“You tell me. Why is our family even a problem for Jax?”
“Why do you want the castle?” I counter.
“I told you that directive was in the will. Buy the castle. Per dad. The end.”
There’s a lift to his voice that is only there when he lies. “Was dad blackmailing Hunter?”
“Is that what Jax told you?”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I covered dad’s ass plenty, Emma, but not on this.”
“Still not an answer,” I say. “I know that dad visited Hunter. And now Hunter is dead.”
“Dad visited a lot of people. They aren’t dead. Hunter killed himself. Suicide was the official cause of death. And yes, I looked into it when Jax started sniffing at your heels.”
He looked into the official cause of death. I swear a chill goes down my spine. There are so many ways that feels problematic to me that I have to set them all aside to analyze them later. And to keep from yelling at him now.
“What was dad’s interest in Hunter?” I ask, setting a trap. His answer should be: his interest was in the property, not Hunter.
It’s not. Instead, he says, “Just let this go. Please fucking let this go.”
Please and fucking in the same sentence.
I know him. That combination is a sign of stress.
Not good.
In other words, there’s something there that he doesn’t want me to find. “I love you, Chance. You are my blood and my brother, but Randall took a plane, came here, gave me seventy-two hours to come home, or he’d hurt Jax in some way. Randall is your man. He speaks for you.”
“I’ll handle Randall.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“You didn’t ask a question,” he says.
“You know what question you didn’t answer, Chance. Maybe I need to look in the journal you so desperately want for answers.” I don’t give him time to object. “Was Randall speaking for you?”
“No. I told you. I told him not to go there.”
“So, you knew he wanted to come?”
“For the second time, yes, Emma,” he snaps. “I knew. He had it in his mind that he’d go there, throw you over his goddamn shoulder, and bring you home. Then we could both stop worrying about you.”
We.
The two of them.
“How did you know he was here?”
“Because he wouldn’t answer his phone and I called the airport. He took the private jet. Don’t you see the distress this has us under? Randall is sneaking out with the private jet, Emma.”
“Randall is threatening your sister, Chance,” I all but growl at him. “That should be your concern, not the plane.”
“Why do you think I keep telling you to come home?”
“So, I should come home, but if I could please get the castle signed over to you first, you wouldn’t turn it down, right?”
“Enough with the castle.”
“Chance,” I breathe out. “Talk to me, please. What is really going on?”
He’s silent a few beats. “Come home and we’ll talk.”
“Because you can’t talk about this on the phone?”
“Come home.”
I swallow hard. “If I’m not back in seventy-two hours, then what? Do Jax and I suddenly die in a car accident?”
“Don’t say shit like that.”
“Fine then. How about this? Don’t tell me what’s really going on. I don’t need to know. You aren’t getting the castle, but Jax isn’t coming after you or us. I promise you. He’ll promise you. Whatever Randall thinks he’s got against us, he won’t use it. He and I—Jax won’t do anything that will hurt me.”
“Until he does. A man can make a woman think a romp is love.”
“Did you really just say that to me? Who are you?”
“Your brother,” he snaps. “It’s my duty to say that to you.”
“End this, Chance,” I plead. “Whatever it is. Tell me how to help end this.”
“An end is exactly what I want,” he says. “This call isn’t getting us there. Which is why I’m hanging up. Come home. We’ll talk. Not until then.” He hangs up.
Come home.
How many times did he say that?
Why does he need me home so badly?
I push off the railing and shove my phone into my coat pocket, before walking back to the door and stepping inside the living room. Jax and Savage are at the fireplace talking. They both stop and turn to me. “How did it go?” Jax asks.
“He called to ask me if Randall was here. He said he told him not to come, but the private plane was missing.”
Savage laughs. “We’re following them both, remember? Your brother dropped Randall off at the airport himself.”
In other words, Randall didn’t threaten me and Jax. My brother did. He just used Randall as the weapon to deliver the bullet. Because that’s what this feels like: a bullet, shot by my brother, right into my heart.
CHAPTER TEN
Jax
I watch as Emma pales with Savage’s words, and by the time the shock has transformed into anger, flushing her cheeks and lighting her green eyes, I’m in front of her. I know where her head is. I understand. Chance lied to her, he’s shut her out, the way Hunter shut me out, and that cuts. It makes you bleed. I cup her face and tilt her eyes to mine. “Don’t write off your brother over one lie that you don’t yet understand. Because the one thing I can say for certain, that me and your brother have in common, is that we both want to protect you.”
She chokes out a laugh. “He doesn’t want to protect me. He sent Randall here to threaten us.”
“Is that what happened? Are you sure?”
“He says no. I don’t believe him. My brother, the one I know and love, would not send Randall to threaten me, but I guess I wasn’t the compliant little girl he expected me to be. So as I said, he’s not protecting me. He’s protecting himself.” Her voice lifts, and it’s clear that she’s in that same emotional hellhole that I was in earlier over that DNA test. And I damn sure didn’t want an audience for that.
“Savage,” I say, over my shoulder, motioning him to the door.
“Get lost,” Savage says. “Got it.” He moves to stand beside us. “But before you get rid of me, we have a problem that just hit my phone. That hotel mogul prick Sawyer is giving Jill an uncomfortable amount of attention. What do you want to do?”
“I don’t really give a damn right now, Savage,” I say. “Just handle it.”
“Got it,” Savage says, but as he heads for the door, Emma grabs his arm. “Wait.”
She looks at me. “This isn’t going to end well. Chance could pull your whiskey from our hotels. Don’t piss off Sawyer. You need your brand to be in his hotels.”
She wants me to protect my relationship with Sawyer. A man who represents one of her largest competitors as a family brand. A man she knows that I planned to use to hurt her brand. She is a Knight like no other, that’s for damn sure. “Please,” she adds and then casts Savage a look. “Please.”
“A whiskey tray that ‘accidentally’ turned over on him it is,” he says. “A sad waste of booze, but a no blame game. I’ll go watch the show.” He heads for the door.
Now Emma grabs my arm. “Jax, damn it. Don’t let Savage piss him off. You need the Sawyer brand if you lose the Knight brand.”
“Savage will handle him, and you and I both need to stop underestimating our whiskey, baby, It’s elite, and Sawyer would be damn lucky to have it in his hotels.”
“Yes, but—”
I lean in and kiss her. “Let me lock up, baby. Then we’ll talk. Okay?”
She nods and I take her coat from her, which is actually my coat. “I like you in my coat,” I say, “but you might need to grow into it.”
She doesn’t laugh. She grabs her phone from the pocket and curls forward, hugging herself. A protective posture that’s understandable after that call and this night. I cross to the door, and once I’ve slid the bolt into place,
I turn to find her standing right where she was, waiting on me, back in fight mode. “You aren’t getting how serious what happened on that call is, Jax. It wasn’t just a lie or a lame threat sent by messenger that we’ve now confirmed came from my brother. Chance is afraid of you. And he was my father’s protégé. My father always said ‘strike first or die.’ He’s going to come at you. He kept telling me to come home. Three times he told me to come home. He’s coming for you, and he wants me out of here before he does. And yet, I don’t know if me staying makes this better or worse for you. Maybe me staying pisses him off and motivates him to come at you harder.”
I close the space between us, my hands coming down on her shoulders. “Do you want to leave?”
“You know I don’t.”
“Then don’t go,” I say.
“It’s not that simple.”
“It’s as simple as we make it.”
“Chance believes you have a reason to come at him,” she argues. “He even checked on Hunter’s cause of death. He might not have killed Hunter, but he’s covering up something about it. My father. It must have been my father.” Her eyes go wide. “That journal entry: We’re better off with him dead. Or whatever his exact, horrible words were had to be referring to Hunter.” She tries to pull away.
I catch her and hold her to me. “Where are you going?”
“I need to read that entry again.”
“No.” I slide my hand under her hair and around her neck then lean in closer. “Let it go, baby. You’ve read it a hundred times.”
“We need to know what happened.”
“That journal won’t give us any answers, and we can’t change anything tonight anyway. Just be here with me.”
“Because I won’t be later?”
“If you leave, baby, I will follow. I will run the fuck after you.”
“We can’t—”
“We so fucking can.”
“But—”
“We can.” I kiss her and stroke the dampness from her lips. “We can. I meant what I said earlier. I want you with me, Emma. And you want to be with me.”
“Yes, but—”
“Don’t fight us. Fight them.” And with that, I’m done talking and so is she, even if she doesn’t know it yet. My mouth slants over hers, my tongue stroking long and deep, drinking her in, breaking down her resistance. For a moment, just the briefest of moments, she resists, but then she is kissing me, and she’s all in. I think I’ve won but then there is desperation bleeding into her kiss, onto her tongue, onto mine. I taste it. I feel it. This is not about her claiming us; it’s about her saying goodbye, and it pisses me off.
I tear my mouth from hers. “This is not goodbye, woman,” I all but growl, scooping her up in my arms and walking toward the bedroom.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jax
Emma belongs here.
She belongs in this house.
She belongs in my castle.
She belongs in my life.
We’re not leaving the bedroom until she knows that.
The end.
With an elbow punch to a button, I kill the lights as we leave the living room. Once we’re in the bedroom, the glow of the bathroom light already burning is all we need. In a few fast steps, I set Emma down next to the bed.
“Jax,” she whispers, but I’m not hearing her reasons for goodbye, not now, not ever, not when it’s for all the wrong reasons.
“Jax North, baby, remember? The man who is going to make you love me too damn much to leave me.” I seal that vow with a kiss, dragging her black lace dress up her hips, squeezing her cheek. “Have I told you how much I love your ass?”
She laughs, and that sound, all sweet and feminine, is music to my ears. “No, but—”
I hate that word and I don’t even let her finish her sentence. I kiss her again, rejecting it and the quicksand that is this family war we’ve inherited, a war some might call our birthright. My hand strokes her backside again, squeezing that same cheek harder before I do what she’s feared I wouldn’t do after I found out that York raped her: I give it a firm smack. She sucks in a breath, and I tangle fingers in her hair and drag her gaze to mine. “York doesn’t decide how we fuck any more than Chance decides what we do or become together. Don’t be the yes girl, Emma. Don’t do what you say you always do. Don’t let others decide your future, our future.”
“I don’t want anyone to get hurt. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Then stay. Stay with me.” I don’t give her time to find another reason to worry. “You need out of your head right now.” I unbutton the top buttons on my shirt. “I need out of your head right now, because your head is taking us no place good.” I pull my shirt over my head and toss it. “Fucking is the way to get us out of your head.” I toe off my shoes. “Any problem with that?”
Her teeth scrape her bottom lip. “No. No problem with that at all.” She steps toward me.
I turn her, unzipping her dress, cupping her breasts and leaning in to whisper, “You tell me no, it’s no. You tell me to go, I go. No one else gets to tell me those things.” I slide her dress down her shoulders, unhook her bra, both ending up at her feet. I catch her waist, lift her, and kick away her clothes. When she’s on the ground again, I cup her breasts, tease her nipples and whisper, “Fucking isn’t quite enough tonight, though, is it? I wonder just what it is you need, Emma?”
She turns in my arms, and I’m folding her close, cupping her face. She wraps her arms around me. “I’m not telling you no to anything, Jax.”
What she’s telling me is that she trusts me, after everything York did to her, and despite all the ways our families divide us, she is still all in. And so the fuck am I. “And I will never let you regret that,” I promise, my mouth coming down on hers.
The instant our tongues touch, the heat between us is explosive. She presses into me, and I mold her closer, her fingers catching on my pants, mine finishing the job. In about thirty seconds, we’re both completely naked, on the bed, on our sides, facing each other, me dragging her leg to my hip; my cock pressed in the slick wet heat of her body. And I don’t know if there has ever been a time in my life when a woman affected me the way this one does. I feel her so fucking completely that it rocks me to the core.
And I’m pissed. Not at what I feel, but at all the people who want to take it, to take her, the way they took Hunter. I don’t care what that DNA test said. He was my fucking brother. And Emma, Emma is mine, even if she, and her brother, don’t know it yet. And I’ve never called a woman mine. “This is where you belong,” I say, catching her hair, dragging her gaze to mine. “With me in our bed.”
“Yes,” she whispers.
I cup her backside and drag her closer. “Say it,” I order.
“Yes. This is where I belong.”
“In our bed.”
“In our bed,” she repeats.
My fingers flex on her backside, and she catches my arm. “Do it,” she says. “Spank me. Show me they don’t matter. Show me, Jax. I need—”
I kiss her and nip her bottom lip. “I know what you need.” And what she needs is to know that she can trust me. That falls on me to show her that she can. And I’m going to do that, by proving to her that York doesn’t get to come to bed with us. I know her past, and I won’t punish her with it by treating her like she’s a delicate flower she fears I will.
I’m going to spank her.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Jax
Trust.
It doesn’t come easily when you’ve been burned, hurt, even punished by someone you love. And Emma has been. By her family. By her ex.
For that reason, I could shelter her. I could make this spanking a barely-there experience for Emma, a small little moment that is here then gone, but that’s not what she needs. That’s not what we need. She needs control, and while that might not seem like it amounts to submission and a spanking, the truth is, it does for her. York drugged her. He invited others to help him gang-rape her. S
he’s terrified that me knowing means that I won’t be me with her. She’s terrified that she can never trust again, that he’ll always be here with us, a ghost of her past that won’t let us be free.
Which is exactly why she needs this to be about more than the spanking.
It needs to be about us. It needs to be about control.
Her control.
What she wants.
I drag her mouth to mine and kiss her, my hands sliding over her body, molding her close. “Jax,” she whispers. “I want—”
“I know what you want, Emma.” I roll her to her back and pin her hands on either side of her head. “No means no. Stop means stop. You say those words, I stop. You have the control. Okay?”
“Yes. Okay.”
“It’s okay to want to stop.”
“I know that.”
“No. You think it’s all or nothing, baby, and while that’s true about many things, including us, it’s not true when it comes to sex. A little.” I kiss her shoulder. “A lot.” My cheek presses to her cheek, my lips at her ear. “A taste.” She shivers, and I pull back. “It’s all good. It’s all right. It’s not all or nothing.”
“I want it all.”
“It doesn’t have to be now.”
“You aren’t going to do it, are you?”
“I am, Emma. I am going to spank you, but if you think a spanking is about a fast and hard punishment, then I don’t know why you’d even want it, aside from proving a point. We aren’t proving a point.”
“This is me trusting you, Jax, and I do not trust easily.”
“Trust is not submission. It’s about you knowing, absolutely knowing, I won’t take you any place you don’t want to go and that if I read you wrong, you know that I’ll listen if you say no, and I will stop. Because I don’t get to do anything you don’t let me do. And I don’t want to do anything, I won’t do anything, that isn’t for your pleasure. This is us. We define us.”
“Yes,” she whispers. “We define us.”
“Good. Don’t move your hands, or I will punish you.”
“Punish me?” She gives a nervous laugh. “How?”
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