Hung Out: A Needles and Pins Rock Romance (49 page)

“I would, but I need a taste. Fuck, it’s been so long.” He knelt as he spoke, and his head disappeared beneath the loose skirt of the dress.

Her knees almost buckled with the first swipe of his tongue and a cry ripped through her throat.

“Scar,” he spoke from the tent of fabric. “You gotta stay quiet.”

So matter of fact was his tone, as if he was shushing her in a movie theater. A hysterical giggle was the next threat to the silence—for about one second. Doing a damn good job of holding back a moan, she took another look at their surroundings, realizing although they couldn’t be seen in the corner they’d adjourned to, they could very easily be heard should someone come into the barn. “I won’t be able to… You can’t…”

“Just for a minute.” And done with wasting time talking, he turned his attention back to her.

She managed to swallow the next scream and concentrated on the feel of the wall digging into her shoulder blades. He held one leg, lifting it and parting her to him more, and when she whimpered, he sank his teeth into her thigh in warning. The pain only increased the pleasure. Trying to make her mind work enough to think of another distraction, she tipped her head back, staring into the rafters.

“I’m gonna come…” she whispered the warning.

“Don’t… Not yet…”

The vibration of his voice intimately against her was almost her undoing. More thoughts. Like, shit, she had only done the most basic of manicuring down there with summer being over, him being gone, and classes consuming her time. Embarrassing. Right. You’d think. But somehow, she didn’t care. All she cared about from second to second was what his tongue and lips were doing next. Each time she made a sound, he paused to bite the inside of her leg, enough once to bring a sting of tears to her eyes. Why in heaven was the pain with the pleasure so erotic? Her fingers twisted in his hair, which had grown so long, and she gave it a yank with each painful nip.

“You unbuttoned yet?”

“No… oh…”

“Tell me when you are…”

“And you’ll stop?” She was already ripping the first button from its slit. He didn’t stop the delicious swirls of his wicked tongue to answer. Two more buttons free. Not that she wanted him to stop, but she’d already heard sounds just outside and was biting the inside of her lip to remain quiet. Last button, and she called it as she was undoing it. “Done!”

He tongue-lashed her one last time before relaxing his hold on her leg, and she almost collapsed in a haze of ecstasy. His hair was sticking out in all directions. He dipped his hands into her bra and lifted the girls out, lavishing them with enough attention to have her throbbing almost as heatedly as if he were still between her legs.

A vibration of a moan filled her throat, and she fumbled with the fly of his jeans as a diversion. Hooking her fingers into the waistband, she used the momentum of sliding down the wall to peel them down, and then overly excited to have him huge and hard before her, shoved the denim all the way to the floor.

“Scar, I’m barely holding on… Not a good idea—” His protest melted into a string of euphoric curses when her lips fit around him.

With him now at her mercy, she fully intended to pay him back for each tortuous minute he’d subjected her to. That was the plan. But Gage was a man. His physical strength outmatched hers. And it was just as erotic when he silently called the shots by yanking her up after she’d barely had a taste, pivoting her to face the wall, copping a quick grab of her breasts before locking his hands to her waist, kicking her feet apart, and growling sex talk into her ear while slamming into her.

T
hey said nothing for the longest time. He wondered if she also was too wrung out to speak. Or if taking her like an animal instead of worshiping every inch of the gorgeous body he’d been deprived of for months had traumatized her into silence.

“You okay?” Finally, he managed two words and cradled her closer in his lap.

“Um hmm.” She barely stirred against his chest.

Tipping his head back to rest in the corner, he closed his eyes while brushing his fingers up and down the smooth silkiness of her toned calves.

“Are they going to write you up or something if we miss the welcome meeting?”

“Write me up?” He grinned at her juvenile suggestion, wishing they could sit like this until… Until they didn’t want to. “Nah.” She relaxed onto him, and until then he hadn’t realized she had stiffened while waiting for his answer. “Just detention.” She slapped at him, and he let her, but caught her wrist when she began to button up. “Leave it, so I can play a little longer…” Using his knuckles, he skimmed the velvet softness swelling from her bra. “Speaking of school…”

“Were we?”

“You probably didn’t, but I definitely had detention a time or two.” His thumb dipped beneath the lace.

“No!” Her whispered comeback was suitably appalled.

Her antics had him grinning like a fool. Everything right now had him smiling. He was firmly entrenched in his happy place. “How are classes?”

“Great. I’m liking them a lot. One professor seems like she’s going to be impossible, but the rest are cool.”

The conversation took off and he soaked up the sound of her voice and relished hushing her laugh with his lips to hers when it got too loud.

“What’s new with your music? Still finding time?”

Nodding proudly, she reached behind him, and he raised his brows when her finger splayed on the back pocket area of his jeans. “My phone, nympho,” she clarified what she was after. And he remembered he had pocketed it when he’d noticed her carrying it without her purse. After thumbing through the icons, she passed it to him.

“Don’t tell me. ‘Gage and Scarlette Wallbanging in a Barn’ has been already uploaded by some spying pervy fuck with their camera always ready.”

He loved watching her brows shoot up when he rattled her cage of decency and decorum. Somehow, Henni Smythe had raised a lady. Despite all she had seen during her upbringing, Scar could be shocked. But that didn’t mean she was a prude. She always laughed at his audacity or told him off, and this time was no different.

“I love how you think you’re so funny.”

“Tell me I’m not.”

“You’re not.”

“I love how you think I believe everything you say.”

“Tell me you don’t.”

They’d reached an impasse, and they both fell quiet.

He had just joked about the sex video for the first time. It had a life of just over a month before the attorneys had managed to get it pulled. Copies continued to crop up, and now it was a task of someone his publicist had hired to routinely scan the internet for it.

Coming out of the past, he spent a moment taking in her mussed hair, swollen lips, disheveled clothing, and eyes alight from their teasing exchange.

With an anticipatory smile of whatever he was about to see, he hit play on the video and hastily bumped the volume down. Onscreen, Scar was on the studio couch with Claudine in her lap. Holding the speaker directly to one of his ears, he nodded his encouragement at what he was hearing. She was advancing on the guitar fast. Obviously, she’d inherited every last artistic gene from her father. When it ended, he replayed, but the second time around, he admired her fingers as they danced on the strings.

She was waiting expectantly, and he voiced his praise aloud. “No way. No way you’re going to school and still finding the time it takes to get that good that fast.” She rolled her eyes, matching his playful tone, but her face lit up, and he always felt lucky when he was the one to put the sparkle in her eyes. Something onscreen caught his eye, and his fingers clamped the phone when another look confirmed what he was seeing. “Son of a bitch. No fucking wonder!”

When she raised her face, no doubt alerted by the flip side of his tone, he looked away, hating the innocent confusion in her gaze. Because, if she truly didn’t know what piqued him about the video, then she didn’t share his same depth of feeling in this relationship.

“No wonder what?”

Easy to see why you’re playing like a rock star
. “We need to get back.” He shoved the phone back into her hand.

She rolled to her knees, and with a hand on each of his shoulders, tried to use her weight to keep him from standing. “What’s wrong?”

He blew out an enraged breath and dropped a concentrated glare to her face. “That’s Colt’s studio.”

“So?”

He honest to God hated her right now.
So?
No. He wished he hated her. It would be easier than loving her. Easier than the stabbing shards of hurt and jealousy.

“You’re being a pissy-ass bitch about me being at Colt’s?”

“I’m
always
a dick about you at Colt’s. And I always will be. I thought you’re with me now, and suddenly I’m feeling like I need to be there to fuckin’ drag you from his car.”

He’d hurt her. He saw it. A shimmer in her baby blues. A shift of her bottom lip told him she was biting it from the inside. She reeled from his words, but she came up fighting.

“You asshole! Seriously? You don’t get to say shit like that when you’re here hanging with junkie whores by the pool!”

“Hanging? I’m not hanging with anyone! Jesus. This isn’t a vacation. I’ve never felt so fuckin’ alone in my life.” Squeezing his eyes shut and clamping his teeth closed, he stopped the pitiful tirade. He felt her shift, but she didn’t storm off as he expected her to. Her hands still rested on his shoulders, but instead of clenching in anger, they’d relaxed, and now he swore he felt the slightest flex of her fingers—almost a gentle squeeze. His eyes drifted open, and his gaze landed smack into her concerned one. Panic seized him. Fear of being an object of her pity. Fear of how much he had opened up to her over the months, and fear of what she now saw when she looked at him. “I knew I shouldn’t have let you come.”

Their relationship was so lopsided right now. Her having it all together and him in the middle of mayhem. He’d been afraid her seeing him in this element would tip the precarious balance and so he’d refused visits at first. Then, after a couple of months of missing her crazy, he’d given in. There had been none of the awkwardness he’d worried about until now.

Now, in the span of something he’d seen during a second in time, his doubts and insecurities returned with a vengeance. He shouldn’t have let her come.

“You’re right. It was stupid.” She pushed away with her hands, but remained staring angrily into his face. “I knew it too.”

Her reply ripped him from his contemplation. “Knew what, exactly?”

“Knew you couldn’t man up and handle doing what you have to do.”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

“It’s here, or doing time in county. You’d walk out if that weren’t the case.”

“I would. Because I’m fine. And there’s no sense sitting around here until some overpaid shrink decides I can leave.”

“They’ll let you leave when you’re ready! Goddammit, Gage. They don’t have some war against you. Let ’em do what they do! Let ’em help you.”

“Do what they do? You know how the world works. Someone like me walks in who has no choice except to stay as long as they say he has to stay. Someone who has deep pockets. Who, every week they can extort another fifteen grand from. Is it any wonder I’m not
well
enough to walk out of here yet? Fuck it all!” It suddenly seemed as if she was staring into his soul a little too sympathetically, and he closed himself off again, this time, looking away. Grasping her hips, he pushed at her, gaining some distance between them. “You should go.” She’d made it clear what she thought of him. He was a loser until a piece of paper said he wasn’t anymore.

“J
ust go. Please…”

“Go where?” Scarlette studied his face, seeing the barest twitch of an eyelid. Still as a statue, he sat, waiting for what came next. What? For her to go ahead to the main complex, and he would catch up?

She had noticed the time on her phone screen. There was a half hour before the short meeting held before dinner. And then after dinner, guests had an hour left before visitation was over until the next afternoon.

Or go? As in leave for today? Each weekend, she visited on both Saturday and Sunday. She kept standing reservations in the same hotel they’d shared prior to his check in almost two months ago.