Ringside (10 page)

Angel

She led me up to
her apartment by the hand, her tight ass and dancer’s thighs right in front of
me as we dashed up the stairs as fast as we could go.

I’d seen the pain
in her eyes when she’d asked for control, and it was all I could do to give it
to her willingly.

Sloane was
damaged. Hurt beyond what I could imagine, and if letting her take the lead
meant that she’d be more comfortable, than that was what I needed too.

That didn’t mean I
was going to be a total saint, though. I reached out my hand and grabbed her
ass. She rewarded me with a sexy come-hither look thrown over her shoulder, and
suddenly we were at the top of the stairwell.

She must have
already had her key out, because the door was opened in a flurry and she pulled
me inside with a fierce tug.

That was one thing
I was finding about Sloane, and maybe it was true of most dancers. She was
strong
. I guess it made sense, all those
hours of training her body, honing it into something graceful and unique and
precise, but still…

It was dark inside
the apartment, and she left the lights off. It was probably to hide the fact
that she was embarrassed by her furniture, or the apartment itself, but I
didn’t give a shit about those things.

The darkness made
her mysterious though, and for a moment she let go of my hand and I had only
the faint smell of her shampoo and the rustle of her clothes as she took them
off to use to find my way to her.

“Sloane?” I asked.

“Come here,” she
said, her voice husky. “Get on the bed.”

I approached with
caution, expecting to bark my shins against a wooden bed frame lurking in the
darkness and instead happily hitting the softness of a mattress on the ground.
I caught my balance and climbed into the bed. There either weren’t any blankets
or she’d taken them away, but that didn’t matter.

Now that my eyes
had begun to adjust, the alarm clock on her nightstand threw just enough light
for me to see her shape against the night. I watched, transfixed, as she got
down onto the bed on her hands and knees and prowled toward me before pushing
herself upright and undoing her bra.

Her breasts now
free, I couldn’t help but stare. Ballerinas were small-framed women, but that
hadn’t stunted her development. I ached to take her nipples into my mouth, to
run my tongue up the undersides of them and feel their fullness gently between
my teeth.

“God,” I heard
myself say, in a low voice I’d have used in church, years and years ago. “I
want you.”

Sloane smiled, an
angle of light coming in off the street and touching her white teeth, her
bright eye, the wild red hair that had first drawn my eye in her direction. She
slid her panties off gracefully.

“Now you,” she
said expectantly.

I scrambled to
comply, almost bumping her right off the mattress as I hurriedly threw my pants
and boxers off before practically tearing my shirt off over my head.

I lay before her,
both of us naked, my cock sticking straight up awkwardly as I waited for her to
tell me what she wanted me to do.

But I’d missed the
point. She didn’t want to boss me around.

She wanted to be
in control.

Sloane dropped
back down to all fours and slunk toward me, stopping now and then to dip her
mouth to my skin, taking a nibble or giving me a lick as she crawled up my
body. I trembled, throwing my head back against the pillow as I felt her breast
drag across my cock as her breath brushed across the tip.

Her inner thighs
were fever hot, and I fought the urge to reach out and drag her up me. No, this
was her turn, just like she said. If I got in the way of that, whatever she
needed from me would be ruined.

Sure, it was
torture to have so much of her so near at hand and not be able to grab her, to
pull her head down and beg her with my hips to take my cock in her mouth, or to
fill my hands with her breasts.

But it was the
sweetest sort of torture imaginable. She crawled up and over my body until the
tip of my cock was at her wet entrance. I could feel the connection, like a
bolt of lightning as she lowered her head to look into my eyes.

“Angel?”

“Yes?”

“Is this a one-time
thing?”

I shook my head. I
was worried that she’d think I’d say anything right then. I mean, any guy
would, but I wanted her to know that I wasn’t going to lie to her, not now and
not ever.

“No,” I said. “Not
unless you want it to be.”

A slow, hungry
smile was her only answer before she shifted her weight and started to sink
down onto my cock.

Sloane

I ran my gaze down
the length of his body, taking in his muscles, the cuts and bruises. I’d almost
forgotten about them in my haste, but if I’d hurt him accidentally, Angel
hadn’t complained.

He was inside of
me. I was above him, letting the weight of my body bring my pussy down around
his thick cock, but the tip of him was already making me tremble. It had been a
long, long time since I’d been able to be like this with a man, and I closed my
eyes and let myself enjoy it.

Money, job, the
future. All of that could wait.

Right now, I just
braced my palms against his flat, muscled chest and let his cock sink into me.

And it felt
right
. It felt like coming in out of the
rain, returning home when you didn’t know how long you’d been away. I pushed my
hips up and then let myself drop down onto him again, gasping this time as my
own wet readiness let him deeper than before.

To his credit,
Angel didn’t urge me on. I could feel his powerful hips practically shake with
restraint as I rode him, slowly at first and then a little faster with each
plunging dip of my pussy onto his cock. He let me go at my own pace, and he
gave me what I needed.

And then, as
suddenly as the desire to be in control had taken over my mind, a new desire
came to life, one completely at odds with the first.

“Angel, take me.
Fuck me. Have me hard and fast.”

It was as if I’d
flipped a switch. The moment I pushed up off of him, riding the length of his
cock until I was almost off of it, his hips bucked up into me, crashing passion
against my body, making my clit feel like it had thrown off sparks at the hot
contact between our bodies.

His hands came up
and grabbed my ass, holding me in place above him as his hips flew into me,
guiding his cock into me over and over, each time pushing the breath from my
lungs as I braced myself against him.

“More,” I moaned
into his ear as the muscles in my pussy started to convulse. He was good, too
good to try and hold off the orgasm that was rushing at me out of the darkness
like a wave. “Give me everything.”

Now his thrusts
were strong enough to lift me off of the bed, and I held on to him just as he
was holding on to me. I reached my hands around him, one underneath his head to
guide my mouth to his and the other around his ass. He was so strong, and the
feel of his powerful muscles thrusting his cock into my pussy over and over was
almost enough to tip me over the edge into an abyss I was only just beginning
to fear.

“You’re mine,” he
said, pulling away from our kiss just long enough to say it. “And I’m yours,
forever or for as long as you want me.”

I felt my nipples
go even harder, scraping against the muscled planes of his body as I ground
myself onto him, panting into his mouth and feeling like there were fireworks
going off around me.

Angel’s pounding,
pulsing cock gave a hot lurch inside me, and I came hard as I felt him finishing
inside of me.

Suddenly, I was
someone else. No longer passive, no longer a passenger in life, I fucked down
at him as hard as he’d been pushing up at me, clawing at his body, at the
mattress, at the walls as I sought a handhold to use as leverage to force even
more of this incredible man into me for a split-second longer as I arched my
back and felt my body clamp down on him.

My eyes were shut
so tight that I saw stars and all I could think of was one word, over and over.

Mine, mine, mine.

Because I believed
him when he said that I was his and he was mine. It didn’t have to make sense.
It didn’t have to stand up to anything other than ourselves and the world, and
in that moment as I drifted down from a high I knew I’d spend the next few days
trying hard to understand, I knew that what Angel and I had found was the thing
that everyone looked for.

I held on to him,
pressing my head to his chest, listening to the crash of his heart slow to a
more normal rhythm as our bodies came back down to earth.

“Goodnight,” I
said.

Angel pulled me up
to kiss me, a move which made me moan ever so slightly as he dragged me off his
spent cock. “Sleep in my arms, Sloane,” he said.

We kissed.

Angel

The first thing I
did when I woke up was reach for her.

Sloane was still there,
and now that I was more awake I could feel the heat of her leg draped over
mine, the soft touch of her breath against my shoulder.

This was
everything I’d been looking for. I didn’t know how hard I’d been searching
until I found it, but now that I seemed to have a chance at this sort of
happiness, I felt a deep, dark pit of fear gnawing away at me.

Because I knew I’d
fuck it up. I didn’t deserve a girl like her. I knew it, the universe knew it,
and one day she’d know it too.

After all, I
wasn’t even what she thought I was.

“Sloane?”

She moved against
me sleepily, one of her soft hands drifting down my body to lay across my cock.
I was already hard. Hell, this close to her, how could I not be? My dick
twitched in appreciation of the attention.

I opened my mouth
to try and wake her, even though I could hear myself yelling
Stop!
inside my own head.
Let well enough be!

But I couldn’t.
She had to know everything.

“Sloane?” I said
again, and this time she propped herself up on her elbow and looked at me, her
hair more wild than usual from last night’s passion, her bedroom eyes big and
dark.

“Morning, Angel,”
she said, her mouth curling up into that sexy little smile I don’t even think
she knew she had.

“I’m not rich.”

She frowned,
clearly trying to work out if I was bullshitting her. “Okay,” she said.

“I mean it. The
Ritz? That’s just a place I got to sleep as a bonus for last night’s fight.
Same with the Jag. I got to use them both for a month while I trained.”

She shrugged. “I
don’t care about that,” she said. “Look around you, I’m hardly used to luxury.”

I followed her
gaze and scanned her apartment. It was small, sure, but this close to the
University the rent was probably still way more than she could afford without
the steady job and the decent tips I’d cost her.

“There’s more,” I
said. “I’m broke. That thousand dollars for the private room I sent you was
pretty much the last of what I had left.”

I knew the money
didn’t concern her, but I saw too that her eyes narrowed slightly as she tried
to grasp what I was saying. Something wasn’t adding up, and she knew it. “I’m
not interested in a sugar daddy. The web site took a twenty percent cut, but
there’s still eight hundred left from what you paid me. You can have it all
back, of course.”

I shook my head. I
didn’t want her to return the money, but I was doing a shit job of getting her
to understand where I was going with this and I knew it. “It’s not that. It’s
just…”

“But you won last
night. I mean, I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know how these things go,
but you must have won some money, right? Otherwise, what was the point?”

Good question.
“Yeah, I got a thousand for signing up for the match. The winner was supposed
to get another three grand, but… Well, the more I think about it, the more I’m
certain I was supposed to lose last night.”

“What do you
mean?” she asked. “Did they tell you to fix it?”

“No. But Nitro
should have beat me, all things being even. And when you told me about him
going down like a ton of bricks even though I missed my shot, well…
He
threw the fight, and that’s got me
worried.”

She frowned. “Let
me guess. The Carellos and Jessie were in on it, huh?”

“Looks that way.”

“Why wouldn’t your
manager tell you? Why not let you in on the secret?”

“Because he knows
I’d never in a million years go for it. I may just be a broke ass fighter, but
I’m still trying to claw my up to decent bouts. A reputation for fixing fights
would end my career before it ever had a chance to get off the ground.”

Sloane sat up all
the way, the covers sliding down her body, revealing her breasts. My gaze
couldn’t help but drink her in, and my heart soared when she made no effort to
cover herself back up. “Why would they do that?”

I shrugged, even
though I was pretty sure I knew the answer. “The only reason to bother would be
because they were setting me up for a bigger fall, which would mean a bigger
pay off for them.”

She sighed. “So?
Don’t agree to fix the next one, or the one after that? Make it clear to them
you can’t be bought, Angel.”

I held out my
hands and looked at the backs of them, scarred and bruised from last night’s
fight and a thousand training sessions and boxing matches before it. “It’s not
as easy as that. All they have to do is get someone into the ring that’s so
much better than me I either hit the mat or get killed.”