Chapter Eleven

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Heart pounding, the vodka in my stomach churning, I ran.

I made it down the hallway to the top of the stairs before he grabbed my hand, yanking me to a halt so fast it wrenched my shoulder.

“What the hell are you doing in my house?” I cried, trying to get my hand free, but his grip was iron. And I knew when I couldn’t win against a man’s strength. So I stopped fighting and waited for him to relax.

“I’m here to get some questions answered,” he said, turning back to the bedroom, pulling me behind him like a fish.

Yeah, I wasn’t going back into that bedroom with him. I started fighting again. If I could get downstairs to the alarm—

“Stop it, Poppy,” he growled and grabbed me by the waist and hauled me back into the bedroom. He threw me down on the bed, and I scrambled off, standing on the other side of it. In front of me was the king-size bed, Ronan, and a dozen yards between me and the door.

Behind me were French doors and a balcony. If I was careful and did everything just right when I jumped, I would land in the pool.

“Thinking of jumping out that window?” he asked. “I wouldn’t. It would be a shame to end this night scraping your broken body off the deck.”

“What do you want?” I asked, taking a step backwards towards the door.

“To talk some sense into you.”

“In my bedroom?”

“Calm down, Poppy. I’m not going to hurt you.”

I made some kind of scoffing whimpering noise in my throat and took another tiny step back.

“You don’t believe me?” He circled the bed, and there was no place for me to go but back against the wall. “You think I already hurt you?”

He made it sound like I was a child. Like I had no idea all the ways he could give me pain.

“Stop.” I put up my hand, as if I could fend him off.

He grabbed me by the elbows, yanking me up on my toes. “How am I supposed to keep you safe when you do something as stupid as go talk to the Morellis?”

The moonlight caught him across the face, and I’d never seen him so angry.

“Keep me safe?” I laughed, which was probably risky considering his anger. But I was beyond giving a shit. Those words didn’t even make sense coming from him.

“What did you talk to Eden Morelli about?” he asked.

“How do you even know I did?”

“There are a thousand wires crisscrossing between the Morellis and the Constantines, and you tripped half of them reaching out to Eden. Who, just to be clear, is not to be taken lightly. She’s as bad as they get. Feral, like. Vicious.”

“And what are you?”

“Oh, Princess, I think I’ve been very good to you.” The low purr of his voice thrummed between us. Making the memory of his hands between my legs tangible and real.

It was time for this to be over. I pushed at his chest, but he didn’t budge. If anything, he pulled me closer. My toes barely touching the floor. But I didn’t wince. Or beg. I gave him nothing.

“Am I hurting you?” he breathed.

“You know you are.”

“This is nothing compared to what could be done to you.”

“You think I don’t know?” I spat at him. “You think there’s one inch of pain you can show me that I don’t know by heart?”

His eyes were dark in the shadows, all the color leached from his body. He was black and white and grey. But when he smiled, he gleamed.

“There you are,” he said. God, this man. He was only happy when I was spitting at him.

“What do you want?” I asked. “What do I need to do to get you out of here?”

The grandfather clock in the hallway clicked forward a minute, so loud in the quiet between us.

“What would you do?” His voice was soft.

“Not what you’re thinking.”

“You don’t have the slightest idea what I’m thinking.”

I rolled my eyes at him. Something that once got me smacked so hard I had to go to the dentist. “Trust me, Ronan. You’re not as original as you think you are.”

That made him tip back his head and howl with laughter, and then he stepped away, slowly letting go of my body which I let sag against the wall while I caught my breath. Pretending to be brave. Strong. It took a lot of effort. Far more effort than cowering and hiding. But I was done cowering and hiding.

He pulled a chair that usually sat beside the dresser forward to sit directly across from me. “What are you doing?”

“Sitting down. You’re going to answer a few questions for me.”

“I’m not going to do shit for you.”

“Swear to god, Poppy. You’re making this harder than you need to.”

“Good.”

In the shadows I watched him look up at the ceiling, a hard sigh. A throbbing heartbeat in his throat. “You called the fucking Morellis,” he said. “If you’re foolish enough to think that nothing bad was going to come of it, you’re wrong. I’m here. I’m the bad that comes of it, Poppy. You’ll be answering some questions.”

“Fine,” I said. Because he wasn’t wrong. The only place for me to sit was the bed, and that wasn’t going to happen. So, I stayed on my feet but didn’t lean against the wall. I was getting tiny little points in tiny little ways. “Ask your questions.”

“Why did you go to the Morellis?”

“To get information.”

“On Caroline?”

That made me blink. “No. Why would I want information on Caroline?”

“The senator?” He began tapping the arm of the chair with his middle finger. A small sign of impatience.

“No. I know everything I need to know about the senator.”

“The foundation?” The foundation? I felt a strange chill. What didn’t I know about the foundation?

“You,” I said, tired of the guessing. “I went to the Morellis to get information about you.”

His finger stopped tapping on the chair.

“What did you want to know about me?” he asked, his voice terrifyingly careful.

“Who you are? Where you came from? Why Caroline trusts you so much? So fast?”

“You didn’t need to go to a Morelli for that,” he said.

“Well, you weren’t telling me anything.”

“Because I’m no one,” he said.

“You keep saying that, but Caroline found you in Ireland and brought you back here for something.”

“I have skills—”

“Eden called you a junkyard dog.”

His head snapped back at that as if the words hit a nerve. “She would know, I guess.”

“Is that what you are?”

“No,” he said. “It’s what I was. Caroline found me and gave me a chance to be something else. I took it. That’s all, Poppy. That’s the story of me.”

“Who put you in the hospital when you were young?”

He stood up from the chair in one fluid rush. Stalked me across the room, and I scuttled like a crab along the wall heading for that French door.

My heartbeat poundedin my ears, and I was aware that this man had a line and with that question it was probably somewhere behind me.

He smacked his hand against the wall beside my head, and I flinched at the sound. Expecting it to be my face that he hit. I slowly opened my eyes to find him watching me. So unreadable. A million miles deep.

“How bad do you want to know?” he asked. He stepped up against me, the hand I’d held out was useless against him. He pushed it back against me with his chest. His skin was hot under his fine shirt.

“I . . . don’t,” I said. My bravery gone. I was a paper doll. Crumpled when pressed.

“Oh, what a liar you are.”

“Okay, you wanted to scare me? You wanted to warn me? Great. You did it. I’ll stay away from Eden Morelli.” I thought briefly of that favor I owed her, but I wasn’t going to tell him about that. Or Jacob.

I wasn’t going to tell him anything, anymore. I pushed against him, but he didn’t budge. It was just the heat of his body. Against my hand. Against me. The longer he stayed there, unmoving, his heart beating against my hand, I started to wonder if this was a different game.

I looked up at him, the memories of his body pushing mine against that door, an unwelcome heat in my brain. In my body.

The hand I had pressed against his chest, shifted. Stroked. Over the firm curve of his chest, I brushed the bead of his nipple with my pinky, and his body trembled. Trembled. I did it again. Harder. I used just a little, the edge of my nail, and he licked his lip.

Fuck. What was I doing? And now that I was doing it how was I going to stop?

“Ask me,” he said.

“Anything I want?”

He nodded. “But it will cost you.”

“I don’t have anything,” I breathed. I was pressing my sharp fingernails against his chest now. All of them, sinking deeper waiting for him to flinch or to stop me, but all he did was bite his lower lip and make dark noises in the back of his throat.

“You have more than you think,” he said, and then suddenly he stepped away, leaving cold blank space behind him. He sat in the chair, his legs spread in a beam of moonlight. The rest of his body in shadow. “Ask me.”

“Who hurt you when you were young?”

“My father,” he said. “And then the priests. Take off your clothes.”

My brain could not catch up. And I stood there, shaking with desire and worry. “Take off your clothes, Poppy. And I’ll let you ask me another question.”

“And if I don’t?”

“I’ll take them off for you.”

I pulled the sweatshirt over my head. Unbuttoned my jeans and pushed them down. I stepped out of them, wearing a thin cotton camisole and a pair of high-cut panties. Hardly seductive.

You’re not much to look at, are you?

But Ronan seemed to like to look.

His hands ran down his powerful thighs to his knees and then back up. Again, and then again. And I realized what he wanted was to touch his cock and he was stopping himself. Well, I thought. That was interesting. It was too bad I didn’t know what to do with the information. I was no Eden Morelli. I was just me.

“Ask,” he said.

“Why are you doing this? With me?”

“Because you make it so easy.”

He was hurting me, because I allowed him to. Because I wanted it.

Oh, I thought, suddenly cold in front of him. Embarrassed. Right.

I crossed my arms over my chest and crouched, reaching for my clothes. I knew better than to want what I could not have.

“And because the night we met I’d never seen anyone so beautiful,” he said. In the stillness that followed his words, I wavered. I wavered because I wanted so badly to believe him. Despite all the proof.

“Don’t lie.” My voice cracked.

“Ask me.”

“Are you lying?”

“I’m not. Now stand up straight.” I didn’t, still crouched. Still hiding. I wasn’t this brave. “You made a deal with me. You could ask questions, but they would cost you.”

“It costs too much,” I said. “You . . . cost too much.”

“Stand up, Princess. You have more questions. You risked your life going to Eden Morelli to find answers.”

“She wouldn’t hurt me.”

“Don’t be a fool, Poppy. She would snap your neck if it served her. Now ask me what you want to know.”

I closed my eyes and found through some kind of magic, my back bone. Rising from the floor, I stood up straight again.

“What do you do for Caroline?”

“I fix problems,” he said.

“What kinds of problems?”

“The kinds lawyers and accountants can’t fix. That’s two questions.”

“What do you want?”

“Oh, Princess,” he groaned, the tone of his voice changed, revealing in the low gravel, what this game cost him. “What don’t I want from you?”

The force holding me to the wall was suddenly gone, and I stepped forward, desperate to touch him. Desperate to have him touch me.

“No,” he said, and I froze. “Back against the wall.”

“Don’t you want me to . . . touch you?”

“No, Princess, I don’t want you to touch me.”

“Ron—”

“I want you to touch yourself.”

I thought what? But the words didn’t get past my lips.

“Princess,” he said softly, like I was something sweet to him, and it pushed me into action. Back against the wall where he wanted me. I feared, no, total honesty—I knew. I knew that if he talked to me with that sweet voice, I’d do whatever he wanted. “Spread your legs.”

I did, shy and spellbound.

He leaned forward into the moonlight. “Wider.”

I stepped out wider. My underwear pulling to the side. “Do what you do when you’re alone,” he said.

“I don’t.” I licked my dry lips with a dryer tongue. Every bit of moisture in my body was between my legs. “I don’t do anything when I’m alone. Not for a very long time.”

His eyebrow lifted. “Why?”

“Because that part of me was beaten into submission,” I told him starkly.

“Well, let’s bring it back.” He sat back into the shadows, and a cloud travelled over the moon outside the window and the room was suddenly dark. “You have beautiful breasts,” he said. “Touch them for me.”

The compliment and the darkness worked in his favor, and my hands came up to cup my breasts. My fingers finding my nipples hard beneath the thin camisole. My breasts ached to be touched.

With his voice telling me what to do, the electrical currents beneath my warm and soft skin hummed to life, and I sucked in a breath.

“You liked when I pulled your nipples. When I made them sting and burn.”

I did. Yes. I remembered that. And I did it to myself. Between my legs I was hot. And suddenly achingly empty.

“Ronan,” I whispered.

“Put a hand between your legs, Poppy.”

I gasped when I did it. My own fingers felt so good.

“Are you wet?”

“Yes.”

“How wet?”

“Very . . . wet.”

I should be embarrassed. How was I not embarrassed?

The cloud slipped past the moon and the room was suddenly illuminated. Brighter for those few moments of darkness.

“Show me,” he said. I slipped my fingers out to show him. No idea if he could see it or not, but it hardly seemed to matter. Nothing really seemed to matter except his voice and the ache in my body. I closed my eyes and put my fingers back between my legs.

“No,” he said. “Put your fingers in your mouth.”

I blinked open my eyes, stunned at the suggestion.

“God, look at you. Still so fucking innocent after all this time. Put your fingers in your mouth. Taste yourself.”

I opened my lips, slipped my fingers inside. I was salty. Musky. Like nothing I’d ever tasted before.

“Enough,” he groaned, like he couldn’t take anymore. “Pet yourself, Poppy.”

Breathing hard, I slipped my wet fingers down my body, back between my legs.

“Remember the first time you did this?” he asked. “A girl alone in her bed?”

I nodded.

“How old were you?”

“Fifteen.”

“What turned you on so hard you had to touch yourself?”

“Zilla’s tennis coach.”

“Tell me.”

“He was nineteen. Mom hired him, probably to fuck him when Dad wasn’t looking. He . . .” I brushed my clit, and power and lust surged through my body. I went back again. Again. Using my fingers against myself. “He . . . watched me.”

“Did he touch you?”

“No. Never.”

“Did you want him to?”

I shook my head.

“Tell me.”

“No,” I answered. “But I liked that he wanted to.”

“I want to touch you,” he said. I wanted him to touch me, too. So badly. My knees buckled, and I pushed my head back against the wall. My hips bowing.

“Why don’t you?”

“Isn’t this more fun?”

“I don’t like games.”

“That’s because you’ve been playing them with the wrong person.”

Enough. I thought. Enough of him and his games. I closed my eyes, blocking him out.

“Poppy—”

“Shut up.”

His chuckle was dark. Ominous. I waited for him to punish me, to tell me to stop. To say something mean.

“Do it, Poppy. Make yourself come.”

My body was awake under my fingers. My body was my own under my fingers. And I remembered what I liked. How I liked to be touched. I remembered what I’d pushed away and forgotten about for so long. I came rushing back to myself. To my skin. My fingers. The ridge of my clit. The tender, wet opening of my body.

That summer of Zilla’s tennis coach, I’d done this relentlessly. Finding every reason to go to my room so I could touch myself. When I started dating I was sure the boys in high school would figure out how to make me feel as good when they touched me as I was able to make myself feel when I was alone, but they just didn’t have the attention span.

In college, Damon in my work/study program, he had the attention span and applied it to my clitoris in the dusty back rooms of the Linderman Library. He’d been sweet and studious and for a very nice month before my world came crashing down, I’d been infatuated with what he did to me and what he asked me to do to him.

It was a fine education in that library.

“What are you thinking of?” Ronan asked.

“The kid who used to finger-fuck me in the back room of the library.”

“What else did he do to you?”

I was distracted by the pinch of my fingers. “Poppy? Did you let him fuck you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Such a good question. “I just . . . didn’t.”

“Did you suck his dick?”

I nodded my head. Once.

“Did you like it?”

Oh god. His voice and the memory and my fingers . . . I was going to come. I bit my lower lip, my fingers working faster over my clit.

“Answer me.”

“Yes.”

“Did he put his mouth on you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t . . .”

“Poppy.”

“I didn’t want him to,” I blurted. It had seemed like a step too far for a back room at the library. I’d have to take off my pants, and what if it didn’t work? Or I didn’t like it? I liked it when he put his hands in my underwear and sucked on my neck. I didn’t need more.

“Did the senator?”

My bitter laugh caught on a gasp.

“Has anyone put their mouth on you?”

“No . . . oh god. Ronan—”

The orgasm that exploded between my legs made me cry out. Made my legs buckle. “Fuck,” I said, teasing it out for as long as it would last. The major explosion faded, and lightning trails rippled through me. I braced myself against the bedside table and opened my eyes.

Only to find him right in front of me. A breath away. His eyes glittering. I jerked back like there was any distance to find between us, but the wall was at my back.

“Can I touch you?” he asked, and there was no game in his voice. No purr. No trick. There was only need. And it was what I liked about the tennis coach. Being needed. Like this. Dripping wet and soft.

And that he asked . . . that was different. I felt flush with some new power he’d never given me before.

“Yes.”

What I expected; his fingers on my skin. His hand between my legs. My breasts grabbed in rough, desperate hands, none of it happened. This man . . . this dangerous mysterious man with all his secrets, went down on his knees in front of my body. His hands slid around my waist, pressing me against the wall. The heat of his hand, the shock of his touch made me gasp. My muscles shook.

“Spread your legs,” he said, and I did it. Knowing exactly how wide he wanted, I gave it to him. That unfettered look between my legs. My soaking-wet panties. My slick thighs. My pink skin, usually hidden, completely revealed to him like this.

“No one has kissed this beautiful spot on your body?”

Speechless, I shook my head.

Without another word, he put his open mouth to me, breathing me in through the cotton. His tongue pressed against me, and I pushed up on my tiptoes, still sensitive from my orgasm. But that was why he had his hands on my waist. To keep me where he wanted me.

“Move your panties,” he said against me.

“Ronan.” I was raw. Shaking. There would be no other orgasm.

“Move them, Poppy.”

And I did. I pushed my underwear aside, and he put his mouth back on me. Against me. He sucked me into his mouth. He tongued me and slipped his hands up to cup my breasts. What did I know about what my body could do? Nothing, apparently.

Because the next orgasm was picking me up in its fist, and I screamed, clutching his head, grinding myself against him. It was like some kind of door had been kicked open, and there was something new for me. Something I never expected.

Being touched like this was a revelation. Like suddenly being worshiped, when all my life I’d only been forsaken.

“Sorry,” I breathed and let go of his head. He chuckled against my skin, licking my slick thighs like he wanted to taste everything. He pulled my underwear back over my body, covering me like it mattered at all. He kissed my belly. And then stood up.

His cock brushed against my belly, and I arched toward him, pressing myself against him. But his hands returned to my waist and pushed me back against the wall. His bent head rested against mine.

So long he stood there. Just breathing.

I reached for his face, but at the brush of my fingers he stepped away. The moment over.

“What else did you tell Eden Morelli?”

Blinking, I only gaped at him. My pleasure-soaked brain unable to catch up to what he was saying.

“Poppy!” he snapped, the sharp disapproval in his tone went to work on my instincts, and I reached down and grabbed my sweatshirt. Putting it over my shaking and sweaty body. “What else did you tell her?”

“I didn’t . . . nothing. Nothing important.”

“You are not the judge of what’s important.”

“Ronan, can we—” I stepped off the wall, and he stepped back. A reversal of our positions just a few minutes ago. “We talked about you. I asked how Caroline would have met you.”

“And what did she say?”

“That Caroline was in the UK for oil drilling.”

He pushed his hair back on his head, and it fell forward over his eyes. “Did you tell her anything about you?”

“No.”

“Good. Keep—”

“Actually . . .”

“Fuck.”

“She said the senator always seemed like a good guy and I . . . might have implied that he wasn’t.”

He nodded, his hair brushing the side of his face. “How much did you pay her?”

I licked my lips, searching for some kind of plausible lie.

“Poppy?”

“My sister paid her,” I said. “That’s . . . how I got in touch with Eden. My sister knows her.”

I waited to see if he would buy my lie, and after a long minute he nodded. “All right. Can you promise me you won’t be seeing Eden Morelli again?”

“Are you really trying to keep me safe?” I asked.

“Well.” He was going to make a joke; I could hear it in his tone. “You don’t make it easy—”

“Ronan.”

He sighed and stepped back towards me like he was a magnet. My entire body was metal shavings I was drawn so hard to him.

“Why do you stay here?” he asked, brushing a damp hair off my forehead.

“In New York?”

“This house. Don’t you have any place else to go?”

I thought of the condo in Cabo. The house in the south of France. I’d never been to either of them, but I knew about them.

“This is my home,” I said. Like he would care that I’d done all these renovations. That I’d built a shower and helped tile the kitchen. That I’d put some blood and sweat and more tears than I’d ever thought possible into this place and didn’t that somehow make it mine?

My home had always been in Bishop’s Landing. I didn’t know a life off this hilltop.

“It’s a shit home,” he said.

“How would you know?” I asked. I didn’t know if I was brave or stupid. “Have you ever had a home?”

His eyes glittered, and his silence wasn’t an answer. This game we’d played tonight left me with a thousand more questions about him, while I kept stripping off pieces of myself to hand him.

“I just want a home,” I whispered, sounding pathetic to my own ears.

“Homes are for old women. You should go,” he said. “Take your sister and sit on a beach in Mexico or wherever girls like you sit on beaches.”

“Girls like me?”

“You should drink and fuck tennis coaches and sit around fulfilling your useless—”

“Why are you being cruel?”

“Because I am cruel,” he said, leaning forward right into my space. His lips parted revealing his teeth like he wanted to bite me, and my stupid traitor body liked the idea. “I’m cruel, and you’re a stupid spoiled princess, and you’re in so far over your head you don’t even realize you’re drowning.”

“But you’re trying to save me?”

“You get in touch with the Morellis again, and you are on your own.”

He left, and I stayed in the bedroom until I heard the beep of the alarm as he walked out one of the doors on the main floor. And then I ran down the steps and reset the alarm.

But it wasn’t until I was in bed, freshly showered, and fully dressed, that I wondered how he got in my house in the first place.