Chapter Twelve

CHAPTER TWELVE

Bianca

It got dark quickly.

It was early November in New York now, the nights getting long, blackness falling like a shroud by five-thirty in the evening. There were old-fashioned iron lampposts dotting the streets of Bishop’s Landing, but they did little to orient me. Every block looked the same, big houses tucked behind great big fences like the rich were worried the outside world would contaminate their charmed lives.

I got lost.

Horribly so.

My phone had lost battery just after the crash at the Constantine Compound, so I couldn’t call Lion Court or look up directions. Instead, I wandered, hoping to bump into someone who could give me directions, but it seemed the entire town was locked up tight after dark. A cold wind blew off the ocean, briny and dense. I shivered in my skimpy workout clothes, unable to run to keep warm because I was too sore.

I was about to give up and buzz at one of the gates along the street to beg for directions or the use of a phone when the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. Awareness prickled down my spine like needles through the flesh, digging straight to the bone.

Slowly, I turned my head to look over my shoulder and spotted a dark smudge moving down the street toward me from the other side of the road.

I picked up my pace, ducking around a corner.

Minutes later, thinking I’d lost whoever it was or that I was just being a silly paranoid girl, I considered an intercom at the end of the street. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something dark split off from the shadows and come toward me.

I hesitated, trying to decide if running was better than asking for help. Finally, I decided to do both. The intercom buzzed under my finger as I took out an earbud to hear the response.

The dark figure drew closer, only a block and a half away now.

“Good evening,” someone finally answered. “We aren’t expecting a delivery at this time.”

“Please, my name is Bianca Belcante and I just moved to the area. I’m lost and I think someone may be following me.”

A pause. “We don’t want any trouble here. Please move along.”

I gaped, heart racing as the figure started to move quicker, cutting down the distance to one block. “I’m seventeen. I go to Sacred Heart Academy and live here in Bishop’s Landing. Please let me in, even just beyond the gates so I can get away from the person following me.”

“You should call the police.”

“I don’t have a phone!” I cried in frustration.

The line went dead.

“Fuck!” I hit the wall beside the intercom, then sucked in a deep breath and forced my aching body to run.

I darted down the street toward the ocean because I knew at some point along the peninsula, Lion Court roosted at the top of the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic.

Acid filled my chest as I ran hard, legs and arms pumping, torso angled to cut through the wind. My entire right side blazed with pain, but panic muted the sensation.

It was the fight-or-flight response.

Behind me, ears straining, I could hear the telltale thump of feet against asphalt.

Someone was chasing me.

The cold ocean air cut through my lungs, piercing my throat as I gulped it down. My feet hit sand along the public access beach, slowing me for one unsteady moment.

I could hear the whistle of wind over another body behind me. The harsh spit of air through a working chest.

I pushed harder, but there was a sinking in my belly, a heavy foreboding that told me I wouldn’t be able to outrun this predator.

Ezra and Henrik had been teaching me to fight though. I knew the dynamics of a punch, the basic mechanics of defending myself if I was caught from behind or approached straight on. Too bad they hadn’t taught me how to evade a pursuer on foot.

For a moment, I thought about taking cover, hiding so that they passed me by, but I didn’t want to be cornered.

I shouldn’t have worried.

Seconds later, I could hear them just behind me, breath churning, air displaced at my back by their impressive speed. My blood rushed through my ears, so loud I thought I might drown in it. Music pounded through the earbud still lodged in my left ear, taunting me appropriately to run.

Before they could reach for me, I stopped abruptly. In the lapse it took for them to stop, I swung up and around, using all my weight to throw a punch where I imagined their stomach might be.

A large, calloused hand caught my swinging fist by my wrist and wrenched me forward, off-balance. I crushed into a hard chest, but I was already fighting, stomping my heel down on their foot, crashing my head into their chin.

I could tell by the size and heft of the body that it was a man, but it was too dark, even the moon obscured, to see his face. I didn’t even think to look. Sheer panic held me by the throat. I was thrown back to being a girl again, cornered by one of the Morelli thugs in the parking lot of my elementary school, his dark eyes wicked as he dragged me into the car.

A wail left my lips, something like a battle cry and I threw my weight into the heavy torso hard enough to rock him off-balance. There was a muffled curse as he fell, taking me with him. I landed on his chest, the air expelling from his chest in a hot plume over my right ear. Before I could scramble away, he was rolling us, pinning me beneath his considerable bulk.

Fear clawed at my insides, tearing me up.

I struggled so hard, I thought my heart might burst.

In the squirmish, the earbud fell from my left ear and a familiar voice cut through the dense night like a blade. “Bianca, enough!”

My body understood before my mind could compute it, freezing immediately. A second later, realization broke through the haze in my skull.

Tiernan.

I opened my mouth to yell at him, to demand to know why he was chasing me, why he’d scared me like that, but the only thing that came out was a long, low whimper.

“Bianca,” he said again, this time almost gentle, the tone rusty with disuse.

His hands softened around my wrists as he pinned them over my head.

“W-why?” I whispered as tears pushed to the front of my eyes. “You scared me.”

He made a noise in the back of his throat, part frustration, part sympathy. “I’ve been saying your name for the last five minutes. You were obviously too panicked to hear me.”

That was possible, maybe, but it didn’t explain why he’d chased me at all.

“I was out looking for your idiot self,” he growled, fingers tightening around my wrists again, his narrow hips and wide chest pinning me to the cold, damp sand. “Then you started running and I didn’t want to fucking lose you again. Ezra, Walcott, and Henrik are all out looking for you too.”

“But Brando?” I protested automatically.

“Chef Patsy stayed late to watch over him.”

A long sigh unspooled from my lips, faintly white in the cold air, fanning across Tiernan’s looming face. “You scared me,” I repeated softly.

“Good,” he grunted, not moving off me, instead, crushing his hips even tighter to my groin. “You need a good scare.”

“I can run by myself without needing your permission,” I countered, even though there was enough evidence to support the contrary.

“You are a stubborn, silly little girl. You don’t know a thing about Bishop’s Landing or the monsters that live in these streets. You want a run-in with Bryant fucking Morelli? You want to run into a man like me who’d see a pretty little thing like you lost and alone, and think he’d take his chances on hunting you down for himself?”

I noticed suddenly the thick, obvious length of Tiernan’s erection grinding into my core. Chasing me had aroused the predator in him. I could tell by the tension in his body that he was barely hanging on to his control. He wanted to rut into me on the public beach like an animal claiming his mate.

Despite the cold, my bones began to melt, my body growing pliant against his tautness, eager for the contrast. Eager for him.

He read the change in my posture correctly and a low growl rumbled through his chest straight into mine. “You like being hunted, little thing?” he hummed. “You like knowing you bring out the animal in me? That I get hard as steel imagining ripping a hole in these tight little shorts big enough for my cock to slot through straight into your wet cunt? I wouldn’t even have to prep you. You’re probably soaking wet for me already.”

God, he was right.

It should have been embarrassing, but I was beyond that. Maybe I couldn’t own my feelings for Tiernan, but I could own my body’s response to him. To his cruelty. It yearned for it.

I arched unconsciously, drawing a wicked chuckle from him. He collected both wrists in one of his expansive hands, the other trailing down my body, stopping to tweak a hard nipple before descending to my core which he cupped possessively.

“You want me to break through this virgin pussy?” he asked coldly, the heel of his hand digging into my clit deliciously. “You want me to take the last part of you I don’t already own?”

My body and free will were the only things I had left to call my own. So why was I so eager for him to possess them?

I didn’t have an answer.

All I had was a second heartbeat in my sex, throbbing for him. My pussy clenched desperately around nothing, already eager to be filled, already swollen. I wanted him to set his teeth to my skin, his cock to my folds, his hands on my limbs and rip me apart with pleasure.

“Fuck me,” I told him before I lost my nerve. “Fuck me, you monster.”

A shaft of moonlight pierced through the night like a blade and stabbed Tiernan in the eyes, making them glow unnaturally green. A second later, we were submerged in darkness again and Tiernan was moving, dipping down to whisper against my ear.

“Remember, little thing, you asked for this,” he warned.

And then his lips were catching mine, locking them in place and sweeping inside with a hot stroke of his silken tongue. I groaned and surrendered myself to the storm of longing he raged inside of my skin.

He kissed me like he wanted to kill me. Like he owned my very breath and demanded its return. There was no romance in the way he stole my air and claimed my body like it was his right. No love or sweetness. Only animal need and driving force, a desire to conquer me that lit us both on fire.

I writhed beneath him, not because I wanted him to let me go but because I loved the hard cage his body made around mine. He kept my wrists pinned, his other hand disappearing into his pocket. A moment later there was a soft snick and a knife appeared above my heaving belly. I trembled like a pinned butterfly but didn’t protest as he drew the tip of the knife down my exposed belly from the underside of my covered breasts to the band of my shorts. The scrape of metal made me shiver. He pressed the blade harder when it traced over the placket of my shorts, already wet between my thighs. I held my breath, the tiny pop, pop, pop of stitches coming undone under the knife the only sound other than the distant crash of waves and the harsh rasp of our breath.

When my shorts were sliced open from stem to stern, he folded the knife in one hand, replaced it in his pocket, and used his fingers to rip the only barricade between my pussy and the night away from me. My underwear cut into my hips and broke away in his hand, a scrap of blue lace he tossed away. It caught on the air and sailed down the beach.

He hadn’t even touched me, not really, and I was all overheated skin pulled taut over tense muscles. I needed him to unlock me, send the arousal crowding my insides spilling out into the night.

I didn’t have to beg.

His hand was there suddenly, two fingers diving straight into my virgin sex, his thumb at my clit to rub away the sting of the stretch. He didn’t kiss me as he fucked his fingers into me, scissoring them to stretch me for his much thicker cock. Instead, he crowded me, an inch between our mouths, breathing the same breath, his eyes pinned on me even in the dark.

I ached to kiss him, to wrap my legs around him, to give myself to him but he wouldn’t let me.

He wanted to take, not receive.

And I was eager to let him.

“So fucking snug,” he muttered as he played in my sticky wet sex, adding a third finger even though I whimpered at the sting. “Hush, little thing, I know you like the burn.”

Fuck, I did. I loved the ache of being filled up. It built like blocks into something high enough to scare me. Looking off the precipice of desire at the fall I’d inevitably take when he made me come around his dick.

“Fuck me,” I demanded, canting my hips up, fucking myself against his fingers harder. “I don’t need gentle.”

“Don’t tempt me,” he growled, finally ducking down to kiss me, a savage, punishing kiss that I knew would bruise my mouth. “I’ll own this pussy so hard you can’t walk straight for a week. Is that what you want?”

Yes!

I didn’t say a word.

He ground his hand harder into my pussy until I threw my head back and keened with the painful pleasure.

“You want me to fuck you into the sand? Use your tight, wet hole to get myself off?” I was listening for it, so I heard the break in his voice as his own suggestions ramped him higher. He was practically vibrating against me as he pulled his fingers out of me and smeared my wetness against my thigh. “You want to know what it’s like to drip, overfull with my cum?”

The “yes” hissed out between my clenched teeth.

Then the searing hot head of his cock was there between my thighs. He beat his hard shaft against my swollen folds a few times just to hear the wet smack before he notched himself at my greedy entrance.

“After this,” he growled in a ravaged voice I hardly recognized. “You’re mine. When you turn eighteen, when you go off to college, when you think you’ll be rid of me, you won’t. I’ll always own this pretty little cunt and the tears I’ve made you cry. There’s no going back from this, little thing.”

A shudder rattled through me that had nothing to do with the cold wind. His possessiveness ate at me, chewing off pieces of my resolve.

A tiny, dark part of me, abandoned by my father and mother to death and neglect, surged at his possessiveness, craving it almost as much as I craved love.

I knew I would never get the latter and, in that moment, I didn’t care.

I lunged up to grab Tiernan’s lower lip in my teeth, biting hard enough to rend the skin, his blood beading on my tongue. He groaned, the last of his civilized veneer crumbling to ash as he savagely thrust his hips, impaling me in one brutal thrust. I threw my head back into the sand as I cried out to the clouded sky. He grunted as he worked himself deeper, angling his hips, using one of his hands to cant me up toward him so he could delve deeper.

“So big,” I panted, tears in my eyes and thick in my voice. “Jesus.”

“Lord,” he corrected, rocking hard, finally seated at the very end of me, kissing the entrance of my womb in a way that shot sparks through my pelvis. I loved it. “Your lord.”

I answered him by biting the stubbled edge of his jaw, nibbling along the square length until I reached the frayed end of his scar. He continued to pump into me, dragging his entire length in and out of my sensitive pussy, firing every nerve ending I never knew I had. After a brief hesitation, I smoothed my tongue over the line of his scar, from mouth to ear. He didn’t freeze. Didn’t reprimand me. Instead, he cursed wickedly, hunched over me and sunk his teeth into the junction of my neck and shoulder, pinning me in place as he used me.

Tears spilled from my eyes into the sand. Tears of pain and pleasure, but also of acceptance.

This.

This was what I wanted.

Rough-edged, teeth-bitten love.

A body against mine like a weapon, inside me like an invasion. I wanted to be filled up and used because he couldn’t get enough. Couldn’t help himself. Couldn’t be a gentleman.

Now, I understood that love wasn’t soft and warm. It was fire and brimstone and if I wasn’t careful, it would burn me alive.

But on that cold beach under a moonless sky, I wanted to be consumed.

“I need it,” I told him brokenly as pleasure gathered like a supernova at the core of me. “Please, Tiernan, I need you.”

His hips stuttered: his movements inelegant for the first time.

“I’m here, little thing,” he grunted against my pulse, flicking it with his tongue, then scraping it with his teeth. “Come all over my dick and show me how pretty you are when you break apart for me.”

His words set off the final spark.

White blasted behind my eyes as I squeezed them closed against the ravage of pleasure that exploded through me, starting at the meeting of his cock and my cunt, nuclear wave after nuclear wave battering through me from head to toe.

He held me as I convulsed, pinning me to the sand with his cock and hands, beating into me senselessly, like an animal chasing completion. It only drove me higher, my climax stealing my breath, my thoughts, my very soul. Until I felt like I was just a vessel, a sacred place for Tiernan to come.

When he roared like a lion above me, I cried out at the heat of his release spurting inside me, his cock kicking against the confines of my swollen, raw pussy. He pumped me so full, I could feel his seed leaking out of me, dripping down my ass into the sand. Something in me loved the thought of my tears and our cum staining the sand, sinking into the beach so that this memory would be a living thing in Bishop’s Landing long after I left it.

Long after whatever fucked-up game we were playing ended and one of us emerged the victor.

Tiernan didn’t move for a long time, bracing himself on an elbow above me, his head ducked into the crease of my shoulder and neck, breathing across the hickey I knew he’d tattooed on my throat. I liked him there. The weight, the stability. It was a comfort even though he wasn’t a man to offer that.

Eventually, the cold and the doubt crept into my bones. I shivered, wondering what my mother would think about me sleeping with her boyfriend, what my father might think of me fucking a man almost double my age.

“This is so wrong,” I murmured before I could censor myself.

Still, I didn’t move him off me.

His hand convulsed around my wrists, then gently let them go so he could brush my hair back from my forehead in a gesture so unexpectedly tender, it shot my heart into my throat.

“Most good things are,” he murmured, and if I didn’t know better, I would have thought he sounded sad. “Don’t worry, they don’t last. Good things never do.”