The F King: A Bad Boy Romance (Still a Bad Boy Book 3) (9 page)

“Oh boy. OK.”

Ryan went through the Gents door and a few seconds later I heard him chuckling again. I did the same on the ladies’ side and approached the mirror tentatively.

As soon as I came into view inside the frame of the mirror, I almost doubled over with laughter. I looked like I’d been to the world’s worst face-painter, who had done the best he could with limited skills and resources.

Chocolate and cream covered the vast majority of my face, all the way to my hairline and beyond, with brushstrokes that had been applied with a tongue. Tear-streaks had cut their way through the food-coverage, and the area from my lips to my chin was also clear. Cream, chocolate and cum spattered my breasts and dress as if I’d been standing next to a food-fetish porn scene that had exploded.

I grasped the edge of the sink and bent over as I tried to get myself under control again. Every time I almost managed it, I’d peek into the mirror and I was lost again.

I’d thought I was
so
sexy in there, but I looked like a clown… and that was OK. It had been so
good
to let go. Hell, it didn’t matter what I looked like, it
was
sexy.

And it was
fun
too. I never had this much fun in my “real” life. I’d never looked worse and yet been so
adored
in all my twenty-five years. It was a seductive feeling.

Carefully avoiding eye-contact with my ridiculous doppelganger in the mirror, I scrubbed my face, and removed as much evidence as I could from my chest and dress, giggling like an idiot the whole time. Then I thought about the honey mustard war paint and lost it again.

Why did it feel like Sarina Bell had already lived more in a week than Sarina Beckett had in a quarter of a century?

S
eeing
Sarina come out of that light trap, covered in food and cum, was simultaneously one of the funniest and sexiest things I’d ever seen in my life. The way she squinted in the glare, the way her face lit up when she looked at me and laughed, was almost magic.

We looked like a couple of fucking idiots, but it was our own special moment to be lost in. To my surprise, I enjoyed laughing with her even more than I enjoyed cumming in and on her, and that was saying something.

The extra money I’d paid to have them remove the infrared cameras with which they normally monitored their guests had been well worth it. Sarina had taken a huge load, and worshipped my cock with her tongue afterwards until I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

I was
drained
, literally and figuratively. So much so that I didn’t even mind when Sarina and I parted ways at the main entrance to Cumberland, with nothing more than a kiss and a lingering clasp of our hands, then slowly walking in different directions.

For the next few weeks, every time we were together, I felt this…
excitement
that I hadn’t felt since high school, discovering girls for the first time, when every kiss and touch was monumental. Even when we were simply spooning on the couch watching a movie, and she squirmed to get more comfortable, I had to close my eyes and savor the feeling.

When I went down on her, or she went down on me, those eyes of hers were hypnotic. So intense, I thought bright blue lasers might shoot out of them at any moment and I had no plans to get out of the way.

She swallowed my cum, she stroked my cock until I shot jet after jet of creamy semen all over her body, she held me close afterwards and tasted herself on my fingers, but she never let me go all the way again. In that respect, it was like a high school relationship before your first time too, except I’d never been so completely satisfied with so little sex before.

I could feel the desire growing in me, though. I knew I’d have my cock in that fucking perfect little pussy again, and it would be that much sweeter for the waiting.

Sarina was in my head, no doubt, and that was pretty fucking unexpected. There was something else growing alongside that buildup of lust, something that made her worth more than all the other girls combined. I wasn’t going to give it the power of a name, but every moment with her was feeding it.

I should have cut it off with her as soon as I realized that, but I couldn’t do it. That unnamed thing was inside of me like a nuclear bomb attached to my heart saying, “Don’t fuck with me, cause I’ll hurt you
real
bad.”

She had no place in my life, the destiny I was working toward. Her soul was too kind to be partnered with the type of man I was going to be, but being near it made me remember beautiful things. Sometimes I would drift off, listening to the cadence of her voice even more than the words themselves.

That’s why, after only a few weeks of knowing her, I had something to ask her that I hadn’t asked anybody in over a decade, because I was never remotely sure that I could make the commitment the question required. Holy fuck, what was I thinking?

“Sarina?”

“Hmmm?”

She’d been bent over, looking at my movie collection, and as she stood up straight again, the hem of my shirt she was wearing lowered with her movement, covering her ass again. This plan was already backfiring.

“Come here, would ya?” I patted the couch next to me.

Sarina cradled her cup of coffee in her hands and came over with a quizzical look in her beautiful blue eyes. I took the cup from her hands when she sat down, and put it on the coffee table, then held her hands in mine.

I was on the verge of breaking out in a cold sweat, which was almost as unbelievable as what I was about to say. The Acardis’ lives were cheap to me, but they were still lives, and yet it seemed like taking them was going to be a lot easier than asking this one simple question.

“So, I’m not sure if you noticed, but I haven’t been seeing anybody else since I met you. The thing is… I don’t really
want
to either… uh… so I was thinking, maybe, it might be an idea, you know to make it… official?”

Sarina’s eyes went wide, showing a whole bunch of white around the blue, and her bottom lip quivered a few times as she tried to remember the English language.

“Official?” she squeaked.

“Yeah. As far as a friendship goes, the benefits in this one are pretty great… but I want more.”

“More?” she parroted.

It was pretty blatant that she was even more intimidated by this conversation than I was. Fuck she was adorable, I couldn’t help but smile, feeling a potentially misplaced sense of control flow back into me.

“How about I call you my girlfriend, and you can call me your boyfriend?” I said.

Sarina looked like she was about to cry. “I can’t.”

The smile dropped from my face as if it suddenly weighed too much to hold up. “But… why not?”

She floundered for a second. “Because… I don’t think you’re being honest with me.”

“About what?”

Sarina took a deep breath. “There’s been something bothering me… like… I don’t know how to say it.”

“Just ask, Sarina.”

“I’ve never felt like this about
anybody
, Ryan. That’s the truth.” She cast her eyes down for a moment, trying to hide what I was sure was a flash of bitterness, then looked up again. “I’ve been kind of pushing this… stuff… down while we’ve been… doing whatever it is we’ve been doing, but if you want to be with me, like
really
be with me, you need to tell me the truth.”

“About
what
?” I repeated.

“That first night in the club, I saw some… things. I noticed you come in, but it seemed like a lot of people did. There were some men that came up to you, gave you some money, and then you gave them something. They didn’t look like the kind of guys who used moisturizing cream or lipstick. Then there was the fight with the gang. They didn’t look like the kind of people concerned with the cosmetics industry either. What aren’t you telling me, Ryan?”

Oh fuck. Looked like Sarina was already crashing like a meteorite into the world I was trying to take over. Fuck.

My heart sank. If I told her the truth, it would drive her away, I’d be “with” her even
less
than now, not more. How the fuck could I explain this?

R
yan probably wouldn’t have had
any different expression on his face if he’d been tied to a post in front of a firing squad. The way that hopeful smile dropped from his face broke my heart. I felt like an ogre, taking this perfect, sweet, sincere moment and using it for my own purposes.

I had to remember I was a cop, I was working here, even though a huge part of me wanted to scream “Yes!” and dive on top of him. A boyfriend? For
me
? How fucking amazing would that be? Instead, I risked losing that beautiful thing.

Then there was the fact that I’d also just put out an ultimatum for Ryan. If he didn’t think I was worth it, then he’d just tell me to get my things and go. Then where would the investigation be?

My heart stopped what it was doing and focused on Ryan, to see if he’d been feeling these utterly forbidden things as strongly as I had. What was taking him so long? If
only
my life was as simple as his I’d have admitted everything by now.

Just
tell
me, Ryan… the things I’ve already done have probably put you out of the reach of the law anyway. You won’t get prosecuted in the end, you’ll be safe. I won’t let them get to you. Just tell me you sell F, that’s all I need for now… say it and we can be together. We can work everything else out later…

“I wasn’t lying about the cosmetics business,” said Ryan.

My heart considered not resuming its work, but then reluctantly started beating, as I dealt with a shrinking feeling that made me try to retract my hands from Ryan’s grasp. He didn’t let go.

“I
wasn’t
, the company exists and turns a good profit. But,” he took a deep breath and paused for an eternity, licking his lips and eyes looking upwards as if searching his head for the right words. “I don’t even know how to explain this.”

“Just tell me, Ryan… It’s OK…”

“I never tell
anybody
…”

I squeezed his hand.

“I’m an only child,” he began.

What that had to do with selling drugs, I had no idea, but I didn’t press him any further. I just listened carefully, hoping that was all the encouragement he needed to keep talking.

“Never knew my dad. Apparently he needed a girl who could take a beating a lot better than my mom. It took her finding out about being pregnant with me to work up the courage to get herself out of there and leave the cheating and the hitting behind.”

Ryan shut his eyes, raised his eyebrows and sighed as if he couldn’t believe these words were coming out of his mouth.

“For my whole life, it’s been just her and me. She had to work like a fucking slave to make ends meet. She had a part-time job during the day, looked after me between school and bedtime, and then a part-time job in the evenings, and odd-jobs all over the place. I can only imagine how
exhausted
she must have been.”

I gripped his hands tighter and shuffled closer so my knee touched his. Ryan had noticeably paled as he talked, and the heat seemed to have been sucked out of the room.

“I remember this one time, I must have been nine years old. I came home from school and she wasn’t there. We didn’t have a TV and there was nothing in the cupboards like the kind of packaged snacks my friends at school had. It’d been kind of a shitty day, kids being assholes like only kids can, and I was sitting there for a while feeling sorry for myself,
angry
at her for not having money like them. What a piece of shit…”

I shook my head. “You were only a-”

“Kid. Yeah. So I was sitting there on the couch and I heard her car kinda cough and splutter its way into the driveway and a minute later she came inside. She had this look on her face I was too young to understand, but I remember it and I know what it means now. She was nervous. What was she nervous about? Well, I was sitting there pouting like a spoiled brat and she knelt in front of me and she had this soccer ball in her hand. I looked at it, and then I looked at her.”

Ryan stopped for a second and then almost gave me a heart attack when he sobbed. A tear dropped from his eye, and I reached up to cradle his face and wipe it away with my thumb without thinking.

There was an impending sense of doom growing inside of me that was terrifying, as Ryan waved his hand in the general area in front of him, as if the memory of his mother was right there for us both to see.

“She had these bags under her eyes, wearing one of the two dresses I’d seen her wear in…
ever
. She had nothing for herself and she bought me a soccer ball. She must have been tired right down to her
bones
, but you know what she said?”

I shook my head, feeling cool air on tear-streaks on my own face.

“She said, “Sorry I’m late, sweetie, you wanna come play kicks with me in the park?””

Ryan didn’t talk for a while and I dropped my hand back down.

“I couldn’t have put it into words then, but that was the first time I had an inkling that she was giving me
everything
, and I promised to myself that, no matter what it took, I’d give her everything too. Only, when
I
gave it, it really would be everything. The world on a silver platter. Before I could do that, though, she got cancer.”

“Oh, Ryan…”

“Probably from one of the shitty jobs she forced herself to have so that I could have anything at all,” he muttered. “But the medical bills kept on getting bigger until I wasn’t breaking even anymore. So, I knew this guy who could get some F, and I managed to make some arrangements so that I could buy from him and sell it on. Pretty much straight away, that started making even more than the cosmetics business. It covers the medical bills and then some.”

“Is she getting… what do they call it… is she in remission?”

Ryan’s face contorted for a second before he squeezed out the answer he didn’t want to give. “No. But she will. She’s going to have it all.”

I reached out and pulled him towards me, holding his head against my chest as we fell backwards along the couch. “Shhh, it’s OK.”

Holy shit. What an emotional can of worms I’d forced him to open. This poor guy was just doing the wrong thing to try to do the right thing. He was a good man.

I
will
keep you safe. I’ll say it’s entrapment, we can still use the information to work up your supply chain… just not against you. And it could take years. That’s a long time for us. Whatever “us” is.

I stroked his hair for a while until he was breathing normally again. “Sounds like we’ve got some things in common then,” I said.

“Like what?”

“I’m an only child too, and I never knew my dad. Of course, I never knew my mom either. I was adopted, but then the adopted family were deemed unfit to parent and somehow I ended up in the foster care system. A broken system if ever there was one. I bounced around for a while, each family worse than the last until I ended up in a home with a guy that sounds a lot like
your
dad. Um… I never tell anybody
this
either.”

“Well, it seems fair…” said Ryan.

I gulped. “I guess so. This guy… one night he was so drunk… beating the shit out of his wife right in front of me. “Teaching respect” he called it. Well, something… snapped inside me, you know?”

Ryan nodded, without looking up at me.

“I was like… “You want to hurt her? You’ll have to go through me.” So I got right in there, in the middle of it, and, boy, he went straight through me. Feel this.”

I reached down and picked up Ryan’s hand, aiming the fingertips at just the right place on my scalp.

“That’s from when he gave me a black eye and I flew backwards and hit my head on the edge of the kitchen counter. I was just waking up when he was done with my foster mother and I saw him coming towards me. That’s when the cops arrived, kicked the door down and dragged his ass off to the holding cells.”

That’s when I first decided to become a cop
, I thought.

“Sounds like he needs to get in touch with his feminine side,” Ryan mused.

“Yeah. Well, instead he got in touch with a lawyer, and he was back in the house by the weekend. But no lawyer in the world could keep me there, so I bounced around a bit more until I ended up with a family that wasn’t awful for a couple years, until I turned eighteen. I don’t keep in contact with them, though. Living there was like living in a hotel, you know? Clean, reasonably safe, but impersonal. So, that’s why I took those self-defense classes, why I saw that guy in the club coming at you with a knife and I thought “You’ll have to go through me.” I’m not a fifteen-year-old girl anymore and I can fight for what I care about. For
who
I care about. For some reason, I cared about you from the moment I saw you, Ryan.”

Ryan looked up into my eyes for a while, as if he was lost and finding himself in there. “Does that mean you wanna…”

I nodded and smiled. “Ryan and Sarina. Has a nice ring to it, huh?”

Ryan turned towards me and moved between my legs before kissing me. I wrapped my arms and legs around him, holding him tight as I kissed him back.

There was no rational and objective argument for what I was doing… but I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.