* * * *
Chapter 12
Mira
Blaine’s kiss was rough and wild, his lips bruising in their all-encompassing need.
It wasn’t enough.
I kissed him back with equal strength, biting at his lip as he pushed his tongue in between mine, fighting him for dominance. The heat of his mouth was intoxicating, and all I could think of was getting more of it—more of him.
Our tongues tangled and I moaned at the first brush. Yes, just like that—
He pressed down on top of me and in between my legs, and I felt the heavy weight of his cock straining against his jeans just where I needed it as he ground against me.
Yes, yes, yes! My body sang as my clit pulsed from the stimulation, and I rocked up against him to meet his thrusts.
Blaine groaned into my mouth and released my wrists.
I immediately latched onto his shoulders, pulling his chest down on top of me. I wanted to feel all of him against me, wanted all of his heat to consume me—
The unexpected touch of Blaine’s hand against my abdomen ripped me out of my hazed lust more efficiently than a bucket of cold water would have.
I pulled my head back from his kiss with a gasp and looked down. He’d shoved my shirt up high, exposing my soft stomach to his hungrily roaming eyes. And my scars.
“Stop it!” I let go of his shoulders and thrust both hands down in front of me, pushing my shirt down to cover me again before I scrambled to scoot out from underneath him.
Blaine froze, his expression turning from wild lust to confusion—and frustration. “What?”
“You can’t just paw at me like a wild animal every time we get into a fight!” I finally managed to get out from underneath him so I could sit up, clutching my crumbled shirt tighter to my body as I glared at him. The inexplicable wave of lust was—mostly—gone, replaced by anger and fear once more. Though this time, it wasn’t Blaine that caused my hands to shake as they clutched at the fabric of my shirt. It was my own reactions to him—how I couldn’t seem to trust myself around him. One minute I was pushing him far beyond the edge, even though I knew full well it was a stupid thing to do, and the next I was writhing in helpless surrender underneath him. And this time, I didn’t even have the alcohol to blame for my erratic behavior.
No, it was becoming increasingly obvious that, for whatever reason, my brain switched off whenever I was around Blaine Steel—and that… that terrified me to my very core.
“Me?” Blaine pulled back, his upper lip curling with renewed anger. “You were not exactly an unwilling participant, were you?”
“You chased me through the house and tried to have your way with me on the goddamn floor!” I hissed, hating that he knew just how much I’d wanted it. “Tell me how I had a choice in the matter!”
Blaine’s eyes darkened. Abruptly, he stood up, leaving me alone on the soft rug. “Fine! If you want to pretend like you’re a bloody victim, that’s up to you. I’m done with your bullshit.” With one final glare in my direction he started down the stairs. Less than twenty seconds after the top of his head had disappeared down them, I heard the front door slam.
Slowly, I gathered myself up from the floor and wiped irritably at my cheeks. There was no need to cry—I’d wanted him to leave me alone, and he had.
Gingerly, I put a hand to my stomach and traced the scars through the shirt. I couldn’t feel them through the fabric, but I knew their jagged lines by heart.
Past lovers had asked me about them, and I’d lied and said they were from extensive surgery when I was a kid. Blaine would undoubtedly know what they were from a single glance. Heck, he’d probably been the cause of similar scars in his line of work.
The thought of him knowing what had been done to me made me sick with fear. Because the second he knew, he would know that I was weak. A true victim. And I knew what men like Blaine did to the weak.
I swallowed thickly and dropped my hand from my midsection. I had to stop letting him get under my skin like this. I’d thrown wine at him, for Pete’s sake, after goading him on a subject I knew was sore.
Was it my desperate need to show him I wasn’t weak? Or was it… I hesitated to even think the thought through, but dug my nails into my palms to steel myself. Was it that some shameful part of me wanted him to lose control and take me like he had that night at the hotel?
As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t deny my physical attraction to him, and the sex had been…
I shook my head when I felt myself redden at the memory, angry that I let myself be so affected by Blaine’s—granted, godlike—physique. I wasn’t some blushing teenager who had never seen a man naked before. I had to control this—like I had to control my messed up relationship with Blaine.
Trying to befriend him was obviously not going to work out before I could figure out exactly why I was acting like I was around him, so I had to find another way to make him respect me.
I glared balefully down the stairs where he’d disappeared not that long ago. Clearly, there was a huge power difference between us, and when he could run off whenever he didn’t want to deal with me anymore, and I couldn’t, then he had no need to respect me.
But if I wasn’t here when he came home…
My glare turned thoughtful as a plan slowly began to come together in my mind.
* * *
Considering how much Blaine had emphasized that I needed to stay in the house and that he had guards posted to watch the front door and the perimeter, it was surprisingly easy to sneak out unnoticed.
I crawled out of one of the windows facing the back garden and climbed the fence to one of the neighbor’s yards with the help from a garden chair, and from there snuck my way out to the quiet streets.
Even though the house was technically still in London, it was in a well-to-do suburban area, so there wasn’t much of the city’s noise to disrupt the crisp autumn night.
I breathed in deeply, enjoying my first breath of freedom for what felt like an eternity. I briefly considered just running away tonight, but my passport was safely locked in a bank deposit box across town. I wouldn’t be able to get to it before the morning, and by then the Steels would long since have noticed I was gone. I would never make it out of London. No, when I escaped for good, it would have to be a lot better planned.
I spent about twenty minutes walking through the neighborhood, so I was sure I could call a cab without the Steels—or worse, their enemies—getting notified. They might have their eyes on our house, but no one would bat an eyelid at a cab pulling up a mile or two away from our property.
As I walked past the big houses with their lush gardens and lit windows, I couldn’t help but think about how happy I would have been to settle down in an area like this under different circumstances. It was the perfect place to raise children and live a quiet, comfortable life. Heck, I’d even spotted a few apple trees in our own garden. I could have been one of those mums who baked pies and had hot cider ready when her kids got home from school on a cold autumn day.
But that wasn’t how my life had turned out, and I couldn’t spend time crying about that. Not now. I had a few hours of precious freedom to look forward to, and damn it, I was going to enjoy them.
I pulled my phone out of the bag I’d grabbed before climbing out of the living room window and found the number for my favorite private hire cab company under my contacts. I gave my location, and the woman on the other end told me it’d be a ten minute wait.
I found a low fence in front of a house whose windows were dark and sat down to play on my phone while I waited. It was possibly because I was staring so intently at it that I didn’t notice a black Porsche pulling up only two minutes later, until the driver stepped out.
The moment I spotted the leather-clad shoes waiting patiently on the pavement in front of me, every hair on my body stood on end. I snapped my gaze up, ready to scream for help if I needed to. Had one of the Steel’s enemies seen me leave the house after all? It took a few moments fo
r my eyes to adjust to the darkness after the bright light of my phone’s display, but when they did, I recognized the stranger’s dark features. It still took me a few moments to place him.
His dark hair, square jaw, and starkly handsome face looked eerily familiar, and I realized with a start that he had to be related to Blaine. He’d been at the wedding, too, standing next to Blaine and the twin groomsmen at the alter. He had to be Blaine’s brother.
“M-Marcus?” I stuttered, feeling my heart calm down a little now that I was reasonably sure I wasn’t going to get kidnapped.
He nodded once and reached out a hand, clearly expecting me to take it.
I didn’t. Instead, I frowned up at him. “Have you been following me?”
“No.” He didn’t take back his hand, instead letting it remain stretched out between us as a quiet command. “Your phone is tapped. I heard you order a cab. Was in the neighborhood anyway.”
I blinked and pursed my lips. Of course my phone was tapped. Not like they’d let me have access to any unsupervised communication. “I take it you don’t have anything better to do on a Friday night than listening in on your brother’s new wife, then?”
He didn’t respond—just looked at me with that same expressionless stare. It was beginning to be mildly unnerving.
“Look, I’m not going back to that house. Not yet.” I crossed my arms over my chest and set my jaw. “And if you make me, I’m going to scream ‘rape’ so loud your eardrums will burst.”
One of Marcus’ dark eyebrows quirked at my threat, probably because we both knew nothing I could do could stop any of the Steels from doing what they wanted with me.
“You need to come with me. Now.” Though his voice was quiet and calm, the ring of command was unmistakable.
“Didn’t you hear me? I’m not going back there. Your arsehole of a brother is out anyway, and until he asks me to come back, I’m not going.”
“I will take you to my place,” he said. “And I will let Blaine know where to come get you.”
Something in his tone made it quite clear that this was the only deal I was going to get, and since it beat being hogtied and carried back before Blaine even realized I’d left, I relented. With a small sigh, I put my hand gingerly in his. “Fine, then.”
The car ride to Marcus’ place happened in complete silence. There was something dark and brooding about his presence that made my skin prickle with the sort of awareness one gets around a docile predator—alert, but not in full-blown panic mode. Not the most smalltalk-encouraging of moods.
He was different than Blaine in that way. Sure, Blaine had the “lethal predator” vibe down to a “T” when he wanted to, but his brother didn’t put any effort into it. The looming threat I got from him was more subtle and took a while to really register, but once it did, it seemed to just roll off him in waves as if it was his natural aura.
From a psychological perspective, it was intriguing, but I found it a little hard to keep an academic distance seeing as I was trapped in a car with him. At least my ovaries weren’t spazzing out like they did around Blaine.
Marcus drove us to us to an exclusive residential area in central London consisting of newer high rises made from what looked to be mainly steel and glass. He parked the Porsche in an underground basement and led me through the parking garage to a swanky looking elevator, where he proceeded to press the button for the top floor. Of course he had a penthouse.
“You’re not much of a suburban kinda guy, huh?” I said with what I hoped wasn’t too nervous a smile.
He glanced down at me, his expression as blank as ever, but didn’t comment.
“I guess Blaine’s not, either. I mean, I know he just moved into the house as well, but I can’t really picture him living it up in a family home.” I have no idea why I chose that strain of mindless conversation, but now that I was on it, I might as well run with it. The completely silent car ride had given me way too much time to soak in his oddly unnerving presence, so I figured a bit of small talk might help the situation.
Unfortunately for me, Marcus wasn’t engaging. He kept quiet for the entire elevator ride while I chatted away about the house and the garden, motioning for me to step out of the elevator once the doors finally opened at the top floor.
Marcus’ flat turned out to be as spectacular as Blaine’s and my house, but for entirely different reasons. I stopped my chattering when he ushered me in the door to stare at the breathtaking view of London’s skyline through the floor-to-ceiling windows that covered the entire outer wall of the large, open-spaced living room-slash-dining room-slash kitchen we stepped into.
“This is amazing,” I finally managed. I stepped all the way over to the windows and looked out. It felt like the entire city lay beneath my feet.
When I turned around, Marcus had placed a high-stemmed glass on the table and proceeded to fill it with a ruby-red wine. I raised my eyebrows in mild surprise when he held it out to me.
The large man leaned against the kitchen island next to where he’d placed the glass. An invitation to sit on the adjoining bar stool, I assumed. I gave him another hopefully not-too-nervous smile and walked back across the parquet flooring to sit where he’d indicated.
“Thank you.” I took a sip from the glass, because it would have been rude not to. It felt expensive and smooth on my tongue, like thick silk. My next sip was bigger, and not from politeness.
He was watching me again, his expression as unreadable as ever.
I sighed and put the glass down. “You know, it’s really unnerving when you do that.”
His eyebrows rose a millimeter. I took it as a question.
“The silent staring. Or just the silence, to be honest. I think I’d prefer yelling, if this is your way of showing your disapproval.”
“I offered to keep check on your phone because if my father sent someone to fetch you, you’d likely get a few bruises. I don’t disapprove of you trying to escape. Blaine’s a bastard.”
“Oh.” I looked up into his flint-colored eyes with some uncertainty. “Then… why didn’t you just let me get in the cab?”
“Can’t.” Marcus looked down at the counter where he was tapping his fingers against the smooth marble. “He likes you too much.”
“Uhh…” I blinked, and felt my eyebrows creep up as high on my forehead as they could go. “Who? Blaine? He said that?”
“No. Doesn’t have to. We can tell.”
“‘We’?” I inquired. “And how? Just, you know, out of morbid curiosity. ‘Cause I gotta tell ya, I’m not really getting the same vibes. In fact, I’m pretty sure he hates me as much as I hate him. A prime example would be tonight, when he chased me through the house and threw me on the floor because I pissed him off.”
Marcus stilled completely, and for the first time that night, I saw clear emotion crossing his features. Dark anger filtered across his handsome face, but when he turned to face me, only his eyes kept that dark spark—the rest of his expression was as blank as before. “What?”
Uh-oh. If I thought he’d had a scary presence before, it was nothing against the nearly physical tendrils of danger that seemed to creep across the floor and envelop the entire room with his anger.
“We had a fight,” I squeaked, clutching at the wine glass hard to stop my hand from trembling. As angry as I was with Blaine, I was willing to backpedal if it meant his brother would get slightly less terrifying. “It wasn’t unprovoked—I threw wine in his face.”
“He hurt you?”
I thought back to the fight, and realized that no… he hadn’t. I’d been scared, and he had been rough, but at no point had I been physically injured. “No, not really. He just... scared me. And then he left. That’s why I snuck out—I wasn’t planning on running away or anything. I just wanted to—to show him he can’t treat me like that and expect I’ll just be an obedient little woman who stays put.”
I hadn’t mean to confess that—not to anyone, least of all to Blaine’s scary brother, but it just s
eemed to spill out as I stared at his blank face and storm gray eyes.
Marcus looked at me for what felt like the longest time, and I felt like he was trying to X-ray my brain with the intensity of his stare to ensure I was telling the truth. Finally, he nodded and pulled back from the kitchen counter, and it was as if the pressure in the air around us changed, making it suddenly easier to breathe.
“Finish your wine. I’m calling Blaine, and then he and I will talk before you go home. He won’t ever scare you like that again.”
The way he said “talk,” I couldn’t help but wince internally. Seemed like I’d gotten an unexpected ally.
* * * *
Chapter 13
Blaine
“Seriously, what’s gotten into you?” Liam shoved a drink across the table to me as he sat down on the crimson leather sofa on my left side. He didn’t have to shout over the music, even though we were in Red, one of our more exclusive nightclubs. The VIP section wasn’t nearly as loud as the rest of the club, set up to allow for sensitive business deals to be made in the private booths.
“Who actually volunteers for a liquidation job?” Louis chimed in from my right. “Even Marcus’s never done that.”
I looked down at my bloody knuckles with disgust. We killed people fairly frequently, and I knew even the lighthearted twins had had to put a few arseholes down over the years. Men who stole from us, enemies who crossed the line, snitches… there was always a method to it, a nearly clinical procedure that left the least amount of evidence behind. Tie the man to a chair, spread plastic wrapping underneath him, one bullet to the brain. Easy clean up.
That wasn’t what I’d done tonight.
“Of course, Marcus has beaten more than one poor sap who crossed him to death before. Did you know the guy?” Liam asked. Despite their light tones, I knew both of them well enough to realize they were mildly concerned. I couldn’t blame them. When I closed my eyes I could still feel the satisfying crunch of bones breaking beneath my fists.
I Need A Bad Boy: A Collection of Bad Boy Romances Page 65
