Vicious: A Dark Bully Reverse Harem Romance (Beautiful Tyrants Book 3)

by Vanessa Winters

  And as his fingers swirled around my swollen clit, my eyes rolled back.

  “Oh, Michael.”

  He released my hands and fell between my legs. “I need to taste you.”

  My hands fisted his hair. “Shit don’t stop. Oh fuck, I love it when you do this.”

  I didn’t even get a chance to catch my breath before his tongue pressed against my oversensitive nub. I rocked against him, feeling his tongue splaying out as his hands pressed my knees up to my chest. He held my legs up, effectively folding me in half as he devoured me whole. His tongue slipped into my entrance, caressing my walls as my body shivered. Goosebumps spread across my entire body and puckered my nipples to near-painful peaks. My hands fell away from his hair and I clawed at the ground, bucking relentlessly as his tongue teased my eager clit.

  And once he pressed his tongue tightly against my pussy, I fell over the edge.

  “Michael!”

  He growled. “Come for me. All over my face. There you go, beautiful. There it is.”

  He flipped one finger inside, and then two. He crooked them and stroked softly, causing my once-clenched eyes to fly open. He pulled the breath from my lungs with his fingertips as he played me like a fiddle, and I felt myself transported to an ethereal sort of plane. I felt weightless. Stressless. Like an angel floating away on a cloud up into the heavens. Fireworks burst in my vision, cascading slivers of silver as my body slowly climbed its way out of the clouds.

  And when my vision cleared, I saw the most handsome face smiling down at me.

  Until I felt a pressure at my entrance.

  “Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, yes, yes.”

  Without another word spoken, Michael sank into me and I lost myself completely. I lost control of my body, my mind, and my sense of space and time. All I felt was him. All I smelled was him. All I wanted was him as he pounded against me, shaking our bodies as his lips whispered my name.

  “Lisette. Holy shit, I love you. I love you. I love you so fucking much, Lisette.”

  I couldn’t speak. All I could do was wrap myself around him as tightly as possible and hang on for the ride. I captured his lips with my own, allowing our tongues to do battle to the rhythm of his hips driving against my own. The sounds of wet skin slapping wet skin sounded around us, shivering me to my core as I gave myself over to him.

  And as his hips began to stutter, I slid my fingertips between our bodies once more.

  “Come with me,” I said through my panting. “Fall over with me, handsome.”

  His grunts turned to growls as he ripped my hand from between our bodies. He pinned my wrists above my head, grinding his tightly-wound curls against my clit as we rose to our precipice. We climbed together, body entangled with body, and as my orgasm crashed over me I felt the pressure of his cock against my walls before he collapsed against me.

  Filling me to the brim as he pinned me to the ground with his body.

  “My. God,” I said breathlessly.

  He grunted in response, but that was about all he gave me. For the first time in my life, I wanted nothing more than to fall asleep after sex. Usually, it energized me. Usually, it gave me a renewed sense of vigor and I had to force myself to fall asleep. But as Michael nestled against me, holding me in his confident arms, I felt my eyes fluttering closed.

  And when we finally fell asleep, it was exactly as I had wanted it to be. I was curled up in Michael’s arms as he held fast to me and our breathing synched together like one being instead of two.

  But in the middle of the night, I felt so cold that I woke up. It wasn’t that the air was any colder than usual that night; it wasn’t even winter yet. But Michael was no longer wrapped around me, and even in my sleep, it had been enough to wake me. I shivered and looked around in a quick panic, realizing how he must have felt when the same thing happened to him the night that I had left. But Michael wasn’t gone, I could see his back as he sat looking at the fire, facing away from me. He must not have been able to sleep and was watching the flames dance instead. I had no idea what time it was, but by the level of darkness in the sky, I guessed that it was still sometime in the middle-of-night hours.

  “Michael?” I said quietly as I sat up on the blankets.

  He didn’t turn around at all. Maybe he didn’t hear me.

  “Michael?” I said again, this time louder.

  He still didn’t turn around or even move. I could see his shoulders rise and fall with his breathing, but that was it. I started to worry that something was wrong, that he was upset at me for something. An uneasy feeling grew in the pit of my stomach as I got up and walked closer to the fire toward him. When I reached him, I put my hand on the back of his shoulder and then knelt down to sit beside him. But when I did, I noticed right away that something was wrong.

  He was sweating, and shaking, and had an immense look of fear in his eyes as if he was staring at something horrible, instead of just the bonfire.

  “Michael, what’s wrong?” I asked, fearing that he had a horrible nightmare.

  I waited for him to answer me, but he just sat there staring at the fire as if he was mesmerized by the hypnotic, stretching flames.

  “Michael, you’re scaring me,” I said. “What is it?”

  He started to talk to me without looking away from the fire, and his words sounded like they were coming from a man who was on the verge of falling over a mental precipice.

  “I never told you about my childhood,” he said in an eerily monotone voice that made it sound like he was intentionally trying not to show emotion.

  “We talked about it a little bit, I think,” I said. “Your mother was awful and corrupt, just like my dad was. Both of our families had dark secrets. I think we both always knew that. I could see the way your mother treated you. She was an awful woman.”

  “Yes, but I never actually told you about my childhood,” he said again.

  “I’m not sure what you mean. Was there something in particular about it that you want to tell me now?” I asked.

  “There are broken parts of me, Lisette,” he said. “Parts that will never heal no matter how much you try to love me.”

  “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about,” I said. “Help me understand what it is. Does this have to do with the whole pregnancy thing? Did it make you start to think about your own childhood again? I told you that I would be careful, and I will. I promise.”

  “No,” he said. “This is about me. There’s nothing you can do.”

  The dancing flames reflected in his unblinking eyes and I noticed him start to grin at the bonfire as if he was challenging it to reach out at burn him. Tears started to stream silently down his face, and as soon as I saw his fingernails digging into the side of his arms so deeply that they were drawing blood, I started to call for Adam and Rob. Instead of being startled by my shouts for the other two guys, Michael just kept staring and grinning at the fire. When Adam and Rob ran out of the cabin in their underwear and slid to a stop behind us, they both looked at me in breathless confusion.

  “Something is wrong with him,” I said as I started to cry.

  The guys walked around to the front of Michael and looked at his face.

  “Hey man,” Rob said to him as he tried to pull Michael up from the ground. “Let’s go inside for a while and talk.”

  Michael didn’t move. He didn’t even look up at Rob. Adam tried too. He saw the nails that Michael was digging into his skin and tried to pull his hands away.

  “What happened?” Adam asked as he turned to look at me without success.

  “I don’t know. I woke up and saw that he wasn’t beside me, and when I went to go sit next to him at the fire, he was like this.”

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  “Yeah, he said his childhood was really bad,” I answered.

  Adam raised one eyebrow at me, and Rob looked up at me as if I had lost my mind.

  “His childhood?” Rob said.

  I nodded. That was pretty much all th
at Michael had said. I was afraid that something had opened up his worst fears and memories and that he was on the edge of descending into madness.

  22

  Michael and I sat quietly inside the bedroom of the cabin alone. Rob and Adam were out in the living room talking in hushed voices by the fireplace even though the morning hadn’t even arrived yet. Once we had all gotten inside, Michael seemed to snap out of it a little bit, but he was still not himself as we sat on the bed together with him staring off at the blank wall.

  “Michael,” I said as calmly as I could. “Please talk to me and tell me what’s going on. Whatever it is, tell me.”

  “I thought I was over it,” he said. “I thought that since you weren’t pregnant, that I could just stop being afraid of it. But then I realized that someday you probably would want to have a child, and when that day comes Lisette; I won’t be ready even then.”

  “How do you even know that?” I asked. “We don’t even need to talk about this right now. It’s so far off in the future and I’ve told you repeatedly that I’ll be super careful and that you don’t have anything to worry about.”

  “But I do have something to worry about. I worry that one day I will lose you because I still won’t be ready for that and you will be. Lisette, I may never be ready to have a child.”

  I realized that I needed to take this one piece at a time. One of the two of us had to be rational right now, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be him.

  “Okay,” I said. “Tell me what happened during your childhood.”

  “I can’t,” he said, dropping his head down to look at his lap.

  “Why not?” I asked. I was starting to get mad. He was the one who had said that we needed to be able to tell each other everything. He was the one who made me promise to be upfront and honest and assured me that we were in this together.

  “Because I promised your mother that I wouldn’t.”

  What?

  “My mother?” I asked in shock. “What does my mother have to do with this?”

  Michael shook his head. He was visibly torn between allegiances, but his main allegiance should have been to me.

  So, I took his face in my hands. “Michael, I don’t care what happened, or what my mother told you to do. You have to tell me. I don’t understand why it’s so hard for you to be open with me about this. I thought that we were past all of this. I thought that we weren’t hiding things from each other anymore.”

  “I’m not trying to hide anything from you, Lisette,” he said, looking like it was physically paining him to speak to me about whatever this was. “But if your mother hadn’t helped me; you and I would not be together right now. The only thing that she asked for in return, was that I never tell you what happened.”

  I was feeling doubly betrayed now. Not only was Michael hiding a secret from me, but apparently my mother had been as well. If he didn’t start spilling whatever this was about, I was going to completely lose my shit.

  “You hated my mother,” I reminded him.

  “No, I didn’t. I helped her in the end, remember?” he asked.

  Okay, true. But up until her death he still didn’t like her much. Our family and his were on opposing sides of the field.

  “What do you mean that we wouldn’t be together right now?” I asked. “What did my mother do to help you when you were younger?”

  “She saved my life,” he said as he raised his head to look straight into my eyes. “And that is why I ended hers with peace and dignity, and eased her suffering. I owed your mother my life.”

  My head was spinning.

  “How did she save your life?”

  “When I was small, shortly after my father had died; my mother had high ambitions that she wanted to achieve for herself. She didn’t want anyone or anything to stand in her way.”

  Yep, that completely sounded like his mom. She was a horrible woman, and an even worse mother.

  “That included me,” he said. “My mother tried to kill me, and it was your mother that came in and saw her attempt it.”

  “What?”

  Michael tilted his head up toward the ceiling and pointed at a thin scar that ran along the circumference of his neck. I can’t believe I’d never noticed it before now. It was so faint, and so thin, and so high up under his chin, that I probably would have never noticed it unless he pointed it out.

  “This,” he said as he traced over the scar with his index finger, before lowering his head again, “is from when my mother tried to kill me. She was strangling me with an electrical cord when your mother happened to walk into the room. Paula stopped my mother and she took me back to your house.”

  “I don’t remember seeing you at my house,” I said in shock.

  “That’s because your mother made sure that you wouldn’t see me there. She put me in the spare room and tended to the wounds on my neck. A couple of the spots were so deep that they had cut through the skin and needed a stitch or two.”

  “Why wouldn’t she want me to see you?” I asked.

  “We were supposed to be rivals. Our families were supposed to hate each other and so were you and me. Any deviation from that narrative put us both at risk,” he said.

  “If my mother saved your life, then why did you always act like you hated her so much?”

  “Again,” he said. “It was the narrative. I never hated your mother. And the only reason that I ever hated you was because of how much I wanted you and couldn’t have you.”

  “I still don’t understand what this has to do with us now,” I said.

  “Don’t you see?” Michael said as he squeezed my hand and looked into my eyes as if he were a suffering animal that needed to be put out of its misery. “That wasn’t the only time my mother tried to kill me, and it wasn’t the only time that your mother stepped in to spare my life. My father was an evil bastard, that much I was raised to know, even though I didn’t know much about him before his death. And my mother was even worse. It runs in my genes. If I ever have a child, what’s to say that I wouldn’t do the same thing?”

  “You think you would kill our child if we had a baby together?” I asked in horror.

  “I don’t know. I mean, I certainly don’t want to, but what if it just happens. What if I can’t control who I am, any more than I could control wanting you?”

  Okay, this was ridiculous. “Michael, you’re worrying irrationally. The mere fact that you’re even worried about it, shows that it’s not something you would ever want to do. I think that you’re just overthinking things and that you’re freaking yourself out. You just need to relax and show yourself some grace. First of all, I’m not pregnant and I’m not going to get pregnant. So none of that is going to happen unless and until we want it to. Secondly, you are not your parents. If anyone should have been a good example of that, it should have been me. I spent all that time chasing down my own mother’s dream until it quite nearly destroyed me and all of you. It cost Julian his life. You can’t go making the same mistakes that I have, not when you’ve been here to see my own mistakes play out. You are your own person, and there is no way that I believe you would harm your own child. In fact, I think that all of the shit you’ve been through will probably make you a better father than most men are.”

  “That’s nice of you to say, Lisette, but I just don’t know if I believe that.”

  We concluded the conversation with very little progress having been made. Michael seemed to be at least talked down from the ledge a little bit, and he didn’t have that crazy, far-away look in his eyes anymore. But he still didn’t seem to be buying in to what I said.

  The next few days made me worried because it seemed like Michael was pulling away from me and that was not what was supposed to be happening now. This was the part where we were supposed to be having our happily ever after moment. Instead, Michael seemed distant as though he was trying to protect me from himself. It was driving me crazy and I wanted to get through to him so badly that I was just about willing to do anything
and seek help from anyone in order to get Michael to stop pulling away from me.

  “I have to say that I’m surprised you would come to me for advice about this,” Adam said as we took a walk outside together.

  I needed to be out of earshot of the others so that I could talk to him. I didn’t want to upset or worry Michael, and I knew that Rob would most definitely not approve of me going to Adam for advice. But Adam knew Michael better than Rob did. They had been friends and roommates, and I needed someone else to talk to about what was going on with Michael and how to get him to come back to me.

  “You’re his friend,” I said. “And you know him well. I need to get through to him and I need him to stop beating himself up about things that he was born into and has no control over.”

  “Honestly, Lisette, if Michael is flat-out telling you that he doesn’t want to have children, then you should probably accept that as his true feelings on the matter. I mean, why else would someone even say that?”

  “He didn’t say that he didn’t want to have a baby,” I said. “He said that he couldn’t because he was afraid that he would do something to hurt the child.”

  Adam stopped walking and turned to look at me with a look of disgust on his face.

  “Remind me why you’re even still considering this as a viable relationship?” he said.

  “Adam, that’s not at all helpful,” I frowned.

  “No Lisette, I’m serious. I don’t even care if you want kids or not. But can you honestly look me in the eyes and tell me that you’re okay with the idea that if you did somehow become pregnant with Michael’s child, that he would want to inflict harm? That’s messed up.”

  “He doesn’t mean it like that,” I said as I tried to get him to see that Michael was just so worried about what he thought might be a predisposition to bad parenting, that it had him thinking illogically.