by Wyatt, Dani
“Yeah, well, it’s all I can do to try to keep myself from Colin’s wrath, I don’t need to try to befriend my future husband’s current fuck.”
As a matter of fact, it would be great if he would just continue to fuck the staff and leave me alone. He doesn’t even find me attractive. Why can’t we just have a marriage on paper without the other accouterments? I’d rather stay a virgin forever than let him be the first.
“Well, as much as I try not to listen to her bullshit, she told me you had a little trouble last week.” Mac set down his knife and fork.
Lilly felt the catch in her chest. The fork in her hand shook slightly. Mac was the only person in the world she could talk to about Flynn.
She set her fork down and clutched the linen napkin over her lips for a long moment.
“I wanted him to die. Right then, something in me snapped, and all the hate and fear and disgust in my life came out on him.” Her voice shook as she looked up to see Mac’s watery, turquoise eyes on her.
His rough fingers pulled at her wrist until she yielded her hand.
“I wanted him to be gone. I don’t want to feel anything. I hate him for making me feel something; it only makes everything harder. But, I couldn’t do it. He wanted to die, too, I think. That’s why he came.”
“I’m sorry, Lilly.”
“Me, too.”
“I think he came for you. For the possibility. I know what that feels like. Men like us, in families like ours, we live a hard life. You have to be cold, leave any weakness behind. But, when someone grabs our hearts, it’s like an entire universe opens up that we never expected. It’s a shock. We don’t know what to do, and it can drive us to do things we never imagined.” Mac settled back into his chair his hand still warm on hers. “When he looks at you, that’s what I see. A boy stunned by the new world you’ve opened up for him and he has no idea which way to turn.”
“Maybe. All I know is love is for fairy tales with dragons and wizards and happy endings. Not for us. Not for me.” She raised her hand to push back a renegade curl from the center of her forehead. “I’ve never seen anyone get their happy ending in this life; it’s all smoke and mirrors and pain and disappointment. Better to just keep your expectations low and your guard up.”
Mac squeezed her hand.
“Oh, now you’re being dramatic. Cut the shit; you can be happy. You’ll find your way. I see it in you. Anyone can change; maybe Colin will change.” Mac screwed up his face with that last part.
“There is nothing about that man that will change. He’s as entrenched in his ways as the Presidents’ faces at Mount Rushmore. It would take a nuclear charge to shake his resolve. He’s a sociopath. This family and their ideas about marriage are from the sixteenth century.”
“Look, he’s still a man. Try not to spit in his face every chance you get. Try a different approach because the one you’ve been using—a hammer to the face and that snappy tongue of yours—isn’t the way to a man’s heart.”
That asshat has no heart.
Lilly knew if Mac understood the depth of Colin’s cruelty, he would never be guiding her down this path.
“Fine, can we talk about something else?”
“Fine. You have time for a game?”
Lilly glanced at the clock. It was 4:40 pm and Colin left this morning for Boston. The driver would certainly be reporting back as to her whereabouts every minute, but Mac seemed to be on the approved list of places she could go.
“Sure. How many moves before checkmate?” she asked.
The bet was no longer who would win or lose, but on how many moves it would take before she cornered him.
“Ten, if you can control that mean streak and take pity on your grandfather.”
Lilly stood up to grab the chess set from the game cabinet across the room as the young worker cleared their early dinner plates.
The great room filled with soft music and the sound of light chatter from the residents in the dining area.
A blanket of sadness covered her as she looked across the jewel toned, textured fabrics of the sofas and chairs to see a couple sitting next to each other, holding hands. The man’s cane settled next to his leg as the woman leaned onto his shoulder, and he gently kissed the top of her head.
He loves her. I can see it, even now. They have to be eighty or ninety and they’re still in love. What is it about this family? It’s never about love. It’s always commerce. Loyalty, sacrifice for the greater good. I’d rather live in a shack and scrape for every meal and have what they have than live in a castle with what waits for me.
“Ready?” Lilly looked down to see Mac smiling and tapping his diamond pinky ring on the tabletop.
“Sure. Too bad we can’t handicap you and tie half of that brain behind your back.”
“How about I close one eye and use my mouth instead of my hands? That make you feel better?”
“I’ll still lose, but I’d like to see that.”
“Just go, your move.”
Chapter Eight
Jesus fucking Christ, I feel like I’ve been in solitary for a year.
Flynn struggled to choke down the eggs and bacon Eloise brought him for breakfast. The last two days were rivers of sweat and chills, dreams and reality all mixing into a kind of surreal stew.
“Can I get you anything else?” Eloise’s stoic countenance told him she was here doing a job and could give less than half a shit if he really needed anything.
“I’m good.”
Without a word, the slight, serious young woman headed out the door and across the courtyard back to the main house.
Fuck me. At least I can draw a fucking breath without feeling like some psychotic grandmother is stabbing me with hot knitting needles.
The guest house of the estate would be an ample family home in most suburban neighborhoods. It sat unused the majority of the time, and Flynn found it humorous to find decades-old family photos accenting the corners and tables still in use around the home's tastefully decorated interior.
Flynn had never known his biological mother. She was a dancer at one of the many strip clubs under Colin’s thumb. After Flynn was born, she disappeared, leaving him in the hands of Margaret, Colin’s wife, while she stood nine months pregnant herself.
Soon after Flynn landed on their doorstep, Gideon was born and Margaret retreated into her own world of yellow pills, leaving the boys to be raised by the house staff and the cold hand of their father. The boys fought each other relentlessly from the time they could raise fists until Colin channeled their angst into the ring. That drove both boys to become skilled and ruthless machines inside the eight sides of the fighting pits.
Staring into the Kodak image of the four of them that decorated a side table in the living room, Flynn saw himself smiling back at the camera in a triumphant raising of some trophy, both boys covered in sweat and bruises.
Flynn put the fork to his mouth, then stopped as he caught just a glint of copper hair across the courtyard as Lilly disappeared into the back of the long, midnight-black limousine waiting to whisk her to her servitude.
Flynn felt like someone dropped him with a brick to the head. The air turned sour, and he fought the urge to run out the door and chase down the taillights as they retreated down the half-mile drive lined with mature willows.
He fought for a breath, leaving the tray of food on the coffee table as he stepped toward the window to see the last glimpse of the black car turn onto Lakeshore Drive and disappear.
The antibiotics were doing their job, and Flynn paced the living room, images of the girl who blew his world apart running in an infinite loop in his mind.
Some people say you fall in love a little at a time, like a wine glass filling drop by drop until it finally flows over the rim. That wasn’t his experience.
He and Lilly were connected from that first moment she emerged from the car and onto the steps of her new palace prison.
Long ago, Flynn’s stepmother instilled in both of the boys that l
ove had no place in their lives. Neither she nor his father ever offered a soft place, a nurturing lap or a gentle ‘I love you’ whispered after a bedtime story.
Even the staff that helped with the practicalities of raising two boys kept their professional distance. They were all too aware what might befall them if it was discovered they were getting too close. Offering too much.
“Love is for the weak, for the pitiful souls with stars in their eyes. Don’t ever think love will find you, Flynn. You are unlovable and lucky we have allowed you here as part of our family. Don’t ever forget your place. The son of a whore. I... I’m a Godly woman. Otherwise, I would have thrown you back on the street the day you dropped on my doorstep.” Flynn could still hear Margaret’s cruel, indifferent voice from the doorway of his childhood bedroom.
Even all these years after she let a handful of capsules separate her from this world, he believed every word, up until she arrived, and the tangled web of every emotion he had ever pushed away rushed over him like a tsunami.
From that day, Lilly became his obsession.
Every breath he took filled with ways he could be near her. Colin entrenched her immediately in her new role as his captive as Flynn shadowed her like a mist, her scent flowing into him like billions of tiny hot daggers.
Their stilted conversations in the hallways and gardens after she arrived turned to paragraphs, and paragraphs into stories and stories into secrets as her green eyes looked past the stone of Flynn’s exterior and found something even Flynn did not know existed.
He found it impossible to fight her pull. After Colin had settled her into her new role as his golden ticket, he gave her freedom to move around her new home.
On a Sunday, a bit more than a month after she'd arrived, Colin was away, and Lilly ambled around the kitchen, unwrapping the stark green salad left prepared for her. Flynn locked onto her scent as he came through the back entry, heat rising up from his toes as he heard soft footfalls on the worn oak floor.
“Hey.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets, his uncivilized cock already lurching up at the sight of her.
Lilly startled before allowing a half-grin to turn up one corner of her mouth, but the words that followed did not reflect her smile. “What do you want?” Almost seven weeks in her new home had done nothing for her general mood.
“I want to know if you thought about what I said. Last night.” Flynn blocked the aisle between the cabinets and the center island as she tried to move by.
“Which part? The stupid part or the ridiculous part?”
“Stop it.” Flynn grabbed her wrist as she turned to go back around the opposite direction.
“Don’t touch me.” Lilly wrenched her arm, but Flynn’s grip was iron.
“Why don’t you just go? I’ll buy you a fucking plane ticket, and you can go back.”
“Why don’t you mind your own business? God, who do you think you are? I don’t need another master; I have plenty already.”
The feel of her skin under his fingers ignited the wolf inside. Being this close made his chest constrict like drying concrete, threatening to suffocate him.
“I said stop.” He tightened his grip on her. “Don’t do this. You don’t have to. What can they do to you if you go back home, huh? Nothing — I won’t fucking let them. I don’t want you to leave, but I don’t want you to stay and be a pawn in this sick, fucking life. Trust me, it only gets worse.”
He stared at her cherry pink lips as they drew into a frown. She blinked twice, then filled her lungs, and he knew the fight going on inside her.
“Trust you? I haven’t trusted anyone since I gave up on my own mother protecting me. Trust. You’re funny. Who do you trust? Huh? You’ve had such a fairy tale upbringing here? So full of trust and love?” The slight Irish lilt in her voice thickened as her ire rose.
Lilly’s mother had worked very hard to prevent Lilly from adopting the voice of home. The kids at the village school made fun of her ‘accent’ as they did her mother who, until her shameful pregnancy, had lived her life in America where she prayed her daughter would one day live.
Flynn listened to her and could only think of how he would scale a fucking wall to try to get her out of here, out of this sick arrangement that would ironically make her his younger stepmother.
“Yes, fucking trust me.”
He knew he would never have her, but he wanted to save her, to protect her.
Flynn fought the urge to let his eyes fall downward. The lush curve of her chest rising and falling with each quickening breath sent his wayward dick in an upward direction.
He thought about how Colin chastised her in front of both the boys at dinner the first night in her new home. Snorting and sneering as he called for the server to remove her plate of filet and fingerling potatoes, ordering her on an immediate diet as her pale cheeks rushed with the blood of her embarrassment.
She’d traveled halfway around the world to stay with the man who would be her husband. He’d greeted her with a slap to the face when she turned from his kiss and now humiliated her and left the table without another word, leaving her sitting with two strangers who would someday soon be her stepsons.
Gideon laughed and cleaned his plate with a smile, then left Lilly and Flynn in silence.
She sat straight in her chair. Hands in her lap. Eyes forward. Her face set in a stare that made her look more like a Michaelangelo sculpture than flesh and bone.
Flynn could feel time stop; his entire being seemed to shift as they sat silently in that room. For twenty-seven years, he had known far down in his soul that love was an illusion for the weak, that life was not for pleasure but for duty and, at best, a tentative truce that allowed for times of jagged peace.
As he stared at the ivory angel across from him, a hurricane built within his chest as a low vibration buzzed inside his head and through every vein as his blood inexplicably warmed. Fissures formed in his stoic facade—minute, microscopic questions that threatened to challenge everything he knew about life.
“What are you staring at?” Having finally had enough, Lilly turned her head to glare at Flynn, and the chambers in his heart lurched and skipped.
“You’re not going to eat?”
Lilly smiled, and Flynn’s face turned hot.
What the fuck is this? She’s a fucking girl, why the fuck you turning into a pussy all the sudden? This isn’t some Harlequin romance you fuck.
Flynn had to shake his head to get the voices to stop. Something was different about her. Something wrapped around his throat and squeezed when she looked at him, and an overwhelming urge to taste her cherry pink lips had him entranced.
“No, I’m not going to eat. Would you care for my delicious plate of broccoli and lettuce? It certainly looks decadent; I just can’t eat another bite. Maybe I’m just still overwhelmed by the warm welcome.” Her golden-green eyes dared him to challenge her.
“Come on. Let me show you something.” Flynn stood up, flicking his head toward the leaded glass French doors of the massive dining room that led to the terrace.
She glared at him.
Flynn leaned against the dark wood trim that decorated the door frame. Hands down in the pockets of his jeans as his gray T-shirt stretched across the flat of his chest.
Jesus, I can practically see my heart tapping on the front of my t-shirt. I need to get her out of here, give her some relief, some air. Let her fucking know I’m not the enemy. What the hell I am, I’m not sure. Fucking girl has my head screwed on like a crooked bottle cap.
Flynn gave her a minute, letting her take a breath and hopefully realize he would stand there and wait until she made the decision to follow.
With a sigh, she rose from her chair and pushed her curls behind her ears only to have them defiantly fall forward again.
The intense heat in Flynn’s chest rose to a point that he almost lost his balance as the caveman inside of him started making crazy ass demands. The way her top teetered beautifully on her waist, only to open up to
the roundness below, sloping out to hips that filled her soft plaid skirt as she tugged at the waist hem of her sweater, had him warring with desires that went beyond any he'd ever known.
“So, what was your name again?” She stood next to Flynn as he lost himself in the peaches and cream of her face. “Hello?”
“Flynn.”
Get your shit together, bitch. She got some magic potion she slipped in your drink when you weren’t looking? You forgot your own fucking name?
The Dunleavy estate was built by the Fisher family back during the glory days of the automobile barons. It sat high on a hill, overlooking Lake Saint Clair, and the original boat house at the bottom of the hill held three antique, classic mahogany boats.
They walked, making stilted small talk as Flynn guided her down through the sides of the estate to a hidden path that ran through a border of trees and down until they could hear waves smacking and lapping against the break-wall.
Inside the boathouse, the moor lines pulled as the vessels moved with the motion of the water. Flynn looked over to see the Irish beauty’s face relax inside the cool darkness.
“This is beautiful.” Lilly stood staring out at the water, crossing her arms over her chest.
Flynn sat down on the long wooden bench against the back wall, tipping his head for Lilly to follow, and she dropped her arms and took a hitched step in his direction.
He could see how she tugged and played with her sweater, wrapping her fingers in the hem and pulling at it over and over, and the way she tried to minimize her limp. Her skin looked as soft as silk. His hand twitched, daring him to reach out and touch the rising pink on her cheeks.
“What happened to your face?” Her lack of filter made Flynn smile.
“It’s my job.”
“Really? What kind of job leaves you with that?”
“I fight. That’s my job.”
“Huh. That’s kind of a shitty job.”
“Not really. It’s the best part of my life. I love my job.” Flynn turned and gave her a smile. Her chirpy, slight Irish accent only made his blood run faster.
“I don’t have a best part of my life. I sort of thought coming here would change that. But, it’s not off to a great start.”
