Dark Ink Tattoo: Episode 2 Read online

  “It was better than the truth. Trust me.” I picked up a fork and spun it, just as waiters reappeared bringing rustic bread and salads. “I just don’t know what to do now. I backed myself into a corner – and Rabbit shouldn’t have to meet such a disappointment.”

  “All he’s doing is writing, right?”

  I inhaled to try to lie, but he made a thoughtful sound. “Last night – the window.”

  “Yeah. To scare me.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Rabbit and Dark Ink are all I have.” I didn’t realize how lonely that sounded, till the words came out, but it was true. The things that’d happened with Gray when I was younger’d scarred and scared me, leaving me more comfortable with people being a boss than a friend.

  “And me,” Mark said, and I looked up. His dark eyes were deadly serious. “And I have friends who have friends,” he said, almost a whisper.

  I swallowed. If he was offering what I thought he was – I – that wasn’t my call – Gray’d only broken a window – and Mark didn’t know what Gray was besides – “No. Please no,” I said, then licked my lips. “But thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said, watching me intently. “And now that both our pasts are off the table, maybe we should enjoy the view.”

  I looked around at the empty restaurant, emptied just for me. Then I looked out at the gorgeous Vegas night, winking hotel room lights, jagged bolts of neon, the light on the Luxor pyramid beaming up to God, and then miles of coldly beautiful desert all around. When you lived here, you forgot just how special this place could be. And lastly, I looked at Mark, who was the first person I’d almost ever told about my time with Gray – and the first person who might not run away from the real story, either. Most of it. The non-werewolf part at least.

  Maybe…maybe my mom was right, and I didn’t have to be alone anymore.

  “Shall we?” Mark said, picking up his fork.

  “Nah,” I said softly, and stood. I circled around the table to him as he pushed his chair back. “How good are the waitstaff here? Would you say they’re polite?” I asked, coming near to him.

  “Excessively.” His eyes flickered over me, wondering – hoping – what would come next.

  “Good,” I said, swinging one leg over his lap like I was mounting a horse, holding my skirt up as I sat down, and when I was settled I took his face in my hands and I kissed him. Sweetly. Like I was kissing him for the first time. The first time I was this girl who could trust in someone.

  His hands came up instantly to press me to him, holding me, his mouth fierce against mine – I didn’t think I was the only one experiencing firsts tonight, surely Mark hadn’t confessed exactly who he was to many other women. I moved from his mouth to nuzzle my beneath his jaw to kiss his neck, and I could’ve sworn I felt his blood pulsing fast in his carotid as his hands rose to catch in my hair. I was still kissing him when he pulled me back.

  “You’re the only woman that makes me feel like this, Angie,” he said, staring into my eyes. “The only.”

  And some scared part of me broke, a piece of my armor, shattering forever. “Mark,” I whispered, reaching between us to haul his shirt up as he started unbuttoning it from the top. He kissed me then and our hands fought as we reached for my dress’s buttons, till it was hanging free like a robe.

  I undid the dress’s tie and my bra and let both fall. I didn’t care who saw us, the Vegas night wouldn’t judge me, and the staff paid too well to care. I rose up high enough for him to sink his hands and free himself from his slacks, heard the zipper slide open, and then felt the heat of him beneath me as I ground against him, only my underwear in the way. He grabbed one of its straps with both his strong hands and snapped it, then snapped its twin on the opposite side, before reaching behind me to yank it away, the thin cotton rubbing my clit as he pulled.

  I rocked there over him, without him inside me, just letting our mutual heat rub, the soft shaft of his cock playing over my folds till he was slick with me, as our mouths searched one another’s, his hands clenched around my ass. Then slowly, inevitably, he pulled me up as he tilted his hips down, so that the head of his cock was right at the entrance of me, and he played it there as I made shamelessly eager sounds.

  “You want me in you?” he growled in my ear. “All the way?”

  I nodded helplessly. “Please,” I whispered. “Now – please.”

  His strong arms slowly lowered me, his chest rumbling in pleasure as my pussy took him in. “That’s it,” he said when my legs were spread wide, stretching my pussy tight around him. “Right there,” he said, beginning to thrust.

  That’s when I knew that this was going to be his ride. I reached up and brushed a piece of hair out of his face, kissed his cheek, kissed his chin, as he went on. His hands stayed on my waist, holding me against him, the force of his thrusts from his ass and thighs alone, each steady pulse stroking that spot deep inside. How could his cock always find it? It was like it was meant to.

  I bent forward over him, and felt his lips on my breast, nuzzling their way down to my nipple to take it inside his mouth and rub it against his tongue. The sensation shot electricity through me, making me clench. “More,” I begged him, and he obliged, switching breasts. His thrusts became more rhythmic, his hands on my ass clutching hard – my feet barely touched the ground, as each of his strokes started to bounce me.

  I leaned forward, bringing my body closer so I could rub my clit on him. Following my intent he rose and stayed there, his taut ass clenched tight, I could feel it underneath the fabric of his slacks, as he gave me his abs to grind on.

  I was trapped there, pinned on his cock, my own ass clenching and reclenching in time, giving me small strokes off of him as my hands on his shoulders helped pull. His breath caught and held, his eyes closed, his head rocked back, enjoying the way I writhed trying to get myself off. It wouldn’t be long now – this – this night – had opened something primal in me long shut down. I wanted to both give myself to him and take him inside me forever.

  “You’re so beautiful,” he said, on a long exhale, as I rocked back and forth on him like a horse. I could only make a wild sound in response, I’d found just the way to ride him and I couldn’t stop now. “Go. Come for me. Go,” he growled, and I whole-body shivered in response. His hands grabbed my ass and hauled me to him, grinding himself into me. “I want to feel your pussy.”

  My breath hitched, my hands clawed, and I couldn’t help myself anymore I – I – I came with a low scream, shouting his name, giving my orgasm to him.

  “Yes,” he growled, thrusting up. “Yes –” he said again, and started fucking me hard.

  Dizzy from my own orgasm and satisfied, it still felt so good to have him in me, my walls thick and tight. He grabbed me bodily with one arm and kept the other at my ass and I held him helplessly. He was just using me to please him now -- and I liked it.

  Sometimes all a girl wants in life is to be genuinely fucked.

  Behind him, through eyes blurry with endorphins, I could see Vegas sprawled out in all her glory – and all of Vegas, if it were watching, could’ve seen me. Being taken. Being owned. A fresh thrill spun inside me. My wolf liked being put in her place – and so did I.

  He felt it first, I don’t know how, but he did. “Oh God, can you?” he moaned, without slowing down. In response I ran my hands into his hair and kissed him with a bite. My clit ground against his stomach when he let me down, and again when he raised me up, his hands and hips untiring and I – I let my wolf out of her cage. For one moment we were one, our powers doubled, as we both wanted the same thing – she needed this as badly as I did.

  “I can,” I growled into his ear. I could feel a new orgasm coursing through my body, through us, looking for a way out. And then there, on another upstroke, it found one. “Yes!” I cried out, curling over and into him, feeling new parts of myself open up to take him deeper, my wolf and I one as we pulled him inside. “Yes yes yes yes --,” I screamed until the words
were unintelligible.

  Mark moaned low at this, feeling my pussy grasp him, then made a strangled sound as he came himself, following me over the brink. His hips wildly spasmed and it was all I could do to hold on as he bucked me. “Take it,” he growled, holding me fiercely in place, and I clung to him, feeling his hard cock bob inside me as it shot its load.

  I sank down as he did, me still straddling him, both of us relaxed into his chair.

  “Take everything,” he murmured against my breast as I rocked back and he slid out, him only holding me again. His hands stroked sweaty hair back from my neck. “I mean it,” he whispered, kissing under my ear.

  I was overwhelmed. This, here, with him – and I’d never come like that before. I’d never come with her before. Maybe my wolf didn’t hate me after all.

  I pulled back from him after I’d caught my breath and saw the same faraway look in his eye – I knew he was thinking about what he’d said, and he wasn’t running away from me. I kissed him again, gently, and then took on shaky legs to sweep down and grab my dress. I felt him stand behind me, and heard his zipper pull back up.

  “I lied,” he said, and I stiffened, from picking up my dress’s tie.

  “You – did?” I said, and inside me my wolf crouched and snarled.

  His lips quirked at my response – he knew he’d set his hook in me, as deep as his cock’d been at least. Then he smiled deep and true and I could feel the – I didn’t want to call it love, emanating from him – but yes. Some crazy part of my heart stretched a little, suffusing me with heat. Yes.

  “Mon Toit – the roof – the name’s a lie. There’s three penthouses above us with the same view.” He held out a hand. “Want to see one?”

  I pulled my dress on, wrapped it, and tied it without doing any buttons, taking it from staid to sensual, and then I put my hand in his. Looking up into his eyes I answered, “Absolutely.”

  One of his eyebrows raised and his gaze traveled over me, like he was already thinking about devouring me again, and inside of me my wolf swung her head and tail eagerly low.

  “Good,” he said, and pulled me toward the restaurant’s door.

  Chapter 6

  “So what’s your name, Mr. Tourist?” the girl asked.

  This, I couldn’t lie about, seeing as it was tattooed across my knuckles. “Jack,” I said, showing her. “Yours?”

  “Amber,” she said. She hadn’t really noticed my tattoos before, I could see her trying to make them work with the rest of me, my hair slicked back with Paco’s hair gel, and in his boyfriend’s too crisp shirt. “What do you do, Jack?”

  I picked the safest occupation, given the room. “I work in IT. Back end server maintenance. It’s incredibly lonely.”

  She gave me a mischievous look and then nodded sympathetically. “I bet.”

  I measured her for a moment. She was drinking, and this was clearly her home, so she was likely over twenty-one or at least eighteen. But there was something a little too knowing about her – maybe even a little scared. And Bella had been scared too, hadn’t she?

  “So what do you do, Amber?” I asked.

  She took a long sip of her beer before answering, “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Then she rested her a cowboy boot on the rail going around the bottom of the bar, revealing a line of wolf print tattoos padding up the inside of her left thigh -- the same size and spacing as the ones that’d run under Bella’s breast.

  “I would,” I answered, and took advantage of the rising bar sounds to lean in. “Completely,” I said, my voice low.

  I’d meant it when I said it, and I saw her eyes start to glaze. Dammit. I couldn’t whammy her here, not with so many people around, she’d have repercussions if she told the truth to me in public – I slid back into tourist mode fast.

  “I’m so sorry that other girl and I couldn’t meet up. I took a taxi out here special –“ As I yammered on I saw her attention return, none the wiser. “You know how you meet someone sometimes and you think you just know?”

  “Yeah,” she said, and I could see her playing a memory of her own inside her mind.

  “And Vegas is the kind of place – it just leads to hoping.” I stared woefully into my beer.

  She put a sympathetic hand on my arm. “How long are you here for?”

  “Just another day.”

  “Work, or vacation?”

  “Bit of both.”

  “Well hopefully you’ll get the chance to see a few more sights.” Her hand squeezed my arm and didn’t pull away. I looked from it to her and finally everything fell into place – the youth mixed with wisdom mixed with being here in this place -- she was a prostitute. Possibly off the clock here, maybe one of these fine angry gentlemen surrounding me was her runner. Vegas was full of schemes like these, even where sex work was legal. Bella, baby, what the hell did you get yourself into?

  To find out, I looked at Amber like a drowning man looked at a life raft. “There is one thing I know I’d like to see.”

  “What’s that?” she asked, all innocence.

  I jerked my chin toward her leg, and used a tone of voice rich with promise. “That tattoo of yours. Very, very close up.”

  Her lips crinkled into a half-smile. “The Midnight Inn. Room seven. Gimme half an hour.”

  “Excellent,” I said, giving her a sly nod, and put a twenty on the bar.

  * * *

  The Midnight Inn was on the outskirts of town, and it was the kind of hotel where questions were not asked. If you’d had to point to Vegas’s seedy underbelly on a map, your finger might not wind up here, but chances were you’d be nearby. I parked Paco’s sedan down the street, and then made my way to room seven like the lady’d said, ready for anything – for all I knew ten bikers’d be on the other side of the door.

  But I knocked as politely as I figured an IT guy would and was pleasantly surprised when Amber opened the door, waving shyly from the across the doorjamb. Public doorways were fine, and places with OPEN signs were usually okay, but private homes – or places private by the hour – still required permission.

  “Can I come in?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said, and the wall that’d blocked me and only me from entering lifted.

  We were in a small dim room with a desk and a queen, and I took the bed, since she was sitting on the desk.

  “You know what this is, right?” she asked.

  “I do,” I said, reaching for my wallet again. If someone was running her, then I had to pay and for all I knew whoever he – or she, it’s the new millennium -- was, was outside with a stopclock. If she came out too early, or without enough cash --

  “Good,” she said, interrupting my train of thought. “Sometimes guys really do think they’ve gotten this lucky.” She leaned back, gesturing up and down at herself. One of her legs was on the seat of the chair and her legs were intentionally open, showing me both her tattoo and the fact that she wasn’t wearing underwear. She tilted her head and smiled. “I’m mostly surprised that you’re not drunk.”

  “Why, should I be?”

  “A lot of guys need liquid courage before they look for company. Even when they know they won’t be rejected.”

  “Maybe that’s why. They’re afraid of a sure thing.”

  “It doesn’t really matter to me – I charge the same for a dick, limp or hard. I just like the hard ones more.”

  “Then I’ll try not to disappoint.”

  She looked me up and down. “All right –“she kicked the chair away and stood up, all business. “Let’s start the clock. Fifteen minutes of fucking is –“

  I interrupted her. “How much is it just for me to eat you out?” It was the easiest cover, gave me the best chance to see her tattoo, and it’d take enough time to be plausible for whoever was likely waiting outside. I wasn’t powerful enough to maintain a whammy for fifteen minutes, and there was a good chance she’d remember what I asked her – I wanted us parting on good terms.

  She looked a little taken aback.
“That’s…it?”

  “I told you I wanted to see your tattoos up close. I meant it.” I leaned over and pulled off my own cowboy boots.

  “That’s all you want?”

  “Yep.” I used my arms to shove myself up the bed. “I’m not even going to get naked.”

  She stood at the bottom of the bed, dissatisfied. I wasn’t the kind of IT manager she was used to, and frankly I was shit at trying to be. Time to stop pretending.

  I crossed my arms behind my head and looked at her. “I’m not paying you for pouting, Amber,” I said. “But I’ll pay you for an hour of your time, if you pull up your skirt and cowgirl up over my face.”

  She inhaled, preparing to argue, then swallowed what she was going to say. “Yeah, sure, of course,” she said, walking up to the head of the bed to be by my side.

  I crawled onto the mattress when she reached me, and slowly straddled me – she was so tiny the act hitched her skirt up to her waist, and I reached for both her lightly tanned thighs. I rubbed a thumb over the trail of paw-prints – it was well done, with no blow-outs, evenly spaced, even on the delicate and too-giving skin where it was placed. But the design was far from original, there were probably a thousand girls in Vegas right now with variations on wolf print tats. Because they were free, or they ran with the wolves, or their great-great-great-great-great grandmother was a Lakota Indian. In my time tattooing, I’d heard all the reasons, and in my experience, reasons were better off ignored – I was more interested in creating art.

  “Do you like it?” she asked, looking down at me. There was a moment of vulnerability there – my current strangeness had made her afraid.

  “I do,” I said kindly. “I like it a lot,” I said, and put my hands on her ass to push her pussy towards my mouth.

  When she got there, legs splayed on either side of my shoulders, I reached in to pull her thighs apart, exposing herself to me. I breathed on her gently, once, twice, and then started in with the tip of my tongue, inspecting every fold, every crevice. She made noises, pretend ones I knew, like women in cheap porn, and started to writhe, reaching back a hand for my cock.