Chapter Nine

CHAPTER NINE

Tiernan

The house was dark and quiet when I returned later that night after a full evening at Inequity, handling business. Silence echoed through the cavernous room, moonlight my only guide as I moved through the cluttered house to my office. I hesitated at the door, noticing the sliver of light spilling beneath it into the hall. My heart pulsed hard, then slowed to a steady beat as I reached into my back waistband for the gun I’d tucked there earlier that afternoon.

I doubted an intruder could successfully breach my security, but it paid to be careful in my line of work.

The old door creaked as I pushed it open, gun raised in the other hand.

Bianca blinked at me, a spoonful of Lucky Charms raised halfway to her mouth.

For one interminable moment, we remained locked in place, a poorly constructed tableau in some amateur theatre production. Only a colorful marshmallow falling from her spoon to plop into the bowl in her lap killed the paralysis.

I dropped the gun as she dropped her spoon.

“Do you usually carry a gun?” she asked, more curiosity than fear when I felt certain it was the first time in her life she’d seen a weapon in person.

With the ease of a lifetime of use, I discarded the magazine and emptied the chamber, a bullet falling into my palm as I stalked across my office to my desk. I crouched in front of the gun safe beneath it, typing in the code and placing the disassembled weapon within.

Only when I righted myself and took a seat across from her in my high-backed leather chair, did I address the teenager squatting in my office.

“Do you usually break into people’s offices and eat offensive cereal at their desk?”

Despite herself, amusement warred with irritation at the corners of her full mouth. I noticed, not for the first time, that her upper lip was slightly fuller than the bottom, a lush, arching curve I wanted to test between my teeth.

“It’s the only room that doesn’t give me the creeps,” she admitted, almost shyly. “Seriously, it’s like a gothic mausoleum out there. I think there are bats roosting in the attic, and when I went exploring with Brando the other day, we found a literal coffin in a guest bedroom.” She eyed me skeptically. “Brando’s still pretty convinced you’re a vampire.”

I scoffed lightly, but there was something warm in my chest, something like tenderness.

“Don’t worry,” she amended, as if I would. “He thinks you’re the nicest vampire he’s ever met.”

A startled chuckle escaped that felt wrong in my throat. “Has he met many vampires?”

She shrugged, taking another bite of that disgusting cereal before she answered. “Knowing Brando, maybe. The kid makes friends with everyone. The odder the better, I think. Have you seen how tight he and Ezra are?”

My amusement faded. Ezra liked kids, he always had. When he’d found out about Grace, he was the first one to buy her tiny little shoes. I still had them, locked in a chest in my room I hadn’t opened in years.

“So, do you?” she repeated. “Carry a gun around all the time?”

I crossed my arms and leaned back in my seat, studying her innocent face, the wide, beguiling blue of her eyes. She was a serious kid, always watchful, always questioning. It didn’t surprise me she would be interested in what I did, but it did surprise me that I wanted to tell her. Most people were afraid of me on sight, and then if they ever found what I did for the family, they could barely speak without stuttering in my presence.

I was curious to see what reaction this slip of a thing would have if I told her.

“I own a casino,” I started. “A place for the very wealthy to put all their cash in my coffers. I own a construction company, one of the biggest in the state. An import/export business that does a brisk business and some…security on the side.”

She blinked, eyelashes casting absurdly long shadows in the dim light from the lit lamps staggered throughout the room.

“That sounds criminal to me.”

“Oh?” I arched a brow. “And what would a little Texan girl like you know about that?”

Something ghosted across her face before she could control her expression, but her eyes remained haunted. “Enough.”

“Movies and books.”

“My mom dated a lot of men,” she said opaquely, swirling the Lucky Charms around in her bowl, the milk gone pink with dye. “I know more than you might think. Besides, you came into the room with a gun cocked and a nasty cut on your hand.”

I looked down in surprise at the wound Bryant had given me earlier that day. It hadn’t closed, deeper than I’d originally thought, flaying open the skin so it curved back like snarling lips.

“Do you have a first aid kit?” she asked, already unfolding her legs and standing up.

I hesitated, but I wanted to see what she intended to do, so I nodded, then jerked my chin at the corner of the room where an antique bureau stood stuffed with everything from a rudimentary kit to emergency surgical tools. You never knew what could happen in my line of business.

She got up to investigate and I had the perverted pleasure of watching her walk away in one of her old ratty, oversized tees, the hem barely covering her ass. Despite her short stature, she had long, shapely legs that glowed golden in the lamplight. When she bent to open a drawer, I caught a glimpse of the sweet curve of ass over slim thighs.

I adjusted my cock in the tight confines of my suit pants, but I didn’t berate myself for my escalating attraction to Bianca. She was beautiful the way her mother had been, almost arresting, but unlike Aida, there was a warmth to her, an inherent sensuality that was impossible to miss. The pope would have sprung an erection watching her walk around in that Greenpeace tee with her hair all long, bouncy curls gently tangled at the ends. I wanted to catch my fingers in those tangles and use them to pin her still when I fucked her mouth.

She claimed the first aid kit with a little cry of “huzzah,” and moved around the desk to my side.

I watched her mutely, too intently as she hesitated, then sat on the desk in front of me, wedging herself between it and me, our legs pressed together. When she took my hand, I was struck by the contrast between the two of us. She was paler, skin silky under downy white-blonde hairs, her fingers long and thin capped with her perpetually chipped nail polish. Against my dark skin, the bold stamp of my cherub tattoo slashed open by a knife wound, I looked heathen, uncivilized.

I felt it too.

The scent of her was in my nose, doing things to my insides. I wanted to press her back with a strong hand in her sternum, pin her there while I kicked her legs wide and buried my mouth at the source of her sweet scent, in that young pussy already inches from my face.

Fuck me.

I’d never been a man driven by sex because I wasn’t a man driven by pleasure.

I’d only known pain and solitude. Jerking off dry to feel the harsh friction of my own hand was enough to satiate me most days, and when it wasn’t, I fucked one of the endless women who threw themselves at me at Inequity because I was wealthy and dangerous.

Never anything like this, just a woman’s scent enough to get me hard as fucking nails.

I wondered if her ass was red and welted from the bamboo cane and felt my dick weep against the fabric of my suit pants.

Bianca hissed softly as she studied my hand under the light of the Tiffany lamp on my desk, my skin cut up by cubes of colored light. “This looks bad, Tiernan.”

Tiernan, said casually. It was rare to hear it like that, like she was a friend or family, unafraid and unintimidated.

I wanted to give her reason to fear me, see her eyes fill with tears as I taught her how to take my pain, how to give me pleasure.

I spoke through gritted teeth. “It’s nothing.”

It was less than nothing, I’d been torn open by Bryant so many times in so many spectacular fashions that it was quite literally nothing to me.

“Who did this to you?” she demanded, as if she wanted to scold a child for getting into a tussle on the playground.

I wasn’t sure what made me be honest. Maybe I wanted to shock her. Maybe I wanted to admit to someone who didn’t know him that Bryant was and had always been the monster Bianca probably thought I was too.

“My father.”

She blinked at me in that way she had that was somehow endearing. “You’re serious?”

I shrugged one shoulder and repeated, “It’s nothing.”

Solemn blue eyes studied me for a long moment, but she didn’t press. Instead, she just clucked her tongue. I watched as she opened the metal box and pulled out materials to stitch the skin together. She was the most maternal seventeen-year-old on the planet.

“You’re dreaming if you think I’d let you anywhere near me with that,” I drawled, tugging my hand away.

“You’re not the first person I’ve stitched up,” she said blandly, wedging my hand between her thighs so I wouldn’t move, her lower lip tucked between her teeth as she prepared the needle and surgical thread.

My fingers twitched to travel up the crease to the warmth of her pussy just inches from my reach.

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Like I said, Aida dated a lot of men. We didn’t have the money to go to the hospital every time one of them beat her.”

Anger flared through me so quickly, I couldn’t breathe for a moment. “Did any of them fuck with you and Brando?”

If they had, I’d hunt them down and kill them myself. It had been too long since I took a life and those fuckers deserved it.

“Mmm,” she said, refusing to look at me as she bent to take my hand. The needle pierced my flesh, but I didn’t flinch. I was used to it and she had a surprisingly steady hand. “None of them cared for Brando. A few of them made passes at me. One of them backhanded me.” She shrugged carefully so she didn’t hurt my hand. “He was super rich, so Aida didn’t like it, but she broke up with him the next day. I had a black eye for two weeks.”

After a pause, she said softly, “Stop moving.”

I hadn’t realized I was shaking. Her words had struck at my chest like a hammer to a gong, fury vibrating through me so hard my teeth ached.

I wasn’t a good man…fuck. But beating a kid?

Only the worst kind of monsters hurt children.

I knew because my father was one of them.

I knew, because once, he’d tried to make me one too.

“His name,” I demanded.

Bianca looked up at me then, her heart-shaped face shadowed against her halo of blonde hair. She seemed shocked by my response, mouth open and lax, hands limp holding my own.

“You spanked me the other day, is that so different?”

“Entirely,” I barked. “You knew the rules, you broke them. I gave you a punishment and you didn’t even fight me on it. That is not the same as being hit senselessly by a brute just because he’s a miserable fuck and you remind him of what he will never have.”

“Why do you care?”

“His. Name. Bianca,” I growled.

“What’re you going to do?” she asked, head cocked, a dark thread of curiosity in her tone.

I didn’t answer.

“Hurt him?” she asked, eyes narrowing, cheeks flushing a pink the same shade as her lips. “Hurt him for hurting me? An eye for an eye?”

“No one hurts what’s mine,” I ground out, even though I could barely hear the words through the roar of blood in my ears.

I was already calculating how long it would take to get to Bumfuck, Texas, again. If I could get out tonight and be back for the meeting with Faire Developments at three the next afternoon.

“I wasn’t yours then,” she countered mulishly. “I’m not yours now.”

She gasped when I turned my hand over in her hold, the skin stitched back together and stinging, to grip her wrist tightly.

“You live under my roof, you sleep in one of my beds, I pay for your very existence. You are mine, Bianca, and the only man with the right to hurt you is me.”

I watched, fascinated, as her eyes flared blue, then black with obvious arousal. So, the pretty little thing liked my aggression, my possession.

A growl worked through my chest, but I didn’t let it loose.

The air in the office felt suddenly too close.

“Do you want to hurt me?” she whispered, the pulse in her wrist fluttering like hummingbird wings under my thumb.

I stood up slowly, looming over her, casting her all in shadow.

“Yes,” I hissed softly, dipping my head so my breath fanned over her face. “I’m the kind of man that finds pleasure in pain. I’m the kind of man who makes a woman scream and cry because she doesn’t know how to take the intensity of the things I do to her body. I’m the kind of man that would make a woman crawl and beg for me before I deigned to put her out of her misery by setting her on my dick.”

“Oh,” she said, almost inaudibly, more a breath than sound. “That’s, ah…oh.”

With my free hand, I found that tangled length of hair and wound it around my fist, tugging her head back so harshly, she gasped and her mouth bloomed open like a perfect pink rose. Her innocence contrasted to that dark, yearning curiosity was an intoxicating combination that made me feel as though I was about to lose my mind.

“You wouldn’t know how to handle me, little girl,” I taunted her.

Fire flashed in those sapphire eyes, tightened that full mouth.

It only made me harder to see that sass and spark. Made me wonder if she’d fight harder to get my cock inside her if I teased and denied her for long enough.

“I’m not into old men,” she retorted, but her breath was too quick, her cheeks stained. “I’m not into being hurt.”

“You were yesterday,” I pointed out cruelly, my grin a weapon. “You writhed and moaned from the strike of that cane on your sweet ass. I thought you might even come for me, untouched.”

“Not likely,” she snapped, breathless.

“That sounds dangerously close to a challenge,” I noted darkly, tugging her hair a little harder just to hear her hiss, just to have her back arch high enough to brush her breasts against my chest.

Their rigid peaks pressed into my pecs.

“You wouldn’t,” she said, but she didn’t sound convinced because even a skilled liar couldn’t have made that true. “You dated my mother. That’s disgusting.”

The grin that claimed my mouth was wolfish, full-on hunger and greed. I used my hand on her wrist to raise her right hand and brush her own fingers over the nipples beaded behind the thin fabric of her shirt. “You don’t seem disgusted to me.”

“I hate you,” she spat, and maybe she did.

I’d ripped her away from everything she’d ever known in Asshole, Texas, to bring her into the big, bad world of Morellis versus Constantines, to use her as a means to an end. I’d treated her poorly because, at first, she was just a tool, a vaguely annoying one. Then, she irritated me for different reasons. No one had sassed me, talked back to me ever. It was surprisingly refreshing and shockingly arousing. I wanted to shut up that smart mouth with my tongue, my fingers, and my cock.

“Your hatred feels an awful lot like desire,” I noted, dipping to drag my teeth over her fluttering pulse point, my free hand palming her chest beneath her neck where the skin was warm and flushed and her chest heaved with ragged breaths. “Have you ever fucked someone you hated? Have you known what it’s like to bring an enemy to their knees with pleasure? The sense of power, Bianca,” I sighed, my breath feathering over her open, pliant mouth. “It’s heady.”

“You could never bring me pleasure.” Oh, but the words were as flimsy as a house of cards just waiting for me to blow them over.

I pressed closer, notching my hips between her thighs so they were forced to splay open to accommodate my bulk, my cock up against the heat of her panty-covered cunt. She shivered so violently she broke open her bottom lip on the hook of her teeth.

I watched the blood bead, knowing I had to taste it on my tongue. “Are you trying to tempt me, little thing? I’ll only warn you once. My iron control exists for the safety of others, of you. Once I snap, there is no coming back until I have exactly what I desire, and my desires are entirely black.”

“Fuck you,” she snarled.

And it was a red flag before a bull.

I had no choice, no other instinct, but to answer.

Violence, like she’d once said, as a response.

My mouth was on hers before she could blink, my tongue sweeping across her lower lip to collect that bright copper tang of blood. A moan, hers or mine, reverberated through me like a struck tuning fork.

Like a melody following the same ardent tune, I hauled Bianca up from the table by one arm around her hips and kissed her until she couldn’t breathe.

Because I didn’t want her to protest.

Couldn’t stand the thought of leaving the warm, silken sanctuary of her mouth flavored as it was like milk and sweet candies.

I plundered her mouth again and again, fucking it the way I wanted to fuck her, until she was a boneless mess of wet flesh and tousled blonde hair.

She didn’t just take it, she begged for it with every line of her arching, vibrating body; tits stamped to my chest, hands suddenly twisting in the short strands at the back of my head, clawing at my neck to bring me closer so she could suck on my tongue the way I wanted her to suck on my cock.

A small nagging voice that sounded unsurprisingly like my father’s, but also like my mother’s, sang at the back of my mind, reminding me that I was kissing the enemy.

Reminding me that I was about to fuck up everything by fucking her.

I wrenched away with the last, tattered remnants of my control, intending to end the chaos. But Bianca stared up at me with those velvet blue eyes ringed in long, frilly lashes, her gaze entirely dark with longing, her mouth a wet, red-bitten mess from my hard-edged kisses.

And I thought, so this is what it’s like to lose control.

This is what those poets and artists paint with words and oils.

Madness brought on by the acute ache of longing.

I could feel her invading me, filling the hollow cavities of my insides with blue the same color as those pretty eyes, with light cast out like a beam from her smile.

Anger chased on its heels, impotency and rage that she would so easily derail everything I was working for. I gritted my teeth, hand tightening in her hair until she winced and gasped but didn’t protest. I could take her, let myself have this, and still do what I needed to do.

I was Tiernan Morelli, lord of sin and shadow.

Some sweet little thing with a halo for hair and a soul like an old, complex storybook wasn’t going to bring that man to his knees.

No one could.

But I could bring Bianca to hers…

“On your knees,” I demanded.