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.”
Chapter Thirteen
Tiernan
I sat in the shadows of my office, even the moonlight obliterated behind thick clouds as an autumn storm raged outside the windows of Lion Court.
I’d just taken Bianca Belcante’s virginity.
The feel of her snug walls hugging my aching cock, the scent of her sweet, young cunt and her sugary perfume in my nose, the…emotion she’d invoked inside me still lingering in my hollow chest like a single rose in a large vase.
After I gave her my hoodie to cover up the wreck I’d made of her clothes, we’d walked back to the house in silence. But our arms brushed, fingers catching on fingers as we moved too close together, drawn back to each other again and again like magnets. We parted ways in the somber, echoing chamber of the front hall, her face all cast in shadow as she stared up at me. I didn’t need to see her features to know what she was asking me with those siren’s eyes.
What does this mean?
Do we still hate each other?
Did you mean what you said? Am I really yours?
I didn’t have any answers, so I didn’t say anything. Instead, like a coward and a fool, I’d stalked off to my office and sat in the dark to brood.
She’d scared me tonight.
When Walcott said she wanted to go for a jog, I’d said no unequivocally. Of course, the little brat had taken off already. By the time I logged in to my account to track her phone, finding her on the same street as the Constantine Compound, I thought I’d have a fucking coronary. When I reached the house ten minutes later, she was gone, the grounds behind the gate empty and still.
It would be…annoying if my investment in Bianca didn’t pay off. If I couldn’t use her as a tool of destruction against my enemies.
But that wasn’t why I fucking panicked thinking about her wandering the streets of Bishop’s Landing, as beautiful as it was deadly, like a lamb in a flock of wolves.
I cared.
Some old, atrophied part of me had started to revive itself the moment I locked eyes on that velvet blue gaze, growing and stretching every time Brando laughed, each time Bianca opened her mouth to spar with me. They were…reviving me, bringing me back from the death I’d had at twelve when Bryant forced me to take his belt in my fist and bring it down on innocent flesh and again when Grace took my future with her to the grave when I was just seventeen.
I felt like Lion Court, old and empty but for relics and memories no one else gave a shit about, but suddenly filled with noise and energy, with the vibrant presence of two blond-haired Belcantes.
I scrubbed a hand over my face, my thumb catching on the puckered line of my disfiguring scar. Sarah and Bryant hired private tutors after I’d been cut open ear to mouth by the belt, too ashamed to have a son with such a deformity out for the world to see. No one knew a thing about the third Morelli brother. I wasn’t in the gossip rags or newspapers like Lucian and Leo, like Sophia and Eva.