Chad's Chase (Loving All Wrong Book 2) (35 page)

As soon as he let me go, my feet gave out and I slid down the wall onto the ground. Chad collapsed with me, chuckling lightly as he rolled over onto his back.

Once my breathing got back on track, I rolled over on top of him and kissed from where his cock lay half-erect on his lower abdomen, right up to his chest, up his neck, until I got to his lips, where I whispered against them, “Thank you. That was amazing.”

Down on vigor, Chad hooked his arm around my neck, kissed me soft and gentle, then whispered back, “I hate you.”

I grinned and kissed him back, wanting to get the last one in. Then I dropped kisses back down his body and sat back on my heels to undo the laces of his boots. Pulling his boots off and socks, I tossed them down the hallway, which was completely littered with all-black garments. His jeans joined the All-Black Litter Crew a minute later.

Leaving him as bare and unhidden as I was, I stood up and dipped my right hand between my thighs, inserting two fingers inside myself. Looking down into his smoldering eyes, I withdrew those two fingers, brought them to my mouth and licked them, then sucked them off. When that little move gave me the reaction I desired—Chad’s cock hardening, growing, stretching further up his abdomen, wanting inside me again—I gave him a wicked half-smile then spun and hip-swayed down to the guest bedroom. “Meet me under the shower head, bad boy.”

We fucked while we showered.

We fucked after we showered, got all hot and sweaty, then had to shower again. Where we also fucked.

Lying in bed now, wrapped loosely around each other, weak-limbed, we were red-flagged for fucking too much. Placed on suspension. Penis and vagina blocked and frozen until further notice.

I trailed my fingers through and through the ridges of his rock-hard abs, thinking about the suspicious empty birdcage inked on his left pectoral. Walking my fingers up to his chest, I tapped my index to the pectoral tattoo. “When did you get this?”

When a full minute eased by with no reply, I raised my head to check if he’d fallen asleep. But those black eyes were wide open, staring at me.

I tapped his tat again, non-verbally re-asking the question.

“Six years ago,” he said, voice still and quiet.

“What does it mean?” I kind of had an idea what it meant, but wanted to hear the words out loud. To feel special. “Why is the cage empty?”

Flinging his arm over his eyes, he made an annoyed sound in his throat. “Really, Jhay? Are you really this egoistic?”

Taken aback, I braced up on my forearms. “Egoistic?”

Angling his arm from over his eyes, he arched a challenging brow at me. “Lie to me and say you don’t already know what this tat means, Jhay. Lie to me.”

Okay. I guess I was an attention-seeking, biggity little brat with Chad sometimes.
Only
with him, though. Because I wanted to be the center of
his
attention at all times. I wanted to know I meant a lot to him. I wanted him to feed me some Prince Charming line like “the sun rises and sets with you”. And after almost strangling me to death, I think I deserved that much from him, dammit.

So I tipped my chin up and said, “Yes. I do know. But I want you to
tell me
. I want to hear.” I mock-pouted. “Pwetty pwease?”

As though he couldn’t help it, he cracked a smile, then cupped my face and raised his head a little to give me a quick kiss. “The cage is my heart. The missing bird is you, Tweety Byrd. The cage door being open is a sign of hope. Hope that you’d forgive me and fly back home one day. To where you truly belong. Inside my heart.”

The confirmation sounded even better coming from his mouth, and I kicked my feet out next to his like an excitable all-pink teenager. This made Chad laugh and shake his head. “And now that I’ve flown back home, what’re you going to do?”

“What do you think? Lock you inside the cage and melt the fucking key.” His palm glided down the curvature of my back, paused on my ass, then squeezed. “You’re stuck with me, Jhay. It’s me, or no one.”

See, most blind-by-love women would find that sweet and completely miss the threat in that statement. But “me, or no one” was a dangerously obsessive love and ownership proclamation. Especially when spoken from the mouth of a cold-blooded murderer.

Even though I was cross-eyed blind with love for this man, I didn’t miss the meaning behind that “it’s me, or no one” threat. It was a simpler term for “till death do us part”. And not in the marriage kind of way, either. The ones exchanged in wedding vows had no weight; “death” in that sense was a mere scrawl of a signature to a divorce paper. “Death”, in an unconventional relationship with a girlfriend-murdering criminal, was
death
.

The thing with me, though, was that I felt his words were fair enough. How? Because my sentiments were exact. For him, it was me, or no one. He was stuck with me. We were both a detonating threat to each other. Both hardcore danger. Two horns wrestling atop the Devil’s head.

However, if ever a man should whisper the words, “it’s me, or no one”, don’t sigh and think it’s sweet. It’s not. It’s not sweet. It’s bitter as gall. Painful as a piercing bullet to the heart. Fuck around and you’ll end up like Liz. Mark my words.

Run.

Love does not threaten. Love does not test, try or compete. Love does not challenge, claim or dominate. Love does not strangle. Love does not suffocate, debilitate or erase. Love does not kill. Love does not end.

Love goes on. Love flows.

Love simply loves.

Love just
is
.

At least, that’s what Isabel, my mother, said.

“That’s okay,” I whispered, laying my head down to his chest again. “I
want
to be stuck with you.”

With a kiss to the top of my head, his arms tightened around me. “Hate you so much, Jhay.”

“Love you, too, Blood.”

Isabel hadn’t spared me this one truth, though…

Love, in its purest form, is madness.

Piercing sunlight unapologetically poked my eyelids open. Chad was missing.

I flipped onto my side and espied him out on the balcony, leaning over the railing, a burgundy towel slung around his lower half, cellphone pressed to his ear, rapt in his conversation.

Slipping from between the sheets and out of bed, I trudged to the bathroom to freshen up. Fifteen minutes later I popped out with clean, moisturized skin, fresh breath, and a revived face, then realized neither of us had clothes in the room. We would either have to borrow clothes from the other famous couple occupying the house, or redress in our dirty habiliments from the day before. The latter sounded more likely.

I glanced out to the balcony and Chad was still on the phone, now with two fingers pressed to his forehead as though the conversation was a headache-inducing one. So I dragged the top sheet off the bed, wrapped it around me ancient Egyptian-style, and went in search of our clothes we’d negligently left out in the hall the night before, hoping the other two—Roman Prince and Rock Princess—weren’t yet awake.

Drifting noiselessly from the room, I tiptoed down the hall, finding not a single item of our clothes. We’d left our stuff littering the hall: of course a more civilized person would have picked them up.

I decided to just suck it up and go seek clothing for me and my man, borrowed or dirty. Didn’t matter. We were both still targets, still walking dead, so at this point it wasn’t really relevant whose clothes we were wearing.

As I neared the end of the hall, I heard discord, voices raising higher, and higher. The two were quarreling. Oh great, marital problems.

“…just not ready, JK. Not at this point in my career when—”

“Your career,” JK’s voice said, sounding more like a sneer. “Do you realize you use your
career
as excuse for everything? I have a ‘career’, too, Sassy, and I’m
still
playin’ my part as your husband. Play your fuckin’ part as my
wife
and do what you promised me you’d do in your vows!”

“It’s just bad timing, yeah?” Saskia returned, her voice now pacific and forbearing. “I’ll run it by Lion and—”

“ARE YOU FUCKIN’ KIDDING ME?!!” JK roared, and even I jumped at the reverberating explosion. “My
wife
needs to ask her
manager’s permission
on whether or not she should carry my motherfuckin’ baby?!”

“I don’t—”

There was a loud crash of something, followed by a jumble of other noises like a few things got tossed and kicked over. Then silence. Then a contrite “JK, wait!” Then the echoing bang of the front door.

I figured JK had stormed out, but waited a few minutes before resuming my journey down the hall. Saskia was standing still in the center of the massive kitchen, staring blankly at a completely ruined blender shattered all over the kitchen counter, pinkish smoothie running and dripping over the edges of the island. Four bar stools on the other side of the island were topsy-turvy.

I probably should be asking her if she was alright, offer her some help or something, but, yeah, I wasn’t that kind of human being.

“Excuse me, were you the one who picked our litter up from the hall?”

Saskia’s head jerked up at the sound of my voice, as if she’d been on another planet, only then becoming aware of my presence. “Oh, um, no. JK did.” As though she hadn’t just been a participant of a heart-imploding marital war, with a cool expression, she walked away from the debris, from the helter-skelter scene created by her Megatron of a husband, and rounded the island, heading into the open living area, towards an ivory couch that had a few pieces of clothes folded in a low stack.

“I could only save yours and Chad’s boots, and Chad’s trousers. Everything else got burned. So you’ll have to wear something of—”

“Burned?”

She fumbled needlessly with the folded garments, and I figured, despite her brave face, she was still on edge from the argument. “Yeah. JK was the one who took them up from the hallway…and threw them in the fireplace.”

“That
asshole
,” I muttered under my breath. I was close enough for her to hear me, but I didn’t give a damn how she took it. Her husband was a piece of shit asshole.

Pretending she didn’t hear, even though I was positive she did, she took up a skinny black jeans from the pile. “You’re taller than me, but I’m sure we wear the same size, yeah? And don’t worry, these are brand new. Never been worn.”

I bet they were. She was
her
. The famous kind who wore clothes once then tossed them aside, until she decided to make space in her closet for new stuff and donate those “old” ones to charity.

The jeans were definitely my size, so I took them and tossed them over my arm. Next she handed me a black, long-sleeved T-shirt and a lace underwear set with an eight hundred-dollar price tag still on. Also black.

“Based upon what you were wearing last night, your style seemed very much like mine,” she explained when she caught me eying the all-black garments piled in the crook of my arm. “I love black.”

Evidently.

When I just shrugged, she passed me Chad’s black jeans, washed and neatly folded, and a black wife-beater. “JK’s a little more built than Chad. Chad’s taller and lean, and I wasn’t sure how JK’s shirts would fit him, so I thought this singlet would be a safer choice, yeah?”

She was a lot friendlier than last night. The night before she’d been flat-out glaring at me, and now she seemed like she was trying to atone for that unwarranted hostility.

“Thanks,” I muttered, taking the wife-beater then bending down to pick up our boots. Chad’s were well and good, but the laces on one of mine were burned off at the ends.

As I made to leave, Saskia said, “He’s a good man.”

“What?” I asked, because that statement was laughable. She couldn’t possibly be talking about Chadrick Niiveux being a good man.

“I don’t know how bad the things are that he does—he or JK won’t tell me—but relationship-wise, he’s perfection,” she asserted. “He’s monogamous. If it’s you, it’s you. And he’ll treat you like no other woman exists in the world but you. Don’t hurt him.”

Oh, that explained it. She knew the fake Chad. The pretend-to-be-a-normal guy Chad. But I knew the real Chad. The one who’ll wrap his fingers around your throat and squeeze the air out of your lungs just minutes after confessing he’s falling in love with you. The one who whispered threateningly sweet things like “It’s me, or no one”.