He fucks me with a wealth of patience, pulling pleasure out of my body so long and hard that every muscle hurts, thrusting inside me long enough that I feel myself turn raw. I know what he wants from me, but it’s too much.
“I can’t,” I say in broken sobs, desperate enough to beg.
“You can,” he says, his voice a velvet murmur.
His thumb reaches down to press my clit, and I flinch in the few precious moments before the climax overtakes me, clamping down on every muscle, squeezing my lungs, tightening my sex around something too large to fit.
His groan sounds like pain. Like a small and welcome death.
He collapses on me for a second time, and I think to myself, We’ve done it. Finally. Except his cock stirs inside me, and I realize I did not understand the size of this mountain. I did not know the strength of this army.
“Again,” he demands, tender and inexorable.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring was so original and provoking that during its 1913 premier it caused protest and violence from the audience.
LIAM
“What the fuck is this?”
The words rip through the air, tearing me out of sleep.
Elijah stands in the doorway, surveying our naked bodies with a mixture of shock and fury. He looks ready to kill me. I pull on my jeans, so that at least I can die with some dignity.
“Let’s take this outside,” I say as Samantha stirs in the bed.
“No, you can explain what the fuck you were doing to Samantha Brooks, the child you’re responsible for, practically your daughter, right fucking here.”
I don’t flinch, but it’s a close thing. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh really. Did you put your dick in her?”
Josh appears behind him in the hallway, looking almost amused, the bastard. “Are we going to have the birds-and-the-bees talk?”
“You knew about this?” Elijah says, incredulous.
“I figured he was teaching her safe sex.”
Elijah lets out a growl. He’s always been the one with the most normal sense of morality, between the three of us. “I thought you were better than this,” he says softly.
“I’m not,” I say because he doesn’t need any fucking illusions.
Samantha pulls herself out of bed, fully awake now. “Hey, can you stop talking about me like I’m not part of this? I’m an adult now. I get to make these decisions for myself.”
She’s using the pink sheet to cover herself, but in the sunbreak it’s practically translucent. With a growl I push her behind me. Elijah lets out a snort. “Oh, now you’re worried about someone seeing her? After you fucked her?”
“Well, we can see why,” Josh says, his tone appreciative. “Look at her with that just-got-fucked hair and whisker burn on her shoulders. Someone’s all grown-up.”
Red colors my vision, and my control snaps. I launch myself at my brother, throwing a punch that sends him careening into the wall. It leaves me open for a split second—a second that Elijah uses to land a fist in my gut. I absorb the blow with a quiet oomph, stepping back from the force. Samantha grabs my arm, which is raised to hit back.
“No,” she cries, and the sound cuts through the haze of shame and fury.
“Christ,” I say, glaring at Josh. I want another go at him.
“Please,” she says, tear tracks glistening on her cheeks. “Don’t fight.”
“Why the fuck not?” Elijah says, muscles straining as Josh holds him back.
“Because I won’t be the reason you hurt each other,” Samantha says, her voice trembling. “If you want to punch each other, you’ll have to come up with another reason.”
She stands there with her chin held high, a sheet wrapped around her slender body. She weighs a hundred pounds of nothing, but she looks like she can stop a war. That’s what she’s doing, with nothing more than the force of her will.
If there was ever a piece of my heart held back, a part of me that wasn’t fully in love with her, it’s gone now. She’s a warrior. A goddess. I want to fall at her feet in supplication. Now I understand why knights would kneel before their queen and bow their heads. It’s the only position that makes sense for a man in the presence of such a woman.
“I love our family reunions,” Josh says with a quicksilver grin.
Elijah lets out a low growl that I can empathize with. I wouldn’t want to be held back from a fight, either. And I can’t even argue his point. I deserve to be beaten. I deserve to be locked in a closet, thrown down a well. I’ve always deserved it.
“Go,” she says, her head held high. “I love that you care about me this much, and I know that because of a messed-up childhood, this may be the only way you know how to show it. But I’m a grown woman. You don’t get to dictate who I sleep with. And I’m asking you to leave.”
Only Elijah looks at all chastened by the words. Josh gives an irreverent little salute before heading down the hallway. I’m the only one left, and I turn to face her.
“Samantha, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”
“You too,” she says softly, heartbreak lending her brown eyes an almost rust-colored red. “You’re the worst one, about to apologize for taking my virginity not even a full day after you did it. I deserve better than that. If you want to get back into bed, to try to find some peace and joy together, then you can stay. But if you want to apologize for wanting me, you can leave.”
I swallow hard, but there’s only one thing I can do.
My feet suddenly weigh a thousand tons. My head swims with the certainty that I will regret this moment until my final day. And my heart beats with a terrible truth, that I can’t possibly stay in this room. Josh was wrong when he said I was still holding on to that baby bird in the closet. I have to let her go. And so I walk out of the room, my expression stoic as it slams behind me. We can’t be on the same side of the door, not when I’m trapped in hell.
SAMANTHA
I grew up without being able to count on my father. Even when Liam North became my guardian, part of me had already learned not to trust grown-ups. They only wanted to tell me what to do, only wanted me to please them. Some things are learned deep in your bones.
I couldn’t wait to become an adult so that I could make my own decisions. Now that I’m here, I realize something was missing in my dreams of adulthood. I can make my own choices; I can choose Liam, but I can’t make him choose me. The sky is full of wind and storm; my wings only take me so far.
That’s how I find myself playing the Lady Tennant, my own composition of loss and heartbreak. It makes me think of biting cold and lonely nights. I thought I wanted to graduate from high school, to turn eighteen, to play on a tour—when all I really wanted was not to be left behind.
That’s what’s happening, even if I’m the one walking out the door.
We’re not going to be pen pals. I may be an adult now, but Liam still makes the rules. I can’t make him write or call or visit me. And I definitely can’t make him love me.
The composition ends abruptly, written only in my head.
It felt wrong to give it one last sorrowful note.
It felt final.
Now the true end comes to me, a silvery line that flutters, uncertain. It darts this way and that, caught on some uplifting wind.
The notes rise higher, ending on the auspice of hope.
Only a few months ago, my bow fell still in the middle of a song. Now it comes to a graceful close at the end of one I wrote myself. Instead of waiting for Liam to react to the silence, I stand and cross the threshold.
He sits at his office, not making any pretense of work. His large flat-screen monitor is dark. The black leather blotter on his desk is empty. The lamp is off.
“Did you like it?” I ask.
“It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.”
A window behind him provides the only illumination. Moonlight limns his broad shoulders and fair ha
ir. I think more than anything that’s happened, this is what marks adulthood. Fighting for the life I want.
Fighting for the man I love.
Circling his desk, I come to stand in front of him. His chair is turned slightly so that I can kneel down almost in front of him. The way he did to me a thousand times, a light touch on my knee, looking me in the eyes like I was important to him.
The deep green of his eyes is only a suggestion in the shadows.
I touch my palms to his knees. “You don’t want to hear me play in concert?”
“I want it more than life,” he says, his voice rough—even rougher when my hands skate on top of his thighs. I already fought for him with music. Now there’s a different kind of battle to be waged. “More than I should.”
“More than writing letters,” I say, a small mocking note.
“We’re not—” A sharp indrawn breath as I feel his hardness through his slacks. “We’re not going to be pen pals.”
I shake my head slowly. “That’s not what I want from you anyway.”
He moves as if to push me away, only to fall still when I touch the head of his cock. That’s when he goes completely still, hissing out a breath. “What you want is impossible.”
“Explain it to me,” I say, tracing a ridge that circles him. Everything about this is new and exciting. I would enjoy it if there weren’t so much on the line.
“I’m not— Oh God, sweetheart. I’m not made for that. All I do is hurt people, all I do is trap them. Starve them. Make them close their eyes and go to sleep.”
His words don’t make sense on the surface, but they do on a deep level. I feel them resonate on the same level as my bone-deep certainties. That I’ll always be left by a man who doesn’t love me. And he’s so worried about trapping me that he’s determined to leave. We make quite a pair.
“You don’t have to protect me anymore,” I whisper. “I’m grown-up now.”
“You won’t ever be old enough, understand? It’s not about your age. It’s about the fact that I’m responsible for you. I can’t let you die.”
Maybe it should scare me—that word. I can’t let you die. Except this is a man who has lived with death as his shadow for so long. I see what it costs him to send men and women into danger. What it costs him to risk his own brothers with every mission.
I find the button to his slacks and work them, clumsy in the dark. And then his zipper. At any moment he might stop me. His breathing saws in and out, audible even though he can run twelve miles a morning barely breaking a sweat. This is what’s straining him, the hardness of his cock in my hand. It feels softer than I expected. The salt tang of him comes to me in the dark, and I nudge toward him, in search of his desire. My nose bumps his cock first, and a shudder runs through him.
“Samantha,” he says on a helpless chant. “Samantha. Samantha.”
Blindly I search for him in the dark, my lips landing on some velvet-burn place on him. I send my tongue to feel him, to trace a raised vein. Then I pull back, toward the tip, finding that ridge again, exploring it with my mouth while he pants and groans above me, a benediction in the night.
“Is this okay?” I say, pausing uncertainly.
His hand lands on top of my head, falling down to stroke my hair, to grab it in unruly fistfuls. “It’s more than okay. It’s incredible. I can’t take it. I’m dying.”
I might not know what he means except that he did the same thing to me while I played Beethoven’s “5 Secrets.” Which means I know that dying means he’s close—but not there yet. So I lick him again, remembering the rhythm he used between my legs.
His hips push forward in small thrusts, uncontrolled, almost as if he can’t stop them. His cock moves through the circle of my fist, the same way he did in the shower.
My lips feel swollen as I pull back, sliding against the soft head of his cock as I speak. “You were angry at me that I kept the Coach Price thing a secret, but how many secrets are you keeping from me?”
“It’s my job to keep those secrets.”
“Bullshit,” I say, punctuating the word with a pump of my fist. The velvet skin moves apart from the hard muscle beneath. “I’m not talking about any of your classified government contracts. I’m talking about you and me and how I came to be in your custody.”
He makes a sound of protest—and I don’t want to hear him give me more lies, more platitudes. More attempts to soothe his own guilt by telling himself that’s what I need from him.
So I press a kiss to the head of his cock, to where the wetness pools into a salty drop. I lick it away from him. And lick again, to find that another one has formed. It’s a sensual feast, doing this in the dark, hearing his shuddery breaths.
“You have to stop,” he says, his hips pushing harder and harder.
I make my fist tighter around him, working him, making love to him with my hand—it isn’t impersonal at all. This is the way I make music with my bow and violin. Every twitch of my fingers, every slight pressure. His ragged breathing and low groans are the music I make.
Heat gathers between my legs, but I force myself to ignore that. There are more important things at stake than my arousal, the dampness in my sex. The ache in my clit.
“Don’t you know how it takes away my power, not to know what happened to my own father, what happened to me? I can’t even remember that night. Only that when I woke up, my father was dead and there was a stranger who would take care of me. Don’t you see how it’s hurting me?”
A low animal sound of pain fills the air, making the hair on the back of my neck rise. He does see it, he does, but he can’t do anything except succumb to the physical release. I close my mouth around his cock, catching his climax on my tongue. I swallow, greedy, knowing this might be my only taste. I lave him gently, kiss him, kiss him, soothing him as he comes down in jerks and pants.
Without warning or ceremony, he drags me onto his lap, fingers working quickly at my jeans, finding their way inside to the slick center. I jerk at the intrusion. Too much friction, too fast. “Wait,” I whisper.
“Now,” he says, unbending.
I try to clamp my legs shut, but it only makes the pressure more intense. “Tell me we can have more than this. Tell me you’ll see me on the tour. Tell me you’ll wait for me to come back.”
He doesn’t tell me any of those things. His silence is answer enough. My body doesn’t realize it’s lost—the climax builds in pleasure-drenched waves, leaving me panting and sated on the lap of a man who’s just turned me away.
His lips brush my forehead, chaste even as my arousal dries on his fingers. “There is no future for you and me. I’m no longer your guardian. You’re no longer my ward.”
Tears dampen my lashes. “We could make something new.”
He pushes me gently off his lap, and I stagger like a deer on my legs for the first time. “You’re forgetting something, sweetheart. I don’t want that.”
Every molecule in my body shouts at me to push him, to shake him, to make him see that we can work. Whether he’s trying to protect me or protect himself, the result is the same. I can’t make him want this. And I don’t think he’ll ever really see me as an adult while I live under his roof.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
There are two skulls in composer Joseph Haydn’s tomb. His head was stolen by phrenologists and a replacement skull was put in his tomb. In 1954, the real skull was restored, but the substitute was not removed.
LIAM
My hands are steeped in blood and dirt. I’ve been working through the obstacle course we use for training for the past five hours, pretending that my life is at stake—because in some ways it is. I set every barrier to its highest point, every weight to its heaviest. I’m still alive, which means we really need to make it harder. Torn muscles ache everywhere in my body. I wipe the sweat and grit from my eyes.
I started this afternoon, and the sun set a little while ago. Footsteps approach from the house. My senses are dulled by pain, which is the poi
nt.
“Go the fuck away,” I tell Josh. He’s come to check on me every hour, offering water and energy bars and once, the use of his pistol. Finish the fucking job, if that’s what you want, he said. He should have given it to Elijah, who probably wouldn’t mind using it.
“I might,” comes a feminine voice. Samantha. “I have some questions first.”
I drag myself into a sitting position, leaning back against a 4x4 staked into the ground. The world tilts wildly until I close my eyes. Something nudges my hand. A bottle of water. I take a swallow, downing half the liquid before I take a breath.
Samantha kneels in front of me, the way I did so often as she played the violin. She holds out something in her hand, her expression solemn. It’s a couple of ibuprofens. I stare at the pills, so innocuous and small, so ordinary when the world is shattering. I swallow them down and finish the rest of the water. “Thanks,” I say gruffly.
“How did you know my father?” she says, her brown eyes as clear as I’ve ever seen them in the deepening night. “The real answer this time.”
“I wasn’t friends with him,” I admit. “We hadn’t ever met.”
She takes a seat a few feet away, her legs crossed. She’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt with her high school crest on it—which makes her look like a child. She isn’t a child anymore, but that doesn’t change what she is to me. Like the bird that fell from the nest before it could fly.
“Go on,” she says.
“He was a spy,” I say, my voice abrupt. Businesslike. Because this had been my business for so long. “He took money under the table from a few different countries, but mostly Russia. It was my job to identify men like that and then eliminate them. But sometimes we would wait. If they could be useful, we’d keep them around, let them lead us to even bigger targets.”
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