by M. Robinson
“Tell me, darling.” The conversational tone gives me shivers. “Who gets to hurt you?”
“You.”
He nips at my earlobe. “Who gets to make you feel helpless and afraid?”
“You.”
Leo tightens his grip, the subtle movement compressing my lungs so I don’t have as much room to breathe. And I find, in a way that’s probably very wrong, that I don’t want more room to breathe.
“And who gets to love you and fuck you and own you for the rest of time?”
“You do.”
“Anyone else?”
“No,” I whisper. “Only you.”
“Then believe me when I say that nothing is too much for you. No gown or necklace or ring around your finger will ever be enough.”
“But—”
But what if it’s not? My most secret fear is that even with this necklace and this gown, even looking as good as I do, that I won’t fit in at the party. His family won’t accept me, or worse, I’ll make a fool of myself. Embarrass him somehow. I was always an embarrassment at the Constantine parties. The same thing could happen again. It isn’t like our engagement party, when Leo was in charge of everything.
He covers my mouth with his palm, and I can feel how careful he’s being, how in control he is. “Nothing, darling. All these things are only pale imitations of how much I love you. How much I want you.” His cock twitches as he says this, and Leo’s jaw works. “How much I need you.”
I turn away from the mirror, into the comforting black of his clothes, and try to catch my breath. It doesn’t work. “I love you,” I tell him, and it’s like the necklace and the ring and the gown—the words don’t match how I feel. “This party is terrifying.”
Leo pulls back to look into my eyes. He’s not laughing now. “Nothing will happen to you at my parents’ house. We’ll go, do an hour of small talk, have dinner, and leave.”
“Before it’s over?”
“Well before it’s over.” A glint in his eyes and a curve at the corner of his mouth make the room even hotter. “I have other plans for you.”
“Like what?”
“First on the list will be to get you out of your dress.” Leo traces the hard edges of my necklace. “We’ll leave this on. I want to see how it looks when you’re crying.”
“From sadness or orgasms?”
“You’ll see when I make you do it.”
I want to drag him down to the floor and forget about the party, but I settle for hooking my hands over his wrists and holding tight. Leo takes my face in his hands.
“Do you promise?”
“Of course I fucking promise.” He kisses me again, soft and quick and the meanest possible tease. “Time to go.”
“Won’t we be early?”
“No. We’ll be late.” He’s leading me out of the closet, through his bedroom, and out into the hall. “Eva’s been there all day, and she texted to say that Lucian and Elaine arrived together.”
I remember the cold, disapproving greeting Leo’s parents gave us at our own engagement party. “So it’s already a good time,” I say as he holds my coat for me.
Leo snorts. “It’s the most wonderful time of the year.”
He’s joking, but I know another secret about Leo—holidays are his favorite. Not because he wants to spend time with his parents at their mansion in Bishop’s Landing, but because they were safer for him. The more semi-public events his father had to attend, the less opportunity there was for violence. So, though he’d rather spend these occasions in peace, he rarely misses a gathering. After all this time, he’s still trying to keep everyone out of harm’s way.
His own coat on, Leo offers me his arm. “Ready?”
No. A formerly poor Constantine can never really be ready for a black tie ball at the Morelli mansion. It’s not something that fits into my life experience. There’s no preparing for this. There’s only doing it. And in typical Leo fashion, he’s given me all the armor he can. No one will be able to say that my dress is a hand-me-down or that it looks like my sister did my hair. Well—they can say it, but it won’t be true. And they won’t be saying it where Leo can hear.
“Yes. If you’re going, I’m going.”
Chapter Two
Leo
If I had my way about it, I would spend Christmas Eve in bed with Haley Constantine. Sunup to sundown. I would lick her and hurt her and fuck her until she was a speechless, blushing mess. I’d let her have a nap. And then I’d start over again.
A short break for Midnight Mass. Then, celebrations for the birth of Jesus. In my imagination, they are accompanied by a leather strap that makes Haley cry so deliriously that I could come from the sound of her sobs alone.
As it stands, I’m buried in her now, torturing us both.
Haley circles her hips underneath the red fall of her lap. She’s straddling my lap in the back of the SUV while Thomas drives. I toy with her necklace, all of me throbbing. She is slick and tight and I am perhaps the hardest I’ve ever been. The glide of her over me is as much of a revelation as it always is. I keep thinking I’ve memorized the sensation, but I haven’t. I’ve spent so many years cultivating self-control. Haley Constantine threatens to unwind it.
But not yet. Not yet.
“Slower,” I order her. “You’re going to make me come.” She’s going to make me push her facedown on the seat of the SUV and drive myself into her until her dress is twisted and wrinkled and ruined. She’s going to make me love her until the end of time. Love is an intense pressure at my chest, an ache, a starlit bloom. It can’t be separated from my desire for her. Fuck, I want her. I need her so much that I have considered, several times, not showing up to the gala.
Abandoning my responsibilities is not an option. I would never forgive myself for it. And furthermore, Haley wouldn’t hear of it. For reasons I cannot begin to understand, she has accepted me as wholly as a person can. She will attend parties with me even if it scares her. She will sit at dinner with my brother even while he puts her under the glare of his curiosity. She goes to bed every night with me. Everything I am, she wants. I am a person who shows up to my parents’ events. To keep things under control. To keep things as safe as they can be.
“I wish you would let me,” she begs.
“No.”
I’ve been playing this game with her for most of the drive. She is not allowed to get out of breath and lose control of herself. She is not allowed to cry and ruin her makeup. She is not, for the love of Thomas and all that is holy, allowed to scream while we’re still in the backseat.
If she does that, I’ll turn this car around.
Haley settles herself against me. “You’re mean,” she whispers. She’s tight and hot and trembling. Every muscle is working to keep herself from coming. Her delicate hips roll in my hands.
“And you’re disobedient. I told you I wouldn’t fuck you until after the gala. Now look at you.”
She opens her eyes and looks down to the red of her dress against the black of my clothes, and then her heart-stopping blue eyes meet mine. Pleading. Huge. “Leo, please.”
This is a lovely agony. I pulse inside of her, and she feels it, tightening down on me in answer. “I keep my promises, darling.”
“You said you wouldn’t fuck me. You didn’t say I couldn’t fuck you.”
“Do it, then.” Her pussy clenches at my bored, irritated tone. She takes her hands from my shoulders and fists them in the lapels of my jacket. Fuck, it feels good. Haley’s trying to keep herself upright as much as she can, keep her hair and her makeup intact, so all of the work is in her hips, in her sweet thighs. I let her get three rolls into her rhythm before I interrupt her. “Stop.”
She does, tears pooling at the corners of her eyes. “Mean.”
“Put your fingers underneath your dress and make yourself come. No more bouncing.”
I’ve never seen anyone scramble for the hem of a dress so fast in my life. Haley yanks it up, keeping one of her hands braced on my ja
cket, and works her fingers down into the sheer fabric of her panties.
Fuck.
It hurts not to fuck her. The pressure is intense. Her muscles work me over, and it takes extraordinary patience not to fuck her, not to thrust into her, to make her use me for her pleasure.
“Darling.” Her eyes snap to mine. Lips parted. Cheeks flushed. She knows what I want. I want to see her face when she comes. “You’re filthy.” I curl my fingers through the necklace and draw her in closer. Close enough to feel her panting breath. “Don’t lose it now,” I warn. “You’ve been so good. You’re so fucking wet. I want to feel it when you come. Quietly, darling. Quiet—”
She makes a sound like a sigh, like a question, and comes.
For all my patience, I can’t resist her. Haley is still mid-orgasm when I yank her hips down against mine, again again again, three strokes is all it takes. I’ve been inside her for so long, poised and waiting. She’s watching me, too, barely breathing, and I let her see it happen. I let her see the way I can’t stop a low noise from breaking free. I let her see the way I have to bite it back when I empty myself into her. Haley’s fingers work faster on her clit. “Oh, oh, oh,” she breathes, and she comes again from the watching.
Jesus Christ.
Her lips are soft under mine, soft and relieved, and I kiss her carefully. It wouldn’t do to destroy her now. I hold her face in my hands and make her look into my eyes. “You’re paying for that,” I tell her.
An adorable, lopsided grin. She shivers on top of me. “When we get home?”
“If I can wait that long.”
There’s enough time before we arrive to put us both back in order.
Haley’s nervous when Thomas lets us out in front of the Morelli mansion, which is a winter wonderland of expensive decorations. It’s always been this way at Christmas for as long as I can remember. The presence of the holly boughs and ribbons brought a certain comfort. Public events meant public personas. The directive to be on one’s best behavior hasn’t changed. The landscape has. All the tended grounds remain in roughly the same configuration, but the balance within our family has shifted, making things more unpredictable.
“Wow,” Haley says, looking up at the mansion through the car window, her body pulled back from the door. She doesn’t want to get out. I don’t, either. If it weren’t for the rest of my siblings, I’d tell Thomas to drive away. Anywhere but here. “This was your house.”
“Yes.”
“It’s huge.”
“It is.”
“None of the siding is coming off.”
“None of the siding is coming off your father’s house, either.”
She shoots a look at me over her shoulder. “That’s only because you keep sending people there.”
True. If I don’t, Haley spends half her time gazing out the window and fretting that her dad and her brother won’t manage to survive without her. My new contract with Philip has provisions that make me responsible for ensuring a “safe working environment,” which I interpret to include the entire house. After all, anywhere Philip goes, he’s working. His mind is always on his projects. You understand, he told me at the engagement party. No doubt he believes we have a similar obsession with work. Let him think what he wants. My mind is always on Haley.
Anyway, I had the dangerously outdated furnace and water heater replaced within days, along with the siding on the house, which was letting in water and rot. The rest of my improvements to the house will be more gradual, as long as Philip doesn’t burn it down with one of his experiments. He’ll have a harder time with the new sprinkler system, I hope.
Haley turns back to the window and swallows.
“My parents are going to be in the foyer with my brothers and sisters,” I mention, casual as can be. Haley can put on a brave face all she wants, but I can see the flutter at the side of her neck and the way her breathing has shallowed as the moment approaches. Plenty happened before our engagement party to make uncertainties, like not knowing who’s on the other side of the door, loom larger, and darker. “They’ll be in a receiving line to greet the guests, so we’ll see them first. Gerard is already inside.”
“He is?”
“Yes.” I hold my phone out so she can see the all-clear text he sent me twenty minutes ago. The astonishing thing about Haley Constantine is that, if I press her, she’ll admit she’s worried about me, perhaps more than she’s worried for herself. It’s both understandable and touching, that anyone outside of my closest siblings would suffer a second of doubt about my safety. It does a strange, squeezing thing to my heart. “Let’s go in. The anticipation is always worse.”
Thomas helps her out of the car first, and I follow her, getting a hand to the small of her back as soon as I can.
“Do I still look okay?” Haley asks.
“Nothing in the world is more beautiful than you.”
Then there’s no more time left. The door opens in front of us and we step through into the main foyer of the Morelli mansion. The space is meant to be imposing in its darkness, but now it overflows with light. Light from the chandeliers, strings of bulbs wrapped around decorations, all of them done by many, many hands over the past weeks. I recognize Eva in the details. The party is out here in the foyer, it’s through most of this floor, but first there is a gauntlet to pass: the receiving line.
My mother believes in a receiving line at her events, though I can tell this one is about to break apart. At the end of the line, Daphne is already glancing at the crowd, her eyes bright. Carter and Sophia stand next to her, Carter looking like he’d rather be alone with his books and Sophia with impatience written all over her face. Sophia is the wildest of my sisters, and the most likely to be somewhere unsavory, but she’s here tonight. Lucian and Elaine are closest to my parents.
An old, old instinct quickens my pace on the way to my father and mother. Always best to approach the dangerous thing at speed. Though—there’s an argument to be made that I’m the threat now, not him. My father holds his hand out for me to shake. His eyes stay on Haley.
He is not on his best behavior, then. Wonderful.
I crush his hand in mine, drawing his attention to me. “Merry Christmas.”
He opens his mouth, his eyes sliding back to my fiancée in her gown, her face open and hopeful and not at all Morelli. She wants them to accept her, and I don’t know how to tell her that acceptance from the Morellis as an institution is nearly impossible to achieve and not worth the cost. “That dress is—delicious,” he says, eyeing her cleavage.
“It’s fucking perfect.” I lean in, close enough that I could be about to hug him or kill him. Alcohol hangs in the air around him. “And my fiancée is wearing it, so let’s use our manners, shall we? Keep your eyes where they belong.”
My father glares. I’m taller than he is now. More lethal. No doubt he hates it, like he hates that Lucian has taken over at Morelli Holdings. I no longer care what my father hates. I only care that he keeps his hatred and his violence to himself. Thirty seconds inside this house and I want to throw the nearest object. Anything porcelain or glass, anything that will shatter. But instead I hold my father’s gaze until he pulls his hand out of mine and claps me on the shoulder. This is for the benefit of all the people at the party, not for me.
I move Haley with me to my mother, who has a distant confusion in her eyes. Two of her sons have come here with Constantines. Maybe she’s wondering where she went wrong. Her acting was far better at the engagement party, so perhaps it’s something between the two of them. I can’t pretend to care. My mother was a bystander. Not the innocent kind.
She kisses my cheek with a detached smile, compliments Haley on her dress, and steps closer to my father. We go down the line. Lucian and Elaine. Carter. Sophia. Daphne. Lizzy’s not here. Holidays at boarding school, which my mother wasn’t pleased about. Tiernan will be wherever my father has asked him to be.
Fine. Yes. I hate it here.
Daphne embraces us both, then steps back
to look at Haley. Her eyes get wide at the necklace. “That is gorgeous,” she says. “Did Leo make you wear that?”
Haley laughs. “Yes. He’s terrible like that.”
My sister’s hand rises to the collar of her dress, but she catches herself and puts it back down. Haley steps in closer to talk to Daphne, and not thirty seconds later, the receiving line stops being a line. That part of the evening is finished. Some loud-voiced man comes to talk to my father. I hear the words “beautiful family,” which is quite enough.
Daphne puts her arm through mine and tugs me closer, but I’m looking for Eva.
Lucian pushes his way into the circle, Elaine at his side, and wraps his hand over my shoulder to shake me. “What took you so long? We’ve all been having such a good time.”
“You’re the one who got him drunk, aren’t you?”
“He started it. I might have encouraged a few more. You’re welcome.”
“If that’s the best you can do for a Christmas gift—”
“Elaine and I were here before he reached this level of intoxication. At least now he’s drunk enough to keep his comments short.”
Elaine laughs. “It’s not the worst thing anyone’s ever said about me.”
It’s my turn to stare at Lucian. “And you just—what? Handed him another drink?”
“Murder isn’t nice at Christmas,” my brother says, and it is a joke, because Lucian Morelli has never once cared about being nice. He scans the room around us, a gleam in his eye. Out of everything, Lucian loves people-watching the most. This sometimes extends to people-hurting or people-killing, but at its core, he wants to know what makes people laugh or cry or scream. “Time to make the rounds. Unless I’m needed here.”
He looks at me when he says this, and it takes much longer than it should to realize that he’s stopped joking. We’ve had some discussions in the recent past about our respective roles in the family. Mine has primarily been keeping everyone alive as much as they’ll let me. His has been fucking off to God knows where. The suggestion that he might stay here if I asked him is unexpected proof that he meant what he said about sharing the work.
