by K. I. Lynn
“Like she’s another notch to add to your bedpost.”
I stepped forward, but was stopped. Lila’s hand pressed against my chest, a burning point that seared me. Her small frame was no match for the two of us, and I hated that she tried.
“All right, boys, back up.”
Andrew backed off like a good little puppy, but I refused to let it go. I wasn’t going to be blasted by a shit like him.
“I have to go to the bathroom. Do you think you two can be civilized?”
No.
“Don’t worry,” I said as I downed the rest of my beer. “I’m on my way out.”
I had to get out before I hurt my hand on his face.
I pulled out my wallet and threw forty bucks onto the counter, then walked away. The noise and the crowd had picked up, and I looked back to find their attention solely on each other with Lila clearly not happy. Dangerous ideas formed, and instead of leaving, I changed course from the front door to the side and the hall the led to the restrooms.
I was going to prove to him that he wasn’t wanted or needed. And I was going to punish her for ever having him inside her. I didn’t fucking care that it had been years. I didn’t like it.
There was an alcove for the fire door, and I hid there until she approached the door and I grabbed her wrist and pulled her in. She was lost in a haze of confusion of the situation, but by her submission, she knew my touch.
I had her lips against mine and climbing onto the sink in seconds, legs wrapped around my waist, hands gripped to my shoulders, and her fucking hot pussy against my dick. I sunk my teeth into her shoulder for mark number one.
“But you left,” she said between pants.
I released her skin and licked it lightly to soothe the reddening mark. “I couldn’t exactly follow you into the bathroom to fuck your brains out with your knight in shining armor watching, now could I?”
By the time I was done with her, he would fucking know she was taken.
Cover her with my come and mark her as mine.
CHAPTER 18
My anger grew with each step back to my condo. It should have been gone. I fucked Lila in the bathroom, gave her a new pet name of Honeybear, and came all over her face and chest. She was covered in come and I made sure to smear it all over her skin to dry. The smell of come wasn’t strong, but it was distinct.
It was the thought of her being there with him and not me. Talking with her, laughing with her. And I knew he was eye fucking her.
Would he try to make a move? Try to kiss her? Lila was pretty submissive—would she submit to his advances?
Fuck.
I almost turned around, returned to the bar so I could drag her out and the fuck away from him. Their familiarity, their history, drove me insane. There was an ease in their relationship that we neither had nor could have.
I hated him. Loathed him for returning to her life.
Three steps in the door, and my fist was in the drywall when it should have been against skin.
I hated him. Hated the fact that I hated some inconsequential guy all because he knew the woman I was fucking in more intimate ways than I ever could.
My knuckles throbbed, and I pulled my hand out. There was no broken skin, but one knuckle did appear to be swelling.
Great.
I froze at the sound of the doorbell. My parents were in Chicago for the weekend and Lila had a key. No one else knew where I lived.
One glance through the peephole, and I pulled open the door to a normally timid Lila who was lit up. Her eyes were wide, jaw set as she launched at me, pushing me back into the wall.
“You, sir, are a fucking bastard.”
She was angry, livid, and it was a fucking turn-on. The beast was ready to turn her around, press her against the wall, a fuck her.
“What the fuck was that all about?”
I smirked at her. The only reason she was back mere minutes after me was because…
“He noticed.” I leaned down and whispered in her ear as I pulled her closer. “Good.”
Her hands smacked against my chest. There was really no physical strength to her, and her anger amused me.
“I can’t fucking believe you.”
“You’re the one who said you were mine,” I said, throwing her own words back. “I was just making it known.”
She struggled and pushed away.
Well, fuck that.
I crossed my arms over my chest.
“You’re always trying to push me away, but I want you to think about it. I mean really think about me no longer being around…or better yet, me with another man, screaming out his name as his cock is buried in me. Tell me, what do you think now?”
Another man’s arms around her? His cock buried in her warm pussy, come dribbling out.
Hell fucking no! Mine! She’s fucking MINE!
I grabbed her wrist without even thinking. Impulse was my truth. The truth I didn’t want to face or admit.
My breath picked up as I looked down, a shake beginning deep in my core. I let go, but she grabbed my hand.
“Shh,” she soothed as she caressed my fingers with her thumb.
I drew in a stuttered breath. It was all too intense on an emotional level, too intimate. I didn’t want the feeling that clawed in my chest, didn’t want to want her so fucking much the idea of her being with someone else made me see red.
Her gaze flickered behind me. “Did you punch another hole in the wall?” she asked. “Were you angry that you let yourself go again and showed me the real you?”
I froze. Where the fuck was she going?
“Did you do that because you were pissed at taking me in a public restroom, or because you claimed me as yours?”
All of the energy drained from me.
“What does it matter?” I asked with a sigh.
“What does it matter?” she mimicked. “We’ve been going with the flow, and then all of a sudden… I don’t get you.”
“You’re the one who wants to ‘be.’ I told you it was a bad idea,” I spat as I picked up the glass of bourbon I’d forgotten about when we left. It burned on the way down, but I needed it for the conversation she started.
“Yes, but your actions back at the bar? Laying claim to me caveman-style? Being possessive and jealous?”
Fuck. She was right. My need to one-up Andrew, to get him to back the fuck up, let the beast divulge the greedy and selfish desires I kept from even myself.
“You changed things.”
Changed?
No!
Memories of all the photos of death and destruction the Marconi dealt over the years flew through my mind. If things continued, I would condemn her to be another photo in a file with his name on it.
I turned and grabbed hold of the glass, then swung my arm out with all the frustration in me, sending it shattering against the wall.
“Fuck!” I tugged at my hair. “Why was he there?”
“Who? Andrew?”
“Who the fuck else?” I asked, not caring if I sounded like a condescending ass. “He doesn’t know shit about me!”
“Well, he seems to think he knows something,” Lila said.
I began pacing, my gaze anywhere but her. The way Andrew talked about me, the venom he spewed meant he’d talked to people about me.
“With all the rumors, he probably believed them. He seems the type.”
Lila held up her hand. “Before I touch that last part…what rumors?”
I stopped and stared at her. Since the beginning, I told Jack that I needed anonymity, a clean slate. The problem was not everyone could keep their damn mouths shut. There was a posture to gossipers. The stare and whisper, looking around. They didn’t see me at first, but their demeanor would always change when they noticed me.
While I knew that most of the office didn’t know anything about me, some remembered my name from stories in the news. They recognized me.
“Lila, you’re intelligent, so I know you’ve figured out transactional law and c
ontracts are not my area, but I can do it.”
She nodded. “You don’t have the personality, and no one graduates with honors from Harvard Law to work contracts at a law firm in Indianapolis, albeit a large one.”
“Exactly.”
I froze as realization dawned on me. We’d reached a point, a crossing. The next words would change things.
We already changed things.
As much as I hated to admit it, they had. I pulled at my hair in agitation, my jaw locked down. Andrew knew rumors, but I didn’t want Lila to know rumors.
“The last few years…hell, they’ve been hell…” I trailed off. How much could I tell her? My hand clenched my chest, and I fisted the fabric there. “I can’t go through that pain again. If I love you, then that’s something they can take away from me. Take revenge on me by hurting you. I can’t deal with that.” The strength left my voice, the next words barely a whisper. “Not again.”
The whispered thought of her being gone tore at me, and I closed the distance between us. My lips on hers, tongues tasting each other as I pulled her so close there was no space left between us.
Before things got us sidetracked, mainly my ever-growing constant need to be inside her, I slowed our kisses.
I reached up and caressed her cheek with the backs of my fingers.
“I’m not worried about you being hurt by me, Lila. I’m worried about you being hurt because of me.”
There. An admission I hoped would appease her, because the energy flowing through me was going to explode soon, a fight in which I would drag out her darkness. Something to appease my own, appease the beast screaming inside me.
I returned to pacing, the agitation crawling up my throat, constricting me. She was a nervous mess, but I was a motherfucking hurricane.
A shudder rolled through me as I tried to reign in the emotions that were trying to explode. There was so much. So much I did wrong.
I was stuck, alive, standing in front of a woman who made me feel something, and I fucking hated it. I’d paid for my sins and I refused to pay again, but for some fucking reason, it felt like nothing had changed since the morning I woke up.
Nothing except the fragile woman in front of me that infuriated me. It was her fault I was voicing my pain. Because I met her and her irresistible call.
She fucking caused the flare in my chest, the anxiety that beat like a war drum in my veins.
My entire body was tense with anger and frustration, and I saw just how much so when Lila’s body leaned away from me.
“You think being a federal prosecutor is great. You work hard to put heinous criminals away, hopefully for good. You don’t think about the repercussions. About how the ones you’re prosecuting or their families may be angry with you and want revenge for you trying to uphold the law and make people safe. You don’t think about how someone will try to take your life because they blame you for ruining their life or their loved ones. They don’t care who else gets hurt in their quest to get to you. Sometimes they even threaten them to scare you.”
I moved to the couch and sat, my eyes fixed on the fireplace, agitation leaking from me in the form of my right leg bouncing at a frantic pace. The energy couldn’t be expelled fast enough and I picked up the only thing left on my side table, which was a sandstone coaster, and twirled it in my hand.
In my periphery, Lila moved closer but remained silent. She was so close to me, too close. They would come, and I would lose her.
A snarl ripped through me, and I pulled my arm back and threw the coaster against the fireplace where it shattered before falling to the floor and joining the pieces of glass.
“I was cocky. I thought nothing and no one could touch me. I was very wrong.”
So very fucking wrong, and I paid the ultimate price. My life was penance for that attitude.
Lila dropped to her knees in front of me.
Each word was fucking torture.
“I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t handle it, not after… I tried, I did. I failed miserably when not even a month back in, I exploded in the courtroom.”
“But you’re not a prosecutor anymore,” she said.
If only it were that simple. Vendettas rarely are, especially not with the head of a large criminal organization very pissed that you put his daughter in jail.
“Do you think that matters, Lila?” I asked. “This condo? It isn’t even under my name. Because I’m still alive.”
I couldn’t take it anymore, couldn’t stand another word about the past, about the shit I brought down on myself.
It was her fucking turn.
Her gray-green eyes stared at me with pain, but they were also devoid of so much.
“Why are you so empty?” I asked, turning the tides. If I was opening up, she sure as fuck was going to let some out as well.
She stared at me. I could see in her eyes the way she tried to find words to answer, and I had a feeling she was going to try and brush it off like she’d done so many times before.
“I can see it as clear as day. It’s one of the many things that drew me to you. You’re empty. You wear a mask to hide it, to make yourself seem somewhat normal, but your face… Do you know how expressionless it is when you think no one is looking? I provoke you to get some kind of reaction like you provoke me to feel. Have you ever been happy?”
She continued to stare at me, unable or willing to answer, but I saw the shake begin in her hand.
“Is that why you chose law? Contracts in general, because it’s cold with precise guidelines? The people at the office don’t see it. They think you’re frigid, but I know you have a loving soul. The problem is you were never shown love, right? That’s very cruel, to grow up without love.”
For too long I’d gone with a hatred built up in me with no outlet. From the very second I first saw her, I knew there was something broken about her. Even since then I’d seen snippets of whatever horror laid in her past, but nowhere to direct the anger that had formed. No person to hate, to hunt down.
“Shut up!” She jumped to her feet, fists clenched at her side as she shot me daggers with her eyes.
Even though she pushed me, she resisted when it was turned on her. I moved to stand in front of her, to leave her no space to run until she let it out.
“Why? Because you don’t want someone to point out what you’re lacking?” I hit with low blows, words to incite her. “That’s why things failed with you and Andrew, isn’t it? He couldn’t take your darkness, couldn’t fill your void. He seems like the type to want to fix something that’s broken.”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” she screamed as she beat her fists against my chest. “Please, it hurts!”
The tormented look on her face was heartbreaking, but she needed the evisceration of her pain.
“Why?” I pressed.
Her face scrunched up as the pain overtook her. “Because I was never wanted, I was never good enough, never smart enough, never loved! He hated me. I was in the way of his happiness, shackled to him.”
He?
“He hated that my mother died and forced me upon him. A child he never wanted from a woman he knew for a day. The things he said, the things he did, the looks he gave…so many times, he wouldn’t even give me that. It hurt more than when he smacked me or grabbed me and yelled. Those were the only times he ever touched me. He was my father. He was supposed to love me. Protect me!”
The blood in my veins turned to ice. Fuck.
It was one thing to speculate, but another to have it confirmed.
“My stepmother, she ignored me. Oh, God…the nasty things she would say to bring me down. She knew he wouldn’t stop her. He encouraged her. Then there was Adam…”
Fuck fuck fuck! A grown fucking man wouldn’t stop a woman from abusing his child? What the fuck kind of bastard was he?
What worried me the most was the lost look in her eyes and the way she trailed off. Her arms crossed her chest as her entire body shook.
“He took high advantage o
f being able to say and do whatever he wanted.”
Do?
Do?
What the fuck did he do to her?
“He hated it when I moved in, hated his beloved stepfather bringing him a sister, and made it his personal mission to make me the most alienated and bullied kid in school. I kept my head down, my mouth shut, and prayed for someone to see me. For someone to love me… I still don’t know why I never killed myself. I thought about it, a lot.”
Her voice cracked at the end.
I stood there staring at her, completely numb, watching as she crumbled before me. Sobs tore from her, each one a searing pain to my chest. I pulled her to me, holding her up as she fell apart.
I stroked her hair in an attempt to calm her.
“You’re dead inside, just like me.”
“That’s not true,” she said with a shake of her head. “You have very strong emotions, violent almost.”
I let out a maniacal laugh full of bitterness and regret “You don’t get it.” I pulled back to look at her. “I wish I was dead,” I said, letting out my darkest secret. “I wish the paramedics had taken five more minutes to get there.”
I heard the smack before I felt it. My vision blurred as my head jolted to the side. My gaze snapped back to her, stunned as to what happened. Her hand was up, and tears slid down her cheek.
“Please, don’t leave me,” she whispered through broken gasps.
“I wish the battery on the defibrillator had been out,” I pressed on. “That way they wouldn’t have been able to restart my heart. Because then I wouldn’t feel dead inside, in pain daily. Because I wouldn’t be here, hurting you.”
How much more of this can we take before we break?
I didn’t have an answer, but I continued on, telling her my story without telling her everything. Morbid details of the condition I was left in.
“I’m angry because I’m alive. My heart, my soul…they’re gone, dead, but my body remains. This is my purgatory.”
“No, no, no, no! Please, please, Nathan… I can’t fathom… I need you. You make… I’m falling… Please, please, please.” The words bounced out between gasping breaths.
