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Our union was destructive, something I’d first sought out just to taste the tang of danger and feel the thrill of rebellion.
The only thing he’d never grown bored with was me.
I was a storm of calamity, cast adrift on a sea of black doings and loosely drawn rebel rules. He was an old growth oak with roots sunk deep into rich earth, limbs stretching wide across the sky, standing sentry across centuries as the world toiled away beneath its leaves.
“Lion,” I gasped through the wreckage of my throat. “I did something bad.”
“You think I don’t know that under all that thorny sass you got a heart as tender as a budded rose, you can think again,” he said in that flat, sure tone.
My heart was imprisoned by his, regardless of his
“No one ever taught you a woman doesn’t have to act like a man to be powerful, did they? Us women, we got more power in our pinky finger than most men hope to wield in their entire lives. And a part of that power is supporting your sisters, believing them when they confess and supporting them when they fall. Shame,” I clucked again.
“I want to apologize, but how can I when there are no words to erase what was done to you? You know, I’m a man of action, not words, Rosie, and fuck me, if I could, I would bring that bastard back to life and write a poem for you on his body with my fists and his blood. And you know, I’m not religious, because fuck that, but for you, I’d pay penance every day with a flogging, write lines until my fingers were numb and broken, self-flagellate until I was mutilated, if it meant taking this pain, this memory and especially, my part in it, away from you.”
spent my entire life watching women drawn into the biker gang fold, entranced by the thrill of rebellion, of taming a bad boy, of reveling in sin.
He kissed like a man with all the time in the world to worship a woman and make her body sing.
“Looks like her name, beautiful as a rose. Mind those thorns though, yeah? I have a feelin’ they might getcha in the end.”
you think I don’t got a line in the sand between good and evil just because I was born with a different code of honor?
We exchanged barbs and coded taunts that seemed cruel but were really pieces of our heart offered up on a bloody platter, an offering of vulnerability that no one else would understand the significance of.
“Tell me, rebel, how I should react when my beautiful, dilapidated rose wants to put herself in another dangerous situation when she stills wears the mark on her skin of the last one?”
“Not in charge of you,” he repeated slowly, his mouth moving around the words in a way that made them cursive, smooth and rounded and emphasized. “Never have been, though can’t say, Rosie, that the idea of it hasn’t crossed my mind. Takin’ all that wild and leashing it, breaking it under a firm, calm hand… yeah,” he drawled. “Thought about it.”
I’d been his since the day he bought me my first rose.
He didn’t take no pills or shots to dull the pain and he chose a huge chest piece with this lion roaring over his heart caged by a thicket of these roses and thorns,”
“You could tempt a saint into sinning.”
“You need me to do something stupid like kiss your sweet mouth in the back of this shit bar while men who’d be happy to kill us are steps away just to prove to you I’d do anything to be near you, on you, fucking in you?”
“You always throw up thorns the second I get close to the heart of you.”
I requested the number 69, but cops never had a sense of humor.
“Another girlfriend, Danner?” He looked over his shoulder at me, his glare smoldering. “I’ll break up with her tonight if you promise to be in my bed, ready to be punished by ten.”
I was strong. I was thorn-studded roses, smoking gunmetal and the cool heat of weed being sucked down your throat.
He’d been going bad for me for a very long time. It shouldn’t have been romantic, his corruption and my culpability, but it was.
“No excuses,” he muttered in my sex. “Come for me again, Rosie. Be a good girl.”
I felt utterly used, completely broken apart and strangely clean, as if he had deconstructed me only to reassemble me properly again later.
if anyone could love the wild, broken spirit that was me, it was Lionel Danner.
“feel safe at night, sleep with a cop.”
“Got you tattooed over my heart, rebel girl. Don’t know if it gets more possessive than that.”
“I’d break my own heart a million times over if it meant keeping you alive.”
“You obey me, Rosie,” he repeated, this time in the dark tone that sent shivers down my spine. “You obey me in the field, and we do this, you obey me in bed, on the couch, in the back of my ‘Stang, where I decide to fuck you. You want this, those are my rules.”
“This is the game we’re gonna play, rebel. You can sass me, fight me and disagree with me all day long. It’s you, and fuck knows, I like that. But now, when I’ve got my hands on your body, I’m your Dominant, and if you want my cock, you’ll fucking well have to earn it by being my good girl instead of my rebel one.”
“But we’ll both know the truth. It may be your body, Harleigh Rose, but I own it.”
“Gonna take you, Rosie,” he told me against the skin of my neck, his tongue licking over my throbbing pulse. “Gonna tame you, leave you just wild enough to fight back against every touch, buck back against every thrust of my big cock in your tight, wet cunt.”
could keep you here like this all day. My good little whore presenting herself. I’d eat you for breakfast, torture you for lunch and then, when you were starved for it, I’d fuck you all through dinner and gift you my cum for dessert,”
“How was that, Rosie? You were such a gorgeous good girl for me.”
It was only Harleigh Rose I wanted with every multifaceted part of me. As a man elementally, powerfully could want a woman, to cherish her, guard her and plant his babies in her.
“I think you’re the best man I’ll ever know.” It was my turn to blink. “What?” She shrugged, suddenly embarrassed by her confession. “It’s true. It’s not like a compliment or anything. It just is.”
“You bought my displeasure today, Rosie. You ready to pay the consequences for it?”
I’d never known stillness to be sexy but fuck me, Lion Danner half naked and posed like a predator about to take me down was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen.
My eyes watered, tears dripping down my cheeks and I loved that too because he’d see me struggle and know I was being a good girl.
Now, he was made of iniquity and built for temptation, a sinner ready to debauch his ultimate craving. Me.
“Good fucking girl,” he groaned, his thrust erratic, his breath fast through his chest. “Now hold still and take my cum.”
need you to recognize that every time you put yourself in danger is a time that I’m either going to join you there or be unable to get to you despite my best efforts.
if you die, I’ll go on breathing, but I won’t go on livin’ ’cause the most beautiful part of my life would have ceased to exist.”
under all that thorny sassy and steely confidence, I sheltered the tender, greedy heart of a romantic.
“Yeah, rebel. My good girl in bed, and my bad girl outside, can’t say I don’t love it.”
I just knew I wanted to please him. I knew that I wore his displeasure like a hair shirt beneath my clothes, itching and scratching until I was slowly driven insane enough to beg him for forgiveness however he saw fit to grant it.
“Oh, I think you’re plenty flowery. When I get you rooted to the bed with cuffs, you bloom for me, wet and open, so pink it’s plush, and I’ve never seen a flower so pretty.”
“It isn’t God who owns this body,” Danner ground out, his face a gorgeous mask of stark almost painful desire. “Say my name while I fuck your ass.”
