“I had no idea you took such an interest in school operations,” Adam teased him as Michael was delegating various tasks to a handful of trusted members of the student body. One of which was putting together the next exam schedule. “I thought you were going to abolish exams.”
Michael chuckled. “People change, I guess.”
Adam nodded, and I was pleased to see all of them getting along so well on the same team. We all knew that it would only be a matter of time before my father made some sort of move to try and abolish the school, or us, or both. But none of us wanted to run anymore. We all had too many things that we had given up or had taken from us by my father. And none of us felt like we were going to let him get away with running the city and its people into the ground. We were going to stay and fight.
The only person that didn’t feel like he had a solid reason for wanting to exchange our freedom for this fight was Julian. He was on-board, and he wasn’t going to leave without us, or at least not without me, but he still seemed to have a lingering desire to just hop a train and get the hell out of dodge. He didn’t seem quite as obsessed with taking down Jack White as the rest of us were, and that was because he didn’t know about his parents. I had to tell him. I had to let Julian know that his parents, who, even though he hadn’t been super close with, he loved and respected, had aided and hidden my father during this entire time, which allowed him to grow and tighten his hold on the academies. I just didn’t want to.
I felt as though we were in a holding pattern. We had all talked about various ideas and plans and ways to expose my father and to keep all of us safe at the same time. But until he made a move, Michael thought it was best to stay low and stay together. Michael had the Headmaster’s suite wholly cleared out. He turned it into a minimalistic loft where we could all stay together. After all the separation, I never once complained about all of us being on top of each other again. In fact, we were all more on top of each other than we ever had been before, but at least we all had our own rooms.
“You’re kind of quiet tonight,” Julian said as he leaned into me on the couch.
Michael and Adam had just gotten up to go dig up some drinks. I was hoping that I wouldn’t start swigging bottles of wine one at a time like my mother had when she was going through her roughest times, but I figured an excess of alcohol consumption was one of the least of my worries. Especially since this situation was far from over. It was nice to have a little reprieve, though, and it gave me time to think about things.
“Julian,” I said gently, figuring now would be as good a time as any. “I need to tell you something about your parents.”
He furrowed his brow. “My parents?”
“Yeah. It’s something my father told me about your parents.”
He sat up to look at me and waited. He was always so good about waiting. I was awful at it. I blurted everything out, and even when I couldn’t, I was still terrible at holding anything in. I always thought that it was better to be blunt and honest right from the start, a quality that I got from my mother.
However, it seemed like I had been doing a lot of lying and secret-keeping that past year. With only a few months until graduation, and hopefully, only a few months until we could all wrap this mess up and finally leave Charleston, I wanted to be better at being truthful one hundred percent of the time. I did wish that I had a little more tact and decorum about it, though.
I drew in a deep breath. “My father said that your parents are the ones who hid and harbored him all of these years.” There it was, blurted out. Ugh.
Julian didn’t say anything, but he didn’t look that shocked either.
“Did you already know that?” I asked him.
He didn’t move. Only his lips did. “No.”
I swallowed hard. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. To be honest, my parents always seemed like they were leading double lives. They were only ever half-present for much of the time. This makes sense now. It makes sense that they were trying to do their best raising me, but without getting too close to me in case, I would grow up to be as fierce and investigative as your mother was.”
“You’re taking this a lot better than I had expected,” I said.
Julian shrugged his shoulders and wrapped his arms around me. “What does it matter?” he said. “The only person I care about now is right here in my arms. My parents have their own lives to lead and their own beds to lie in.”
He leaned forward and kissed me. It started as just a small kiss, the kind of kiss that two people who were “more than friends” have on occasion. But something changed at the moment that brought the heat of it all rushing to the surface again.
The small and tender kiss gave way to more when Julian’s tongue pushed softly through my parted lips and found mine. It grew as he pulled closer to me, and I shifted my hips to get closer to his lap. By the time I had started grasping my fingers in his hair, he lifted me up off the couch and carried me to his bedroom.
He set me down and laid over me, and I was reminded of that time in the tree when I felt his longing press against me, and he tried to push it out of his mind. This time, there was no pushing it off as the hard bulge in his pants pressed against me on the bed. I had wanted Julian ever since I could remember. Even before I knew how much I wanted him, the feeling sat simmering under the surface.
When I thought about all the times that we wrestled around playfully, or laid wrapped up with each other, or saw each other half-naked; now when I thought about those moments, they didn’t seem innocent and platonic at all. Now I could feel the urgency of all that yearning we had kept for each other hidden neatly away just below the surface.
He could feel it, too.
I tugged at his shirt and he lifted his body up, leaving only his pelvis sitting against mine with his body straddling me so that I could pull it up and over his head. I ran my hands over his chest and down his abs and into the top of his pants. He didn’t look like the boy I grew up with anymore. Not with his chiseled body and happy trail that led down into his pants where the huge and bulging part of him pressed against his jeans.
He pulled my shirt over my head and unclasped my bra, tossing it over the side of the bed. When I felt his hand on my breasts, I was jealous for a moment of all the other girls he had touched before me.
Julian and I should have been the first for each other.
But when he came back down to kiss me, and the soft waves of his hair fell against my face, I knew that none of that mattered. We were there together, and it was finally time for the separation between our bodies to be over. He kissed me as I loosened his pants and helped me to pull them over his hips until he kicked them onto the ground. After all the time I felt him ever-so-slightly against me and after every time I caught myself looking at his pants at random moments, I could now finally see and feel him completely.
And the throbbing cock that hung between his legs against me made me squirm beneath him.
Julian carefully pulled my pants off in one swift movement and then scooped his hand behind the small of my back to bring me perfectly into the place beneath him where we seemed to fit together like a puzzle. His cock, pressed against my heated folds. Throbbing for me, as if I were the only place his body wanted to be. And as I gazed up into his eyes, his mouth came down against my own. His tongue, exploring my mouth before I whispered against his lips.
“Where my body ends, yours begins. That’s what you always said,” I reminded him.
He smiled as he reached between our bodies and lined himself up with my entrance.
When he pushed himself inside of me, light burst forth from my mind’s eye. We fit together like two pieces of a puzzle, and the way he stroked the back of my clit made me wetter than I’d ever been. I felt my arousal dripping down my ass crack as our bodies rolled together. My arms, threaded around his neck as our hips met each other in the middle. I breathed the air he afforded me. My lips ached to be against his own. And as his thrusts drove me higher and higher into
the heavens, I groaned down the back of his throat.
Before our tongues intertwined with one another.
“Oh, Lisette. I love you so fucking much,” he whispered.
His words drove me higher into the clouds, until I felt as if I were soaring over earth. I felt the heat of his words deep in my gut as that coil began to tighten. I bucked my hips ravenously. I felt his hands pawing at me, trying to touch every single part of me at once. We were a knotted entanglement of limbs and passion, fervently chasing the same end as one another.
And when I felt his cock thicken against my walls, my eyes rolled back.
“Oh, that’s it,” I groaned.
He rolled his hips quicker. “Come for me, Lisette. Do it. Take me with you.”
I clawed at his back. “Shit, shit, shit, shit.”
He growled. “Oh, yeah. Grab that dick. Holy fuck.”
Julian made love to me in a way that was like no other. He was gentle and strong, patient, but steady. It was as if every movement of our bodies undulated in a rhythm that climbed further toward a perfect utopia. My eyes rolled into the back of my head. His movements became stunted. And when I felt his cock burst within me, it pulled me over the edge with him.
I shook against his body with the force of my orgasm until I collapsed beneath him. Spent, and panting.
And wanting more.
As we lay in each other’s arms afterward, I thought about the night in my dorm room when we had almost had sex. Where he professed his love for me and how things always seemed to get in between the two of us at the most inopportune time.
“I’m glad we didn’t have sex that night in my room,” I said.
Julian slid off to the side and pulled me close. “Why? Was it that underwhelming for you?”
I sat up and turned around to look at him. His eyes that had been filled with happiness and fulfillment were now filled with a bit of concern. And I needed to remedy thanks to the careless way that I blurted out all of my thoughts.
“God no, that’s not it at all,” I said as I watched the concern vanish from his eyes. “I’m glad that we waited until now because of how wonderful it was.”
He blinked. “Even though I wasn’t the first man you had?”
“I wasn’t the first woman you had either,” I reminded him. “But you told me it didn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t,” he said.
“That’s what I’m trying to say. I’m glad because that night might have just been sex, and this was so much more than that. This was making love as if our bodies were finally coming home to each other.”
Julian leaned up to my height and kissed me. “It would have always been making love, Lisette, and it always will be because I love you. It can’t be anything else for me. And regardless of Michael or Adam, I will always be the first man you’ve had.”
The look on my face let him know that I didn’t understand what he was trying to say.
“I will always be the first man that you had because you have always had me…and you always will.”
And as his words etched themselves onto my heart forever, I pressed my head forward to kiss him.
I felt home with Julian, and our bodies knew it.
28
That night, as the three of us sat and talked. We discussed where we would go after graduation. Suddenly there was a knock on the door. No one ever came to the door here, so we were all rightfully a bit startled. The guys immediately jumped into protective mode as Michael went to answer it.
There in the doorway stood Marta. Her cheekbone still looked like it was several shades of black and blue, and there were a few sharp-looking stitches poking out of it. When I saw her, I realized that I had completely forgotten to tell Michael about what had happened to her while we were in my father’s office on the day of the press event.
Michael stared at her for a minute, and a flash of concern swept his face when he saw the closed-up gash on her cheek. But the concern was quickly replaced with stringent suspicion.
“What are you doing here?” he asked her as he stood in the doorway and blocked her view from inside.
Marta held her head high. “I’ve come to give you a warning.”
“You can tell Jack that he can take his warnings and shove them right up his—”
“The warning is from me,” Marta interrupted. “And I really think you should hear it.”
Michael looked back at the three of us, and none of us knew what to make of it.
He opened the door and let her inside. “Fine. You have five minutes.”
Marta walked in and looked around at all of us. Michael waved a hand toward one of the chairs in the room for his mother to take a seat before the rest of us sat down around the room ourselves.
“How did you even get in here?” he asked her.
She didn’t answer him. Instead, she got right to the reason she had come.
“Jack is unhinged,” she said.
Adam laughed. “You think? I hope you didn’t come all this way to tell us something we already knew. It would be a shame if you risked your life for something so stupid.” He didn’t care about her life, though; none of us did. Marta was an evil woman. I doubt even Michael cared about whether she lived or died anymore.
She sighed and continued as she ignored Adam’s remark. “A long time ago, I made a terrible mistake.”
“Just one?” Michael sneered.
She knew she deserved that remark. “It was the worst of many that followed,” she said. “I was married to your father, and I had an affair.”
“Let me guess,” Michael said. “It was with Lisette’s father.”
Marta nodded.
“Is that why Jack killed my father?” he asked.
I could see the hatred boiling within him. It wasn’t necessarily just toward Marta, but more toward all of them.
Marta sighed. “In part, yes.”
“What was the other part?” Michael asked.
“The other part ties in with something that Pauline was trying to help me with.”
“What?” I asked. “My mother wouldn’t have helped you with anything.”
I was enraged that she would even dare to mention my mother’s name.
“There are still some things about your mother that you don’t know. Pauline was a good woman, even to me. And she was an even better mother, more than I could ever hope to be.”
“That’s not something I don’t know,” I hissed at her. “I know everything about her. You know nothing.”
“The affair caused something to happen, and when Jack found out about it, he was so furious that he killed my husband in order to make me obey him from then on out.”
“That’s not an excuse,” Michael said. “Lisette’s mother didn’t have a husband anymore, either. She was afraid of Jack, too, but she didn’t cower at his feet and do all his dirty work. You chose to side with him.”
“There’s more to it that you don’t know,” she said.
“Please, then, enlighten us,” Michael said as he threw both hands in the air dramatically.
“Let’s discuss this another time. That’s not why I’ve come.”
“Then why exactly did you come?” Julian asked. “What is the warning you brought us?”
“Pauline was hiding something else from him too, and Jack is getting close to finding it. When he does, he’s going to use it to solidify his legacy of crime, and he won’t stop at anything from exterminating all of you.”
“What difference does that make?” Michael asked. “He already wants to kill us all now, anyways.”
“It makes a big difference,” Marta answered. “Right now, he is working within the rules and the eye of the public. If he finds this, he won’t care about the rest of it anymore. He’ll kill everyone openly in front of everyone watching without regard to any repercussions. You aren’t safe here. You need to get as far away from this city as possible.”
“What is it that he’s close to finding?” I asked, curious about my mother’s all
eged involvement in helping Marta to hide anything from my father.
There was a noise outside the door, and it made Marta screech and jump a mile in her seat. She did look genuinely terrified, and Michael saw it in her face too.
“I have to go,” she said. “Before he finds out that I was here.”
Marta got up and hurried to the door.
“Mom,” Michael called after her as he went to the door before she left. It was the first time I’d ever heard him refer to his mother as “mom.” Usually, he called her mother, and then there was that one time he referred to her as a bitch. “You should stay here where I can protect you.”
Marta looked up at her son and put her hand on his cheek. Her eyes teared up as she spoke to him. “I know I haven’t always been the best mother to you, Michael,” she said as her voice cracked. “But I have loved you, even if I haven’t known how to show it.”
Then, she opened the door and left.
“Well, that was weird,” Adam said as Michael walked back over to sit down with us.
“What do you think she was talking about?” Julian asked. He looked at me as if I might have some clue as to what else my mother could have been up to, but I didn’t have the first idea about any of it. Apparently, my mother was much more secretive than even I knew.
“She looked scared,” Michael said as he put his head down in his hands, and I saw his shoulders rise and fall with a deep breath. “Did you see her cheek?”
“Yeah, I meant to tell you about that,” I said. “I’m sorry, I forgot. My father did that to her on the day of the press release. He was furious about what you had said in front of the reporters, and when we got back to his office, he did that to Marta and then killed two of his own security guards.”
“Did he hurt you?” Michael asked as he lifted his head up quickly and looked at me with concern.
“No, and I’m not quite sure why.”
“You’re his heir,” Adam said. “That’s what filthy rich criminals always care about in the movies, right? They’re always brutal with everyone else, but super careful with the kid that’s going to continue on their legacy after they’re gone.”
Ruined: A Dark Bully Reverse Harem Romance (Beautiful Tyrants Book 1) Page 19
