Strangers of the Night Read online

  She tossed it in the trash.

  She went to her bed and slipped beneath the sheets naked, knowing already that no matter how much she tried, she was not going to be able to get enough rest. For that she needed to be worn out from fucking, orgasm after orgasm, and that would require leaving her apartment and trying to find a pickup, and while it wasn’t impossible, it didn’t seem likely to be easy at nine in the morning.

  Persephone closed her eyes. Her hands moved over her body, finding all the secret places that brought her pleasure. It wasn’t working, not easily. Not the way another person’s touch would have worked.

  Not the way Kane touched her.

  * * *

  His hands move over her hips, fingers digging a little into the flesh as he pulls her a little closer to the edge of the bed. Her knees skid on the soft hotel sheets. Her fingers, too. She is facedown, ass up, as the saying goes, and her breath comes swift and rasping in her throat as she opens herself to him.

  He’s a bit too tall to enter her from behind, but when his thick cock slides inside her, it hits at the perfect angle to make her cry out. Her cheek presses the mattress. Her mouth open, lips wet from the tip of her tongue.

  Earlier he kissed her hard enough to bring the taste of blood, and it was this roughness that she thinks of now as he fucks into her. His fingers squeeze her harder. One of his hands slips around to stroke her clit in time with every thrust. It’s exactly what she needs, exactly where she needs it.

  It’s even better when he starts to talk. Urging her in that low, growling voice to let him make her feel good. To give her body to him. He demands her pleasure, and this urges her body to respond exactly in the way he’s asking her for.

  Muscles tense, tight, her thighs shake as her hips buck. He fucks deeper into her, but not faster. Each stroke of his cock inside her heat is echoed by the circling of his fingers on her clit. Ecstasy builds inside her. Higher and higher, until, finally, she explodes.

  * * *

  Quivering in the aftermath of her orgasm, Persephone let out a small moan and buried her face in her pillow. She’d been thinking of the last time she’d seduced Kane. Of all the men she’d slept with in her life, why was it this man was the one her mind turned to when she needed sexual release?

  It was dangerous, she thought as her eyes drifted closed. And she was drawn toward danger, always. She strained toward sleep. Kane was dangerous to her, because she liked him.

  Chapter 2

  Kane Dennis hadn’t fallen off the turnip truck yesterday, as the saying went. Not that Kane ever said it, not aloud. It was something his grandfather, the man who’d raised him, would’ve been likely to say, though, and in situations like these it seemed appropriate.

  Persephone from the basement apartment was hiding something. It was in the way she rarely met his gaze, even when he caught her staring. It was something in her posture, how her head went up and back so straight every time she saw him, as though he’d surprised her into a fight-or-flight reaction and she was just barely resisting the urge to either kick him in the junk or run away.

  The question was not, however, what she might be hiding, but why on earth he gave a damn. Whatever it was, it didn’t affect him in any way. In the beginning when he’d started getting that vibe from her, he’d been on the lookout for any signs of the usual—drug dealing, prostitution, fencing goods. Anything he would have found impossible to look beyond because it was going on literally right under his nose.

  There’d been none of that. Only the subtle, persistent feeling that she knew more about him than he could ever discover about her, and that was what had gotten under his skin like a sliver. That’s what he told himself, anyway. That it was curiosity. That she seemed interesting, a woman with stories to intrigue him, a woman who might not be repulsed by the ones he had to tell. It had nothing to do with her body, Kane told himself as he avoided the cranky elevator for the stairs, up a flight to his apartment directly above hers. Nothing to do with her soft strawberry blond hair, cut short to emphasize her giant dark brown eyes and the smooth expanse of her pale throat...

  Nothing to do with that at all, he told himself grimly as he went inside his own apartment and dumped his now cold coffee down the sink. How had bringing her a cup of coffee made him into an asshole? Or had it been the fact he’d had to ask her why she didn’t like him that had made the corners of her mouth turn down the way they had? Worse than that, what the fuck was wrong with him that seeing her clear discomfort and distaste only made him think about her more? We chase what runs from us, Grandpa Charles would’ve said, and Kane had to agree.

  Persephone Collins was running from him, and it drove him crazy with desire because he couldn’t figure out why.

  * * *

  “I’ll give you a hundred.” Chuck gave Persephone a glance over the rims of his reading glasses and shrugged at the sight of her disgruntled expression. “It’s the best I can do. Look, you know I can’t move this shit very fast. Bring me something I can actually sell, I’ll pay you more.”

  Persephone eyed the array of slightly less than brand-new cell phones and flash drives she’d brought him. She’d known it wasn’t likely Chuck would cross her palm with much more than a few pieces of silver, but for the past two weeks she’d kept her sticky fingers to herself—unless someone was foolish enough to walk away from their laptop or phone in a hotel lobby or a coffee shop long enough to get a refill.

  “They’re all wiped,” she pointed out. “Unlocked.”

  He shrugged again. “Yeah, yeah, but look, you can pick up a refurbed phone for pennies on the dollar anymore. In the box. With a charger.”

  Persephone frowned. “Fine, I’ll take the Benjamin.”

  It was better than nothing. She pocketed the cash and ducked out of the used electronics shop, glancing out of habit from side to side as she headed down the street. Chuck ran a mostly clean place, hadn’t been the target of any raids or anything like that, but you never knew. Maybe it was time to get out of the sticky-fingers game, she thought as she grabbed a bottle of water and a candy bar from the small newsstand on the corner—paying for it with cash from her pocket, not stealing it, although there’d been times in the past when she’d lifted food to keep from starving. She was well beyond that now.

  Her phone buzzed in her pocket as she tore the wrapper from the candy. Chewing nougat and chocolate, she answered without looking at the name or number on the screen. Only one person was allowed to get through to her directly on this line.

  “What,” Persephone said. The liquid male chuckle tickled her eardrum through the distance, and she held the phone away from her face for a second before putting it directly against her mouth to amplify the chewing noises.

  “You’re disgusting,” Phoenix said.

  Persephone swallowed the bite of candy. “What do you want? Let me guess, you’ve run out of funds and you don’t have a sugar daddy or mama waiting in the wings.”

  “Cold, sister mine. So cold.”

  She pressed her lips together to fight off a smile. He was going to try to charm her, but damn it, she was mad. Phoenix had blown through town a few months ago and emptied her bank account by simply reaching into her brain and forcing her to give him the account numbers and passwords he’d then used to legitimately transfer all her funds to him. Sure, she could’ve taken it to the authorities, but that would’ve opened up investigations on her, and he’d known that.

  “I would’ve just given you the money, you know,” she said as she hopped the four concrete steps to the front door of her apartment building. “Why do you get to wipe me out?”

  Her brother’s chuckle went a little darker, enough to raise the hairs on the back of Persephone’s neck. Like she could ever forget that behind the laughter and jokes, the put-upon front of laziness and congeniality, her twin brother was as fucked-up as she was. Perhaps more, be