Phantom: Her Ruthless Fiancé: 50 Loving States, Kentucky (Ruthless Triad)

by Theodora Taylor

  His voice broke on that last word when my body clamped down on his dick, helplessly obeying his command as the orgasm ripped through me.

  And that was it for control. For either of us.

  He flipped me on my back and drove into me, rutting me like an animal as he confessed. “Missed you so much. So much! Fuck, how did I stay away? You see what you do to me? This tight cunt belongs to me. Mine. Obsessed. Obsessed. I can’t deny you. Can’t stop fucking you. I can’t—”

  This time he broke off with his own release. And I flailed like a dying bug beneath him when another unexpected orgasm crests through me, even more powerful than the first.

  I had to bite into his shoulder to keep from screaming, and that only made him thrust into me deeper—so deep that he touched somewhere new.

  A third orgasm started before the second one even had a chance to recede. And this one didn’t just crest. It destroyed everything inside my mind. My sense of decency, all lingering resentments, any ability to think whatsoever.

  We were in his parents’ house, and I didn’t care. I couldn’t care. I completely lost my mind as the pleasure tore me apart.

  Fortunately, I had Hak-kan there, and he kept his promise.

  He made it better.

  He swallowed my screams with his kiss until I calmed down, then he wiped the tears off my damp face, then he held me tight in his thick arms until I stop trembling from those insanely intense orgasms.

  Then he made me laugh when he asked, “So we’re back?”

  Yes, he made me laugh and answer, “Yes, we’re most definitely back.”

  24

  Hak-kan held me for a long time after our reunion underneath the Wu-Tang Clan poster taped to his ceiling. We talked and apologized until the house quieted below, and we heard the closing of his parents’ door in the distance.

  Around ten p.m., we snuck downstairs and through the side door that wasn’t connected to the house’s alarm system. Safe from prying eyes, we dashed back to the Audi he’d left parked in front of the house.

  We were both in our late thirties, but we giggled like teenagers as we sped away.

  And when we got back to his place, we did it again. This time slower and more reverently as we basked in the glow of the city lights beyond his window wall.

  There was no pain this time. Remember me, he’d commanded, so that was what my body did, molding around him as if it knew it belonged to him.

  Maybe I did belong to him. As Lunar New Year’s Eve gave way to Lunar New Year’s morning, I became more comfortable with that thought.

  I awoke to the scrape of him opening up a dresser drawer the following day.

  “What’s going on?” I asked sleepily—then I jerked up in bed when I saw the time. “I’ve got to get to work!”

  “I mean, you could go in,” Hak-kan answered, taking out a pair of sweatpants and closing the dresser drawer. “But everybody would be looking at you funny since I already told them you were taking the day off.”

  I plopped back down on the bed, hugely relieved. “Thank you. I don’t want to leave anyone in a lurch, but I’m wiped.”

  “Wonder why?” He threw me a wicked grin as he pulled the sweatpants up and over his heavy dick.

  “You know why,” I chided. “Are you headed out?”

  “Yeah, I’m about to take a short jog….to the front door. Wayne just texted. He’s bringing up all your shit. Plus, food.”

  I could have acted new. Put up some kind of protest about him having my things moved to his place without checking with me. Again.

  But I was too darn happy to pretend like this announcement didn’t thrill me to the bone.

  So I just sat back up in bed and offered to meet Wayne at the door since it was my stuff he was dropping off.

  “Nah, you smell like I’ve been fucking you all night,” Hak-kan answered with a lopsided grin as he pulled a light crewneck sweater over his head. It hugged all his hard muscles like a second skin.

  “Plus, I’m having a Neanderthal day.” His gaze settled on me, heavy and possessive. “I don’t want any other man looking at you for a while. But don’t worry, I’ll give you back your agency tomorrow morning.”

  Somehow, I’d forgotten how adept he was at saying crude things that somehow gave me all the feels in my panty region.

  But I had to act like his words had no effect on me for the purpose of informing him, “For future reference, just telling me I smell would have been enough to keep me from going out there.”

  “For future reference, I know,” he answered, dropping a kiss on top of my now very messy weave. “I tell you all the other stuff because it makes me hard.”

  He wasn’t kidding about that.

  After Wayne left, Hak-kan came back, grabbed a condom from the nightstand, and fell on top of me without a word.

  By the time we made it back out to the kitchen, we had to order a second breakfast because the cheese and grits Hak-kan had asked Wayne to bring over from an uptown soul food restaurant were too cold to eat and too dairy-filled for me to sanction heating back up.

  After that, we learned to order food that could be eaten cold without the risk of severe stomach cramps, and I spent most of the Lunar New Year’s Day on my back without touching the luggage Wayne had left by the door. Hak-kan was insatiable and bent on claiming every day he missed fucking me when we were apart.

  I knew that because he explained this to me in explicit detail before going down on me to soothe my sore pussy…making it better—a little too better, actually. By the time he was done, I was begging for him to abuse it all over again.

  For those reasons, it might be easy to understand why it didn’t occur to me to ask one of the burning questions from my introduction to his family until we were eating heated up lo mein from Hak-kan’s favorite Chinese food restaurant for a much-delayed dinner that night.

  “So you told your parents all about me, but you weren’t planning to let me meet them?” I asked.

  He froze with his chopsticks filled with noodles halfway to his mouth. In a way that made me ask, “What?”

  He released the noodles back into the cardboard box. “Okay, I’m trying this whole never lying to you again thing out. But that’s kind of a hard question to answer.”

  “I’ll wait,” I offered, and I took a bite of my lo mein like I had all the time in the world.

  He grimaced. “I guess this short version is that they weren’t in on the whole fake engagement thing, and it didn’t seem fair to them. They would have gotten too excited about you. I mean, you met them, right?”

  I nodded, easily understanding, “Yes, I could see how introducing them to me, especially as your fiancée might set up an expectation you wouldn’t want. But then why mention me at all?”

  He let out a weary sigh, then answered, “I didn’t say one word about you. Not a single word, not even when I left before Thanksgiving dinner to fly out to Kentucky.”

  I shook my head, really not understanding. “Then how did they know everything about me? That I was a doctor? And that we’d broken up?”

  Hak-kan looked to the side and muttered, “My grandma told them all of that.”

  “So you told your grandma everything about me but not your family?” I asked, really not understanding his logic.

  “Nah, I don’t tell that savage shit—especially about my personal life,” Hak-kan answered with a wry chuff. “She’s a 200-year-old with nothing to do but gossip. Can’t keep nothing secret. I wouldn’t trust her not to divulge my grocery store list.”

  I might have laughed at his aggrieved tone and hyperbolic assessment of his grandmother’s character. But the question remained, “Then how did she know so much about me?”

  “Uh…” Phantom scraped a hand over the back of his head. “Well, you know, she’s a fortune teller. And she kind of told me and our entire family that you were the woman I would marry.”

  My eyes widened. “She did what? When?”

  “About ten years ago, I guess,” he ans
wered. “Right after I met you for the first time. I had lunch with her afterward, and she told me and then everybody else in the family that I had just met the woman I would marry—a tall, black doctor. And that grandma would die soon after holding our firstborn, a little girl—so yeah, that was a bomb drop. And you saw my family. They were ecstatic about that shit. Less ecstatic about having to wait ten years for the prophecy to even sort of begin to come true. Like, everybody except Mike got married before me. But main point…they were kind of expecting you.”

  I’m an OB/Gyn for women with disabilities, so I’ve pretty much got my neutral “I’m not judging you” face on lock. But it was kind of hard not to look at Hak-kan like he was delusional.

  Mainly because everything he’d just said to me was completely insane.

  “I don’t….” Another scraped hand over the back of his head. “I don’t want to scare you. I was kind of hoping to slow feed you all this psycho shit, not overwhelm you with it. So can we drop this?”

  When he put it like that, the trepidatious person I used to be wanted to agree. But the new Olivia he helped carve out of a block of insecurity answered, “No, we can’t drop this. I think it’s time for you to tell me everything. Everything you did after your grandma gave you this supposed fortune of yours.”

  Hak-kan let out a huge expulsion of air. As eager as he’d been to spend every minute of the day with me, he now looked like he’d rather be anywhere but here.

  But after a few moments of hesitation, he began talking, “So my grandma told me that I’d just met the woman I was going to marry. Only thing is, this woman already had a boyfriend—one I found out was into some nefarious shit. So yeah, I used him to wash some money, gave him enough dirty side hustle to make it worth his while to exclusively launder for my triad and a few of our partners. And it worked. I controlled who he dealt with, so none of it ever blew back on you.”

  I shook my head, not quite able to add all of this up. “But Garrett and I broke up. We were apart for years, and I never heard from you….”

  I realized the answer to my question before he had the chance to reply. “That’s when you were dating the other woman. The one you almost asked to marry you.”

  Hak-kan confirmed my guess with a nod. “Yeah, fortunes are weird—especially if you don’t know what it feels like to make them come true. I met a girl—one who fit into my world, and I was like, why the hell not try to make this work? No offense to my grandma, but you felt like a long shot at best. But then we broke up, and by the time I was free, Garrett had swooped back in, and I was fucked.”

  Alarm warred with regret inside of me.

  I hated that I’d wasted so many years with Garrett. But how could I, as a woman of science, reconcile all the truly delusional things Hak-kan was telling me?

  “Do you seriously believe this? That we’re meant to be? That this was all part of some prophecy? And you manipulated Garrett—and what else? Kept tabs on me all these years, just because your grandmother made up some fortune about us?”

  I wanted him to say no. I wanted him to laugh all of this off and tell me that only his family believed his grandmother and not him.

  But instead, he said, “When I convinced my partners to buy VIP Bai3, I told them it was a good investment, and it was. But I’d also read an interview with Drew Glendaver about how he hoped to pass the company down to one of his daughters. But from what I could tell he wasn’t grooming Clement Calson to take over as CEO. I did some forecasting and here we are.”

  I didn’t no whether to be impressed or scared. No, Dad wasn’t grooming Clement to take his CEO position. He’d confessed to me once that his son-in-law was a V.P. of Distribution born. Meant to be a cog in charge of other cogs—not the entire company. But I couldn’t believe Hak-kan had figured that out, just by reading one article.

  “And you might have wondered about the rose tattoo on my back…” he continued.

  My heart dropped into my stomach. “No…no, you didn’t.”

  My middle name was Rose after my mother.

  Hak-kan just gave me a New York shrug. “Yeah, I did, and yeah, I seriously believe it. I made myself out to be the hero in this story of ours, but it was more like I was the villain, lying in wait. I figured you’d feel some kind of way about that if you found out, so I didn’t tell you. Because I know how crazy this all sounds. But yeah, I’ve been waiting for you for over ten years, and I honestly believe you’re my destiny. The place I was always supposed to end up.”

  He said all of that….

  He said all of that, and then he picked up his beer and took a swig like he was finished saying his piece and was just waiting for me to catch up.

  But I couldn’t catch up. Couldn’t process all of this new information. I tried and failed to speak.

  And eventually, Hak-kan finished his last swig of beer and broke our long silence with, “Well, I gotta take a whizz, brush my teeth, wash my face—make myself beautiful for bed. That means you’ve got about ten minutes.”

  “Ten minutes?” I repeated, shaking my head.

  “Ten minutes to get on some clothes and run screaming from this place because you’re freaked out. Imprisoning women is wrong. I get that. Now. But Dragons don’t let people go easily—especially their women. So if you’re going to run, you should do it before I come up with some more ruthless villain tactics to keep you here.”

  With that, he rose to his feet and walked back to his master bedroom as promised. Leaving me there with the remains of our meal…perhaps our last.

  He came back out from the bathroom exactly ten minutes later, rushing through the door as if he’d set a timer.

  Which is probably why he visibly startled when he found me sitting on the bed as opposed to in the kitchen where he’d left me. Completely naked.

  He stared at me. Blinked. “You’re still here.”

  “Yes, I am,” I answered.

  He took a step forward, then stopped. As if he was afraid to believe.

  I was afraid too. Maybe more afraid than him when I opened my mouth to confess, “I want a baby.”

  He jutted his chin and crooked his head to the side. “What?”

  “I want a baby,” I repeated, my heart pounding. “That’s the real reason I was with Garrett. Why I settled for the guy who looked good on paper. I want a baby so bad. So no, I don’t believe in prophecy or fortune-telling or anything like that. But if there were ever a fortune I wanted to come true, it would be the part about me becoming a mother.”

  He had sounded crazy. And I knew I sounded crazy too.

  Hak-kan looked to the side as if he was having second thoughts about that prophecy.

  But then he looked up with a hungry gleam in his shark eyes. “You think I won’t put a baby inside of you?”

  Excitement and fear swirled in my belly…in the place where I want him to plant his seed.

  No more hesitating. He closed to space between us in less than three steps. And he didn’t stop until I was on my back.

  But this time, Hak-kan didn’t turn into an animal on top of me.

  Instead, he reared up between my legs and pulled himself out, stroking his thick cock as he studied me with heated eyes.

  Snow flurried outside the window wall, but I burned beneath his gaze.

  “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting to have you like this? No condom? Raw?”

  He rubbed his shaft against my folds as he said this, then punctuated the question by pressing the fat knob into my clit.

  My back arched at the sensation, and I fisted my hands in the sheets. I wanted this, wanted him raw inside me.

  But there came no swift taking per usual. He sawed his shaft up and down my slit, teasing me until I was whimpering and soaking wet.

  “Please, please,” I ended up begging. “No more. It hurts.”

  He understood what I meant—that I was referring not to the size of his dick but the aching pain of not having him inside of me.

  “C’mon, beautiful…”

>   He pulled me up to my knees.

  “Watch me,” he commanded. “Watch me put it into you for the first time like this.”

  It was a command, but I didn’t have to be told. I couldn’t look away as he guided his pale cock into my dark inner folds, breaching me without a condom for the very first time.

  Sometimes this position was challenging for me—the one most likely to cause me discomfort and pain.

  Not this time, though. My pussy enveloped his big staff, and when he pulled me forward onto his lap, placing my knees at either side of his waist, there was no pain.

  No pain at all.

  At least not for me. Hak-kan threw his head back and expelled a huge breath.

  “Fuck, you’re killing me, beautiful. I’m sorry, I’m not going to last long this time. I won’t be able to hold out for you like I usually do.”

  He pitched forward and put me on my back, determination glittering in his black shark eyes.

  “Want this baby with you,” he said, his voice coarse as he began pumping into me. “Want this baby with you so bad.”

  Yes, he was crazy….

  But so was I.

  And it went beyond fucking this time. We made crazy, desperate love, our slapping bodies the only sound in the room as the snow swirled outside. Until…

  Oh my goodness, he lied. He lied. When we came, we crested together—me crying out as he seeded me in warm, heavy spurts.

  And our mutual release… felt like a promise as we began this new phase of our lives.

  25

  PHANTOM

  Eric called Phantom out of the blue in early May, just as he was about to make bacon and eggs for him and Olivia. And it sounded like he was crying.

  “I’m sorry! I’m sorry. I know you only gave me this number in case of emergencies with Olivia. But there’s an emergency with me, and Olivia’s not answering my calls or texts.”

  Well, that was because she was worn out. She’d be leaving for her annual couple of weeks in Uganda the next day. And Phantom had wanted to give her some memories while she was gone, along with a reason to rush back.