The All Encompassing: Shifter MC Novel (Pureblood Predator MC Book 1) (20 page)

I stroll into the kitchen, smile, and give Connor a peck on the cheek. He wraps his arm around my waist and pulls me close, sending a shiver of warmth and anticipation through me. He’s muscled hard, blessed with the kind of build that stays trim even though he rarely works out.
 

“I missed you,” Connor says, pressing his mouth to the small of my neck. “Maybe a bit too much.”

“I…missed you too,” I say, and I guess it’s true. I
have
missed him. More than I’d like to admit.
 

He brushes back my hair, staring into my eyes in a way that makes me shiver…and damn if I don’t feel guilty. Am I using him? Maybe. Does it matter? Maybe not.
 

Connor’s eyes widen and he pushes me away so he can get a better look at my forehead.

Shit.

“Lil…what…damn! What happened?”

Questions. I shake my head. “I caught myself on a cabinet. At work.”

Connor’s eyes narrow. He knows I’m lying, but he has the sense not to press. He gestures at the stove and says, “Can I offer you breakfast?”

“Yes.”

“You want to tell me what’s going on?”

“No.”

He sighs and grabs a single plate. I take a seat at a table made of a single block of polished marble. The legs are rough-cut iron flaked in green patina. Industrial chic. I wonder how long the table’s creator spent making something new look old.

“Sorry for waking you,” I say.

Connor shrugs while he drops the bacon on the plate. “I’ve only been home for an hour or so.”

“Oh yeah? Late night?” I try and keep the snarkiness from my voice. But as usual I fail.

“Not that, Lil. Business.”

“Your father’s?”

Connor turns and leans over the plate so I can’t see his face, then says yes.

“Where?” Usually I don’t ask him about his father’s businesses. But I’m having a hard time making conversation, and I’m afraid of the silence that might settle in this giant cavern of a room.

“Mexico City,” Connor says, walking from the kitchen. “An absolute madhouse. You been?”

“No.”

A shadow flickers across Connor’s face. He knows I haven’t travelled anywhere, and now he feels like an ass for asking.

“Connor, it’s not—”

“Hostile takeover,” he says, a bit too quick.

“Oh yeah? What’s that? A suit’s version of a shootout at the OK Corral?”

Connor smiles. At least I can still make him smile.
 

“Basically,” he says, “it means someone’s getting fucked.”

“You doing the fucking?”

“Always.”

Connor brings me breakfast. I take a bite of bacon and notice he’s having something in a bowl. “Gruel?” I ask, savoring the bacon’s fattiness.

He smiles. “Porridge. I’m finished eating living things.”

“Since when?’

“Since…I dunno. Maybe three weeks ago?”

“Has it been three weeks since we…”

“Five.” Connor’s face saddens slightly.
 

“You’re such a monk,” I say, trying to change the subject, and besides I’m not far off the truth. One day I expect to show up to Connor’s place and find he’s wearing a robe, meditating and subsisting solely on energy drawn from the ether.

Connor takes a nibble of porridge. It’s funny he calls it porridge. Not oatmeal. Oatmeal is clearly too low-brow. It’s what the rest of us eat. And suddenly I’m frustrated—both at myself and at Connor. The man’s done nothing wrong, yet there’s a part of him I’ll never be close to. A big part. Connor and I are from completely different worlds, and it’s the little things—like the fact he calls oatmeal porridge—instead of the obvious ones like the glass mansion and sport car collection, that constantly serve to remind me of this fact.
 

I guess you can take the girl out of the street, but you can’t take the street out of the girl.
 

Connor is nothing if not generous and genuine and a pretty damn good person, as these things go…yet I’m always a little uncomfortable in his presence, always slightly on guard, like I’m afraid I’ll make some idiot normal-person blunder, some social gaffe that exposes I don’t truly belong with him here in this huge house, and I never will.

“I’m glad you’re here, Lil,” Connor says quietly.

“I’m glad to be here,” I lie, feeling like a sack of shit. That’s the problem with nice guys, especially rich nice guys: you can’t even be frustrated at them without feeling lousy.

The kitchen faces a living room that faces the water. The sky is lightening to pale blue-black. The constant low mass of claustrophobic grey cloud that cloaks Seattle seven months a year has broken slightly, revealing a few stars overhead.
 

It might be a fine day in the Pacific Northwest.
 

“How’s the j-o-b,” Connor says, spelling it out in a way that sounds awkward coming from him.

“Good.”

“I’m happy for you.”

I nod and finish up my breakfast. Connor’s family had a lot to do with me getting through school and becoming a cop in the first place. First the shelter helped drag me out of the shit my teenaged life had become. And then…when Connor and I were together, I discovered a motivation to actually do something with my life. Maybe.

“I’m working my first case,” I say into a heavy silence.

“Yeah?”

“Well its not
my
case. I’m tagging along with the detectives. Kind of job shadowing before the homicide exam.”

“That why you’re here?”

My jaw twitches in irritation at the implication I have a hidden motive for seeing him. Connor’s father helped Seattle’s Chief of Police overlook the fact that his newest nobody girl-cop applicant had a history of living on the street, petty theft and minor dope dealing. “No. This visit is…personal.”

“I like personal.”

“What’ve you been up to?”

“Oh, kicking it. You know. I’m really into…” He trails off and chuckles at himself.
 

“What now?”

“Well, two things. One is…awesome. I’ll show you later. And the other is…I’ve just been totally fascinated for the last few weeks with living clean. Like reducing my impact on the planet. Thinking about what I leave behind, I guess.”
 

“Your carbon footprint?” I ask, trying to keep the sneer from my voice.

“Yeah. But more than that. Like…this idea of
purity
. About living the right life. Whatever that is. You know. About being…a good person. What’s my contribution? What will people say about me?”

The man is twenty-five years old and already thinking about his legacy. His living room is large enough to contain a normal sized house, yet Connor talks about reducing his carbon footprint without a trace of irony. If he wasn’t so damned earnest I’d call him a hypocrite, but I know he means it.
 

“What about the sculpture?”

“What? Oh. Yeah.” Connor pushes a half-eaten bowl of porridge into the center of the table. “Haven’t been doing much. Kind of lost interest.”

Connor’s one of those guys who gets seized by a new idea or hobby and immediately devotes his life to it. A few years back it was learning the banjo. He was going to move to Chattanooga and play hillbilly music in dive bars. You know, be reborn as someone without money. Someone
authentic
.
 

Then he wanted to learn how to fix cars. He outfitted his garage like a professional mechanic’s shop, hired a retired mechanic to help him, and spent ten hours a day for six weeks taking apart engines. Then he got up one morning, had a shower, fired the mechanic and quit.
 

The shop’s still gathering dust.
 

Next he decided he was obsessed with bonsai trees. Built a greenhouse. Read every book. Most recently it was sculpture.
 

Connor gets a rush on the fast, easy learning curve of a new pursuit, but when things plateau and the gains don’t come quite so quick and the real work begins…he quits. And on to the next thing.
 

Like everyone else, Connor wants what he doesn’t have.
 

Connor’s rich and handsome, but he really wants to be a creative type, wants to have
talent
. He’s searching for something. There’s a lot of time between daybreak and nightfall when you don’t need to work. Connor’s stumbled into the boredom and listlessness usually reserved for the workaholic who retires, wakes up the next Monday and says, what now?

I’m one of the only constants in his life, which is sad to say, because I’m not at all constant. Poor little rich boy. I’ve been waiting for Connor to lose interest in me for years. And I think part of the reason he doesn’t is because I’ve never really let him have me.
 

Never let him in.

I get up, carry our dishes to the sink, rinse them, pour myself a cup of coffee, down it, then walk back to Connor and put my hands on his shoulders. He hasn’t moved an inch. He reaches up and puts his hands over mine. His skin is soft, smooth, and suddenly I remember the feeling of the biker Prez’s skin when he gripped me, hard and unforgiving.
 

Aaron. The biker’s name was Aaron.
 

I close my eyes, pushing the memory away. I was in that dive for less than an hour. Met a cute guy without a future and got shot at.
 

End of story. Nothing’s changed.

But as I pull Connor from his seat I know that’s not true.
 

Not true at all.

Connor’s living room has a single modern white-leather couch facing the lake, a glass coffee table, and that’s it. It looks like an art gallery in between showings. Connor stands, looking at me with a mix of uncertainty and desire. I pull him across the living room, thankful for the in-floor heating warming the soles of my feet.

We stand facing the lake for a moment. There’s some violet in the sky now, and a hint of brighter rose. A breeze is whipping the lake into a frothy white.
 

Connor turns, pulls me close. His lips graze mine, warm and inviting. I kiss him, trying to hold back, trying not to want him as much as I do, but something inside me feels raw and exposed and vulnerable, and I reach down and wrap my hands around his ass and pull him against me. His stiffening cock presses against my cunt. Connor kisses down my neck, tucks my hair behind my ear and kisses my earlobe, sending a shiver down my arms.
 

I don’t love him, but I love knowing he loves me.
 

“Lil, y’know, I just…I mean…” Connor mumbles.

I shush him with a finger to his lips. His beautiful brown eyes peer down at me. He’s framed by the breaking clouds over the lake. The look he gives me says he knows what this is.
 

He pulls my sweater over my head, then my tee. Reaches up and cups my breasts in his hands, then leans down and runs his moist lips across my stiff, sensitive nipples, making me draw a quick breath. I put a hand behind his head and pull him hard into me. He takes my right nipple in his mouth and flicks his tongue over it, then puts it between his teeth.
 

I run my fingers through his hair while he kisses across my chest and over my other nipple. My cunt is warm and moist and throbbing for him, and I reach down and undo his jeans, slip my hands inside and grip his cock.

He’s trimmed neat and already hard, and I thrill to that odd collision of sensations that is a man’s ready cock: solid and demanding, yet soft and smooth and welcoming all at once. Connor has a lovely cock, thick and slightly curved, and when I run my thumb over the slightly rough tip of him I feel a drop of slick pre-cum.
 

“I want you in my mouth,” I say.

“I’ve waited for you.”

“I know.”

I sit back onto the leather sofa while he tears off his pants. He’s still wearing his t-shirt, and when I look up at him and chuckle he asks what’s so funny and I tell him to take it off. He does, and then he’s standing naked in front of me, his hard cock poised right at my mouth, the chiseled lines of his taut abdomen and pecs lit by the soft morning light. I run my hands over his hips, across his abs to his nipples, then kiss the side of his cock once, lightly.
 

Connor moans and lifts his head to the sky, thrusts his hips forward just a little.
 

I kiss along the length of him, working slowly down to his thick root, then over his hips, then reach up and rake my fingernails across his balls, which are already pulled tight up under his cock. He lets a hand fall on my shoulder, runs his fingers through my hair and across my neck. I wrap my hand around the base of him and squeeze, pull him closer, let my breath fall hot against his waiting tip.
 

He swells in my hand, responding to my touch. Then I open my mouth and draw him in, taking him in slowly. His legs quiver as I plunge him into my mouth, deep enough he’s pressed hard against the back of my throat. His cock is hot and hard and lovely. My cunt throbs with need. I use my hand to work across the part of him I can’t fit in my mouth, then draw back, letting my lips catch against the rim of his head.
 

Connor has both hands on my neck now, holding me tight but still letting me set the tone. I suck at the tip of his cock, drawing a taste of salty-sweetness into my mouth. I twist slightly so I can look up and see him, and he’s looking down at me, watching me suck his cock, smiling.

“I fucking love my cock in your mouth,” he says. “I fucking love how you suck me.”

I take him inside until I can’t draw a breath. He pulls me down deeper, forcing my head onto his lovely cock. I let him hold me there for a moment while I tug and squeeze his balls, then I move out and begin working fast, bobbing my head forward and back while my hand grips and strokes, and I feel his cock harden still more, feel his balls draw up tighter under his cock, his pre-come mixing with my spit, coating my lips in sweet wetness and Connor throws his head back and moans, his knees shaking.

“I want to come in your mouth,” he says. “Please let me come in your mouth.”

I pull him from my lips with an audible pop and shake my head no.