O Come, All Ye Sinners Read online

  Matt followed me into the bathroom when the tub was nearly full, steam rolling off the water and fogging up the wide mirror over the sink. I had my makeshift medical paraphernalia set up on the closed toilet lit next to the bath and there was an already soaped-up sponge in my hand, my jacket discarded and my thermal sleeves rolled up so I could clean him.

  “Get in, Mr. B,” I said, narrowing my eyes at his still clothed form. “Lose the clothes.”

  “Was hopin’ the first time you saw me naked would be a fuckuva lot more romantic,” he said, glaring at the bubbling bath water as if it was boiling lava.

  “Didn’t take you as the making-love romantic type.”

  He shifted his intense gaze to me. “I’m not. My kinda romantic is getting’ naked and doin’ the horizontal tango.”

  I laughed. “Not sure you’re up for that, buddy.”

  “Try me,” he dared and then he reached behind his neck to slowly peeling his sweat suctioned tee over his head.

  My mouth went dry at the sight of his abs, perfectly staked boxes of hard muscle I wanted to climb with my tongue. A tattoo dipped down from his upper back onto both shoulders and down to cover his entire pectorals in an abstract array of green and blue ink. One of his nipples was pierced. Saliva pooled in my mouth at the thought of taking the silver barbell between my teeth.

  When I looked back up at his face, he was grinning.

  I cleared my throat and leveled him with haughty look. “Let’s test that after we get you clean of blood and grim.”

  He chuckled low in his throat and popped open the button of his jeans. I watched him slowly grasp and lower the zipper then part the denim with both hands so he could lower them over his hips and down his thick, delicious thighs. It felt like someone was revealing a profound secret just for me, unearthing the answer to the question of life, and it lay nestled in the black boxer briefs stretched tight around Matt’s big body.

  He paused with the denim pooled at his feet, his fingers hooked in the waistband of his underwear, his stare hot like a hand at my throat.

  I tried to tell myself to calm down. A body was just a body no matter how finely tuned. That Matt was fucking injured because of me and it was my duty to nurse him back to health, not with the magic powers of my pussy, but with hot bath water and stolen medication.

  But nothing I told myself changed the fact that watching Matt Broderick strip down in a steamy bathroom just inches from my flushed face was without a doubt the sexiest moment of my life.

  I held my breath as slowly dipped the fabric over that hard V of muscles arrowing into his furred groin and then I choked on a groan as his wonderfully thick, hard cock appeared. It was heavy and swollen red at the tip with arousal, veins prominent in the dusky shaft that I wanted to explore with my tongue.

  He wasn’t even touching me and I felt on the edge of some kind of visual orgasm.

  My eyes stayed fixed on him as he moved forward and stepped into the scalding water with a soft hiss before lowering his oversized body into the tub. Water sloshed over the side as he settled, but I ignored it, my gaze transfixed by the sight of water running down his wide chest, glistening in his chest hair before rolling down into the bubbles obscuring his beautiful cock.

  “Work quick,” he said gruffly, pulling my eyes to his. “Or I’m haulin’ ya into this tub with me and we’ll do the tango wet.”

  I shivered before I could quell the urge and then straightened my shoulders.

  “Lean back and relax,” I told him.

  He stared at me for a long moment before complying, tipping his head back against the rim and closing his eye.

  I hesitated then stood up to quickly shuck off my jeans and black thermal before I stepped one foot in the tub and then the other on the opposite side of Matt’s body so I was straddling him. His eye snapped open, blazing with heat as I lowered myself onto his lower torso and settled there.

  His hands instantly went to my hips, his thumbs running over the string of my white bikini-style underwear.

  “Be good,” I scolded, but my voice was tight with arousal. “Let me take care of you.”

  And I did.

  Gently, I use the soft sponge to rub over the deep hills and narrow valleys of his muscular torso, worked my fingers into his stiff neck and up into his hair so I could carefully wash it without getting suds in his eyes. He let me tend to him, a giant sprawled in a tiny pink bathtub, his potential strength and intimidating energy lax as if I’d tamed me like some wild animal with my soothing pets.

  I’d never taken care of a single soul in my life.

  And the feeling was like nothing else, I could feel the warmth of tenderness bloom like a bruise in my chest, part pain and part beautiful reward.

  When I was finished cleaning him, I leaned out of the tub to grab the glass of water and pain meds I had waiting and handed them to him.

  “Where’d ya get these?” he asked, his voice gravelly with relaxation and sleepiness.

  “Stole them.”

  His eyebrow shot up. “You stole pain meds? For where? You hold up a pharmacy in the twenty minutes you were gone?”

  I sniffed. “No. I pretended to fall outside a house in a neighborhood a few blocks away. The lovely family let me in to clean up in their washroom and call a friend.”

  “And you stole from them.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, even though I was irritated by his incredulity. “You needed something for the pain.”

  “Teenage runaway skills,” he surmised.

  I nodded curtly, taking the glass from him and placing it on the ground before I started to unwrap his bad eye. “You gotta do what you gotta do, you know?”

  “Hey,” he called to me, his hands slicking up the backs of my thighs, over my ass to my hips where he squeezed gently. “Kitten, if anyone knows that better than me, I don’t know ’em.”

  I stared down into his rough face and saw the truth of that. “Okay.”

  When I peeled the gauze away, it was to find his bad eye slightly bloody and weepy, the cut starting just above his eyebrow and angling all the way down into his beard. The wound was stitched closed, even his torn eyelid, but the eye itself was red, cloudy and it looked totally beyond repair. My fingers lightly traced his sliced eyebrow then down his cheek over his sharp, bearded jaw before going to his mouth. His lips were full, the lower one plush, the colour of the inside of a seashell so pale pink.

  I leaned down and pressed a kiss to that mouth, my gratitude and apology more eloquent on my tongue than they ever could be through my voice.

  Matt groaned and slanted his head to thrust his tongue between my lips. I sighed into his mouth as his arms went around me, curling me into his chest so that I felt surrounded by him, cocooned by him. I was safe and aroused, a bizarre combination that shouldn’t have been so unbearably heady.

  Then we were moving.

  He shifted in the tub and stood quickly, his hands at my ass so he could carry me out of the bath. We were dripping wet and his bad eye was uncovered, but he didn’t seem to care as he kissed me and carried me over to the bed. He dropped on top of me softly, bracing his weight in his forearms so he wouldn’t crush me with his huge build.

  “Feelin’ romantic, Tayline,” he warned me against my lips.

  The sound of my name in his rich voice shot a shiver straight down my spine to my pussy.

  I gasped as his head lowered to my chest and his lips latched onto my nipple through the sheer material of my bralette. The sight of his big, dark head against my pale chest and the sharp pull of his lips and teeth against my sensitive flesh had me writhing in minutes.

  He soothed me a hand stroking down my side, slowly angling over my belly to cup my sex over my panties.

  “Taste so fuckin’ sweet everywhere else, gotta taste you here,” he told me as he sat back on his knees and ripped my underwear down my legs.

  His stare was hot against my pussy as he lifted my hips high with his hands on my ass and brought me to his hungry mouth.

/>   I moaned long and low as his lips latched onto my core and his hot, slick tongue laved over my aching clit. He growled into my folds, shaking his head back and forth between my thighs so his beard abraded my skin deliciously and his tongue vibrated against my sweet spot.

  “Fuck,” I cursed, my legs straightening to hold back the epic climax threatening to snap my body in two. “Matt, God, that feels too good.”

  He didn’t let up. Instead, he carted my body further into his lap, my hips canted high into the air so he could drink shamelessly from my center. I could hear the wet sound of his mouth on my pussy, the harsh rasp of his aroused breath as he ate at me relentlessly, and I knew I was going to come.

  One of Matt’s hands left my ass, slicking up my damp inner thigh to sink to thick fingers in my snug cunt.

  I came apart.

  My body unravelled at the touch of his fingers, thoughts spilling out of my fractured mind, sensation unspooling through my blood until all that was left of me was the scattered remains of fabric and thread that had once held me together.

  “Fuck, gorgeous,” I heard Matt curse and then he was lowering my lips so I was draped over his thighs and his searing hot cock was at my entrance.

  “Look at me,” he barked. “Wanna see you as I take you.”

  My eyes snapped open and locked with his one-eyed gaze just as he powered his hips forward and impaled me on his huge cock.

  I cried out as pain edged pleasure flooded my body, but I didn’t take my eyes off his starkly aroused face, not even when he grasped my hips and started to go at my hard.

  “Look at that snug, pink pussy wrapped so tight ’round my cock,” he groaned, looking down at our connection.

  I lifted myself onto my elbows so I could see the obscene sight of his thick, dark cock slick with my cum stretching out my cunt. My head fell back on my shoulders as another orgasm sunk its teeth into my spine.

  “Gonna come again.”

  “You wait for me,” he told me.

  “Hurry,” I begged, my pussy already tightening, twitching, ready to detonate all around him.

  “Look at me,” he ordered again as one hand smoothed up the center of my body and rested over my left breast, over my heart. “Want you to feel me.”

  And I could.

  I could feel his eyes on me, the terrifying, glorious weight of his intent and intense affection behind them, the heavy brand of his hand over my heart and the thick surge of him between my thighs. He was everywhere; in me, on me, around me.

  In that moment, he was mine.

  “Yeah,” he rasped, somehow reading my thoughts. “Fuckin’ yeah.”

  And when we came, we did it together.

  Later, I lay with him in the near dark, only the flickering grey light of the muted tv casting pale shadows over the bed.

  “There’s a word in Spanish for a man like you,” I told him. “Tuerto is a one-eyed man. We don’t have a word for that in English.”

  “We do. Cyclops,” he deadpanned.

  I hit him in the shoulder then traced the pattern of his tattoos there, distracted by their beauty and the stunning cut of his muscles below that. “Cyclops. Well, it’s definitely more original than Matt.”

  “What’s wrong with my name?”

  I shrugged one shoulder. “It’s just…so normal. You are not a normal man.”

  His gaze seared into me and he pulled me tighter on top of him with the arm at my hip so that he could speak against my lips when he said, “You are not a normal woman. More like a fuckin’ dream.”

  “A very bad one,” I corrected, my fingers soft with apology against his freshly gauze wrapped left eye.

  “I might’a had sight through both eyes before I met ya, but I’m tellin’ you this in a real way that has nothin’ to do with your guilt or me wantin’ to make you feel better and every-fuckin’-thin’ to do with the truth. In a lotta ways, I was blinder last week than I am today.”

  “Yeah?” I asked. “How’s that?”

  “Was livin’ life on autopilot, stopped pausin’ to see the beauty and the possibilities laid out for me. Man loses an eye, comes that close to a dirty kinda death, he sees things differently than he used to.”

  “Tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine,” I whispered, desperate to understand every inch of him in a way I’d never felt before.

  His broad fingers played with one of my small hands, tracing over each slim digit, mapping the veins in my wrist and the lines cutting through my palms. There was an intensity to everything he did with me, for me, as if he was an ardent scholar and I was every script, scroll, and verse he ever wanted to read.

  I’d never had anyone pay attention to me, let alone to the depths and clarity of Matt’s attentiveness. It should have disturbed me, rubbed me raw like some collar on the wildness of my free spirit. Instead, it settled something restless in my chest, a beast that yearned for pack but had never found one.

  “Don’t really got much to tell, kitten, but I’ll tell it. Mum died’a breast cancer when I was three, Dad was an alcoholic piece’a shit, never made many friends back home ’cause he had a reputation as crook, which meant so did I even young as twelve. Got the fuck out of Newfoundland and been riding nomad ever since.”

  “Young, wild, and free,” I surmised. “Same as me.”

  His hand tightened at my hip. “Got a feelin’ we’re cut from the same kinda clothe.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed softly, loving that because I’d never had it before. “My story starts different, but ends the same. Parents died in a wreck when I was three, went into foster care, never found a good home, runaway until running away became my whole life. Back in Canada after four years in Europe bumming around and learning French and Spanish.”

  He was quiet for a while, his coarse fingers running patterns over the skin of my ass.

  “You ever want a home?” he finally asked.

  His words cracked open the lid of desire I’d kept screwed tightly shut in the center of my chest.

  I took a deep breath and let it out. “Yeah, sure. You?”

  “Home can be a person or place, never found either worth stayin’ put for,” he replied, feeling me stiffen beside him. “Thinkin’ that’s changed now.”

  “Yeah?” I asked, as if my heart wasn’t in my throat, as if hope wasn’t clogging my airways.

  “We figure out what to do ’bout this Mexican who wants to see us dead, I’m thinkin’ fuck yeah. Try this place, it doesn’t suit, move on like normal, just doin’ it together.”

  Together.

  The word raced on the track of my mind, lap after lap.

  “What’re we going to do about the guy?” I asked, instead of confirming, because I as chicken shit.

  Matt tensed around me then rolled us both to the side of the bed so he could reach into his jacket and come back with a phone in his hand. “Stole this from him. Figure, the second we turn it on, he’ll find us.”

  “And then?”

  His grin was a slow slice across his face. “We set ’im up.”

  Early morning fog rolled in diaphanous clouds off the ocean through the streets of Entrance and into the huge snowed over asphalt parking lot of Evergreen Gas Station. It was quiet, too early on the Sunday morning before Christmas for anyone to be up and about in a small town where church going was probably still a normal thing.

  We chose the gas station because it was close enough to town to draw attention if things went backward, but far enough we wouldn’t risk engaging any innocent civilians. Matt had made calls to set everything in motion even early this morning while I showered and tried to brace for carnage.

  “Relax, Kitten,” Matt said, drawing my attention to the passenger side of the stolen Prius where we were parked and waiting behind the gas station.

  “This could go so wrong,” I told him something he already knew.

  I’d just found him, I didn’t want to lose him before we even got the chance to be.

  “As long as we don’t die,” he told me, his mouth
twisted in something like a grin but so much better. “This’ll make one hell of a story to tell the grandkids.”

  I grinned despite my nerves, marvelling at the fact that I’d only known him a matter of days and he already knew how to make me laugh.

  “Ready?” he asked me, his hand catching one of mine to bring it to his mouth. “We do this, it’s done. We can set up house like some kind of reformed Barbie and Ken.”

  I snorted. “Not sure we’ll ever be that.”

  “No fun in it,” he agreed. “But I found a girl looks like sweet kitten, but has steel claws and ruthless bravery. Any kinda life with her would be good, I’m thinkin’.”

  “You tryin’ to make me cry?” I accused him. “Because I don’t do that.”

  He grinned, unabashed. “Just testin’ ya.”

  A car pulled up to the front of the station, a nondescript black Volvo that wouldn’t usually draw attention except for the fact that it was 5:30am on a Sunday and no one should be pulling up for gas.

  “Go time,” Matt muttered. “Stay safe, yeah? This looks like it’s goin’ south, get gone.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m not leaving you, Cyclops.”

  His smile was all teeth, full and happy in a way that didn’t suit his face because he rarely did it. Without replying, he leaned forward to lay a hot, wet kiss on me and then pushed open the door and got out of the car. I watched him walk to the back entrance of the gas station convenience store, his gait smooth and sure even though I knew his sight was still wonky. The gun I’d stolen was tucked into the waistband of his jeans.

  I glanced at the clock on the dash, my knee bouncing with pent of nerves. I wasn’t supposed to follow him into the station unless he didn’t return for more than fifteen minutes, but when the black Volvo remained idling at a pump for five minutes without anyone getting out, I started to get worried.

  I’d just unlocked to check it out when two things happened.

  The idling Volvo’s wheels screeched against the pavement before it went driving straight through the front glass wall of the gas station.