by Bethany-Kris
Her fingers traveled up his palm, to the inside of his wrist, over the ink there, and then further up his arm, over the tail of a falling phoenix. She had admired his tattoos before—many times—but he knew, just the way her fingers slowed on certain pieces, how they stroked back and forth to check again, that she was finding things she hadn’t before.
Hidden secrets.
Covered scars.
“It always pissed me off whenever someone would toss my drawings and scribbles into the rubbish bin, like they weren’t important,” he admitted. “I couldn’t do that, no matter how awful or terrible they were.”
“You won’t ruin art,” she said, filling in the blank he left open.
“Not if I can help it. And it did help, for a while.”
Evelyn’s fingers came back down to his palm, pressing into the shamrock. “Except it didn’t.”
“I like to tell myself differently.”
“That’s called lying, Connor.”
“It has helped, to a degree.”
Evelyn sighed, still keeping a hold on both his hands as she stared at him, forcing him to meet her gaze. “Why, though?”
He didn’t have a good answer for that.
Not entirely.
“I’m not sure.”
“That’s a lie, too.”
Connor tugged his hands from her grasp, and scrubbed his uninjured one down his face. “Because it all gets to be too much, and I don’t like who I see staring back at me. I wanted it to go away. It’s easier than dealing with it.”
Evelyn tipped her head to the side. “Is it, though?”
No.
But the lie was easy to tell. Maybe he was just made to be crazy. So why was it that Evelyn looked at him like he was completely normal?
“You know I’m here, right?” she asked.
Connor blinked, confused at what she meant. “Of course you’re here, lass.”
She shook her head, a sad smile playing at the edges of her lips. “You’re not listening.”
“The water is pretty loud.”
“Cute.”
Connor managed a smirk. “I try.”
“I’m here.” Evelyn lifted her hands, pointing her index fingers at his temples. “When this gets too much …” She pointed down to his chest, right over the spot where his heart beat, adding, “And when it hurts in here, too.” She grabbed his hands, flipping them over, forcing him to look at his chaos and his lies all over again. “You don’t need to do this when I’m here, Connor.”
“You don’t—”
“Understand? I know that it gets dark in your head, because I see it when you don’t think I’m watching. I know it gets tight in your chest and hard to breathe. When you just want to think about anything other than what’s up there, but all you can do is feel. So, you have to feel something else, right? Is that me not understanding to you?”
“It’s not the same as being inside my head,” Connor said, sounding rather lame.
“Then maybe you should let me see inside sometime.”
“It’s not a very nice place.”
Evelyn smiled. “I think I can handle it, Connor.”
He didn’t think so at all.
Unwilling to argue about it, and not wanting her to worry, Connor grabbed Evelyn’s cheeks with his hands, ignoring the pain in his injured palm, and kissed her hard. His move took her by surprise, making her gasp into his mouth, which only aided him on in deepening the kiss, his tongue seeking out the familiar sweet warmth of hers. He didn’t pull away until his lungs started to burn, struggling for a proper breath, because all things were lost when it was just Connor and Evelyn.
Him and her.
Evelyn pulled him closer, tugging him out of the spray of water, and nearer to the glass doors. He hit the valve to shut the water off just before he kissed her again, the force sending them both out of the shower altogether. He didn’t feel the coldness of the room wrapping his body, and she didn’t seem to mind all that much when he started pulling off her sopping wet clothes, either.
Connor wanted out of the bathroom, away from his issues.
He could shove them away for a while.
He could pretend they didn’t exist.
The further they got out of the bathroom, the better he started to feel. The trail of wet clothes he left behind—all pulled off of his lover—hit the floor with smacks, leaving puddles with each piece.
Evelyn helped a lot with making him focus on something else for a while, what with her demanding mouth taking a slow inventory of his throat, then down his chest, and lower. Connor found himself standing in the middle of the dark hallway, his head tipped back and his eyes rolled high to the sky as her hot mouth came in contact with his hard cock.
She took him deep into her throat without hesitation, the texture of her tongue sent sparks from the base of his cock straight to his balls. Her nails dug into his thighs as her teeth dragged down his length, and holy shite, all he could see were stars bursting beyond his eyes.
The groan he let loose was feckin’ primal.
It even hurt making its way out of his throat—raw and blinding.
It was easy, maybe too easy, to get lost in the way she sucked him off, all hard and fast, uncaring if his cock went a wee bit too deep, or if he yanked on her hair and pulled her in faster. The slick heat of her mouth, the tightness of her lips wrapping around his cock, was enough to make him stupid in the feckin’ head.
And he didn’t even care.
“Feckin’ there.” His words came out in a growl. “Suck that cock, love.”
All too soon, he was coming, hard enough to make his knees weak and his hands shake with the fistfuls of Evelyn’s hair. She never even slowed at the feeling of his cum hitting her tongue, and instead, sucked him harder.
She sucked him dry.
It still wasn’t enough.
His cock was still hard, his head was still too loud, and his body still felt too much. He didn’t want to feel those things at all.
“Come on, then,” Evelyn said in a whisper, standing when he pulled her up. “Can’t I handle it, Connor?”
He didn’t respond, simply turned her around, swatted her arse firmly, and sent her moving toward the bedroom. Evelyn’s legs hit the bed at the same time he was climbing over her, spreading her thighs wide and fitting himself between them.
Her back arched high off the bed the moment he filled her with his first thrust, and she only grinned when his hand found her throat, forcing her head back and taking away just enough of her air. His other hand grabbed tight to her side, her skin pinking under his digging fingertips as he pulled her body into his for the second thrust.
The harder he took her, the more she smiled.
She wasn’t even mad, he knew, but she took it somewhere else in his head, somewhere far away, where his aggression and anxiety was focused in on feeling her, not feeding a monster.
The firmer he squeezed her throat, the more she goaded him.
Is that all you got and fuck you, fuck you.
She knew exactly what she was doing, demanding more, taunting him to give her more than he already was.
He let her.
It was only after she had come, then again on her knees with his arm wrapped around her throat, did he hear her ask him again. The words came out soft and breathless, her voice raw from crying out and losing air over and over again.
“Can’t I handle it, Connor?”
He kind of loved it … or maybe that was her.
• • •
“Evelyn?” Connor came to stand in the doorway of his studio, finding the lass in question standing in the very middle of the room, looking as though she had been waiting for him. Surrounding her were sheets upon sheets of drawings, all turned up for him to see. “What are you doing?”
He’d spent his morning with his head stuck in a coffee cup that was more whiskey than it was coffee, not that he made it a regular thing to do. He needed something to perk him up, considering he hadn’t slept at all,
and Evelyn could only stay awake for so long to feed into his crazy nonsense.
Evelyn looked around at the drawings. “I wanted to show you something.”
Connor stepped further into the room, taking in what drawings he could see without going in even more. Some were simple drawings, things she had seen around the brownstone, or flowers outside along the walkway. Others were of faces he didn’t recognize, and some of them were his own reflection, though always happier than he thought himself to be.
“Did you rip all of these out of your books?”
Evelyn nodded. “All of them.”
She had several sketchbooks. She filled them like nothing, her mind constantly spilling out images onto paper, as though she might forget them otherwise. He swore she could draw for hours—days, even—without her fingers cramping up or tiring of her work.
The one thing she had never done?
Shared her sketches with him.
There had been the one—of him—but other than that, Evelyn kept her art locked up tight, hidden in her books, and pushed out of sight. She never offered, and Connor understood how personal of a thing it could be, so he didn’t ask.
But now, all he had to do was walk around the room, and be careful not to step on her pictures. So, he did just that, though some of the images bothered him.
A man standing over her. Tattoos he didn’t recognize. A wedding band on the hand that was pushing open a woman’s thighs. Bruises on skin. Fresh welts on a delicate back. A bloody smile.
Connor swallowed hard, his gaze taking in even more images, ones he knew had to be older memories for her, even though she had only drawn them recently. Ones he recognized, of her father, Declan, sitting behind a desk, smiling at someone looking up at him. Others of her father were darker in tone, as though the weight of the world rested on his shoulders, and he hadn’t realized someone wee was watching him break down.
“It’s dark in here, too,” Evelyn said softly.
Connor looked over at her, his attention gone from the images but not for too long. “Pardon?”
She pointed at her head. “In here, it’s dark. It never stops, and some of these, I’ve drawn time and time again, just to get the image out of my head for a little while. There’s more in here, things I know and have seen or remember, but haven’t put down yet. But it helps to get them out sometimes, to make them go away, even if they come again.”
It’s dark in here, too.
Art was not like this for Connor. His idea of creating beautiful images had been born from a desire to escape, to appreciate the craft. He had been drawn to it because of his memories of Evelyn as a wee girl, but he’d continued because of how much time and effort and skill it took to complete something.
For her, it seemed like it just bled right out of her mind.
Connor moved again, walking further, taking in a new row of images. One of a woman—not Evelyn, as he could see her face—entirely naked, bound in a hogtie on a dirty mattress, her skin a gray tone, and her eyes closed. Dead, likely.
He blinked, freezing.
That image seemed familiar, though he couldn’t quite reach why.
“Why this one?” Connor asked, pointing to the image.
“I was just a girl—I found some pictures in my father’s desk. That was one I couldn’t forget.”
There it was.
Connor remembered the memory easily, of a much younger Evelyn showing him her drawing, though it had been rough and not as detailed as her newer version.
“I can’t get it out my head, so I draw it a lot,” Evelyn admitted.
“Your father, you said?”
Evelyn nodded. “He caught me with the one, and got really angry. He burned them all, after that. I don’t think they were his, but I don’t know why he had them.”
Connor wondered if he did know, or if he had known for a long time. He thought he recognized that woman, naked and dead on a mattress, tied like an animal with ropes that looked to have choked her to death.
She looked like his mother.
“Someone is knocking on the door,” Evelyn said softly.
Connor barely heard it over the buzz of his tattoo machine, and since he was positive he didn’t hear her correctly, he continued his task. After twelve hours with his back hunched over, his hands were getting tense and his shoulders were stiff. Evelyn had wanted this tattoo badly. It was something she had sketched out the week before, when she had stayed the day with Killian, and Connor couldn’t deny her a thing.
Not even when his hand was still healing and hurting like a bitch, and he knew he should have asked her to wait. The pain was grand, anyway, like a feckin’ gift to him. It reminded him he was doing better a week after falling into that trap again, that he was alive, and that he had the most beautiful creature under his hands.
Besides, no one else could tattoo Evelyn.
Not with her wee problem once the machine was turned on.
Connor didn’t think he would be able to sit still and watch some other fecker—or even a woman, maybe—do something that Evelyn found pleasure in, especially when she then needed to … find relief. He would probably kill somebody and he wouldn’t even feel badly for it.
Why should he?
“Almost done the major outline,” Connor said.
“I can tell. You’re very low. Still there’s—”
“You’re going to need at least two to four weeks before we can sit again and start to color it in,” Connor explained, “for healing and everything.”
“Great.”
Connor didn’t miss the strange inflection in Evelyn’s tone. “What’s wrong, lass?”
“I’m sure the wings look fine, don’t they?”
He sat back, fully admiring the outline of the wings and all their feathery details over her shoulders and half-way down her back. It was quite a piece—one that might take another artist and client four or even five sessions to complete. But with Connor’s almost mindless focus, and Evelyn’s high tolerance for pain, two sessions, or maybe three if some color bled, would do it.
“Looks classy on you, love,” he answered honestly.
And sexy.
And crazy.
And wonderful.
He wondered, one day, would her skin be covered in art like his?
Connor liked that a lot.
These pieces were absolute art.
And so was her body.
It just fit.
“Great,” Evelyn repeated, “but someone has been knocking on the door for ten minutes, and they’re starting to get pretty persistent.”
Finally, Connor’s concentration on the task at hand was broken, and he heard the hard banging coming from the front of the brownstone. After the week he’d had, being able to get lost in tattooing had been a relief he couldn’t pass up.
“Obviously, they’re not going away,” Connor said, referencing whoever was at his front door. He stood, letting his gloved hand slide up Evelyn’s back with a gentle touch. Her shiver told him it probably still stung a bit, and her skin was a pretty pink all around the black lines. “You okay?”
“Perfect.”
Connor pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “Cover up, in case I have to invite them inside, love.”
Evelyn nodded, already reaching for the top and brassier she had tossed aside earlier. Connor didn’t bother to pack up his kit, figuring his uninvited guest had already been made to wait long enough. He only got a peek at the man waiting outside and he realized instantly why they had been so feckin’ persistent.
Killian.
Connor opened the door, letting his friend step inside, before closing and locking it behind him. He didn’t miss how Killian had looked over his shoulder before entering.
“Took you feckin’ long enough,” his friend muttered.
“I was busy.”
“Riding that broad, I suspect.”
Connor didn’t even think about it, simply reacted. It wasn’t a particularly hard punch, and he still had the latex gloves o
n, but it was strong enough that when it connected with Killian’s jaw, the man’s head snapped back a good three inches. Sometimes, a hit was a better warning than any sort of spoken word.
Killian flexed his jaw and rubbed the spot with his hands before passing Connor a wary glance. “My apologies.”
“I’ll accept it only because I didn’t have to demand it.”
“It’s been a rough day.”
Connor cocked a brow. “It better, otherwise you’re just a cunt.”
“Your arsehole father has been making his rounds. Said he showed up at my place first, but I wasn’t home. He found me at the pub downtown making a pickup. Had a bunch of feckin’ questions about you, and where you’ve been these last months. He was asking if you had any ladies around you lately, shite like that. Thought you might want to know.”
Well, then …
Connor pulled the latex gloves off and stuffed them in his pocket. “Is that all?”
“Basically. He gave me the indication I wasn’t the first person he had spoken to.”
Wonderful.
“Connor?” Evelyn called out from behind him. “Is something wrong?”
He passed her a look over his shoulder, seeing she was fully dressed again and seeming concerned over his conversation. “Everything is grand, love. Why don’t you go make some tea?”
She nodded, and then gave Killian a hesitant smile.
He returned it, though not quite as wide. “Afternoon, Evelyn.”
“Do you want some tea, too, Killian?”
“He’s leaving,” Connor said before his friend could answer.
“Oh. All right, then.”
Killian didn’t speak until Evelyn was gone from the hallway. “You need to handle your father.”
“I’m aware.”
“Soon.”
“And then what?” Connor asked sharply. “Put a giant target on me arse because his feckin’ bastards and the other gobshites he has working with him come after me?”
Killian sighed. “Then you’ll have to take care of them, too. You know, when the time comes.”