by Liz Crowe
“All this—it must make you very happy. Are you? Happy now?” He bit the words off, flung them at her, until she blinked. And his lips were so… close….
She forced her gaze away, to get control. This is not good. She had no business having an instant fantasy image of kissing him… not him, not Metin, the man who ruined her sister.
He propped his hands on either side of her head. “Go ahead and look at me, Melanie.” His lips and tongue caressed her name, drawing out the syllables in a sing-song way she didn’t remember from any other time he’d used it.
The room faded. The floor fell away, walls disappeared, and all she had left was a boiling rage, desperate loneliness, and the man in front of her. The man she would sooner fling off the balcony as speak to. The fucker was playing her, messing with her mind… he….
Suddenly, without warning, his lips were on hers, his arms lifting her up against the wall. Those were her fingers buried in his hair, and her legs spreading, welcoming the hand he shoved down the front of her jeans. She moaned, hating herself but unable to stop. Then he broke away, frozen in place, his mouth hovering over hers, his dark eyes hypnotizing her.
“Take your goddamned hands off me,” she demanded, not meaning it. Their combined breathing was ragged as eyes met, tears in both sets.
“Okay,” he said, before slanting his mouth over hers and picking her all the way up.
Chapter Five
The fog surrounding his soul for the last months remained, fixed firmly in place. He hurt, all over, every day. Not one molecule of him didn’t pulse with raw agony. His chest ached, head pounded, stomach refused to accept food. His life ended after he walked out of that hospital in Michigan, leaving behind his heart and soul and only shot at true happiness.
All that was left to him was drinking, fucking, sleeping, and waking up to begin again—a real merry-go-round of uselessness. He felt scraped out, a husk that he filled with booze, women, and strange beds.
In the months since his family’s destruction, he’d spent something like a sum total of thirty minutes sober. Rendered a lightweight from years of strict self-discipline—no alcohol during La Liga’s season and certainly none if there were World Cup qualifiers or during the once-every-four-years that he played with his own Turkish national team. He certainly was one no more.
His agent had done his level best to get Metin out of Turkey and back to Madrid once training began. The club gave him a lot of leeway, considering circumstances and his star status. And he’d thanked them by showing up hung over, three weeks later than everyone else, slipping slowly out of shape, and furious at the world. His anger manifested itself within minutes of a friendly—read: low contact—scrimmage.
The coach had to run out onto the field himself and practically sit on Metin to get him to calm down, while his teammates cursed and held hands over broken noses, busted lips, and in one case, a fractured toe. He barely remembered a moment of it, other than the red-tinged anger that he’d exorcised by beating the living shit out of the men opposite him on the field.
If he were honest, he hardly remembered anything from those first six or seven months. Orgasmic over the drama, the foreign press shoved its way into his face and life even more, catching him out in the wee hours draped over this or that random starlet, drunk, and on occasion, high. After a while they lost interest, moving on to the next story, but he could be assured that if he were fucking up in public it would be photographed.
Real Madrid put up with his bullshit a lot longer than some clubs might have. But he was Metin Sevim, wonder-boy player, superstar forward, the ballet master of the pitch, blah blah blah. And fans paid good money to see him play. But it seemed the harder they tried to get him to clean up and fly straight, the more crooked he went, thumbing his nose at their interest in him as a player or even as a human being. He could care the fuck less about soccer. His life was over.
Halfway through the fall season, they traded him down to Valencia, where he got into a giant brawl with a ref, nearly breaking the guy’s arm in a fit of rage before puking on the sidelines. That photo monopolized soccer gossip headlines for weeks.
And got him booted to a place of honor on the bench for the rest of the season when he bothered to show up for the games. Finally, he ended up playing in Turkey, for one of the premiere Istanbul-based teams, as a bit of a show pony. His homeland treated him with a little more respect, at least at first. They understood his grief and let him wallow in it.
Once there, he’d felt justified, appreciated by his own people. Until he showed up roaring drunk to a game against their arch, cross-town rival. That pretty much shoved what remained of his career all the way down into the toilet and given it a firm flush—leaving him here, in an over-priced condo with absolutely nothing to do but drink, fuck, and cry himself to sleep when memories would not be drowned in alcohol or between the thighs of yet another nameless woman.
After literally beating up anyone who came to drag him out of his hole, including his brothers, Metin got left well alone. He had no patience for being saved. There was nothing in him worth saving. He wanted to die. Many a night, leaning into the wind that whipped across the large balcony of his condo, he’d been on the verge of taking care of that death wish himself.
The sight of Melanie Matthews, Alicia’s sister, ripped at his soul. It shoved open the booze-soaked, heavy doors slammed over what was left of his heart, leaving it exposed, raw, bleeding again.
And so, he had acted, using what free will remained to him, all the while cursing himself for doing it. Her lips were soft, pliant, her body firm and perfect. The sweet, sexy sounds she made as he laid her back onto his messy bed revved his libido into overdrive. But it was wrong. Beyond wrong—horrible, unthinkable, and he damn well knew it. And nothing could stop him, nothing at all.
They ripped at each other’s clothing, primal, animal sounds coming from them both. Teeth clicked together, tongues tangled in raw urgency. Metin’s entire being was on fire—he had to have her, to purge, to prove…. What?
She kept talking around his lips, her words belying her body’s reaction to what he did to her.
“I hate you, you fucking pig. You asshole. You… oh, sweet Jesus!” Mel cried out when he slid into her body with a long, firm stroke, shutting her up.
He blew out a breath at the perfection of it. He pounded into her, jaw clenched, and she wrapped her legs around him, her body enveloping his as if she could consume him utterly, possess him, own him, and make him forget. His orgasm worked its way up to the base of his brain, ready to explode across his consciousness.
He kissed her, fucked her mouth with his tongue, his hips moving, rolling in perfect rhythm with hers. The connection so amazing and so awful, he tried to hold back his release. But she dug her fingernails into his ass, tilted her body up, taking him so deep he groaned, low, long, and loud, coming so hard he shuddered with the force of it.
“My love.” He buried his face in her breasts, sucking in deep breaths of her lusty scent. Then, the “wrong” side of the equation clicked in and he sat up fast, pulled out and away from her. “Oh, god,” he whispered. “I’m… sorry.” He stumbled away, hand to his lips, mortified at what he had allowed to happen.
Melanie lay there, looking up at the ceiling, her body beaded with sweat. Her breathing coming in short gasps then slowing. She propped up on her elbows to glare at him. He tried to slow his pounding heart, to square exactly what he had just done.
“So I’m here to bring you to America. To coach some new team. Did my tactic work?” She cocked an eyebrow at him, but her eyes shone with tears.
Fury gripped him. That, combined with surprised horror at her lame attempt at a joke, made him want to put his fist through the wall. He found his jeans, pulled them on and walked out of the room. His head pounded but not from a hangover. His heart ached but not from sadness. His body had never felt so sated, even though it had been one of the fast and dirty screws he typically did not favor.
He ran a hand do
wn his face, drank some water, and attempted to process what had just happened. What in god’s name had he done? And why? How did fucking his dead wife’s sister, whose hatred for him was like a palpable living being between them, do anything but make his life even more of a black hole?
He took a step around the corner to pace and a bright pain sliced into his instep. “Jesus!” he cried out, limping past the pile of glass that once covered the single photo he still allowed. The sheer weight of impossibility sat on his chest poking at his eyeballs until they watered.
Picking up the picture, he ran his thumb over the image of his one true love and the beautiful life they’d created between them. Tears rolled down his face, his foot bled all over the floor, and when he saw Melanie standing in the doorway, hair disheveled and redressed, he closed his eyes.
“Get out of here, Melanie. Before we make this whole thing worse.” He didn’t recognize the sound of his own voice anymore.
Her harsh laughter was familiar. He shivered with memories. God, he had hated her and her need to keep Alicia under her bossy thumb. Opening his eyes, he found her stare, one he remembered—which in some perverse way relaxed him.
“Yeah. Right. And you fucking my brains out within minutes of seeing me in your Istanbul condo isn’t ‘worse.’” She hooked her fingers around the word. “No, I think you and I need to sit and have an adult conversation, Metin. I don’t give two shits about you really, although at least I can see your appeal between the sheets now. But I’ve been asked to consider my sister’s legacy. And I’m here to tell you that you are dishonoring her with your behavior.” She crossed her arms, her body language sending a clear message. Metin ground his teeth.
“You are an unmitigated cunt. Do you know that? Do you have any idea how I would just as soon….”
“Ah, ah, ah, now watch what you say there, soccer boy. You do not want to make idle threats.” She held up a trembling hand.
Taking a deep breath, he put his hands on his hips and tried again. “Melanie, I don’t know why you’re here. I can’t imagine what makes you think I would come to America and coach a team of has-beens if it involves being anywhere near you. I’m sorry for… leaping at you like that. It’s a mystery, one of life’s great unexplainables and should likely remain so.” He closed his eyes again, shoving out the recent memory of how bloody perfect she’d felt to him. “I lost control. I’m sorry, and I assure you I will never lay a finger on you again.”
She drew herself up to her full height, and he had to consciously avoid gawking at her angular beauty. What he had once taken for hard lines were more like lean, sexy curves. He curled his hands into fists, prepared to punch himself in the face for even pondering having her again. Because that’s exactly what he was doing, right at that moment.
“Good. I have purged it from my memory as if it never happened. Let’s sit a minute, drink some tea, so I can report to your desperate family that you are indeed alive and still as much of an asshole as I remembered.” She smiled then, and for some reason his knees gave out. He was standing one second, crumpled to the floor the next, cradling the photo of his family, rocking, keening, making the most obnoxious noises.
And Mel was there, on the floor with him, sitting amongst the broken glass, the clothes, the empty bottles, and the crap he’d let pile up for the last months. Her arms were around him and he buried his face in her neck. The tears he’d already shed would fill a hundred oceans, but still they came, salty, unwelcome, and painful, ripping at his chest, burning their way down his raw face.
He clung to her and didn’t know where his tears ended and hers began. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m….” He sucked in a breath unwilling to let her go. “I want to die.”
“Shh….” She rocked with him. “You aren’t going to die. She would never forgive me if I let that happen.”
A surge of hysteria caught in his throat frightening him. But she held him close, and for the first time in nearly two years, he did not feel utterly alone.
Chapter Six
She knew even as she got trapped in its grip, the nightmare had returned. The heavy drawer slid open, the sheet pulled away, and there her beautiful, perfect nephew lay, his skull crushed almost beyond recognition, his eager voice silenced in the screech of metal and blood. She reached for him. But Metin was there, yelling and trying to drag the boy into his arms. Hands pulled her away, forced her down into a chair to watch her brother-in-law come apart at the seams. Her father remained stoic. And for the most part, so did she, remaining strong in the face of Metin’s complete breakdown.
She thrashed around, forcing herself awake. Something heavy held her down and she gasped, trying to sit up, terrified, until she realized Metin’s arm draped over her chest while he snored softly next to her. They’d fallen asleep on his couch after she conjured up some semblance of a meal out of his fridge contents, forced him to eat it, and held him off from the wine bottle he wanted to open.
“Nope. I think you have had enough to last you a few lifetimes.” She’d raised an eyebrow at all the empties still covering every visible surface.
He’d scowled, but set it aside, sipping the water she put in front of him, his silence thick with unhappiness. She had teenage boys so that was nothing new to her. But the distinct buzz in her ears and warm satisfied feeling between her legs were certainly something she had not experienced in a damn long time.
Melanie, you are some kind of slut. You marched in here to rescue your ex-brother-in-law, and let him fuck you instead. Nice. Very nice. A rogue tear slipped from one eye. Yeah, and it felt amazing, incredible, and perfect on so many levels it terrified her so she reverted to bossy bitch mode to cover her discomfort.
But now here she was, tangled up in the man’s arms, sharing a tender moment, as if they had made love, not fucked like animals. Her skin flushed with embarrassed anger. She struggled out from under his arm, and watched him sleep. The dark-olive hue of his skin, the black scruff of beard, his still-broad shoulders and strong arms mesmerized her. At that moment she sorely wished she were someone else and could actually be there with him. Instead, she got up, found a clean towel and availed herself of the giant shower.
Cranking the water all the way hot, she swayed under the strong stream, letting it beat the shame out of her at how badly she wanted to walk in there and do it again, to be connected to a man she had no business thinking about in any way, much less a sexual one. The soap smelled like him—sandalwood with a hint of citrus. She used it all over her, cleaning, and wincing when she touched her sex, smiling at what a horny old lady she’d apparently become. After a near solid hour she emerged, pink-skinned and exhausted.
“Whoa!” she yelped, nearly plowing right into Metin. He’d positioned himself in the doorway, arms crossed, a smile playing at his lips. “Shit, man, you scared me.” She moved away, clutching the towel, embarrassed and pissed at the same time. “Excuse me,” she muttered, sliding past him.
He touched her bare shoulder. “I may have spoken too soon, swearing I’d never touch you again.”
She shivered. But stepped away. This is not happening. She was an adult woman with nearly-grown boys, and she had to get the hell away from this guy and his super powers of seduction. Damn man was a walking flesh-bag of testosterone. He was… her dead sister’s husband. Good god, Melanie, you have really messed up this time.
“No, you didn’t. Now let me get dressed and let’s talk.”
He leaned against the wall, eyes trained up at the ceiling. “Sorry, Melanie.”
The sound of her name across his lips sent a raw bolt of lust flaming down her spine. She sucked in a breath, felt on the verge of potentially making the worst choice of her life. “I’m not fucking you again, Metin. That was a mistake, remember? Spare me the flirtation.” She stepped closer to him anyway. And when she lifted her lips to his, her brain went into shutdown mode.
But he stopped her, thumbing her chin. “You are right, you know,” he said, his low voice rough with emotion.
He blew out a breath. “It was a mistake. A huge one.” Brushing his lips across hers, he cupped her neck and tugged her towel down with the other hand. “But I want to make it again. Melanie.”
Mel thought her heart would beat all the way out of her chest. What the fuck did she think she was doing? She broke from him, held him at arm’s length, every inch of her now-bare skin on fire.
“Metin, god, please stop it. We can’t do this. It’s… not right.”
“But I need it. And I think you do, too.”
“I hate you.” She gasped as he yanked her close, his lips hovering over hers. “I will never stop hating you.”
“I don’t care,” He ran his fingers down her face, wiping the tears away. “It’s just physical, Melanie. Nothing more or less. Hate me all you want.”
“Keep telling yourself that,” she scoffed. “Pig.” The words made sense. But the way she honestly felt did not. It was illogical, irrational, and she couldn’t come up with a reason to stop.
“Mmmm hmmm….” He picked her up and tossed her onto the bed. “Now, let me show you how we pigs make our women scream with pleasure.”
“Oh sure, big talker. I’ll have you know I’m a great orgasm faker.” She licked her lips in spite of herself at the vision of him standing there in all his naked glory.
“There will be no faking in this room tonight. That I promise you.”
“Stop!” She held up a hand, needing to retain her sanity and compartmentalize the whole crazy thing. “Listen to me.”
He dropped to his knees, running his hands along her thighs. “I’m listening.” He licked his way up the inside of one.