Spider: A tattoo romance (Rough Ink Book 2) Read online

  Spider

  I resisted the urge to hoist her over my shoulder. Just. I wanted to, real bad, but it seemed like something her scum-of-the-earth ex might do, and I didn’t want to be anything like him. I needed to put Emi as much at ease as possible and not do anything that might spook her. She was trying to play it cool, but earlier in the park, she’d given off a skittish vibe, which had been getting more obvious the more intimate we got. I wanted her in my bed, so I needed to make sure her nerves didn’t get in the way of that.

  I led her down the hall to my room, where I heaved an internal sigh of relief that my military brat training had kicked in that morning and I’d made my bed for once before leaving for work. I wasn’t sure why I cared about that, but I did.

  Once inside, I kicked the door closed behind me and turned to Emi, reaching out to pull at the waistband of her jeans.

  “I really want to see you with these off.”

  She blinked a few times, saying nothing and giving me plenty of time to wonder if she’d changed her mind.

  I waited, not wanting to pressure her.

  She nodded, then undid the button and zipper before pushing her jeans down, never breaking eye contact. I held her gaze while undoing my black jeans and pushing them down. I fought the temptation to step out of my boxer briefs, remembering to take things slow.

  In a way, I was glad. I was enjoying being in the moment, just watching her, taking in the details of her body before things progressed. But looking at her, naked apart from her panties, I wasn’t sure I could tear my eyes away long enough to do anything else.

  My brain may have been saying that, but my dick had a different view of the situation and was in danger of snapping in half in my underwear if I didn’t do something about it.

  Keeping my gaze locked with Emi’s, I pushed down my boxer briefs and took my dick in my hand. Her eyes traveled down my body as I squeezed hard, pumping my hand back and forth. I focused on her face, enjoying her reactions as my tip glistened with a bubble of precum. Patience had never been a strength of mine, but with Emi I was almost enjoying the delayed gratification. Something told me the experience would be sweeter for it.

  That was the theory, but either way, if I was with her, I knew it would be good. We’d had a connection from the moment we met, despite the incredibly fucked-up circumstances. I’d felt it, and I knew she had too. On Friday, when she’d pretended she didn’t know who I was, I could still feel the undercurrent of chemistry buzzing between us even as she straight-out lied to my face. Then when I’d kissed her, the mutual attraction had gone from a sting of static to a full-blown electric shock.

  This was new territory for me. I’d liked women in the past. I’d felt intensely attracted to others. I also had friends like Kota, with whom I had a special connection. But I’d never felt all three things for one person or as strongly as I felt them for Emi. She’d come crashing into my life in the most dramatic way possible, and it hadn’t exactly been smooth sailing since then, yet I was already sure I didn’t want her to leave.

  I moved closer to her, releasing my dick to place my hands on her cheeks, tilting her head backward so she could look me in the eyes. Then I bent down, aligning my mouth with her ear.

  “I’m gonna need you to take those panties off now. They’ll be surplus to requirements for what I have in mind.”

  I smiled as Emi’s body quivered against mine. You and me both, babe.

  She wasted no time in obliging my request, and when she’d finished, I stepped back again, giving myself space to admire her fully naked form. She was out of this world, but she seemed self-conscious, uncomfortable with being looked at in that way. I had a good idea why, and I resolved to do my best to put her at ease.

  I approached her again, bending down to press a flurry of gentle kisses over her collarbone and then on her chest. I felt like a creeper sniffing her thick, wavy long bob, but I did it anyway, taking in the smell of her shampoo and the unique scent that was just her.

  I kissed down one of her tits before circling her nipple with my tongue, loving the way it puckered to my touch. I grazed my teeth over it several times, then blew lightly where my teeth had just been, Emi’s moan of pleasure telling me I was on the right track, I repeated the same on the other side, loving the way she reacted to me.

  I walked forward a little so her back was against the wall. Unable to bend much farther—the height difference between us was hefty—I lowered myself to my knees to spread tiny kisses all over her torso.

  Sitting back on my heels, I grabbed her butt to pull her body to my mouth, then extended my tongue, flicking the bud of her clit gently, watching as a wave of pleasure swept over her face. It was hot as shit. I nudged one of her legs, lifting it over my shoulder to allow me better access to her sweet spot.

  As I licked and sucked, the thought of what it would feel like to have her come in my mouth crowded my mind. I was a man on a mission to make it happen, but as her breathing became quicker and shallower, and I knew she was close, she pulled away, looking down at me breathlessly.

  “I’m ready. Please tell me you have a condom here?”

  I nodded, leaning sideways to reach for the top drawer of my nightstand. I opened it and groped around until I found what I wanted. Pulling the box out, I snagged a condom and discarded the rest of the packet in a hurry, not caring where it landed. Once I had it on, I shifted from kneeling to sitting and reached out to pull gently on Emi’s arm, lowering her to me.

  As she sat down, we paused, drinking each other in. I noted her heart-shaped face, tapering to a delicately pointed chin, that gave her an almost cartoon character air. Then I studied her small but full lips, salivating at the memory of them colliding with mine. Last, I moved my focus back to her amber eyes. So expressive, and somehow always tinged with sadness. The thought that even now she was unhappy hit me somewhere I couldn’t identify. I just knew it hurt like hell.

  I reached up to brush a stray hair from her face, and she flinched. Then I recognized the feeling loud and clear. It felt like someone had taken my heart right out of my chest and used it as a punching bag. It left me winded and wounded, more so than after any football tackle. The thought that she’d lived in fear made me want to storm the prison and break every bone in that degenerate piece of shit’s pathetic body, then throw him into a sea of piranhas while he was still alive.

  “I’ll never hurt you.” My voice was low and hopefully reassuring.

  She nodded, and I drew my index finger down from her cheek to her chest, and over her breast, hesitating at the tattoo.

  “I’d like to do a cover-up on this one day, if you’ll let me.”

  “Hmm?” Her eyes were unfocused, pupils dilated with arousal.

  “The tattoo. I can adapt it, make it into something beautiful.”

  She nodded again, sadness clouding her eyes once more, and I decided not to dwell on the negativity for fear of killing the vibe. Instead, I continued trailing my fingers down to her navel. She watched, still as a statue, her breath hitching as my hand moved lower. With the other hand, I pulled her closer to me, lifting her bent legs, folding each of hers over mine into a W in my lap.

  When I slipped inside her, I maintained eye contact, carrying on the wordless conversation we’d started the first time we met. Silent questions, answers, and promises passed between us. I moved carefully in and out of her, noting every clench and ripple of her taut muscles around my dick, and the extreme pleasure that kicked in when she began alternating between riding me up and down and circling her hips excruciatingly slowly.

  I couldn’t remember ever being as aroused as I was then. It was too much and yet not enough all at the same time. On the one hand, I wanted to take it to the next level and feel her explode around me while I did the same. On the other, I wanted to prolong my orgasm for as long as possible.

  When we came, it was bittersweet. It was by far the most intense and intimate sex of my life, but also the saddest. I felt turned inside out with pleasure, and I came
like I never had before, while Emi climaxed silently, tears spilling down her cheeks as she spasmed around me. I didn’t ask what was wrong, and she didn’t offer me any explanations.

  “Hey, um… I’m not keeping you, am I? If you have somewhere to be, don’t put yourself out on account of me.”

  We were chilling on my bed a little while later, me on my back and her on her side with her head resting in the crook of my elbow. I was winding a lock of her thick black hair around my finger, trying my best to resist the urge roll her onto her back and fuck her into oblivion. My boner, however, had no intention of resisting anything.

  “Hmm? Why would you think that?” My mind was still in the gutter as I answered.

  “You just looked at your phone. Again. Do you need to be somewhere?”

  “No. There’s nowhere else I need to be, and sure as shit nowhere I’d rather be.” It was true. I had no clients until late afternoon. “I was just checking that I hadn’t missed a call from my old man. He turned sixty today, and we were planning to FaceTime earlier so I could wish him happy birthday, but I haven’t been able to get ahold of him. Knowing him, he’s taken his new bike out and lost track of time.”

  “Bike? Like motorbike?”

  I smiled at the thought of the lieutenant general donning leathers and hitting the road, or saddling up on a Harley.

  “No, a road bike—pedal bike, I mean. After he retired, he went on a fitness kick to improve his general health and lose a little weight. All those dinners and receptions for high-ranking officers had caught up with him a little, and he didn’t like the middle-aged spread. He fell in love with cycling, and now it’s an obsession. We—my mom, brother, and I—bought him the brand-new top-of-the-line bike he’d been eyeing for a while. I’m sure he couldn’t wait to get out on it.”

  “Aw, that’s great. Sounds like you’re close.”

  “Yeah, in our own way. He’s had his moments over the years, but he’s basically a cool guy, you know? Shit at technology, though. Always will be. Years of FaceTiming and it’s still a debacle every single time. I don’t know why I thought today would be any different. He’ll call me back at some point, and I’ll spend more than half the call telling him to hold the phone up higher, or unmute the microphone, or move his hand from in front of the lens.”

  I laughed. “It’s always such a comedy of errors that sometimes I can’t help but wonder if he isn’t doing it on purpose, just to get a rise out of me. I can’t tell you the number of conversations that I’ve conducted with his left ear, or just his torso, or even a full screen of the dog sitting in his lap, because he can’t get his shit together. He’s commanded entire squadrons and saved thousands of lives, yet the guy can’t make a video call without a step-by-step tutorial.”

  “He’s ex-military, obviously?”

  “Yeah. Army. Over forty years of service. It’s all he’s known since he was seventeen years old.”

  “I wouldn’t have figured you for an army brat until you mentioned it before.”

  “For real? Why not?”

  “Um, let me see. You’re covered in tattoos, your hair is… um… ‘casual,’ and you seem pretty laid back. Not what I’d think of for someone who grew up with that kind of discipline.”

  “Hmm… maybe. The truth is my mom did most of the parenting. Don’t get me wrong, the lieutenant general was an awesome father when he was around, but as with all officers at his level, he was married to the job and gone more than he was at home. Mom is the furthest thing from the ‘typical’ army wife, so I guess that explains why I’m loose as fuck.”

  “So what’s your mom like? I mean, what makes her atypical?” She traced small circles on my chest with her index finger, and I struggled to work out why it felt so fucking good.

  “Just about everything. She runs her own race. Always has. She’s creative. When she met Dad, she was a dancer and choreographer, but she gave that up when she had us. It was too hard for her to maintain her own career while having to uproot every few years, make new friends, enroll us in new schools, that kind of thing.”

  Emi nodded, her hands never stilling. I felt like I’d died and gone to the best version of heaven.

  “Still, she just never seemed to give a fuck about the norms or fitting in with the other wives. I think she was a controversial figure in army circles, but it didn’t bother her or give her reason to do things any way other than her own.”

  “She sounds amazing.”

  “She is. I think you’ll like her.”

  What. The. Actual. My normal verbal diarrhea was on steroids around this chick. I was a hop, skip, and jump away from inviting her home to meet them both. I needed to dial back the overfamiliarity, stat.

  Just to give myself something to do other than make a complete idiot of myself, I reached over for my phone, deciding to try to call Dad one more time. When it rang in my hand before I could place the call, I’d never been more glad to be saved by the bell. I glanced down at the screen, expecting to see Dad’s FaceTime details, but it read “Mom Cell” instead. Weird.

  “Speak of the devil. It’s my mom. Do you mind if I grab this? Maybe my dad has finally admitted defeat for the first time in his life and has given up on technology altogether, and asked Mom to place all his calls for him.” I laughed at the absurdity of the suggestion. “I want to speak to him before I get stuck with work admin shit and clients for the rest of the day.”

  “No problem. Go ahead.” The call went to voice mail just as I tried to pick it up, so I called Mom right back, but it went straight to her voice mail. After a few more fumbled attempts to catch each other, she finally picked up.

  “Hey, Mom. What’s the matter? The lieutenant general too important or just too old to make his own calls these days?”

  19

  Emi

  It was stupid, but my heart twanged as Spider spoke about his parents. It wasn’t that I begrudged him his happy family. It was just that hearing about households full of love and laughter and people who cared about each other made me mourn the life I never had.

  Our experiences couldn’t have been more different. From the small amount he’d told me, I was sure his parents had loved each other when he was growing up and still did. I doubted my parents ever had. Not that I could blame them for that. It was one of the few things I didn’t resent them for, in fact. Theirs was an arranged marriage, still not all that uncommon in Mauritius even fairly recently. My parents had been paired with each other by their parents, neither party seeming to care whether their child had a say in the matter.

  It had been a slap in the face for both of them. My mom was one of the smartest people I’d ever known, and would ever know, no doubt. She was academic to a fault throughout her school years and had harbored aspirations to be a doctor. She’d been well on track to get there too. Valedictorian every year, enough science and math prizes to decorate an entire house, and a college scholarship offer just about to drop.

  All of that had gone by the wayside when she’d found herself promised to my father. Well, that wasn’t quite true. Unbeknownst to her, she’d been betrothed to my father’s family many years before. The details were foggy, but the bottom line was that it had nothing to do with what was best for her, what she wanted, or her own free will and intentions, and everything to do with her parents’ needs and priorities.

  Their union was a result of a business deal that had gone badly for her family. Part of the restitution was that my mother would marry my father—his family’s second son, and a divorcé to boot. Basically, my mother was traded to pay her family’s debt.

  That was how Mom had found herself married to a man of half her intellect—and that was being generous—and almost twice her age. A man who was just smart enough to realize he was outclassed by her, but too stupid to do anything about it. He knew it, and he hated her—and me by extension—with every fiber of his being.

  Resentment was Mom’s poison. She resented her parents, whom she was never to see again; they’d sent her life on a
downward spiral from which she’d never recover. She resented my dad because marrying him had killed her dreams. And she resented me because I was part of the invisible shackles that had bound her irrevocably to an existence she hated.

  They’d barely landed in the US to start their new life when my mother was knocked up, and my father had her right where he wanted her. Pretty much barefoot and pregnant. Every time she looked at me, she saw everything she’d lost, everything she’d never have. I was the human embodiment of the bitter pill she’d had to swallow day after day. I was a living, walking, breathing wasted opportunity.

  My father hated me because I wasn’t the son and heir he’d always dreamed of. There were to be no other kids for them, thank God, though not for want of trying. Well, my father tried. It didn’t take a genius to work out that someone with my mother’s flair for human biology and zero desire to repeatedly procreate with an ogre might have had something to do with their apparent sudden infertility. My father being my father, never connected the dots.

  I wasn’t as smart as my mom, but I was a damned sight more intelligent than my dad—though I had encountered slugs who met that criteria, so it was a dubious compliment—and I was better at reading people than either of them. I understood them both better than they understood each other, and possibly even themselves. Deciphering their moods and preempting their moves was the only reason I’d made it out of their clutches alive.

  I could predict one of my father’s rages like other people sensed storms. I knew when to make myself scarce—disappearing to my room, hiding in the very back corner of my closet, journal in hand, writing by flashlight. When that didn’t block out the bitter reality unfolding around me, I’d learned how to mentally transport myself elsewhere, shutting out everything else.

  On the rare occasion that I missed the cues or wasn’t fast enough to flee the scene before the shit hit the fan, I’d 'escape that way, even while right in the middle of the chaos. I kept stock-still and rewrote history as it unfolded around me, recreating the scene in my mind as I wanted it to be. There were a lot of knights saving damsels in distress, slaying dragons, and vanquishing monsters as they went.