My heart ached at the thought of a young teenage Brandon roaming the streets of South Boston with his gang of troublemaking compatriots because they were the closest thing to family he could find. I’d seen enough of that type back home. Their friendly fist bumps and encouraging slaps on the back were likely the kindest physical contact he’d received. No wonder he couldn’t forgive himself for letting them go to prison while he took the easy out.
I sighed heavily as I let the water run over my face. It was still a giant mess, and even though I felt like I knew—and even loved—Brandon better for it, I wasn’t sure I could handle the aftermath of whatever was going to happen next. Jane had told me to sleep on it, but the truth was, I already had. Things already seemed different, even after five hours of sex. What was I going to say when he woke up? I couldn’t be with him with this kind of drama afoot, but I wasn’t sure I could tell him no either.
How could I say no to Brandon Sterling?
I was interrupted from my brooding by a large pair of hands sliding around my waist. I twisted around with a start and found Brandon standing behind me in the shower, completely naked with a hungry, searching look in his eyes. He took up most of the room in the small space, and pushed me back against the wall, so that the water streaming from the rain-nozzle poured over his face, coating his long lashes and face with water, of which he didn’t even seem to be aware.
“Hey,” I said softly over the hum of the water.
I had been so lost in thought, I hadn’t even heard the bathroom door open and close, hadn’t registered the slide of the shower curtain when he’d stepped in. But now he had my attention—one hundred percent.
He didn’t respond, just let his gaze rove over my body, followed by his hands. His finger trailed up from my hips and up the sides of my ribs, cupping my breast briefly while he drifted his thumbs over my nipples.
“So beautiful,” he murmured, entranced by his small movements. My breath caught in my throat as he bent down reverentially to kiss one pebbled nipple, then the other, which he sucked briefly in between his teeth before releasing it with a small pop. His lips slid up my chest, tracing my collarbone and up my neck, where his tongue twirled around my pulse with maddening circles.
“Brandon…” I groaned, slipping against him as my legs started to lose their ability to bear my weight. His hands immediately fell from my breast down to cup my ass firmly, holding me up as he pulled me against his erection.
“I got you, baby,” he rumbled before taking my mouth in a gentle, thorough kiss that seared more than the hot water spraying both of us from above. His hands continued to knead my backside tenderly, and a few fingers slipped lower to massage my damp entrance, which was already opening for him of its own accord. All of my previous reservations melted completely away under his touch; the only thing I could think of was how badly I wanted him inside me again.
“Do you feel it, baby?” he asked against my neck. “Do you feel how perfectly we fit? Your body was made for me, Skylar, just like mine was made for yours.”
He pressed the entire length of his trim torso up against mine as if to illustrate the point, eliciting a further groan from the back of my throat as I pawed desperately at his shoulders for him to come even closer.
“Please,” I panted into his slick skin. It was the only thing I could say.
He purred against me and tilted his hips so the tip of his erection teased at the sensitive, open juncture between my legs.
“You want this, Skylar?” he asked as he rolled his hips in, pressing just slightly inside before pulling back out. “You want me inside you?” His tongue slipped into my mouth with a searing kiss before as he pressed inside me just a little bit more. And pulled back out.
“Ummm,” I moaned, biting into the hard lines of his shoulder. My eyes squeezed close, and I squeezed his trim, muscular waist with my legs. I wanted him so bad I could hardly find a way to breathe properly.
“Say it,” he ordered, pressing his erection just an excruciatingly bit further before taking it out yet again. “Tell me.”
“I want it,” I moaned into his skin, tilting my hips toward him in a failed attempt to pull him inside me. His cock slipped tantalizingly between the slippery space between my legs, but still didn’t completely thrust inside me. “Please, Brandon, please!” I begged.
“Okay,” he assented.
But instead of pounding into me with the ferocity I craved, he gripped my ass tighter and entered me at an excruciatingly slow pace forcing me to feel every bit of his length as he slid into my darkest place, inch by terrible, wonderful inch. Still holding me firmly against the shower wall, his flexed biceps the only sign of effort, he arched away from me slightly to watch as he moved his cock in and out at the same agonizingly slow cadence.
“Look at me, Skylar,” he commanded, and my eyes, which were squeezed shut, opened to find his baby blues blazing with love and passion.
“Touch yourself, baby,” he commanded softly. “I want to feel you come around me.”
Without breaking our eye contact, I obediently slipped two fingers between us to massage my clitoris, which was already swollen and throbbing from want. The combination of his slow, forceful movements with the flutter of my fingers was instantaneous.
“Aaah!” I cried out, unable to keep my eyes open any more. “I’m…God, I’m close, Brandon!”
“Not yet, baby,” he cooed in my ear. “Hold it, just a little bit more.” He started to pick up the pace, and I could tell by the slight shaking of his body he was having just as hard of a time holding back. “Just. A little. Bit. More.”
I moaned even louder, pushing off the wall behind me meet his unforgiving movements. Unable to control myself any longer, I tightened suddenly around his cock, which ultimately was both our undoing as he lost his control and started to pump faster and more erratically.
“Oh fuck, Skylar!” he groaned, an animal in the throes of pain and pleasure, slamming back into me against the wall my head landed with a satisfying clunk. I couldn’t have cared less.
We fell apart simultaneously, biting hard into each other’s shoulders as both our orgasms swept through us, quaking through muscle and bone. Brandon’s powerful legs finally buckled, and as we came down from our mutual high, he slid down to his knees in the shower, keeping me securely wrapping around his waist while the water continued to pour over us.
“Please,” he croaked through long, drawn breaths. He leaned down and kissed me, so tenderly it almost hurt. It seemed I wasn’t the only one still reeling from our conversation. “All I am now…it’s yours, I promise. So please, Skylar, let me…let me try. Just let me love you the way you deserve.”
We sat there for a few more moments, letting the hum of the shower fill the silence as we breathed into each other’s space. I gripped him tightly and threaded my fingers through the wet curls gathering at the nape of his neck. Even under running water, he smelled so good. How could someone who felt so good be wrong for me?
“Please,” he whispered again huskily. His arms were still wrapped around my waist, holding me in a vice-like grip. He was scared, I realized, to let me go.
There was nothing else I could say. In my heart I knew I was never going to leave him anyway. I whispered back:
“Okay.”
~
Chapter 40
I awoke the next morning feeling sore, disoriented, and slightly hungover. True to her word, Jane made herself scarce enough that I didn’t know if she had actually come home last night. Her absence had allowed Brandon and me to share a bottle of cheap wine and greasy Chinese food in between two more bouts of noisy, soul-searing sex. He didn’t try to convince me to go back to Beacon Street although I imagined he missed his bed. His feet protruded at least six inches off my college-issued double mattress like he was some kind of giant.
But whether it was because Miranda was still there or he knew it would just make me uncomfortable, the question of leaving never once came up. There was no checking of his cel
l phone messages, no borrowing my computer to look at his email—for the first time since we’d become involved, Brandon’s undivided attention was focused squarely on me.
I had a fairly consistent internal alarm that woke me up most mornings. Sometime just past six, I slipped my robe back on and left Brandon snoring in my bed, a pillow clutched endearingly over his stomach like an oversized teddy bear.
But I had to get up. Unlike most weekends, when some herbal tea and a glance at a textbook would often help me back to sleep if I wanted, this morning my stomach was in complete knots as the events of the past twenty-four hours came crashing back all over again. I brewed a quick cup of Irish Breakfast tea and sat quietly on the couch. Jane had told me to think about it, so I had. And although things looked different in the morning, I wasn’t sure I liked their hue.
I huffed. I wanted things to be resolved quickly, but that definitely wasn’t in the cards. My gaze dropped to the coffee table, where the crumpled copies of Brandon’s divorce records still lay face up. I set my mug on the table and reached for the wrinkled pages.
They were standard court documents, one packet laying out the terms of the separation and the official filing for divorce. Miranda had been given an extremely generous monthly maintenance, along with the residency of their New York apartment as well as a house in Cape Cod. The other stapled packet was a copy of the most recent terms of their divorce agreement, which, I noted, Brandon had signed, but Miranda had not. I wasn’t sure why he had brought them—perhaps to prove to me how close he really was to being finished with the whole tawdry business.
I hesitated. Brandon’s entire life was contained in these pages. Was this really something I should be looking at?
It didn’t take long for my curiosity to get the best of me, and I continued to page through the lengthy document that only Brandon had signed. It was also a fairly standard agreement, its length only accounted for by the sheer volume of assets the two of them shared. It was also incredibly generous, granting Miranda more than seventy percent of their liquid assets and property, as well as almost all of their personal stock portfolio invested in non-Sterling companies and all of their properties, including the house on Beacon Street. The reason was soon clear: Brandon was giving her everything else in exchange for sole ownership of everything related to Sterling Ventures and the law firm. He meant what he said: he didn’t want her anywhere near his company or its boardroom.
Why didn’t she want to take the deal? She’d end up personally richer than her husband, although they’d both still be billionaires by a long shot. Was it just to mess with him? Or was she still trying to stay connected to him to put off the inevitable?
As I flipped through the rest of the agreement, I continued to ruminate on that unpleasant—yet unfortunately understandable—possibility until I saw a name that made my entire brain shutter completely. The end of the agreement included a set amount of their assets to be paid into five different trusts, separate from the money that would be split between them. The first two trustees’ names were familiar enough—Douglas Murphy and Michael Larsen were clearly the formal names of the men who had gone to prison in Brandon’s stead, causing a permanent stain on their records that would follow them and their job prospects for the rest of their lives. Paul Sterling was obviously family, maybe his father. Emily Petersen was also clearly of some relation through his foster family. It was the fifth name on the list that stopped me.
Victor Salvaturi Messina.
Victor Messina was a relatively common name among second and third generation Italians. I had actually met two different ones personally: one in New York, one in Boston. And I seriously doubted that Brandon care enough about the pizza delivery kid from the North End to give him several million dollars.
No, I knew exactly who Victor Salvaturi Messina was. Brandon Sterling was make payments into a trust for New York gangster who had nearly cost my father his life. He was doing exactly what he had told me not to, and getting wrapped up again in crime.
He’d said that part of his life was over. He’d said he understood why I didn’t want him coming near those men. I thought he understood how desperate I was to get me and mine away from this man, from this kind of life! The last thing I wanted to do was give the keys to a piggy bank to a man who would never be able to get enough. Who would never, ever leave us alone.
A jingle of keys at the door shook me out of my stupor, causing me to drop the papers back on the table like they burned my fingers. Jane entered the apartment, slow and sluggish in an outfit clearly designed to be worn at night in much warmer temperatures.
“Oh, hey!” she greeted me with a start when she saw me sitting on the couch. Jane frowned at my expression as she took off her coat and quickly hung it on the rack next to the door. “Everything okay?”
With a shaky hand, I pointed a finger at the papers on the table.
“Ah,” Jane said knowingly, following my direction. “You looked. Yeah, it’s a shitload of assets, isn’t it? You know these kinds of people are loaded, but it doesn’t really hit you what that means until you find out they could buy Nicaragua if they wanted to, does it? Well, the good news is that if you ever do marry the guy, you’ll be able to negotiate one hell of a prenup.”
“It’s not that,” I replied. I grasped at the papers and held out the one with the trust agreements on it. I pointed to the name that had me quaking with bad memories.
“Vicomte Slughead Meshuggena?” Jane joked as she leaned over the couch, squinting her eyes before she stood up. “Goddammit, I should have brought my glasses with me. The guy wasn’t even worth taking them off anyway. What does it say?”
“Victor Salvaturi Messina,” I said slowly as I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “He’s a small time mobster. He’s bad news.”
I took the papers back and set them down on the coffee table as if they contained some terribly contagious disease.
Jane shed her shoes and walked around to sit next to me on the couch. “Is he…”
I nodded. “Yes. He’s the same guy who beat the shit out of my dad. And for some reason, Brandon is giving him money. A lot of it.”
Jane nodded slowly. She didn’t know that much about my family’s entire history with the Brooklyn crime families, but she knew about the most recent events, enough to comprehend the consequences of this particular revelation. She reached over cautiously and set a hand on my shoulder while I stared at the crumpled sheets of paper.
“What do you want to do, Sky?” she asked quietly, checking over her shoulder toward the bedrooms, where Brandon’s light snoring filtered out every few seconds.
“I thought…” I whispered vacantly, “…that I could do it. That I could forgive him and we could move on. But this…he’s getting involved with this scene, going over my head, inviting this fucking scum into my family’s life permanently. How am I supposed to get my dad clean if he has this menace forever in his life? Is this supposed to pay him off? Does he really think a guy like this won’t come knocking around for more if he knows it’s there?”
My voice had become shrill to the point of being almost soundless. I took deep breaths as my chest constricted. I pushed my hands over my face as if to cleanse myself of the situation. It helped, if not entirely. When I pulled them back through my hair, sudden clarity came over me. It didn’t matter what Brandon’s intentions were or whether or not we were desperately in love. It didn’t matter that I had never felt like this for anyone and suspected I never would again. I absolutely could not allow my family to come anywhere close to this kind of mess again. And I could not be with someone who wasn’t honest with me.
“Do you want me to ask him to leave?” Jane asked. “Say the word, Sky, and I’ll march back there and kick his naked ass to the curb for you. You know I will.”
I looked up. I loved him too. I knew that. But I didn’t want to end up like these women I met at the clinic, who threw their lives away for a man because of some bullshit notion of love, and I certainly couldn’t be in
debted millions of dollars on account of Victor fucking Messina. I was better than that.
I turned to Jane, full of decision.
“No,” I said quietly, yet definitively. A deep mixture of resolve and regret throbbed within my heart. This was going to be hard, but I knew I had to do it.
“Jane,” I said. She looked at me with sympathy, as if she already knew what I would ask. “Can you help me out with something?”
“Need me to call the security guard?”
I shook my head. “No, no. Just…can I borrow some clothes? I’m going to leave him a note saying I’ve gone to the library or something and will be tied up with research all day. He’ll go, I’m sure of it. Just…tell him that’s where I went, okay? And that I didn’t want to wake him up.”
She looked uneasy. “Skylar…”
“Please, Jane. If I see him right now…I don’t think I’ll be able to do this.”
All of a sudden, I couldn’t move fast enough. I stood up and darted quickly and quietly about the apartment, gathering my books and papers I needed and jamming them into my messenger bag. I grabbed my cell phone, keys, and wallet from my purse and slipped them inside too, flipping efficiently through the bag to make sure everything else was in order. When I looked up, Jane was still sitting on the couch, watching me with obvious sadness.
“Jane,” I said, my tone bordering on a bark, the way it did when I was both frustrated and determined. I wanted to get past this, and Brandon could wake up at any minute. “Clothes. I can’t leave the apartment dressed in nothing but a bathrobe.”
Legally Yours (Spitfire Book 1) Page 44
