Honey, Honey by Rebel Carter
Chapter Seventeen
LAW
She was fierce even when she was tired. Even when she was embarrassed and hurt, or confused. Honey was fierce in a way that I had seldom seen in people with far more power than she had. Not that it mattered. She took what she had and she wore with the grace of a Queen in command of herself. I could see the unbreakable parts of her, the parts made of steel that had her holding her head high and which let her walk through her every day as if she were untouchable.
She was plenty touchable, breakable, and every other-able there was that meant fragile. It didn’t stop her her one fucking bit. I watched her where she sat sipping her mug of tea, eyes back on that fucking painting. I wanted to throw it out into the hallway so that she would be forced to look at me. I wanted her attention. All of it. I was hungry for it, and I knew that was bad.
Bad for me. Bad for her. Bad for the fucking both of us.
I was jealous of a goddam painting. What the hell did that say about us going forward? Probably nothing good.
“We have to negotiate, Honey.”
Her eyes were on me then. “Negotiate what?”
“Us,” I said, and watched her eyes go round as saucers.
“Us?” She whispered, the confusion in her voice ringing clear as a bell through the room. “What do we have to talk about? There is no us.”
“You just said you wanted to stick with me until we figured out why Zeus and Connie are trying to shove us together,” I reminded her. I looked down at my hand, my beaten to hell hand that had done more violence than anything else. Softness and beauty were things I didn’t touch. But when Honey had put her hand in mine?
God. That had been all beauty.
And when I’d had my hands on Honey in her apartment the night before? Fucking bliss. I’d left because I wanted to keep her safe from me, because I knew that if I kept on touching her, let her put her hands on me, that we would have a big fucking problem. Because the second Honey touched me is the second she was mine.
When she had put her hand in mine she’d sealed her fate without even knowing it. I wasn’t going to let her go after tonight. Sure, she was mine by order of Connie, but this was going to go beyond that. I was done keeping myself from what I wanted, and what I wanted as her.
“I remember,” she said, eyes dropping back to her mug of tea. “I just don’t get why you want there to be an ‘Us’. You said it yourself–it doesn't make sense why Zeus would want us together. Why would you be saddled with a ‘traveling barista’.”
I grimaced at the way she said the last two words. It sounded dirty, like something you didn’t mention and not a job to be proud of. “I didn’t mean it like that. I was just naming your job because I don’t know anything else about you.”
Her dark brows drew together and she looked up at me. “I guess that’s true…” She said, voice uncertain and I knew I had an in there. I wasn’t lying to her. I’d just told her there would be no more lying and that rule applied to us both.
“You do honest work. More honest than anything I do, or have ever done, to get paid. Why would you think I would give a shit about your job?”
She shrugged. “Because everyone in this town cares about that stuff. You know that. It’s always who you know and what you do, not who you are or what you feel.”
I smiled at her. “True, but fuck those people.”
She laughed, the sound of it small, but it was a laugh all the same. “You should laugh more. It’s...nice,” I said, because I didn’t say what I really wanted to say, which was that it was beautiful. That it sounded better than anything I could remember hearing or would ever want to hear. Words like that made me sound like a kid that didn’t have his shit together when it came to women and love.
I almost made a face. Love. What the hell was I doing that ‘love’ was a word that managed to make it across my brain? Outside of the context of I loved her tits, or I loved the way her mouth felt on my dick, or I loved eating her pussy? What did I know of love?
No, this had fuck all to do with sex and her body, or how she made my dick feel. This went to what Honey was making me feel inside. The emotions she was waking up in me were big, too big for me to make sense of this early, but I was going to have to try if I wanted to keep my head in the game.
“Thanks,” Honey said, smiling at me. It was small, thin, but like her laugh, it was there. “You have a good laugh too.”
“When did you hear me laugh?” I asked, because I couldn't think of doing it around her.
“You did it twice,” she told me without hesitation. “Well, twice but... the same time, you know?”
I shook my head because I didn’t know. “No.”
She sighed at me as if it was my fault I wasn’t keeping up with her half formed thoughts. “In the rain, you laughed twice then.”
“I don’t remember doing it.”
She shrugged as if that didn’t matter. “I still heard it. I liked it. You sound different when you laugh. A whole different man.”
“That’s good, I guess,” I ventured when she didn’t explain.
“It is. You sound like a man you can make–” she stopped and then shook her head, cutting herself off.
“Like a man you can make what with?” I asked, interested now that she was looking like she wanted to be anywhere but here. “What were you going to say, Honey?”
“Nothing.”
“What did we say about lying?”
She grimaced and then said, “What I was going to say was that you sound like a man you can make a life with when you laugh.
We both froze. Honey because I knew she was nervous at the honesty she’d given me, and me because I’d never been told I was the kind of man that could make anything. I was a man that broke things, people, and lives. I took. I had always taken, right from the beginning it was how I earned my place on the streets and at the table beside mafiosos. I broke people and names with my hands. Even my corporation was focused on taking companies apart bit by bit until there was nothing left. My hands did not create. Not ever.
But now this woman...Honey, thought I was a man she could make a life with and all from the way I sounded when I laughed. I wished I could remember laughing around her because I wanted to know what she looked like when she thought that about me.
It had to be beautiful. I bet it was. Would bet half my damn fortune on it. I grunted when she gave me a curious look.
Honey rolled her eyes at me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I’ve never heard that before.”
“Maybe you should laugh more.”
“Could be.”
We stared at each other and then she was grinning, a giggle coming from her lips. “I like that you don’t really. Laugh, I mean. And...and I like that I got to hear it.”
“What else do you like?” I asked, switching the topic to something that mattered a whole lot more to me than my laugh. Though I could see from the pinched look on Honey’s face that she thought my laugh was plenty important.
“Nice conversation switch,” she sighed, setting her mug down on the cart beside the bed and stretching out like a cat in the sun. Arms over her head and leaning back on the down pillows the bed was piled with. I swear I’d never seen a more overstuffed bed than this one. I was surprised she wasn’t swallowed by the blankets and sheets when she climbed in, but I did like seeing her surrounded by soft things. Things I knew were comfortable and delicate, just like her. I wanted to keep her like this where nothing and no one could hurt her.
But in order to do that, I needed to know exactly what I was working with when it came to Honey.
“We were going to get here anyway. Might as well do it now.”
“I guess,” she sighed heavily from where she was laying on the pillows and then shifted onto her side, a move that caused her robe to gap, revealing her soft flesh to me. I could see the top curve of her breast right down to the swell of it, her nipple frustratingly hidden from me. She shifted, her arm moving beneath her breasts, pushing them up, and I forced myself to look away. I was supposed to be negotiating, or at least starting the conversation we needed to have, not trying to catch an eyeful of her tits.
“What do you like?” I asked again, giving her an expectant look. Honey licked her bottom lip and then bit the inside of her cheek, the gesture making her look young. It had me imagining what she must have looked like when she first moved to the city a decade ago. What would have happened if I’d met her then? Would I have been able to keep her like this? Happy, safe and surrounded by fine things where she didn’t worry or work herself to death?
Would I have even had that in me then? No, I probably hadn’t. I’d just gone clean and was focused on work. My drive and energy bent on rising to the top in the corporate world. If I’d met her then I would have been just as careless with her as any other man. I didn’t want to be just any other man to Honey.
I wanted to be her Dom.
