“You’re upset,” Liv stated, her searching eyes not allowing me to hide anything.
“You could say that.”
“Baby, what’s the matter?” she asked quietly, sounding like the old Liv, like the Liv I used to love.
She cupped my cheek and settled the other hand on my hip to balance her bum leg. Her lately empty eyes were suddenly filled with emotion. There were these rare moments when she showed her vulnerability and her care, when she revealed that she was still human and capable of feeling, that drew me back to her.
“Isaac gave me an ultimatum.”
I didn’t need to tell her anything more. She was intimately acquainted with the tension between my father and me. She knew that I would not relent, and she also knew what would happen if I didn’t. What was sickening was the fact that she tended to agree with him.
“Good Lord, Marcus, why do you keep fighting him?” she asked, a flicker of impatience crossing her eyes. She was always impatient lately. “Wouldn’t it be better if you just pleased the man and went on with your life?”
What she couldn’t comprehend was that, if I obeyed my father, I would not go on with my life but with his. I wanted to have a say in my own life. I wanted the decisions I made to be made because that was what I wanted not because I had been forced. I wanted to have a life in which my father had no say and no right to dictate.
“I don’t want to fight with you too, Liv,” I warned her, and just like that, she softened against me, a timid reassuring smile pulling her lips upward. It looked just the tiniest bit made-up.
“I don’t want to fight either. I want to take care of you.”
Liv pushed me back until I fell like a boneless heap of muscles onto the sofa, then she cautioned me with a finger to wait for her. She limped her way to the kitchen and returned minutes later with a hot mug of cinnamon tea. She walked back to me slowly, careful not to trip and spill the drink. The thought that she was so vulnerable made me clench my jaw until it hurt.
“Cinnamon tea, to help you relax and improve your mood,” she said lightly, handing me the mug and gingerly snaking her way onto my lap.
I froze. Once, Liv used to be the sweetest and most affectionate woman I had ever known. Nowadays, she rarely displayed any form of affection and seldom allowed any sort of closeness. To have her take the first step staggered me.
“Thank you.”
I took a sniff and a careful sip of the hot liquid. It was unlikely to improve my mood although cinnamon was an aphrodisiac as potent as any other. I wondered if that had been Liv’s explicit intention or if she had made me cinnamon tea just because she preferred it. With her, I never knew.
We remained in silence. The rage within me hadn’t subsided, but having her in my lap, with her fingers playing in my hair, on my face, on my lips like she was discovering me for the first time, helped, or rather forced me to restrain whatever violent emotions I might have held on to.
She knew me well. She might have been unable to calm me completely, but she was able to distract me. Her small hands traveled to my neck where she kneaded the tight knots in my muscles. She made me feel so good that I let my head fall back against the headrest and my eyes close. When I groaned in grateful pleasure, she giggled like a high school girl. Despite my unbalanced mood, the sound made me genuinely smile. Then there was silence again, a loaded silence that foresaw the storm.
I still had my eyes shut when her mouth molded around mine and her hands firmly secured my head as if she couldn’t bear the idea of me facing away from her. It was a slow, exploratory kiss but not a shy one. With her soft lips, she was preparing me, coaxing me for the avalanche that we knew was about to come.
I felt a small hand fisting the hair at the back of my head and the other traveling from my face, down my throat, past my collarbone, and to the first button of my shirt. It fell open easily. Her tongue languidly traced the seam of my lower lip, tasting me, allowing me to sample her sweet, flowery taste.
Then all languor was over. My hands found her narrow waist, and I pulled her even closer. My head came off the headrest, and my mouth collided with hers almost harshly. My heat mingled with hers as I recognized the signs—we were going to consume each other.
“Liv—” I began, but she didn’t seem willing to talk anymore.
“Let me take care of you,” she mumbled between kisses.
An instant of tension made me remember our last amorous encounters. They had been few and far between, and as if following a pattern, they had always happened when I found myself in a disastrous mood and had always been initiated by her.
This was her way of showing me that she still cared, that she wanted to appease the demons within me, but this was also a pattern that had to be broken before it completely tore us apart.
“This has to stop, Liv,” I told her with a sternness that sounded weak even to me.
“Not tonight,” she both pleaded and commanded.
“Not tonight,” I agreed.
I stood with her in my arms. My mouth devoured hers while I decided that this was our last time together. It had to be. We had to break a circle that was leading us nowhere but to more heartache and disillusions. Tonight, though, we were going to fool ourselves that we were still whole.
I laid her on my bed carefully, knowing that any brusque movement would hurt her leg. That was the only gentleness I granted her, and she didn’t want me to coddle her either. Liv might have changed a lot over the last couple of years, but some things never truly changed. She had never been shy in bed. She had never liked slow lovemaking. And she had never tried to muffle the fire that burned between us—that burned us.
I grabbed her shirt by the collar and wrenched it open so hard that the buttons fell all around the room. Liv hadn’t put on a bra like she had known she would not need it. What invited me to go on were not her full breasts or their stiff peaks but the transfixed look in her green eyes.
I stroked her waist and found her hips to better position her underneath me, then I bent to nibble on her throat while my hands massaged her breasts just like she had rubbed my neck earlier.
She moaned, but when my fingers lingered over the scar on her left hip, she went still. The scar on her body didn’t hurt anymore, but the one in her mind and soul hadn’t even started to heal yet.
Her eyes were fixed on mine, silently telling me that she didn’t need to be romanced. She needed to be taken. But whereas she refused to feel, I was curious to find once more how it felt when pleasure and love fused together.
Chapter 7
Charlotte
I was much too upset to think straight. My hands trembled around the steering wheel, but my foot pressed firmly on the gas, and so, the black sedan I was driving became a blur in the night. I was crying, but I didn’t know exactly why. There were too many emotions overwhelming me, and the lump in my throat made it difficult to breathe.
When a Range Rover passed by my car, almost wrenching my side mirror in the process, I let out a shriek. I was not only upset but also painfully tense. I feared the slightest disturbance could make me shatter. Of course, when I had thought about disturbances, I hadn’t imagined bullets flying toward my car and almost shooting me in the head.
A thunderous noise split the night, and it took me a while to understand that it was the echo of my own scream. Driving was a challenge. Another car was following me closely with a man leaning out of the passenger’s window, holding a gun and pointing it at me. The shooting started soon after.
It was too dark for me to distinguish more than the ruffled dirty blonde hair covering the man’s head, and it would have been entirely useless even if I had been able to catch any other particulars. I had the grim feeling that I wouldn’t make it out...alive.
Although panic was slowly settling in, I swallowed past a dry throat and willed myself to stay calm. New York was famous for brutal gangster crimes, but I had never imagined I would be one of their victims. I didn’t entertain peculiar relationships, so nobody should have
had a reason to want me dead. Unless I represented a reminder of someone who had in truth wronged my attacker.
I knew I was crying because I could feel the wetness on my cheeks. My heart sped and slowed at the same time as it became terrifyingly clear that I was running out of time.
I had to leave this darkened, empty road and drive someplace where crowds still swarmed the streets even at that hour. There, somebody had to save me. But it felt like the darkness was swallowing me.
And then everything stopped. I only heard a great blast like a bomb had just exploded before the car halted. My body was violently plunged forward. The airbag opened and cushioned my torso and face. I was dazed for a long moment, then I felt a sharp pain from my hip all the way to my knee. When I looked down, I saw blood stain my pants.
My first instinct was to scream for help, but then, I saw flashlights behind my car, and the sound froze on my tongue. I debated whether I should play dead or not when I caught a glimpse of the silhouette of a man approaching my car. In the darkness that surrounded me, all I could see was that same blonde hair that sent chills down my spine.
Then the man without a name hurled my door open and ducked his head so he could see me. An evil, pleased smile spread on his face as he pinned me with his cruel eyes.
“Hey, sugar,” he said as he dug his fingers in my throat.
His grip loosened slightly as somebody grabbed him from behind and shoved him away. Crying and shivering, I looked up into ocean blue eyes.
“You...” I managed to mumble before I choked.
I WOKE UP SCREAMING at the top of my lungs. Sweat coated my nape and wetted my pillow. My hands were trembling just as they had been doing in my dream. My chest felt constricted like a heavy weight was pressing down on it. I struggled to take one breath at a time and gain some semblance of composure, but the whole dream still felt terribly vivid. Especially since it reminded me of that Friday night.
My first nightmare with the nameless blonde had been on that Friday night. I had assured myself then that it was a typical stress release and that through that first nightmare I had gotten rid of the last remnants of fear I had felt in that empty, dark alley.
But apparently, I had been wrong.
Fear clawed at me until a pair of electric blue eyes mysteriously settled me down. Then, remorse filled the hole that fear had dug into my chest. In my memory, Marcus’s gaze shifted from purposely charming and leisurely amused to unexplainably wounded.
I had been rude to him, and at some point, I had suspected he had read right through my façade, but in the end, my severity hit him in a way that erased all humor from his eyes.
I was a stranger to him. My words and my actions shouldn’t have had the power to hurt him like they had. And surely, the wound I had caused shouldn’t have affected me the way it did.
I writhed in my bed, impatiently trying to fall asleep, but now that the vividness of the nightmare had dispersed, it was Marcus, or rather the guilt I felt toward him, that kept me awake.
I had been rude only because I had felt threateningly close to believing in his charming act. That was my survival mechanism. That was how I managed to remain detached. But what was survival if it lacked in emotions of any kind? And why had I even bothered to push him away so harshly if now I had this nagging feeling that I had been wrong?
I rolled on my side, and my eyes landed on the clock resting on the nightstand. It wasn’t even 6 o’clock yet, but I was completely awake. And furious with myself. Why couldn’t I act normally? Why couldn’t I just dare to take a risk and befriend a mysterious and annoying stranger? Why wasn’t I that daring woman he had told me about?
I sighed, defeated, trying to erase from my mind the image of Marcus King, but remorse refused to be appeased. I knew one way to burn the negative energy that coursed through my veins like wildfire. Running. I always ran, and frequently, I ran away from...feeling.
Central Park was quiet enough, but it could have howled with life for how much attention I paid it. With the hood of my sweatshirt over my head and my earphones in my ears, I listened to orchestral music, and I ran—I ran until the muscles in my calves started protesting, until my heart seemed to expand so it occupied my whole ribcage, until the air burned my lungs and my breaths came out jaggedly.
And despite the exertion, despite my stubbornness of concentrating only on my footing as I ran, it was Mr. King returning to the forefront of my thoughts. He was haunting me. And perhaps the persistent recollection of him was my punishment for having been so mean that, in the end, I had almost felt cruel.
“Actually, no, Miss, you can’t,” I recalled his voice with such clarity that I had to stop myself from turning around to check for him. “To accuse me of assault, I should have caused bodily harm to you and I—”
The way he had phrased his sentences had sounded quite intriguing for an ordinary man. It wasn’t the way a scoundrel or a lowlife would have talked. His words couldn’t have been anything else but the argument of a man who knew what he was talking about, of a man who knew the law.
I sighed with renewed regret and frustration. I should have realized my mistake last night. I should have understood that he wasn’t a rogue, or at least not a complete one, and tried to part ways politely. But sometimes the best and easiest defense was a great offense.
I jogged back to my apartment building, preparing myself mentally for a new work day, but today of all days, dealing with my father or the murder case he had so kindly dropped on my plate sounded utterly dreadful.
I felt a throbbing pain in my chest and in my left shoulder before I realized I had bumped into someone. My hood fell off my head, and the earphones dropped from my ears. A pair of long-fingered masculine hands grabbed my hips to steady me.
I gasped, recognizing the hands, and as I did so, I tried to convince myself that it was only my imagination playing tricks on me. But when I looked up, there he was, half frowning, half looking startled himself. Marcus.
“I’m sorry, Miss,” he apologized, emphasizing his last word coolly.
He removed his hands from my hips immediately, as if I had burned him, and retreated with clenched teeth. His jaw rolled, and a vein, long and thick like a rope, crossed his forehead. He hadn’t expected to see me again.
The hood of my sweatshirt had covered my identity until it had been too late. With another pang of regret, I realized he would have avoided me if he’d had the chance.
“Marcus,” I called, my hand reaching of its own accord and grabbing his arm.
He started walking away but stopped in midstride and fixed that peering stare of his on my face. My impulsive reaction surprised us both, but this might have been truly the last time I saw him. I wanted—no, I needed to apologize. For some unknown reason, I just needed him to know that I wasn’t a mean city girl like he certainly imagined—like I had made him imagine.
“About last night,” I started, releasing his arm when he fully faced me.
I was a lawyer for a reason. I was able to talk to crowds. I was able to make a judge see my point and convince a jury of someone’s innocence. Sometimes, I could speak so much that I bored myself. Marcus, though, rendered me speechless.
He watched me quietly, folding his arms over his chest and keeping his expression still, detached.
“The way I behaved toward you last night was completely bad-mannered,” I tried again, proud that my voice hadn’t wavered this time. But the apology had sounded empty, and it certainly hadn’t gained me his forgiveness.
“There is no need for you to apologize, Miss Burton. I have been rude in the first place. I have stalked you.”
His distantly polite words had been the perfect reply to my ineffective apology. His once sensual voice now sounded like frost. I gritted my teeth and shut my eyes. I was not used to apologizing, let alone to explaining myself or the reasons I acted in a particular way. Although still a stranger to me, I wanted him to understand—I wanted him to accept my apology. But most of all, I didn’t want to be just
a bad memory in his life.
“No, you weren’t rude. You took me by surprise, and then, you got truly persistent. I am by nature a suspicious person, and I don’t trust people who approach me the way you did. So I acted the way I know best. I made sure I pushed you away. I didn’t realize that in my attempt to create a barrier, I offended you. Please accept my apology.”
He arched an eyebrow and studied me at length. He had the expression of a man who analyzed each word I said. He had the power to make me feel as nervous as I did before I received a verdict. My eyes darted to his mouth when he stuck his tongue out to wet his lips, then I all but gasped when he shook his head and began walking away.
“No,” he answered calmly but continued to walk away.
“Why not?” I demanded. I couldn’t believe that I was following him. Next thing I knew, he would accuse me of stalking.
“I don’t like barriers.”
“But—That is ridiculous.”
I knew as soon as the words left my tongue that my voice had sounded everything but apologetic. The man frustrated me. Couldn’t he just accept the apology? It all got worse when his lips quirked up. Once again, I amused him.
“Careful, sugar,” he cautioned. “You sound dangerously close to being outraged, which is not at all a justly remorseful attitude.”
“Stop calling me sugar,” I hissed before correcting myself. “Look, you don’t know me, so you don’t know how difficult it is for me to express regret, but I am truly sorry for the way I behaved last night. I wish we had parted on better terms, and I know it is my fault that we didn’t. Can you forgive me for that?”
“I’ll accept your apologies,” he said abruptly, stopping in the middle of the street, almost making me bump into him again.
“Thank you,” I breathed with just a tint of exasperation.
His eyes, framed by long, dark lashes, remained fixed on me, so long that I all but started squirming. He had an intensity about him that stole your breath away, that hint of mystery that offered him a dark side, and yet, in spite of the way we met, he wasn’t as dangerous as my mind had wanted to make him.
Darkside Love Affair Page 7
