by Sybil Bartel
“I’m not insulting your success. I admire every one of your accomplishments. I’m asking who chose this color on your lips.” As if to prove his point that I let every one of the things he was suggesting happen because I relinquished control over myself, his thumb dragged across my lower lip.
His words making me feel small, I shoved his hand away and spit out ugliness I couldn’t take back. “So what if I didn’t pick out my makeup. What did you do? What did you ever do besides blame me?”
Calm, still, his amber-green eyes holding me hostage, he reduced me to my own lies. “You were always submissive, Sanaa. I did not make you that way.” Dismissing me, he turned toward the door.
The girl who first laid eyes on the beautiful golden boy next door, the boy who made her heart come alive and sing at first sight, she frantically pushed her way to the surface and bled out desperation. “I wasn’t alive until I met you.”
Ever so slightly, he paused, but then he took another step.
The pendulum that was my emotions around him swung the complete arc away from anger and whipped past desperate as it hurdled toward panic. “Wait. Please.”
His next step didn’t come.
Frantic to keep him, I dropped back to my knees because it was the only way I knew how to show him what I wanted. “I was living, but I wasn’t alive.” Memories of another life dripped pain on my heart. “I didn’t use my voice for song. I didn’t know hope. I didn’t know life could be full of colors that made my heart sing.” Colors of his rich, dark hair and dusty lips and sun-kissed shoulders. Shades of turquoise ocean days and navy, star-dotted nights. Being with him had made everything brighter, and he’d given me the courage to sing arousing, seductive songs about a kind of love most people only dreamt of. But now I was an empty shell who performed on stage like I knew what I sang of. With both nothing and everything to lose if he walked out that door like this, I begged. “Please.” Please. “Give me my heart back.”
His broad shoulders tensed, but every other muscle in his military-hardened body froze.
Fearing what I would see in his eyes if he turned around, terrified I wouldn’t get the chance, I fueled the incineration of my demise. “Make me your Songbird.”
He turned.
As if he knew I was on my knees, his hard, cold gaze was already angled down to meet me. “My Songbird,” he stated.
“Yes,” I dared to answer.
“Mine,” he ground out, hardness creasing little lines by his eyes and bringing his eyebrows down low.
Terrified, determined, I didn’t drop my gaze. I waited. I waited for him to decide exactly what our future would be, because he was right, I was submissive. And with him, that had always felt safe. But once I fell into the real world and hit the impossible, dizzying sphere of fame where my feet never touched the ground and I didn’t have a single guiding hand, but a thousand every second of every day, nothing had felt safe.
So I waited.
I waited for the one man who truly knew me.
I waited with strained vocal cords and crushing anticipation while he held my heart in his impossibly hardened countenance.
But then my Ronan, the boy who was a man, the only calming influence in my life, he robbed me of any hope of refuge. “What exactly do you want from me?”
I only thing I’d ever wanted. “Just you.”
He started to turn.
“I want attention and safety and control,” I stupidly blurted. “I want emotion and feelings and dominance and protectiveness.” I wanted everything.
“You have my brother for that.” Controlled and smooth, his voice suddenly like thick caramel, the blow hit harder than if he’d yelled at me.
But then I recognized it for what it was. Jealousy. Deep seated and significant in ways I was only beginning to fully understand after his brother’s admission.
Tempering my voice, I tried to alleviate fears I was responsible for. “Your brother never brought me joy. Your brother never owned my smiles.” I briefly wondered how big of a mistake I was making with my next words, but I said them anyway. “Your brother never felt like you.”
“Yet you still mistook him for me.”
I knew he wanted real answers. We had never discussed this. Not rationally. Me throwing desperate apologies at him wasn’t an explanation. I’d always wanted the chance to explain. I’d cried for it. But now that I had the stage, my reasons a decade ago were trivial.
All but one.
“I feared if I didn’t give myself to you before you left, you wouldn’t come home to me.” And I feared if I hadn’t signed that contract, and if he hadn’t come home, I would’ve been left with nothing. I didn’t want to ever be in the same position again that I was in when my mother died. My seventeen-year-old self didn’t think I could survive a second loss, not one that involved him. Signing that contract was more than a financial decision and a dream. It was an emotional security blanket.
“I was not going to take advantage of you that night,” he adamantly protested.
“I know.” That was the problem. He’d told me I wasn’t ready, and I’d thought I was. “But I wanted you to.”
He gave his same argument from back then. “You were still seventeen.”
“I was one month shy of my birthday.” Four weeks didn’t matter. “I knew what I wanted. You wouldn’t have been taking advantage of me.” I’d wanted nothing more than to give him my virginity.
“Your grandmother wouldn’t have seen it like that.”
“She was old-fashioned and ailing, and she wouldn’t have had to know,” I uselessly protested, because all of this conversation was too little too late, and the same thing we’d argued about back then.
“I made her a promise,” he reminded me.
Sighing despite myself, I repeated what he’d said to me back then, what I knew he would say now. “And you never break a promise.”
“Not intentionally.”
I couldn’t not say the words. “You broke your promise when you left me.”
“You tried to fuck my brother.”
Recoiling as if he had struck me, I let ten years of holding in an ugly admission roll off my tongue. “I wanted to believe he was you.”
As if expecting my reply, as if he had been waiting all these years to ask me, he didn’t hesitate with his next question. “Because he had no qualms about statutory rape or because he actually wasn’t me?”
His astute question only twisting the knife, I whispered the truth. “He wasn’t choosing the Marines over me.”
“I was choosing an honest future that would support you.”
My damp hands rubbed down my thighs as my poor upbringing vainly tried to smooth the expensive, wrinkled fabric of my dress. I wasn’t so naïve that I didn’t understand that back then. I knew he’d wanted to take care of me, and I’d respected that, but it didn’t make my feelings any less real, even if they were selfish.
And I was too embarrassed back then to tell him food was hard to come by on my grandmother’s meager resources. I didn’t let on that I was always hungry and I’d been worried what would happen once he enlisted, let alone deployed.
I also never told him food had been even harder to come by growing up in Trinidad. I was too ashamed to admit my mother worked the streets to first put alcohol in her bloodstream and second, a very distant second, secure food for herself, then her daughter. It wasn’t until her fifth arrest for prostitution in a brothel that was raided that it was discovered she was sick. And even then, it wasn’t a question of finding a relative to take in her fourteen-year-old daughter. A country with too many stories like mine and not enough resources to help, I’d merely been a statistic until I found a letter in an old shoebox with a return address in the United States.
I wrote to a grandmother I’d never met and asked to come live with her. Sending the letter, I’d had visions of fancy houses with cupboards full of food and driveways full of cars. In reality, the woman who sent me a plane ticket did so only out of obligation, and it
’d cost her. A fact she never let me forget in the short time we had together.
But none of that changed the events that led us here.
“I know you were trying to secure a future for us.” I knew he’d always wanted to be a Marine, and I didn’t want to say anything to make him feel anything other than proud of that. “That’s the exact same reason why I’d signed that contract.” I looked up into his impossibly complex eyes. “I was trying to create a future for us too, one where you wouldn’t have to deploy.” Casting my gaze away from his, I gave him the truth of my ten-year-old insecurities. “And I needed a safety net in case you didn’t come home from war.”
STARING AT HER ON HER knees, I didn’t want to absorb any blame.
I didn’t want to admit I hadn’t taken her virginity because I was protecting her.
That promise I’d made to her grandmother wasn’t for her.
It was for me.
I’d been stalling.
I knew who I was back then as sure as I knew it now. If I’d taken her virginity that night, I would’ve stripped her innocence and broken her with my demands. She would’ve been left reeling when I deployed the next day, and I wouldn’t have been able to guarantee she’d be waiting for me when I came home. I’d selfishly wanted to make her my wife before I introduced her to my dominance.
I didn’t psychoanalyze why the fuck I needed to dominate. I just did. But I’d been losing the power exchange with her, even back then. The second that video went viral, I’d lost control—of her, of the situation, and of my future. Joining the Marines was the best decision I’d ever made, but it also took away my control. Which had only made my need for her worse.
Logically it was easy to understand why she’d wanted Vance to be me, but I wasn’t a forgiving man.
“Life is war.” I’d fought for every damn thing in it. Except maybe I hadn’t fought hard enough for her. Her eyes, her curves, her smooth skin, the submissive pose, I wanted to fuck her so bad right now I could taste the dominance coursing through my veins.
But I didn’t deserve her.
Maybe I never had, and fate had made the hard decision I’d refused to.
“Life is a gift,” she corrected as she regally knelt at my feet and mocked my entire fucking existence.
But even that didn’t stop me from wanting to wrap my hand in her hair and pull until her head was back, her neck was exposed, and she was breathless just from that single touch. I wanted to push her to the edge and dominate the fuck out of her.
With my mouth, my hands.
Then I wanted to fuck her harder than any sparring session with my brother she’d ever experienced. I wanted to show her she didn’t need him or that bullshit he fed her disguised as control. He was sparring with her because he wanted it. He wasn’t giving her what she really needed.
But I could.
I could give my Songbird everything.
Except right now I needed to ask her about Abernathy and what she and Vance knew, if Amherst was a liability anymore. I also needed to check in with Luna and Harm. I needed to do my damn job.
But I fucking stood here.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she whispered.
“Like what?” It wasn’t a question. It was a test.
Quieter, lower, her voice dipped to submissive. “Like you want me.” She dropped her gaze. “Like you want to touch me.”
Shoving my hands in my pockets so I didn’t wrap them around her throat, I leaned down and let my breath touch her ear. “I don’t want to touch you.”
She sucked in a sharp breath.
Coating my tone in deceptive seduction, I gave her reality. “I want to break you.” Then I wanted to put her back together with my own brand of dominance.
The wind howled outside, and she shivered. “I’m already broken.”
It wasn’t the rawness in her voice that surprised me or the way she said broken that made me want to feed my cock into her mouth. It was her actual admission. I never knew if she saw it all those years ago. If she saw my need like I saw hers. If she knew why she’d been drawn to me. Or if she knew she was the gift between the two of us, the Songbird that’d brought music to my darkened soul.
“Now you’re telling me the truth?” I challenged, feasting on the curve of her ass and the swell of her full hips as she rested on her heels. I wanted her to lie. I fucking prayed for it. Because the second she gave me permission to touch her, I wanted to punish her.
“I never lied to you.”
My dick pulsed. “Except about the contract, my brother and Kyle Abernathy.”
She flinched as if I’d struck her.
A better man wouldn’t have salivated to taste that fear.
Her throat moved with a swallow, but her hands, her long fingers, they remained on her thighs. “What do you want to know about Kyle?”
Kyle. First name. Familiarity.
“What does Abernathy have on you? Besides the fact that I killed his assistant and beat the fuck out of him,” I clarified.
All the color left her face, and she turned her head to look out at the ocean. “You should keep the past in the past.”
Too late. “How deep is Amherst involved in this?”
“Call Vance,” she evaded. “Tell him to come here.”
My phone vibrated in my pocket, but I ignored it. “So you can get your stories straight or so he can be your mouthpiece?”
Her shoulders tensed, but she looked back at me. “The Ronan I knew was never cruel.”
“Then you didn’t know me.” The vibrating cell stopped, then started again.
“I knew the man who deferred enlisting so he could stay with me until I graduated high school. That man wasn’t cruel. He was protective.” Something close to regret flashed across her face, and her voice softened. “What happened to you in the Marines?”
Not giving her an inch, I threw it back on her. “What happened with Amherst?”
She stared.
I let her.
For a half a minute, I let her see every angry, depraved thought. I let her look at me without hiding the fucking knife carving out my chest every time I so much as smelled her. I let her see the real me.
Then I reined it all in.
Disgusted or frightened by what she saw, she shuddered. “Do you really want to know about Leo?”
“Will I have to kill him after I find out?”
Her perfect eyebrows drew together. “You were never purposefully violent.”
“You don’t know what I’m like when I fuck.”
Her eyes widened with shock, but she didn’t comment.
“You can get naked with my brother and let him leave bruises on you, but I can’t say the word ‘fuck’?” I was pushing her on purpose, because every second longer I stood in her presence, the truth became clear.
“It’s not the word I object to.” Her hands moved absently over her thighs, and she averted her gaze again. “It’s the act.”
“You think I don’t fuck?” I was never going to own this woman.
Her gaze hit my shoulders, and she took a steadying breath, but her hand went to her chest like she was trying to hold herself together. Not giving me eye contact, she answered. “I think I don’t want to think about it.”
The wind kicked up again, echoing the storm in my head, and suddenly I was over this bullshit conversation. Talking wasn’t going to fix the years between us. We were beyond that. “I think you do. I think you intentionally let yourself get roughed up by Vance. I think you wanted me to know exactly what you’ve been doing, and I think you knew the second you read the first note that it was Abernathy. The only question is why Trefor or Vance hasn’t caught him yet.”
“Do you…?” She rubbed her chest before her hand moved to her throat. “Do you have a girlfriend?”
Now she was asking? “No.”
I could have elaborated. I could’ve given her the truth that I hadn’t allowed myself to feel anything for anyone since her. I could’ve ended this whole fucki
ng charade right then, but I didn’t. In my fucked-up head, she was still the shy, innocent beauty of a girl who’d moved in next door when we were teens. I would always see that girl. But I’d be a fool to ignore the fact she sold out concerts, made more money than I’d ever see, and she was a household name.
I couldn’t compete with that.
Nothing I could offer her would compare to what she’d given herself. Which stupidly only made me want to put my hands on her more.
Fantasizing about my palm over hers and my fingers on her jaw, I forced myself to stick to the script. I was here to protect her. Find this asshole. Take him down. For that, I needed more information. “Have you seen Abernathy at any point?”
“No.” She shook her head once, but she still wouldn’t look at me. “We can’t find him.” Strain pulled her eyebrows together. “Are you married?”
Not giving her a direct answer, I tested her. “Do you see a ring on my hand?”
Exactly as I thought would happen, her gaze shot to my left hand, but it was still in my pocket. Now she had a choice.
Staring for a beat, she inhaled. Then she looked away. “You did that on purpose.”
“Yes, I did.” But she didn’t ask to see my hand or push the question.
She gave a brief shake of her head, and her long dark hair moved in waves across her back. “You always wanted to control me, control my movements, my thoughts.”
“No, I wanted to own you,” I corrected. And I wanted her participation in that as much as I wanted to dominate her sexually.
“Wanted.” She snorted out in exasperation. “But now you don’t?”
I didn’t respond.
I waited.
Controlled, still, my breathing even, I feigned a patience I had in every aspect of my life except with her.
Eight seconds later, I was rewarded.
Her head lifted, and her midnight eyes met mine.
I didn’t hesitate. “Now I want to fuck you.”
Her lips parted, heat touched her cheeks, and she tried to hide it, but her body gave her away. She fucking trembled. Then she used my ten-year-old words against me. “You used to want to make love to me.”
