by RuNyx
After minutes and minutes of holding him, and him allowing her to hold him without complaint, Morana pulled her face out of his neck and looked at his Adam’s apple, exposed by the unbuttoned collar of his white shirt.
Letting her eyes travel upwards, she finally locked her gaze with his.
Those blue, blue eyes made her sigh softly. They were patient, not in the alert way of predators but in a softer, much tender way. He was waiting for her to explain her bizarre behavior.
Morana moved her hands to the sides of his face, cupping his jaw in her palms, feeling that scruff scraping against her palm in that delicious way and told him, in two words, with every emotion strangling her heart.
“Thank you.”
His brows furrowed, just minutely, as he tilted his head slightly to the left, trying to figure her out.
After a minute, he asked. “What for?”
Morana stroked his cheek with her thumbs. “For caring.”
He didn’t get it. Of course, he didn’t. How could he? He didn’t know her entire history. He didn’t know what he had become to her. He didn’t know she’d seen him do what he had done to her father when she had been missing. He didn’t get it because he didn’t know how it had tilted her world on its axis again, how it had split her chest open, how it had warmed her to the bone in a way she knew she would never be cold or alone again.
And she wouldn’t be able to convey it to him, to tell him any of it. So, she did it in the only way she could in that moment.
She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his.
He stilled.
Completely stilled.
His hands tightened slightly on the side of her hips but he sat frozen under her. Morana didn’t care. She held him with all the affection she felt for him in her heart, and tilted her head, pouring it into that one kiss. She nipped at his lips, sipped from them, kissed them gently, reverently, giving him tenderness she knew he had never received in two decades.
He let her. He let her shower him and received it. Accepted it. Didn't kiss her back but didn't push her away.
Morana tasted his lips the way she had wished to for such a long time. Tilting her head to the other side, she fit their lips together again, locking them for a moment before sucking at his lower lip, feeling the scruff on his chin rubbing against her skin, the bristles around his mouth burning hers.
Someone knocked on the door.
Morana pulled away from the simplest, most beautiful of kisses and stared deep into his eyes.
“You,” she whispered to the space between them, “Tristan Caine, are a beautiful, beautiful man. And my heart beats for you.”
The confusion and surprise on his face were priceless. This was not The Predator. This was the boy who had been called a monster for doing the brave thing and left behind alone never to be told he was precious. This was the boy who had buried himself deep inside the stronger man, who could not understand or process her actions or the thoughts behind them. She had reached under the persona and found the man, the boy.
Without another word, Morana stood up. It was proof of his shock that he let her.
She opened the door and Dante looked at her, eyebrows raised. Morana shook her head. He smirked.
“We should get to the house. It’s time for dinner,” Dante announced, indicating the main door. “We can talk on our way there.”
Morana nodded. “Is it okay if I leave my laptop here? I’ve left some programs running and I won’t feel comfortable with them in that house.”
“Of course.”
“Can we have a moment?” whiskey-and-sin asked from behind her, addressing Dante.
“Another moment?” Dante grinned, before shaking his head and walking out the main door wordlessly.
Morana turned to ask what he wanted to talk about when suddenly, she was slammed into the wall beside the door. She looked up, baffled, barely catching her breath, only catching a fleeting glimpse of the wild look on his face before his mouth crashed down over hers.
Her toes curled into her shoes, her fingers going around his tight waist, feeling the gun tucked to the side of his trousers under her palm. Body catching fire, heart thundering in her chest, Morana caved to him like sand under an ocean wave. His hands fisted in her hair, tilting her head back as he devoured her mouth. This kiss was nothing like the one minutes ago. It was harsh, almost bruising in its intensity, but the undercurrent of something untarnished ran through them. She still felt his confusion in the kiss, but there was something else there too. Something precious. Something she couldn't understand and he was trying to tell her. She parted her lips gladly as his tongue swept through them, dipping inside her mouth before pulling out. His entire body pressed hers into the wall - feet to feet, hips to hips, chest to breasts - as he leaned down and she went up on her toes as high as possible.
Sensations coursed through her body, her blood heated and burning every single part of her from inside out. His teeth tugged on her lower lip; a moan left her mouth. He swallowed it, stroking her tongue with his, tangling them together for a split second before pulling away again. Her hips canted into his, her hands pulling him closer as he feasted on her mouth, his hands firm but gentle in her hair.
It wasn't just a kiss. It was more, much more.
They broke apart for much-needed air.
“Dinner,” she mumbled through a hazed mind.
“I’d rather eat you,” he murmured back, kissing her feverishly once again. Morana lost herself in the kiss, let herself drown anchored by him. They kissed for seconds, or minutes, or hours, she didn’t know. All she knew by the time he pulled back was her lips were swollen and she wanted more. He did too. She could feel it in his body, see it in his blue eyes.
“That’s how you kiss me next time,” he told her, putting a little space between them.
Morana rolled her eyes. “Thanks for the tutorial.”
She caught the flash of a dimple as he turned away towards the door. She tugged him back by his shoulder and planted another one on him. That dimple was to blame. He returned it. Passion burst between them.
Panting, he took a solid step back this time. Morana straightened her clothes and brushed her hair with her fingers. Following him out the door, she saw Dante take note of her swollen mouth and Tristan’s disheveled hair.
“Not a word,” Tristan warned, slipping back into his usual mask.
Dante just grinned, pushing one hand in his trouser pocket and another around Morana’s shoulder as they started walking towards the mansion. Morana saw Tristan glance pointedly at Dante’s hand, which the man did not remove. Tristan looked forward again and kept walking. She relaxed into his hold.
The night was quiet, beautiful. The sky was still littered with clouds, the moon still peeking from behind them. Men, who had been visible around the property during the day, became invisible again. Strolling towards the mansion with the two men, Morana broke the silence, announcing, “I had a little moment with Mr. Maroni today. Nothing that I couldn’t handle.”
She informed them about the conversation, at least parts of it, and about the coding programs she had worked on all day. Leaving out the parts about her watching the camera recording and talking to Amara, she walked, tucked beside Dante, walking beside Tristan. It felt surreal. Safe.
The closer they got to the house, the more she could see both men tense. After a point, Dante dropped his arm from around her and walked into the mansion. Tristan was back to his stoic, cold self as they reached the door. He gestured for her to precede him. She did, still fuzzy in the heart and the body.
They entered the foyer. As the door shut behind them, surprising the hell out of her, Tristan pulled her into his body and looked down into her eyes. His hand came up, his thumb circling her heavy lips where his mouth had left his mark.
"Tonight."
Morana inhaled sharply as she felt the touch throb in her body. She gulped, nodding. He dropped his hand.
“Give them hell,” he whispered to her.
She smiled. He stared at her smile for a long, long minute, his magnificent eyes glued to her mouth.
And the most beautiful, precious thing happened.
His cold, aloof eyes warmed.
Something wasn’t right.
The nagging, persistent feeling refused to leave Morana alone as she looked down at her phone, tracking the progress of the programs she had left running in Dante’s house remotely. It never, ever took her software so much time, no matter how complex the algorithms. She prided herself on that fact. And yet, it was almost twenty-four hours that she'd let the codes run and the progress, much to her disbelief, was only at forty percent. Forty fucking percent. That just wasn’t possible, not unless she had external interference. She had checked for it. There was none. So she just didn’t understand what the hell was taking so long that her program was progressing at the pace of a pregnant snail.
Baffled and annoyed at her creation, Morana walked out into the lawns from the house. She was slightly frustrated and not only at the program - also at last night.
The dinner had gone over surprisingly smoothly. There had been some underlying tension of course, but not a single snide remark from Maroni. He had informed her politely about a party he had been planning for a while, a party that would be held tonight, and then he had been quiet throughout the dinner. Maybe that was how he behaved at the table and her first night had been an exception. She didn’t know but she had been braced for a wrong look or that smile that rubbed her the wrong way. She had been braced for some underhanded words at her or worse, at the hunter sitting beside her who, by the time they had been seated, had completely wiped away every trace of the man he had been back at Dante’s house. Had her mouth still not been burning from the passion inflicted by his, she would have chalked the entire thing up to her crazy imagination.
Tristan had not been Tristan sitting beside her, he had been the silent Predator - alert, watchful. And now that she had seen some of his layers, she marveled at the ease with which he switched back to his default. And not just him. Dante had sobered as well, his grins of ease shifting to smirks without mirth.
The more she got to know both the men, the more she realized just how much of their true selves they kept hidden, so much of which she still hadn’t been exposed to. Some could say the same about her as well. But since she knew herself, she knew it was more about not knowing who she was under the entire facade. She was discovering that herself for the first time in her life because, for the first time, she had started to feel the edges of that comfort. Regardless, there was a long way for her to go, to realize who she truly was as she wasn’t her father’s daughter deep down. For now, she was a confusing mess of things. All she knew at the moment was.
And despite everything, she still didn’t trust anybody completely.
She trusted Tristan and Dante more than she had ever trusted anyone but she knew she was still holding some part of herself back, especially when it came to Tristan. She trusted him to keep her safe. She trusted him not to hurt her. She trusted him enough to show him her jugular, over and over again. She was getting attached to him at a rapid rate she couldn’t and didn’t want to control. But there was a part of her, a rather small but strong part, that told her to hold some of herself back, to not surrender completely. She felt for him, strongly, deeply and truly. The emotion he incited in her came from the most broken parts of her, and yet it was the purest emotion she had felt in her life. She acknowledged that he had the power to emotionally scar her in ways her father had never even grazed. He had the power, that she had given him, to ruin her for anybody else.
And that small part was her failsafe, her just-in-case. Because if that ever happened, if he ever betrayed her and left her for the wolves, she won’t succumb like a helpless lamb. That small part of her would let her survive. It would let her build herself back up. That small part was hers, only hers. And she had no clue how to give that to him, even if one day she wanted to. That was just another one of the many reasons for her frustration.
She was also vexed because her shopping was supposed to be delivered by noon and it was already afternoon. Usually, that wouldn’t have bothered her but she’d just had a rather rancid encounter with Chiara Mancini in the morning. The stunning woman had reminded her rather nastily (and Morana was assuming she was nasty because she, like the rest of the house, had heard her passionate encounter with Tristan two nights ago after she had warned Morana off him) of the party Maroni was hosting in the evening for his ‘business’ partners. The party was in honor of some big deal they had made that she was not supposed to know about. And assuming from the first party Morana had seen on these grounds, she knew she needed to look good, especially if that Chiara woman planned on looking stunning and make eyes at her man. It was a female thing.
She needed a dress.
Another reason for her irritation was Tristan himself. Last night, after his eyes had screamed unnamed pleasures on her flesh, after his mouth had whispered the same promise of pleasure on hers, he had escorted her to her room after dinner and opened her door. And then, for the first time since she had known him, he had chickened out and left her there.
Chickened out.
Tristan ‘The Nothing-Scares-Me Predator’ Caine had chickened out. Yeah, she hadn’t believed it either. But she had seen it in his eyes, those magnificent eyes.
He’d been spooked. She, in all her tiny capacity, had spooked him and he, during the quiet dinner, had had enough time to process whatever shit had gone to his head.
And so he’d backed off. Completely. There hadn’t been any texts from him in the morning and she hadn’t seen him at all. Not even from the window. And Morana didn’t know whether to be annoyed or amused by the stunning turn of events.
She understood needing space and everything because he did have a lot to process and from what she had seen of him, emotional processing wasn’t his forte. He reacted more than thought and felt. Or at least he tried to. And it was a good sign that he was so off-kilter with her because he was feeling. So, she was trying to be understanding about it and not pester him like she wanted to. But he needed to get it sorted soon or she was banging down his door.
The noise of a large vehicle pulling up outside the gates broke her out of her thoughts. Morana watched as the gates opened and a white delivery van came down the driveway. Letting out a breath, one of her issues sorted, Morana headed towards the end of the driveway in front of the mansion to greet the guy and sign off on the delivery. She just got there when she noticed the men patrolling the property had stopped. They were looking at her and the van, mostly curiously but all alert. Morana raised her eyebrows. What, didn’t anyone shop online around here?
The sound of the vehicle door opening jarred her perusal. She turned to greet the two uniformed delivery men who looked around the property rather nervously.
“Delivery for Morana Vitalio,” the older of the two said to her.
Morana nodded, signing off on the device he extended to her. That done, she got to choreographing the two guys into putting all the boxes on the steps of the entrance, watching them get antsier and antsier to get out. She couldn’t entirely blame them, not with the way the guards were watching them.
At least thirty boxes later, the men inclined their heads at her and hurriedly got into their van. Hastily, they reversed out the drive and went off at record speed. Morana sighed, realizing yet again that the world so normal to her was, in fact, not normal. Outsiders were absolutely terrified of it unless it was romanticized in stories.
Shaking her head, she looked at the boxes and sighed again.
“I see you’re already spending Tristan’s money,” Chiara spoke from the doorway, eyeing the packages.
Morana rolled her eyes, all pretense of civility gone between the two women. “Green is not your color, Chiara.”
Chiara actually looked down at her blue dress before grasping her meaning. She scoffed. “Oh, please. I could have men lining to buy me anything I want. I can do
anything I want.”
Morana nodded seriously. “Yeah, except leave me alone apparently.”
The other woman grit her teeth. “Tristan won’t protect you forever, you little slut.”
Morana deliberately picked up a package, perusing it, not giving the woman attention. “I don’t need his protection, Chiara. That’s for women like you. Now shoo. Go lurk like a lizard somewhere else. I have work to do.”
She could feel the other woman bristling at her dismissal. She didn’t give a rat’s ass. Like seriously, how Tristan could ever sleep with that and not have his rather good male equipment shrivel up was beyond her. Chiara slithered away and Morana shuddered. Then she turned her focus on deciding what to do with her deliveries. She could ask some of the staff to help her take them up to her room.
But the few people in sight were already busy with chores, making arrangements for the party, and she didn’t want to leave the packages just lying there unattended, not after the money she’d spent on them from her own pockets.
Floundering at what to do, she felt someone come behind her. Whirling around, her package held up like a weapon, Morana narrowed her eyes at the three guys she’d seen near the perimeter, their tall rifles strapped to their backs. They were all taller than her (which wasn’t a benchmark because her height was nothing to boast about) but two of them were kinda short and the third, for some insane reason, reminded her of Chris Pine. Shorty, Stocky and Pine were looking at her quietly.
“Um,” Morana shook her head at the weirdness of the situation. “Can I help you?” What else did you ask fierce looking guys who patrolled the enemy grounds with guns?
Shorty grunted. “You Caine’s girl?”
Morana felt her lips twitch even as she forced herself to keep them straight. “Yes.”
Shorty and Stocky nodded in sync and moved to the packages, picking up a bunch of them together. Without another word, they moved into the house. Morana watched them go, baffled, before turning to look at Pine, who simply stood there, guarding her deliveries.
