Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men #6) - Giana Darling Page 0,102
avoid harming me was a heady combination. Somehow, he knew my darkest thoughts, the fantasies my brain concocted only in the deepest hours of night when I lay awake and dreaming with my hand between my thighs in bed.
I looked up at my reflection, noting the way my smile suffused every inch of my face with gentle contentment. Last night had been intense and glorious. The evidence of it was stamped on my skin in the beard burn abrading my neck and chest, in the faint bruises decorating my hips like little bunches of grapes, and in the deeper bruises on my knees from kneeling in the shower to take Priest’s blunt cock in my throat. I’d always bruised like a peach, and for once, I was proud to bear the wounds on my flesh. I shivered at the salacious image I made, watching as my eyes went half-mast with remembered lust.
I startled when someone knocked on my front door, then grinned cheek to cheek as I wondered if it might be Priest come back to see me. I practically flew to the door, hair flying, before I realized I was naked.
I bit my lip, then grabbed the knit cream throw Cleo had made for me from the back of my living room chair and wrapped it around myself.
“Hello,” I sung as I opened the door.
Bat, Dane, and Cleo all blinked back at me.
The two men averted their eyes, covering their smiling mouths, but Cleo burst into delighted laughter and started clapping.
“Oh, oh, I just knew it,” she crowed as she pushed past me into the house holding a picnic basket.
“It was pretty damn obvious,” Bat told her as he followed her into the house, ruffling Cleo’s silky hair. “Don’t be too proud’a yourself.”
Cleo just beamed at him. “I’m just so happy for her.” She turned to look over her shoulder at me as she headed into my kitchen. “I’m just so happy for you.”
I remained in the doorway, getting cold in the icy wind, watching as Dane grinned at me and knocked the snow off his boots before entering and closing the door behind him.
“I’m thinking you aren’t used to being teased like this,” he said softly.
I bit my lip, then nodded. “This is kinda new, you know?”
Something flickered in his eyes like a faulty light bulb. “Yeah, kid. I gotcha. I’ll handle them if you promise me coffee. It’s too damn early to function without coffee.”
I didn’t know Lila’s brother very well. He’d been presumed dead, missing in action from the military overseas for all the years I’d known her, and when he returned, he’d mostly stuck to Lila, Zeus, Bat, Smoke, and one of the promiscuous club hangarounds, Tempest Riley.
But now he was there in my living room, tall, broad, dark-skinned, and as beautiful a man as I had ever seen. And he was looking out for me even though he didn’t know me from Eve.
I smiled beatifically at him. “I make the best coffee. Harleigh Rose even says so and you might not know this, but she has a serious coffee addiction.”
“First thing we bonded over,” Dane told me with a wink of his absurdly curly-lashed, unusually pale blue eye. “Lead the way.”
Bat and Cleo had already made themselves at home in my kitchen, Bat sitting on a stool at the island while Cleo unpacked her picnic basket.
“What did I do to deserve this?” I asked her as I leaned over her shoulder to press a kiss to her cheek as a distraction so I could steal a peach from the rattan basket.
“I saw that,” she said mildly, but she let me take the fruit and continued to busy herself with breakfast. “You don’t have to do anything for me to do something nice for you, Bea. You know that. But in this case, I figure you being obsessed over by a psychopath is reason enough to bring you breakfast.”
I blinked with the fruit held to my mouth, the soft flesh as smooth as Priest’s surprisingly plush lips.
Cleo caught my look and laughed. “I meant the serial killer, babe, not Priest. Although, after what seems to have happened last night, maybe this should be a celebratory breakfast instead of a consolation breakfast.”
A blush fired my skin, making Bat laugh, and Dane shoved him with his shoulder as he sat down beside him.
“Why don’t you get dressed for church?” Dane suggested, pointedly nodding at my blanket robed nakedness. “We’ll take you after breakfast.”