But he turns my world upside down when he puts me on the bed.
The bed that I sleep in.
The bed he used to put me down on back when I used to be so sick. But he’s never gotten into it. He looms over me now. His shirt made even more wrinkled by my fisting fingers, his lips appearing wet and swollen due to my kisses and his eyes all burned with lust for me.
Burned with all the things that he thinks about.
Because I’m pregnant and my body’s changing.
And so when he kneels at the foot of the bed and goes for the waistband of my pajama pants, I don’t stop him. I don’t feel shy when he strips them off my legs and goes for the zipper in his hoodie.
He lowers it, all hastily now, without any finesse, and I know it’s because he’s excited.
He’s excited and eager to see me in my new body.
But when he reaches to the bottom of the zipper and his fingers grab the hoodie to part it so he can see my naked skin, his jaw clenches. And I know it’s because he hates it at the same time.
He hates this eagerness because he’s making my body change.
He’s responsible for my swollen belly and my aching tits.
So I grab hold of his hands that are fisted in the fabric and make him do it. Make him part the hoodie that’s covering me from his eyes. So he can see.
So he can revel in what he did to me.
And he does, I think.
He does when his body moves with his breaths and when his lips part and his eyes grow hooded. He revels in my slightly bigger belly and wider hips. My swollen, rounded breasts and darker nipples, as I lie there on my back with his hoodie parted and spread, my braid almost undone and fanning over my head.
But then I realize that he’s never even seen them before.
My naked body, let alone my naked tits.
So I tell him, “I… I used to be smaller.” I swallow when his eyes lift up. “My breasts. Even smaller than this, and my nipples were… were a lighter shade of pink. My hips were smaller too. I’m not… I’m not your tight little ballerina anymore.”
The bones of his wrists that I’m still holding flex. “No, you’re not. You’re my gorgeous, glorious, pregnant Fae. And you’re perfect. You’re so fucking perfect that it hurts. Here.” And he puts his fist on his chest to show me like I showed him.
All I can do is go lax on the bed and whisper his name. “Reed.”
“Show me where I hurt you,” he demands, his eyes piercing.
And I do it.
I have no shame when I let go of his wrists and creep my one hand up to my breasts and squeeze one. “Here.” My other hand goes down my swollen belly and touches my pussy.
I don’t stop there though.
I don’t just touch it, I rub my lips, wet and soft, making my hips jerk under his eyes. I part those lips like he parted my hoodie to show him my fairy hole, like he calls it, and whisper again, “And here.”
Making him growl.
There’s no mistaking the sound that emerges from him.
He growls at the sight of my spread-open pussy, the pussy that he thinks is hurting because of him, and I see determination wash over his gorgeous features.
He brings his eyes, all dark and predatory and protective, to mine as he grabs my naked thighs. As he makes my legs fold up at the knees and hooks the arches of my feet to the edge of the bed.
Then without taking his eyes off me, he moves his hands.
He gets them under my butt and picks me up off the bed. I fist my hands on the sheet when he fits his broad shoulders between my spread thighs and settles himself at my raised pelvis.
And then with his eyes on me, he puts his mouth right there.
On my pussy.
On the hole that I showed him, and sucks my lips into his mouth.
The growl that emerges from him then is the fiercest one I’ve ever heard. And I can’t help but think — again — that he has turned into an animal. Like he did that night when he came for my scent and sniffed the column of my throat, wanting to see if I smelled the same.
And God, I love that.
I love how I change him.
Because he changes me too.
He makes me shameless and I writhe my hips on his mouth, moaning. Which only makes him growl louder and suck harder, as if he’s sucking and drinking from a cup or a wedge of a fruit with his big hands raising it up to his mouth.
After that I don’t have the strength to look into his horny animal eyes.
I close mine and give myself to him.
I curl my fingers in the sheet, my toes in the air, and I let him apologize to me.
I let him talk to my pussy, tell her how sorry he is. How he was an asshole to her that night. How he should’ve known. He should’ve known that she was tight and untouched. She was innocent and daisy fresh before he plowed into her. Before he destroyed her and trashed her and made her cry. Made her bleed.
How he knocked her up.
And then with his long pulls and sucks on my clit, he tells her that he’ll apologize to her for the rest of his life if he has to. He’ll eat her and suck on her and lick her until she can’t stand it anymore, until she can’t stand the pleasure.
He’ll pamper her until she comes and comes on his tongue.
And she does.
I do.
My channel pulses and I undulate my hips in the air. I twist them, shake my ass in his hands as I come in his mouth. As my pussy ripples on his tongue.
As he sucks on my clit and licks my fairy hole. As he moves his mouth up and down and side to side, growling and apologizing and soothing and hurting me.
I come and come and come. I flow into his mouth, douse his tongue with my juices as I chant his name over and over and over.
I chant the name of the guy who’s asking for my forgiveness on his knees, with his mouth on my pussy.
The guy I’ve already forgiven. Who then brings me down to the bed, carefully, tenderly before he bends over and places a reverent kiss on my pregnant belly.
He moves up to my swollen tits and kisses them too, finally going up to my forehead to breathe me in, to place soft kisses in my hair.
Only to leave me all alone in my bed.
“She’s forgiven me,” I say to Pete, barging into his office.
An hour later, after I’ve put her to sleep in the bed.
I couldn’t sleep though. I couldn’t stay there either.
At the scene of my crime.
At the scene where I touched her with my dirty hands. Touched her pregnant, warm belly and her soft, swollen tits. I touched her pussy.
I touched my gorgeous, glorious, pregnant Fae when I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t.
I promised myself that I wouldn’t touch her, make her all dirty.
“Isn’t that a good thing?” Pete asks from his beat-up office without me having to give him any context.
An office with a table that’s overrun with files. A cabinet that hardly organizes anything for him and a computer screen that he was squinting into because like me he can’t sleep either, until I interrupted him.
It’s a tiny place, much smaller than my father’s office, and Pete has had this as long as I’ve known him.
But this doesn’t suffocate me.
It doesn’t choke my breaths.
“Fuck no,” I spit out.
“And how’s that?” he asks, settling into his cheap leather chair that squeaks and is bad for his back. That I’ve told him a million times to replace. But he won’t.
It was a gift from Mimi.
He can be such a sucker.
I plow both my hands through my hair. “I don’t deserve it.”
“Well, that’s not your call to make now, is it?”
“It fucking should be.”
“But it’s not. You wronged her and she moved on. You need to move on too. That’s how it works. An apology, making it up to someone.”
&nb
sp; My chest contracts. My fingers flex.
The fingers that touched her because she tempted me.
She wouldn’t let me keep my fucking hands to myself.
I’ve been aching, dying to touch her ever since she told me she was carrying my baby. I was fucking craving to touch her body, her belly that she so freely touches and every time she does, my blood heats up. My fingers hurt for not getting to touch her skin, the life inside of her.
And she fucking took advantage of that.
“What if…” I burst out but then trail off, pacing in his office.
“First, sit down. You’re giving me a headache. And second, what if what?”
I don’t.
I come to a halt though and grab the back of the chair in front of his desk. The chair that’s better than the one he’s sitting in but he won’t replace it because he still loves his dead wife.
What is with people and love?
Seriously though, why is it such a big deal?
“Thanks. But I’ll stand,” I tell him.
He studies my face before shaking his head. “You know what you are?”
“What?”
“A rabid dog.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “Thanks, Pete. I feel much better now. I’m glad I came.”
“Good, because you are. You’re like a vicious wild animal that bites the hand that dares to pet you. Because that’s all you’ve ever known. Biting and snapping your teeth at the world. But as Mimi would say, it’s not your fault. It’s the world’s fault. Because the world has bitten you back.”
I clench my teeth. “Are we done here? Because I’ve got a fucking problem.”
“What is your problem, boy?”
“My problem, old man, is what if it happens again?”
“What happens again?”
I don’t even know what I’m doing here. I don’t even know why I came.
I don’t know why I keep coming to Pete whenever I’ve got a problem. I went to him when my father fucked her over two years ago. I went to him when I found out I fucked her over again and got her pregnant.
And I’m here tonight too.
He never helps.
But the thing is that I’ve got no place to go. And if that doesn’t burn, that the only place I can go to is a fucking garage and the only person I can talk to is a fucking old man who’s still in love with his wife and needs a beard trim, then I don’t know what will.
I swallow, curling my fingers into the chair. “What if she falls in love with me again?”
“Why’s loving you such a bad thing?”
“Aside from the fact that one time she did, and I broke her heart because I was too wrapped up in my shit?” I swallow, my throat feeling tight. “And then my father used her to get back at me. In case you didn’t know, my father is still alive. As much as I’d like to kill him, I’m not going to do that because that might also kill my mother. Who somehow still loves that sick fuck. So nothing’s changed. She needs to stay away from me, from us. From Jackson men. We don’t know a thing about love or being decent human beings.”
Pete stares at me for a moment, rubbing his bushy white moustache, before muttering, “You know why your father used her to get to you?”
“Because he’s a psychopath who only cares about what he wants and because he saw it as an opportunity.”
“Yes. But he’s also smart,” Pete tells me. “He was smart enough to know that you’d do anything for that girl. You’d give up soccer. You’d give up your scholarship, your whole plan of getting into the pros to stick it to him. He knew that.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So you’d give up your fucking soul for that girl. And your father knew that. So what does that tell you?”
I raise my eyebrows at him. “Why don’t you explain it to me?”
Pete smiles. “It tells you that you might know a thing or two about love after all, you clueless bastard.”
My chest contracts again. Like a boulder is sitting on it.
A giant fucking wrecking ball. A ticking time bomb that’s going to explode.
But I ignore it. I ignore it all and scoff at Pete. “I made that deal with my father because she didn’t deserve to be used. Not again. She didn’t deserve to be punished for something that she did because she was hurting. Because I hurt her. Not everything is about love.”
“Whatever helps you sleep at night, kid.”
You love her, don’t you? You love our baby.
The pressure on my chest increases at her words but I ignore that too.
It doesn’t matter if I love our baby or not.
She’s a part of me. Of course I love our baby.
But that doesn’t mean I’m free to love anyone else. I don’t have time for it when I have to protect Fae, protect both of them, from my father.
That’s why I’m doing all this, aren’t I?
That’s why I’m working for him. That’s why I go every time he calls. I attend every goddamn meeting. I sit in on every conference call he makes like a good boy.
I’m giving him every little thing his villainous, corrupt heart desires because I want him to be happy enough to back off, to leave me alone.
I never want him to find out about Fae and our baby. I know he’ll use them as pawns if and when he can.
And it has worked.
He’s a psychopathic toddler. You give him what he wants and he’ll move on to something else.
My father has no clue. He doesn’t know what I do with my time off. He doesn’t care as long as I show up for work and give him what he wants.
But you know what? I don’t know why I’m freaking the fuck out right now.
Nothing has changed.
I promised that I’d protect her from my father and me and that’s what I’m going to do. Unlike last time, I’m going to keep her heart safe from me.
Because no matter what she believes, I can’t love.
I am that rabid fucking animal that bites. Because that’s all I know. That’s how I’ve survived this world. That’s how I’ve survived the man who brought me into this world.
“Thanks for nothing,” I say to Pete, stepping back from the chair, ready to leave. “And I’m buying you a new chair that won’t kill your back. That fucking thing you have right now needs to go to the dump.”
And then I turn around and walk out.
But not before I hear his laughing words. “I’ll throw it in the dump the day you throw away that sweater of yours. The one with that fucking mustang on it that you still keep in the trunk of your car.”
Asshole.
All the girls at my school are in love with him.
Which is nothing new because every girl at Bardstown High loved him too.
And his dark magic is still alive at St. Mary’s School for Troubled Teenagers.
They are in love with him, with his Mustang.
His sparkling vampire skin and his long dark hair. They think his gunmetal gray eyes are so cool, and the way he walks with long, effortless steps makes them swoon.
Even though they watch us with giggling eyes and snickering lips. Even more so now than before because my belly’s showing. And well, I’ve had to make uniform adjustments. Meaning, I don’t wear one because those skirts are not made for expanding bellies.
Anyway, I know they love it that he drops me off and picks me up from school. I heard a bunch of them talking during lunch one day.
My girls especially love that. That he waits.
“Oh look, our gorgeous villain is here,” Poe sing-songs. “Waiting for his Fae.”
My breath catches in my throat. Because I was talking to Wyn about our English lit homework as we were climbing down the steps after finishing for the day and I hadn’t seen him yet.
Although to be honest, I should’ve known.
He’s somehow never late, even though he comes straight from work.
I narrow my eyes at Poe though. “Don’t mak
e me regret telling you that.”
I don’t even know why I did.
Since I don’t live with them anymore, we try to catch up as much as we can during lunch and any other free time that we get. And since Reed Roman Jackson is such a big topic, all our conversations circle around him, and since I’m an idiot, I let it slip one day that he calls me Fae.
And well, since then they haven’t let it go.
Poe sticks her tongue out at me and I do the same in return.
While Salem, our doomed-in-love turned happy-in-love friend, sighs. “I’m so jealous. Like, it’s so cute I wanna die. You know what? I’m going to make Arrow write me another poem next time he calls. Just to make up for all this cuteness.”
Arrow and Salem are still going strong. Not that I ever doubted that they would.
He’s crazy about her. Every visitation weekend, he makes sure to fly over from California, where he lives to visit Salem. The rest of the time, they talk on the phone on Saturdays, email each other. Even write love letters.
I don’t know what she’s complaining about because her thing is beyond cute.
I raise my eyebrows at Salem. “Make him?”
She raises hers back, smiling slyly. “Yeah. I can make him do things.”
Poe jumps in. “What kind of things?”
Salem shrugs. “Things your virgin ears won’t be able to hear without blushing.”
“I don’t blush. Ever.” She throws us a coy smile then. “And who says I’m a virgin?”
“Poe, you are a virgin, okay?” I tell her, rolling my eyes. “We know that. So stop trying to be all mysterious.”
“Fine. I’m a virgin.” She sticks her tongue out at me again and I do the same. “And I hate you. I hate both of you for having sex before me. I want to have sex too. And you know why I haven’t had sex yet?”
“We know,” Salem says.
“You do?”
“Yes,” I reply. “It’s because of your tweed-jacket-with-elbow-patches-wearing guardian. Who sent you here.”
As expected, Poe’s face scrunches up with fury. “Exactly. Everything wrong in my life is because of him. Everything. Ugh. I can’t wait to kill him and dance on his grave and then have sex with the first guy I meet.” She turns to Salem then. “Until then you’re gonna have to tell me everything. So I can live vicariously through you.”
A Gorgeous Villain Page 42
