by Casey Hagen
Text copyright ©2018 by the Author.
This work was made possible by a special license through the Kindle Worlds publishing program and has not necessarily been reviewed by Romig Works, LLC. All characters, scenes, events, plots and related elements appearing in the original The Fidelity World remain the exclusive copyrighted and/or trademarked property of Romig Works, LLC, or their affiliates or licensors.
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Table of Contents
Scorched
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
SCORCHED
A Dangerous Intentions Novella
Casey Hagen
Hagen Novels, LLC
KENNEBUNK, MAINE
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Beatrice Addington slid into a seductive night with a man who lured her with his confidence, hooked her by bringing her sexual fantasies to life, and using cunning, turned tables on her by sucking her into his plot for revenge against her father. One night of unbridled passion costs her a lifetime’s piece of mind leaving her trapped between a familiar, staid past and an unpredictable, treacherous future. With the truth of her father’s betrayal revealed, Beatrice must decide where her loyalties lie and how far she’s willing to go to get what she wants.
And she wants Micah Alessi.
Micah Alessi couldn’t have conjured a more fitting weapon for his revenge against Wallace Addington than the man’s own daughter, Beatrice. When one night of mind-blowing sexual exploration creates feelings anchored deep in his heart, Micah will do anything to keep Beatrice ensnared in his web of erotic discovery. After gambling on a hunch and setting Beatrice up to see the truth about her father, he hunts for ways to keep her bound to him long enough to become the one thing she can’t live without. What better way than setting her up with Infidelity and signing a yearlong contract binding her to him?
With the deal made, Micah follows the path to revenge, bringing Beatrice along for the ride. But can Beatrice shun her family and accept who she’s at risk to become while by his side? Can she survive being bound to a man seething with hate that poisons the people he cares about most? And can Micah accept that by possessing Beatrice, he might taint her, destroy her heart, leaving her a shell of the woman he loves?
Chapter 1
Beatrice flexed her toes against the velvety microfiber chair nestled in the corner of Micah’s bedroom. With her feet curled under her, she studied Micah’s sleeping form in the dark. His muscled body lay across silk sheets, exposed to the air and her gaze, all except where the trail of dark hair disappeared under the fabric draped over the hefty bulge at the junction of his thighs.
Hunger swept through her, slickening the folds between her thighs, tightening her nipples, and making her mouth water.
The voracious need between them overruled the sting of betrayal that had burned through her veins, the heat so searing, that after the rush, ice cold desolation followed.
He’d played her by bringing her to The Cellar.
He knew she’d see her father there…she’d bear witness as the mask of the man fell away, shattering every last illusion she’d maintained about his character as a faithful husband and responsible father.
A father who’d raised her at arm’s length with occasional pats on the head as a demonstration of love and pride, leaving the bulk of parental responsibility on her mother and nannies.
And despite his lack of affection, she’d lauded him as her hero, because it’s all she knew.
Did Micah think that with the truth revealed, she’d cling to him in the ruins of her fractured world?
And by sitting in his chair, in the dark, watching him in the glow of skyscraper lights spilling into his penthouse windows and falling over his olive skin, wasn’t that exactly what she was doing?
Micah betrayed her, and still she’d let him strip every last thread from her skin and play her body. She’d traded her pride for his promise of pleasure.
What did that make her?
She’d never played with fire. Like any child, she’d been taught the dangers of intense heat.
Hot meant pain.
She’d grown up in a home with only gas fireplaces, no fire pits, and even the tapered candles remained out of reach.
She’d never gotten close enough to know the intrigue of the flames as they romanced you. The way they tantalized. The discovery of a beautiful burn luring you in closer and closer with the promise of comfort.
The ultimate blaze of passion.
Since Micah… since revealing her desires and indulging in secret fantasies as her adopted alter ego, the sexually fearless Natasha, she’d danced within the flames of lust and intrigue. With every touch, the fire between them forged a bond that turned her into someone she didn’t recognize.
When Micah had peeled back the curtain revealing her father’s depraved dealings, he’d set her adrift from the life she knew, with no anchor in the brewing storm.
If he thought exposing her father’s lewd behavior would drive her into his arms permanently, he might have just met his match.
He stirred.
His tan leg slid out from under silk sheets. Reaching across to her side of the bed, his hand roamed the surface, searching.
She itched to go to him. To seek the comfort of his arms from the uncertainty of her future. But she’d only take that comfort after using the last vestiges of willpower she possessed to force him to come to her.
That fragile seed of power she held over him became her beacon of hope that she’d survive the collision of the two worlds she stood between.
He sat up, his gaze finding her across the room. She couldn’t read him. Not when the dark hid the nuances of his facial expressions, but that muscle along his jaw finally jumped, and she knew she’d displeased him by leaving his bed.
And by not returning when his dark gaze demanded it.
What would Natasha do?
She’d raise her chin on an air of conceit and look away. Beatrice did just that.
Her heart thundered in her chest as she waited him out and thank God she had a window next to her or she would have made a fool of herself staring at the wall.
Energy sizzled in the room with the sound of his feet hitting the floor. “You left my bed,” he said, his voice vibrating with irritation.
The power she held, as meager as it was, bolstered her confidence and gave her tongue license to say just about anything. After all, what else could he take that he hadn’t already?
“I didn’t realize you regarded me as nothing more than a dog to be tethered to a leash,” she said without looking at him.
He stopped. Tension radiated from him.
A direct hit.
“You know that’s not what I meant,” he said quietly.
“Do I? I’m not sure about anything anymore when it comes to you. Maybe I never was,” she murmured, tightening the crisp dress shirt of his around her. She wished she hadn’t slid it on to begin with.
“Then why are you here?” he said, taking a seat on the ottoman before her.
He should look ridiculous, his six-foot-two frame naked, sitting before her, with his knees jutting up, and his hands dangling from forearms balanced on them.
Her gaze drifted between his thighs and the arousal
evident there.
Heat rose to her cheeks. The heart of her yearned to be touched, but she denied the desire by clenching her crossed legs tighter against the urge to open to him.
“Because of you, I have nowhere else to go,” she said as she curled her fingers into the arms of the chair.
His gaze drifted to where the shirt she wore parted with her movement, revealing a sliver of skin between her breasts. “Not true. You can go home.”
“How? After you showed me what my father is, how can I do that?”
He caressed her knee with his fingers. “Easy. He doesn’t know you saw him. You can sail through the door of your father’s castle and pretend nothing ever happened.”
“I can’t look at him. I don’t know if I can look at him ever again,” she said.
“How about you put the blame for that where it lies… with your father?” he said, tracing his fingertip over her shin, eliciting shivers from her.
Two days ago, when they had arrived back at his penthouse, she’d been so lost after what she’d seen and terrified of what it all meant that she had clung to Micah with nothing more than a meager explanation. Barely an acknowledgment of what lay beneath his anger and need for revenge.
She needed to find out if she was just a weapon in the war against Wallace Addington that he liked to fuck or someone he had feelings for who he just happened to discover was the perfect weapon.
“His behavior is vile, yes. However, what does it say about you, your need for revenge, and how you value me that you would put me in a position to witness it?” Her mind immediately went back to the moments Micah let himself be vulnerable with her. The stories he’d shared about his grandmother, losing his parents, cooking for her, and on the first anniversary of New Year’s skating since his grandmother passed, taking Beatrice instead.
Everything in her told her his words were genuine.
But that dark past he’d only touched on hovered in the background. She didn’t know that Micah and how much of that man, the one who’d do anything to get what he wanted, still lingered inside him.
“We’ve had this conversation. I told you I’m sorry that I handled it the way I did. You said you wanted to stay. Do you still want to stay?”
She met his gaze and glared. “Sometimes I wish I had never let you touch me,” she whispered.
“Why?” He took her anger, and even as he did, his warm fingers curled around her slim foot and pulled it into his naked lap. He glided his thumb over the arch agonizingly slow, his gaze locked on his task.
The goal: to hold onto her.
He knew just what he was doing. Every time she had wavered in the past two days, he’d touch her and remind her of the invisible bonds that held them together.
He’d been the only man to recognize the woman inside craving adventure, desperate for someone to set her free.
“Because now I know what it’s like to be cherished,” she said, her voice breaking on the words, showing him just how torn up she was inside.
He ducked his head, his hands roaming along the calf, kneading the muscles there. “And that’s bad?”
“When it locks me in another prison? Yes.”
“Loving someone isn’t supposed to be a prison,” he said, his narrow-eyed, intense stare holding her in its grip as he uncrossed her legs and lifted her ankle to his lips.
Her breath hitched and her mouth parted at the feel of the moisture from his warm tongue on her skin. “You think I love you?” she asked, the choppy rise and fall of her breasts affirming her excitement.
He grasped the shirttail of one side of the shirt and peeled the fabric from her, the button seam catching briefly before releasing on her painfully stiff nipple. Micah, being the expert seducer, never broke eye contact despite the display, with his shirt partially removed and her legs open enough to offer a glimpse of the heart of her.
“I think it takes a lot more than sex, no matter how good, for someone to forgive what I did,” he said, caressing her cheek.
She turned into his hand, just a fraction, but a surrender all the same. “That’s not an answer.”
His thumb grazed her cheekbone. The other danced up her leg to the curve of her hip. “Yes, I think you love me,” he said, sliding from the ottoman to kneel before her. He tucked his arm around her and jerked her to the edge of the chair. His fevered skin burned against the inside of her thighs.
The shirt slid off her arm with the force. She laid a palm on his chest, her fingers curling into the sprinkling of dark hair there, tickling her palm. “Don’t expect the words.”
“I don’t,” he said, the relief evident in the way his jaw relaxed and his lips twitched. Dipping his mouth into the curve of her neck, he caressed her skin with his attentive lips, humming against her as he feasted. His thumb fanned over her nipple, just once, as if waiting for her approval.
Taking his hand, she moved it back over her breast, and together they swirled around her nipple, sending her into the flames once again. She arched into him, letting him take her again like he’d been taking her since that night at The Sliver when he’d promised to satisfy the hunger inside her.
But while he took, he stoked the fire between them. He taught her how to let out the sexual being buried inside, and emboldened her to take what she craved from him.
She reached between them, found his hard cock, and ran her thumb over the leaking head.
He growled low in his throat at the contact, dropping his forehead to her collarbone on a groan.
When she pulled her hand back, he glanced up at her. “Don’t stop touching me, Beatrice,” he said in a harsh whisper torn from deep inside where he carried pain from his past that he’d only begun to hint at.
Needing to banish any glimpse of his pain, especially when she carried so much of her own, she brought her thumb to her mouth, glistening from his cock, and closed her lips around the saltiness of him.
Heat reddened his cheeks, something she had never seen from him before. His labored breathing told her just how much she had turned him on. Burying his hand in her hair, locking his fingers, and tugging at her scalp, he tilted her head back and crushed his mouth to hers.
Their insatiable appetites took over the lingering sting of betrayal as they devoured one another in a clash of lips and tongues.
He kneaded the flesh of her hip as he pulled her tight to him, his hard, throbbing length demanding relief between their joined bodies.
Dismissing finesse, she reached between them, guided him to her entrance, then clasped his ass muscles, sinking her nails into the hard flesh, and pulling him to her, desperate to relieve the ache.
He thrust deep, so deep, her head fell back as she struggled to breathe while the inferno flared to life inside her. With each stroke, the dig of his fingers into her mercilessly drawing her in, she climbed higher, his position allowing him to graze her clit with every thrust until she thrashed in his arms, desperate for release.
She wrapped her legs around him, gripping tight, every wild grunt slipping from his aggressive mouth, making her frantic for more.
The pressure built until she’d die if it didn’t break. Just like in the past, he knew, and increased his onslaught, pulling his length out until just the head remained then slamming into her again. The sound of his skin slapping hers drove her higher.
A scream tore from her throat. Clasping his biceps, the muscles flexing under her fingers, she sank her teeth into his chest, crazed with the sharp pleasure as a flood of liquid head rushed from within her, coating them both.
He hissed, but held her head to his chest as if welcoming the punishment of her bite as penance for how he’d hurt her.
“Hold onto me,” he ground out.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and clenched her thighs around him as he lifted her with him when he stood in a tantalizing display of power.
Four long strides later, he lowered her to the bed, keeping them joined the entire time.
“Don’t leave me,” he whispered, his dar
k gaze piercing her.
Tears welled up in her eyes, and she bit her lip.
“Please,” he begged.
She nodded, the tears breaking free and rolling down her temples.
He began to move, his gaze never leaving hers, no matter how many tears fell and pushed her to the brink all over again.
Except this time, he toppled over with her on a lusty shout.
He continued to rock inside her as he kissed the tears away before licking them off his own lips.
In that moment, one thing became abundantly clear: if they had any chance, she needed to balance the power between them.
After discovering who her father was, she could never surrender to a man completely again.
Chapter 2
Micah waited for his right-hand man, Sebastian, while intermittently pacing his home office. He gazed out his floor to ceiling windows at the people of Manhattan flowing in rivers down the sidewalks of the Upper East Side. The masses swelled at the intersections, spilling out onto the edges of the streets, bursting at the seams to get to their destinations.
Something told him that any minute, Beatrice might hightail it out of his life forever and although he couldn’t force her to stay, he intended to be around to say his piece if she wanted to leave.
She could dart into that sea of people and be gone in the blink of an eye.
Maybe not at this very moment since she lay soaking in his massive jetted tub.
She’d retreated into herself last night, and for the first time in a long time, too many years to count, he’d tasted fear.
His money, his power, they could gain and hold anything he wanted, except for one thing.
Beatrice.
But an Infidelity contract would buy him a year. If Infidelity would allow it. His previous talks with Karen Flores at Infidelity had been successful with her assurance that when he was ready, they’d be able to pair him up with a suitable woman who’d meet all of his wants and needs.
