drooling morons hovering around the bar.
"God, this place is insane tonight." Trix dropped a tray on the counter behind the bar and took a deep breath. "At least it's slowing down--for now."
For now, Six agreed silently, carefully not looking at the stage. As soon as the crowd broke free of Rachel's spell, they'd be eager to get back to drinking--maybe even more enthusiastically now that Trix was behind the bar. The newest member of the O'Kanes was everything Six wasn't--voluptuous, fashionable, gorgeous--and she spent every night drowning in admiring gazes and generous tips without doing anything more seductive than smiling as she poured whiskey.