Kurt’s lips twitched. “That obvious?”
“Not to her, apparently.”
Kurt had asked Sascha to work on the amendments to the script he had for his first movie adaptation.
Knowing how much Kurt loathed edits, Sean had been surprised he’d been this patient in withholding the request.
“She’s good at it.”
“She’d have to be for you to trust her with them.”
Kurt beamed a grin at him. “You know me too well.”
“Where your work is concerned, you’re anal-retentive, Kurt.”
“Perhaps, but she’s almost as bad as I am. You know she found issues that even my fancy-schmancy editors didn’t?”
“No, but I can imagine. She can be a nitpicker when she wants to be.” He blew out a breath. “I don’t know why you two don’t just write something together. You’re always hashing out ideas in the kitchen.”
Kurt tilted his head to the side. “What would we write?”
Sean frowned then shrugged. “I don’t know. It was only a thought.”
He watched as, now contemplative, Kurt rapped his knuckles against the armrest once more. When his brother fell silent, Sean did too as he stared into the flickering flames of the open hearth.
It was bitterly cold, and though there was still light, the day not even having morphed into late afternoon, it felt grim outside these walls. As grim as his mood.
As the two of them sat there in silence, he didn’t turn his head when the door to the library they were using opened. Staff were in and out all the time, and though the intrusion was irritating, it was damn nice to have people to pick up after him on this level—talk about five-star treatment.
When the figure came to a halt in front of him, he peered up, expecting the butler or a maid. But it wasn’t either. It was Sascha.
Before he could say a word, she slipped her feet out of her shoes, then plopped herself on his lap.
Within seconds, she’d curved an arm around his neck and was nuzzling into him. Her large tits were squashed against his pec, and her soft hair tickled his chin. With a soft sigh, he curved his arm around her, so grateful for her at that moment that he wanted nothing more than to just hide his face in her throat like Tin sometimes did.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he whispered. “So fucking sorry.”
She sighed. “Don’t be. Not your fault. It’s just fucked up and a lot to take in.”
“You’re telling me,” he said drily, pressing his face into her hair. “I would never do anything to hurt you or Tin, honey. You know that, right?”
She tensed in his lap. “Sean, you say that like you were behind this. You weren’t. Jesus. She was the reason I was mad. I didn’t like her from the start, and I was jealous at how she was cozying up to Andrei, and then with this? With the threat to Tin?”
“I brought her into our lives.”
“No. You didn’t. She did. I was frightened, Sean. Frightened and irrational. I wasn’t thinking right. Wasn’t thinking with anything other than my instincts, and those were telling me that another of my children was in grave danger, and once again I couldn’t protect them.” She nuzzled into him. “You understand that, don’t you?”
“Of course, I do,” he rasped. “I just, I-I don’t know what to do, Sascha. Don’t know what to say to you to make things right.”
“There’s nothing you can say to make it right, Sean.” When he tensed, she shook her head. “There’s nothing because you haven’t done anything wrong. It was a knee-jerk reaction, and I realized something today… these past few months? It’s been one huge knee-jerk reaction after another.
“I’ve barely communicated with any of you. I’m here, and I’m present, but I’m not talking, and I know that has to change because it’s not fair to any of you.”
“You’ve been grieving,” Kurt excused, his voice low, soft. Gentle. Everything Sean wasn’t feeling.
Inside, he was a torrent of emotion. A veritable flood of feeling, and for a man who prided himself on his self-control, Sean understood how very out-of-control Sascha had been feeling of late.
“I know I have, honey, but that was no excuse to cut you out, and that’s what I’ve been doing.” She blew out a breath then turned her face into his chest again. “I’m sorry about that. I’m really, really sorry.”
Sean sighed and repeated Kurt’s words, “You were grieving. You’re entitled to grieve how you need to grieve. If that means getting angry or quiet, that’s your choice, sweetheart.”
Silence fell between them with only the crackling flames in the hearth truly breaking up the sheer quiet in the library.
After a few moments, almost as though the continued silence was what triggered the question, Kurt asked, “Where’s Tin?”
“Playing with Alice.”
“Who’s Alice?”
“The Princess,” Sascha said with a small smile. “Perry’s daughter.”
Sean reached up and tapped her nose. “We’re rubbing shoulders with royalty now, are we?”
Perry laughed. “That should please your mother, Kurt.”
“Nothing pleases mother, Sascha,” Kurt replied drily. “You’ll come to learn that soon enough.”
Sean grunted. “How long are we there for?”
“Ten days.” Kurt winced. “Longest ten days of my life.”
“She needs to get to know Tin,” Sascha chided, and though neither of them said anything, the look they shared spoke a thousand words…
Though Kurt claimed Tin was his biological son where his mother was concerned, Margritte wouldn’t believe it until their boy had a DNA test.
Sean wouldn’t be surprised if Margritte ignored them for the entirety of their stay anyway. It wasn’t going to be the homecoming Sascha seemed to be expecting, but none of them had the heart to disappoint her.
Sometimes in this world, seeing truly was the only way to make someone believe, and where their parents were concerned? There was no salvaging those relationships. No matter how hard they tried.
Sean was the same with his folks. He and Kurt had the weakest relationships with their parents. He hadn’t even called his on Christmas, for God’s sake.
“Don’t be disappointed if they don’t welcome us with open arms, Sascha,” he warned softly, unable to lie to her after what they’d been through these past few months.
“I don’t really expect them to,” was all she said, but Sean knew her. Knew how big her heart was, and knew that, deep down, Sascha would indeed expect a heartfelt homecoming for Kurt when that just wasn’t about to go down.
Chapter Five
“Are you sure you want this?”
Sean stared down at Sascha’s ripe curves and his cock began to pulse to his heartbeat.
Whatever he’d expected when she’d slipped into his room, almost parallel to what had occurred the other night, it hadn’t been her asking him for release.
He’d never anticipated that.
Not when he’d thought, in her own way, she’d been telling him she didn’t want this from him anymore. She’d called it a ‘lack of communication,’ but Sean had read between the lines and had apparently been wrong.
Fuck, that was happening more and more of late.
“Of course, I want this,” she breathed, wriggling on his lap, her belly nudging his cock.
He stared down at her pale peach skin draped across his lap, the endless curves, the bright red hair that swept down her back, and shuddered.
To submit was to trust.
To be trusted was the only way to dominate.
He gripped one of her ass cheeks, parting the thick flesh to find her pussy. With his knuckles, he dragged them down the central line and gritted his teeth when he found her sopping wet.
He sagged back in the armchair, a mixture of defeat and success.
“Sean?” Sascha asked after a few minutes when he did nothing more than squeeze that ass cheek as though her butt was his stress ball.
“We can’t do this if you don�
��t trust me, Sascha,” he rasped.
“And that’s what I’m showing you. That I do trust you,” she whispered, arching up, twisting, and propping her elbow on his leg. She was bright pink from hanging down the way she had, and she looked flustered as well as, he had to admit, horny.
“How can you?”
“Because you’ve done nothing wrong,” she repeated.
“Why do I feel like I have then?”
“Because I reacted the other night in a way that detonated your Atlas complex.” She blew out a breath as she shoved her hair out of the way, then she moved herself off his lap and sat on her knees between his feet.
There were rules to domination and submission. Hard limits and soft ones. Safe words and expectations.
He’d never been that strict with her. Not really. As he studied the way she knelt between his leg, he knew that back in the day, he’d have spanked a sub for not kneeling with her legs spread, pussy presented for him. And he’d probably have clamped her nipples for not cupping her elbows behind her back.
He’d been harder when he was younger. Meaner, he had to admit. Faintly sadistic in his tendencies as he meandered a path that later on, he realized, had taken him down a turn he regretted.
Andrei and Sawyer liked to play. That was their forte. They were kinky and Sascha’s recent development had fallen into that. They liked tying her up, loved spanking her butt and marking her with their fingers and toys, but they weren’t hardcore with it.
Sean had the power to be hardcore.
He knew that and he didn’t like that about himself.
Never had, never would.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” she murmured, breaking into his thoughts.
He parted his legs, pleased when she moved deeper in between them, her face coming to rest on his pajama-clad thigh. He reached for her then, his fingers coming to caress her hair with a care he’d never shown another woman. Because Sascha wasn’t his sub, she was his. Plain and simple.
“Do you know why I stopped doing things like this?”
She blinked up at him, her bright green eyes like gentle sunlit pools. “Doing what? The dominating thing?”
His lips almost twitched at that as he shuttered his eyes and sank deeper into the armchair. Resting his head back, he stared at her forehead, not her eyes, not wanting to watch her flinch.
“I ignored a sub’s safe word.”
She stilled but didn’t pull back. “Why?”
“Because I knew—” He blew out a breath. “I believed that she could take more. But that wasn’t for me to decide, it was for her, and I ignored it.”
She fell quiet a second, processing his words. After a while, she stated, “Did she leave you?”
He shook his head. “No. And it wasn’t like that anyway. There’s a club in SoHo. Andrei, Sawyer, and I used to go there. It was a fetish place. Back in the day, it was dirty and grimy, I guess, but it was pretty much all there was at the time.”
“Did you share women?”
He nodded. “Of course.”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course,” she muttered on a low grumble that had him faintly smiling.
“You know our history.”
“Not complaining,” she retorted, but he could see she was jealous and there was no need to be.
He hummed under his breath and began stroking her hair again. “I took it too far, and though at the end she flew, it wasn’t right. But I knew I’d do it again.”
“Was she upset?”
“No. She was euphoric. You know what ‘flying’ is, right?”
“It’s the rush of endorphins that comes from a gamut of pain or pleasure.” She cocked a brow at him. “I can read too, you know?”
His lips twitched as he tapped her bottom lip. “Cheeky.”
She winked. “Only for you.”
He laughed softly, but his amusement died off as he said, “I tended to her, but all the while, I just knew I’d do it again. I was cocky back then. I’d just been offered my first book deal, and I was involved with the Huntington Case—I was getting famous for what I could do.”
“That was the guy who murdered all those schoolteachers, right?”
He nodded. “It was.” With his spare hand, he reached up and cupped the back of his neck, using it to prop himself up so he could better look at her. “It concerned me.”
“That you were concerned at all tells me that I have no need to be concerned,” she told him softly.
Sean hummed under his breath. “Perhaps.”
“Go on, tell me what happened.”
“Sometimes you open a door and it takes you down the rabbit hole. It’s up to you to wander back up and shut that door, or fall even deeper.” He cringed at his memories. “I went from sharing with Andrei to spanking a girlfriend as we fucked to getting off on whipping a sub in such a short space of time, Sascha, it frightened me.”
“Are you a sadist?”
She asked the question so calmly that he didn’t trust the velvet-lined question at all. “No. I have sadistic tendencies,” he admitted. “I’m more into control now, but when I was younger, yes.”
“What changed?”
“I made myself change.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t like that part of myself. It was too similar to what I was dealing with in the outside world.”
She gaped at him. “You’re not comparing yourself to those fucking sickos, are you?”
“In the nineties, anyone into BDSM was considered a ‘fucking sicko,’ Sascha. It’s all a label. What people can’t understand, they consider disturbing.” He shrugged. “It’s always concerned me how well I understand the patterns in these cases. Always made me wonder how close to insanity I am myself—”
Before he could do more than jerk, Sascha had jolted upright, and just as he expected her to bolt, she grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. The move did delicious things to her tits, but he quickly glanced at her eyes, surprised to see the flickering fire of outrage buried in the depths.
“You take that back,” she growled.
“Take what back—”
“That you think you’re some kind of freak!”
He clenched his jaw. “Maybe I am. Maybe that’s why I like what I do—”
“Fuck off, Sean. Just fuck off.”
Growling, Sean grated out, “And where should I fuck off to, Sascha? Maybe I should move the fuck out and—”
Her hand retreated and his face whipped to the side as she slapped him. Once. She scrambled onto his lap, one knee either side of his thighs as she grabbed his jaw, pressed her forehead to his, and gritted out, “You want to leave me?”
He swallowed. “Never.”
“Then what is this? Confession?” she rasped. “You. Are. Going. Nowhere, Sean. Do you hear me?”
Closing his eyes, he whispered, “It might be for the best.”
“Why? Because you feel guilty about Jane? Or because you want out?”
“I don’t want out,” he ground out.
“That’s what it sounds like to me,” she retorted. “Look, Jane was a freak. She’s done despicable shit, shit that no one can forgive her for. I don’t care what the fuck led her to do what she did, nothing makes it right. Nothing. But that’s not on you.
“The other night was a knee-jerk reaction. I apologized for that. You told me and I freaked out. You can understand that, surely? I don’t believe you bring danger to our world. You haven’t to this point, and this was an anomaly.
“We’re working on making sure that it never happens again, but even putting security in place doesn’t stop crazy. Look at this place. You’ve seen the guards stationed everywhere and it didn’t stop a Queen from being assassinated!” she half-shrieked at him. “Am I mad that some bitch came into my home and got close to us? Yeah. I’m furious. I took that out on you, and I totally shouldn’t have.” Her bottom lip quivered. “Don’t hate me for reacting, Sean. Don’t leave me f—”
He reached up and grab
bed a tight hold of her, and dragging her into his arms, he bit off, “I never want to leave you. Ever. Sascha, you’re it for me. You’re my fucking everything, and that’s what kills me. She was attracted to us because she knew I was on the case.”
“Why, though?”
“She came to snoop and then she fell for Andrei,” he replied, his voice low as he made the admission, an admission that had her stiffening on his lap.
“I knew she had a thing for him,” she barked but she didn’t pull away, just sagged into his hold. “Fuck, Sean. This is so messed up, but…” She fell silent and after a deep inhalation stated, “That’s life, darling. That’s life.”
He pressed his lips to hers and gently teased his tongue along the softly pursed clasp of her mouth. When she let him in, he sighed with relief and carefully explored her. Seeking her taste, her soft moans. He stole her breath, stole it intentionally, took it from her and made her breathe from him.
She shivered in his embrace, her arms sliding up and over his shoulders and around his neck. The proximity felt wonderful, especially after he’d felt certain she’d avoid him to hell and back.
“I love you,” she whispered against his jaw, her body relaxing totally into his. “Nothing could change that.”
He squeezed her. “I love you too.”
Her fingers began to trace shapes over his stubbled chin as they just sat there in a restful silence that somehow meant the world.
“Are you coming back to us?” Sean asked after a while, hoping she understood his inference.
Slowly, she nodded. “I’m coming back. To me, and then to you.”
Another squeeze. “I’m glad. Maybe I can come back to myself as well.”
“I’ve never seen you anything other than in control, Sean,” she admitted.
“That’s because it’s how I prefer it. I hate being out of control. Hate it. But with all this, it knocked me sideways.” Sean reached up and rubbed his temple. “I’m not entirely sure how to get back on track either.”
“We take one day at a time. One step forward together.” She shrugged. “Nothing more we can do.”
He pondered that a second, knew she was right, and inquired, “And what about this? Do you really want this?”
Sean: Quintessence The Sequel: Part IV Page 8
