CHAPTER TWO

SPARROW

I SHOULD HAVe known he was a man of his word.

But he should have known that on top of hating his guts, I was also a virgin.

A virgin, despite my best efforts.

Contrary to what anyone might think, I wasn’t especially keen on saving my virginity for that special someone. I’d grown up in a rough neighborhood, among people who didn’t buy into fairytales. Prince Charming was about as feasible as Santa Claus to me, if not less. There was not one romantic bone in my scrawny body.

No, my cliché virginity was due to the fact that I just hadn’t met anyone who wanted to share more than a few kisses and the occasional grope with me. I was notorious for my bad luck with the opposite sex. True, I wasn’t particularly striking or sexy, but I wasn’t a hag either. Yet somehow, guys always kept their distance from me.

At school.

At work.

And especially in and around South Boston.

So I’d quietly carried the burden of my virginity, hoping I’d find a man who’d be sweet enough to guide me through the dos and don’ts of lovemaking.

I had a feeling Troy Brennan, with his physical size, strength and brutal way of living, was not the best tour guide for a beginner like me. If there was one ray of light in my grim situation, it would have been my hope that Troy was too busy messing around with half of Boston to notice I had a pair of boobs and an ass, too.

But he did. He noticed.

Right after we got back from our wedding celebration, to be exact.

We arrived back at his glitzy penthouse in Back Bay, thoroughly drunk and understandably flushed.

Brennan walked into his lavish bedroom and started taking off his clothes silently, folding them in a neat pile on a sleek black bureau near the huge king-size bed. He stripped down to his briefs, giving me a full view of his muscled body. All male, not an Abercrombie & Fitch-ad type of guy, but a real, hairy, big, demanding one.

Furious and frightened, I walked swiftly into the master bathroom, shutting the door behind me with a loud bang and locking it for good measure.

“Don’t be long,” he instructed from the bedroom.

I ignored him, took a seat on the edge of his giant Jacuzzi and, regulating my breathing, plucked out the hairpins that dug into my skull one by one. I threw them into the sink with a blissful plink. Then I tackled the impossible dress, struggling to reach the laces in the back and shimmying until I finally managed to crawl out of the corset more fitting for a Barbie doll.

I opened drawers and cabinets. Stalling, stalling, stalling. After all, he was drunk. Maybe he’d fall asleep, pass out…or throw up and choke on his puke. Maybe I had nothing to worry about.

After forty minutes, I tiptoed back to the bedroom wearing a pair of socks and my old PJ’s—gray sleep shorts and a white cotton tee—and crawled onto the far edge of the immense bed. I wanted to curl into myself and disappear between his sheets as far away from Brennan as I could manage.

Not breathing, barely moving, I peeked sideways to check to see if he was safely asleep.

His eyelashes fluttered up and down against the red and blue city lights spilling into the darkness. He was staring at the ceiling, lost in thought, the covers thrown back on his side.

“Scared of sex, huh?” His menacing voice cut through blackness with an amused bite. “Well, no surprises there.”

I didn’t fail to notice that he was shirtless, wearing nothing but a pair of Calvin Kleins. They were white, tight and emphasized his erection.

His body was muscled steel. Tantalizing and smooth, with the exception of three, old scars running from his stomach to his chest, his shoulder to his bicep, and a smaller one near his throat. A shamrock was tattooed on his chest across his heart, timeworn and faded.

A flashback of my friend Daisy and I eavesdropping on the teenage girls whispering in our apartment building’s stairwell made my heart stutter. I was just a kid, six years younger than the high school girls, when one of them excitedly told her friends that she’d finally managed to bed Troy Brennan. That he was a certain kind of guy: his body was built for fighting and fucking, and he did both with a passion, rage and brutality most girls wouldn’t forget.

But even if I wanted to get nasty with my husband, I couldn’t forget who he was—the guy who murdered Billy “Baby Face” Crupti, a murder so brutal the media reported that Crupti’s body had been chewed on by animals prior to being dumped in the water. And there was a priest who’d been found dead in our parish church, his tongue cut out.

Everyone in South Boston knew that Troy had killed them both.

No one said a word.

That should have told me a thing or a dozen about my husband.

His cruelty was infinite. His hands had touched blood, weapons, knives, dead bodies. Thinking about him caressing my body with those hands should’ve made me nauseous. Yet somehow, it didn’t…

“Not scared at all. You don’t know anything about me.” I turned in bed, offering him my back and hugging my knees to my chest. I buried my face in the soft pillow.

His side of the mattress lifted unexpectedly. I heard him pad across the floor to the bathroom, but he didn’t bother to close the door. I listened closely. He took a leak and washed his hands, whistling. When he returned, he stood there at the end of the bed in his underwear, his cock saluting in my direction.

“First time you’ve seen a boner?” he mocked.

I didn’t want to tell him the truth. Yes. So I gulped and looked up, concentrating on a piece of modern art, a painting of a naked woman behind him. I shrugged. “Yours is nothing special.”

“That’s where I can prove you wrong.” His smile almost passed for human.

“Thanks for the offer, but beside the fact I’d rather chew on used needles, I just got my period.” I pulled the duvet all the way up to my nose.

“Bull-fucking-shit.” His mouth twisted into a vicious smirk. “Let’s see it.”

“What?”

“Let’s. See. Your period,” he said slowly. “Take off your briefs.”

I scooted away from him, looking around me, trying to marshal my thoughts. “You’re not serious?”

“I don’t do humor, Sparrow. Besides, you’ve shown some spine so far, don’t wanna ruin it by chickening out on me, do you…wifey?”

“But…”

“The butt is a good option,” he said evenly, not a trace of amusement in his voice, “but I’m more interested in seeing your blood right now.”

I glanced around me, looking for...what? Sharp objects to throw at him as I ran? He could probably kill me just by breathing in my direction. Instead of taunting him like a three-year-old, I should’ve told him the truth.

“I’m not chickening out.”

He moved closer toward me. “Actions speak louder than words.”

Screw it. He wanted to play, and I was starting to understand his twisted game.

I stood up in front of him and peeled my PJ shorts down an inch at a time. My fingers scraped my pubic bones and despite my hatred of him, I found myself self-conscious about my scrawniness. I bet he was used to sleeping with women who were all curves. And I looked like a boy, with my pale skin, fragile frame and bonfire hair.

But he’d challenged me, and I had my stupid pride to keep intact.

“Underwear, too.” Brennan sat, falling onto my side of the bed with a soft thud as I stood in front of him, removing my clothing inch by inch.

My body vibrated as I held back my hatred. His gaze zeroed on my pelvic area, tucking one hand into his underwear and stroking himself leisurely. I took off my underwear, feeling a mixture of disgust and thrill with the situation. What the hell is wrong with you, Sparrow? Appalled, I wet my lips, watching him. Are you freaking high?

“Show me your blood,” he rasped.

I winced again, sucking my lower lip and releasing it slowly. My body hummed with embarrassment as I slid one of my index fingers between my folds, scraped the surface of my inside shallowly, and displayed my finger, showing him a scarlet smear of fresh blood.

I’d put the blood there while I was in the bathroom, purposely cutting my foot open with his razor and letting myself bleed so I could insert it between my legs. I’d closed the cut with the styptic pencil I’d found next to his razor and then rolled on a pair of socks to hide what I’d done, just to be safe. I knew it was sick, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

And I was desperate not to give Brennan what was mine, in case he decided to have me on our wedding night.

Troy inspected the blood on my finger, raised his eyes to meet mine and licked his lips, top to bottom. He looked like he was going to pounce and rip me open at any moment. Whether it was with lust or hate, I wasn’t completely sure. Either way, he was raw, untamed. Trouble.

“Do you really think a man like me will be put off by blood, Red?” he asked.

“Quite the opposite,” I said, using every ounce of confidence I still had in me. “But rape is beneath you. I know that.”

I hoped that.

Troy stopped stroking himself and leaned forward. I barely managed to control my quavering thighs when he parted his lips and took my bloody finger in his mouth while his eyes zeroed in on mine. He sucked my finger clean for a whole minute before releasing it with a pop and snaking his hands behind me, cupping my ass cheeks and jerking me toward him. I collapsed on the bed, straddling him. He smiled that mischievous smirk that seemed to highlight his startlingly handsome features, his eyes wild with abandon. My thighs clenched on either side of his waist.

Damn thighs.

Hell, this was bad. I needed to stop, this much I knew. My body, however, had very different plans.

“I won’t do anything that you don’t want me to do,” Brennan said finally. “But so far you haven’t stopped me. Now why is that?”

I shut my eyes, taking a deep breath.

“I haven’t stopped you because I don’t want you to hurt me.” I put my hands on his bare chest to balance myself. His muscles were flexed, hard. Something about what he said annoyed me. He made it sound like I enjoyed his attention, the way he sucked on my blood. I didn’t. True, I didn’t feel violated—for some screwed up reason I wasn’t eager to explore—but I certainly didn’t ask for it.

A moment of silence passed between us as we looked at each other, my eyes imploring and his, contemplating. The only noise was the sound of faraway cars honking in the downtown Boston night and the lash of rain washing against his floor-to-ceiling windows.

“I don’t find you attractive.” My voice was hoarse.

A lie.

“Say that to your pussy.” He wasn’t offended one bit. “My briefs are soaked, Mrs. Brennan.”

A truth.

I blushed furiously, scrambling off his lap and almost kneeing his junk in the process. I darted to the end of the bed, desperate to avoid him. Resting on his elbows, he turned his head, his eyes narrowed on mine, challenging again.

“You’re wasting your time.” I covered my lower body with my hands, feeling my ears pinking before I even whispered the words. “I’m a virgin.”

“I had a feeling you would be.” Amusement danced in his eyes as he rolled closer and reached out to draw circles on my pubic bone. “That can be rectified.”

“I don’t want it to be,” I fired back, feeling all kinds of ashamed, annoyed and…Hell, who was I kidding? Troy Brennan really wasn’t that bad to look at. If you were willing to ignore the monstrousness lurking behind those ice-blue eyes, he might not be the worst candidate as a lover.

Of course, that was the last thing I was going to admit to him or anyone else in this lifetime.

“This period of yours…” He licked his lips, keeping his voice businesslike and ignoring my last comment altogether. “When is it going to end?”

“Four, five…years,” I answered, my lips twitching, but I thought about how it’d feel to have him, even five years from now. “What can I say, Mother Nature can be a bitch.”

“And she’s not the only one.” He flattened his hand on my stomach, and I let his heat seep through the fabric of my cotton shirt.

His master bedroom was magnificent, with marble flooring, a huge black-leather headboard, gray and white satin throws, rich beige rugs and custom lighting. It looked like something out of a catalogue. Breathtakingly impersonal and too sterile to feel at home in.

Just like its owner. But just like its owner, it was unbelievably striking.

It was different.

It was insane.

It was…something I didn’t hate, even though I desperately wanted to.

“Something tells me that if Mother Nature was in charge right now, you’d be riding me like a jockey.” He sat up and hauled me back toward his body, his breath caressing my skin.

I let out a soft moan and fought the urge to lean into him.

His lips traveled oh-so-briefly over my wrist, his words sharp as a razor but his voice surprisingly sweet. “Why don’t you show me this spine of yours, Sparrow? Why don’t you take a look at what you did?” he urged, looking down at his underwear.

My pulse hitched, my eyes slowly traveling down to his groin. A faint trail of pink blood stained his white boxers, watered down by my wetness against his bulge.

I hated him for showing this to me. I hated myself for doing this to him.

“I’m nowhere near ready to have sex with you, Brennan. Not now. Probably not ever.” But even as I said the words, I knew they were a lie. Hell, he probably knew that, too.

At the same time, I hated him so much it burned through my skin, made my bones ache with rage.

“Sparrow Brennan…” He tasted the name on his tongue, clucking it in approval. “One day I’m going to fuck your brains out, until you won’t be able to walk the next day.”

One day, my brain processed. But not tonight, asshole.

“You know that. And I know that,” he continued, “so if you want to lie to yourself, by all means, be my fucking guest. But we both know you’re already mine. Mind…” He reached up and stroked my temple softly.

A shiver ran down my spine.

“Body...” His hand traveled down to my chest, groping my right breast suddenly and circling my erect nipple with his thumb.

I dropped my head back, letting him touch me.

“Soul…” He continued down to my stomach, underneath my shirt, his fingers brushing every inch of my flesh.

Oh, hell.

“Heart…” His hand glided back up to my left breast where he paused for a second, snorting a sarcastic laugh. “Well, the heart you can keep yourself.”

Then, without a warning, he flipped us both in one fast movement. He was now on top, with me writhing underneath him, stomach to stomach. His weight pressed on my pelvis, and before I could muster the courage and brain cells to give him another mouthful, he ground his bulge against me, nothing separating us other than the stupid fabric of his underwear.

Heat swelled inside me. I sucked in a breath, biting my lip furiously to suppress a moan.

“Should I stop?” he asked, his arms boxing me in as he continued grinding.

“Y-yes,” my weak voice stuttered. I did want him to stop…didn’t I?

He paused, but his smile grew bigger and more shark-like. He dipped his head, his mouth finding mine as he rolled off of me. He spoke into my mouth, his lips hovering over mine, but not kissing me. “Someday, I’m going to get us kicked out of this place, when you scream my name so loud in this bedroom that everyone can hear.”

I frowned at him. “I doubt anyone would kick you out of the building, considering your reputation.”

Troy threw his head back and laughed a wholehearted, joyful laugh. He loved my last statement. Loved being feared.

“That much is true.” His hand moved to my throat, his finger tracing an invisible line. “You know, Sparrow? Maybe we could play together after all. There’s some fun hiding underneath your layers of goodness.”

I had a feeling there was nothing fun hiding underneath his layers of darkness, but I didn’t say a thing.