by Robin Lovett
He tries for more civility. “I feel badly about our meeting yesterday. I hope we can clear up this misunderstanding.”
“You were my father’s most trusted lawyer when my mother died. You thwarted the police investigation into her death. There’s no misunderstanding.”
He feigns compassion, like he’s known me intimately for years. “Blake, you were a child when it happened. I was there. I wanted to help you.”
“Bullshit.” His trying to treat me like an old family friend incenses me. “You’re just like him. You wanted the money. And he paid you for your silence. You knew and you did nothing.”
“Knew what?”
“How my mother died! How he killed her!” My anger erupts, blinding my rationale.
“Blake.” His voice is gentle. “How did he kill her?”
I stare him down with the force of all the violence I feel. “You know.”
“You don’t have to be like him, son. He’s gone. You can let this go.”
“My mother’s dead!” I scream, leaning across his desk into his face. “I will never let it go!”
His eyes cloud over with resignation. “I don’t know what you want from me.”
“I have proof of what you did.” I lay the first two pages on his desk. “The correspondence about the money my father sent you yearly for your silence.” The blood money.
I enjoy the horror that creeps over his face.
“This isn’t for what you think, Blake. This was for my silence but it wasn’t the kind of silence you’re thinking of.”
“Doesn’t matter.” I put more papers on his desk.
He accepts them with shaking hands and looks it over, the emails I found to incriminate him. “These are from my private server,” he whispers in shock.
Because of their confidence in their security, he and my father were sloppy. I found their emails from when they renegotiated the terms of their agreement.
Satisfied with the horror slanting over his face, I sit back in the chair. “You’ll understand my temptation to go to the police with this.”
“I—I—” He stutters. “Blake, you don’t have to do this.”
“Prison isn’t a hard enough punishment for you, I’ve decided.”
“And what is?”
“Your daughter.”
Terror—the kind that destroys a soul—crosses his face, and I know without a doubt I’ve picked the perfect revenge strategy.
“Please,” he begs. “Leave her out of this. I’ll go to prison. I’ll—”
I shake my head. “She’s mine. For the rest of your life, she’s mine. When you die, I’ll let her go.”
“If you kidnap her, I’ll send the police after her.”
“Not if she’s with me willingly. If she refuses to go with the police, there’s nothing they can do. There’s nothing you can do short of kidnapping her yourself.”
He palms his face. “You don’t have to do this. It doesn’t have to be this way. If you would just understand—”
“I understand perfectly. I’m only here to make you understand your daughter is mine now, and will be until you’re dead.”
His eyes close and his lips move, like he’s whispering a prayer. “You can’t do this. Daisy will never—”
“She’s already mine. She’s at my estate. And I’m never letting her go.”
“You can’t just use her as a pawn for the rest of her life!”
“It’s only for the rest of your life. However long or short that may be.” I stand and make my way to the door. “Make sure your wife knows to call me when you’re dead.”
I leave with hatred pulsing through my veins like a drug. I cling to it, I breathe it.
I get to my car and am assaulted by a vibrating sound. I rummage under the passenger seat to find the source. It’s coming from Daisy’s purse. I dig into it, feeling like I’ve invaded a private world. Though it’s a less private world than where she let me put my hand last night.
I find her phone, with a dying battery.
Her connection to the outside world. I put it on silent and into my back pocket. She won’t be getting it back. It’s mine now.
Chapter Nine
I hear his car pull into the drive and feel like a stay-at-home wife when I come out to meet him. It’s after noon. Where the hell has he been?
He gets out of his car and stares at me. “Hello.” His eyes rake over me, and I laugh.
“Your sister is quite a bit smaller than me. I’m rather enjoying it.” I turn a circle in the tank top that’s so tight, my bra is poking out the collar. It barely covers my chest and doesn’t cover my middle at all, stopping at my belly button. The little shorts aren’t much more than underwear, the hems cresting at the bottom of my ass, leaving the curve of the cheeks exposed.
I shrug. “It’s not my fault Penny is a petite little thing and you didn’t let me bring clothes.”
He says nothing. He stalks closer—there is no other way to describe how he moves toward me, his muscles lithe and gracefully flexed, his gaze hooded and direct.
But as he gets closer, there’s something in his eyes that’s different. A vicious edge, even worse than when he left my father’s office yesterday.
“You went to see my dad, didn’t you?” I ask.
He still says nothing, but the fierceness of his expression is enough. It’s a yes. He’s been talking business. Something upsetting. Something that’s made him very angry. It’s an anger that has me turning molten and going a little weak-kneed.
I’m dying to know what he’s going to do when he reaches me.
My pulse accelerates, my whole body quickening in response to what he gave me last night and to how he kissed me yesterday at the office—after the last time he looked at me that way.
The waiting—walking around the estate, chatting with the Tanners, exploring the house—it’s been a trial in anticipation. I didn’t know waiting could go from delicious, to torturous, to anxiety inducing, such that seeing him now I’m ready to beg, to get on my knees and give him whatever he asks in gratitude for last night and in hope of so much more.
Heat drips through me, tingling over my skin until it aches.
I’m a mess of need just from watching him come to me—the promise of him unleashing his intensity into me again.
He stops in front of me, his breathing as fast as mine, his muscles bunched in restraint. I don’t know why he’s holding back, if it’s for him or for me.
“Please,” I choke out.
It’s enough.
He cups my face and kisses me—again with no prelude, but with a freeing of all the things he keeps tightly wrapped within himself.
He wields his tongue like a weapon, stealing everything in his path, taking all I offer and more with a desperation that defies reason. His lips mold over my mouth, and he uses them to pry my mouth open, delving as far into me as my jaw will allow.
I press my body to him and his hands oblige—gripping over my back and pressing us flush together.
His mouth hunts down my neck and up to my ear. “You want it all, don’t you?” The words pull at all the needy places in me, reopening the gaping hole in me that craves anything he has and is.
“Everything,” I whisper. “Give it all to me.”
The groan from his throat matches my need—he wants, needs, as badly as I do. We are a perfect meeting of desires—where he wants to unleash, I wants to receive. A meeting of a yin and yang as complete as the universe can create. Stronger than a magnetic or gravitational pull, there is no resisting this unbelievable thing that is happening between us.
He lifts me and I wrap his my legs around his hips. His hands grab my ass and squeeze, holding me to him. There’s a stumbling, a lurching up stairs and through the door.
“Tell me which way,” he mumbles against my skin, refusing to look up.
I look over my shoulder, breathlessly directing him to the closest bed, the buttercup bedroom where I slept last night.
He drops me on the mat
tress, falling with me, and slides down my body. His teeth nip a path over my chest, my hands twisting and pulling at his hair, my heels burrowing into his back.
His fingers shake over me, his grip wildly desperate, biting and scratching my skin. His face tunnels into my shirt, growls of frustration accompanying his tearing into the fabric with his teeth.
He takes his anger out on the flimsy cotton and rips it from collar to hem. I help him with my bra that he yanks at, unable to remove with his trembling hands.
Shirt and bra gone, my breasts bare to him, he palms them and massages them, flicks his fingers and tongue over the nipples, his movements too hurried and frantic for me to decipher. I try to watch but am thrown back by the pleasures he sends into me.
My heart beats beneath his face as though trying to reach out and touch him. It wants him within me as badly as the rest of my body does. I arch beneath him, needing more of the same but also dying for more of him lower on me. Every caress of his hands stokes the urgency bursting within me for him inside me.
I push his shoulders—he’s giving me too much and not enough, excavating more of my aching emptiness. Rather than satisfying me, he’s raking deeper into the hole of need that I didn’t know was there until last night. The hole that has become the sole focus of my existence to fill.
I cry yes and beg for more when he finally moves lower. He tears through my shorts with the same ferocity as my top. Naked, my skin and curves on display for him, I watch him feast on me with a gaze like an x-ray, as though with his eyes he can see into the darkest recesses of me and know what I want and need better than I know myself.
He spreads my legs, pressing my inner thighs open. A sound comes from him, a noise that sounds like it comes from the depths of the earth.
“So wet,” he murmurs to himself. “For me.”
The last thing I see is him licking his lips, and then his head descends. Seeing becomes impossible.
His tongue. His tongue. His . . .
Light, pulsing light and sparks, like the guttering burning of a fuse. A long fuse that I can’t see the end of. Staring at the flame is blinding, blinding me from all sense of place or time. Or even myself, my name or his.
What he’s doing to me—I know it’s him on a carnal level. This male who stirs my blood in explosive ways, who sees into me with a precision that only comes from a physical communion. Passion flows between us, each fueling the other until it bursts and takes us beyond reality.
I come, a circuit board of color, a devastating of me. I am body, I am physical, I am me . . . more me than I have ever been.
The sensations crest beyond what I can take. I back away from his mouth, kick his shoulders from me, crying and aching, overtaken by the pleasure riding the edge of pain.
Is it torture, is it ecstasy? I don’t know. I can’t tell anymore, and I curl in on myself away from him, unable to look at him or say a thing to him.
He sags onto the bed next to me, but doesn’t touch me.
Which I’m grateful for. I might cry from how badly I still want even after the mind-bending orgasm he just gave me. I can’t want more after that. I can’t take anymore.
I’ll disappear and drown in the whirlpool of desire he makes in me.
* * *
I lay spent, wasted beside her.
Wasted with the intensity of seeing, feeling, and making her come like I’ve rended her soul in two. I don’t understand what is happening. It’s oral sex, not open heart surgery. I wasn’t even inside her, I didn’t even come, and I feel like I’ve killed something in myself—and created something terrifying in her.
I have to get away. I can’t be in this bed with her—hearing her breathe, feeling her heat next to me. I feel covered and tainted with this new thing that is her and me together and I have to get rid of it. I don’t want it on me.
I stumble from the bed to the bathroom and flip on the shower.
As I strip down, I don’t look in the mirror. I avoid it. I don’t want to see it—see the effects she’s had on my skin, on my body, my expression. I feel it like a brand on me, the need that is still pulsing through me.
I turn the water to scalding—hot enough to redden my skin and deaden the sensations crawling over it. Once I wash it away, I’ll remember what I’m really here for. I’ll be able to separate myself from this woman who—no. I’m done thinking about her.
I close my eyes, reminding myself of my talk with Nowell, of the fear on his face, of the hatred I felt and the satisfaction that came after. The satisfaction I should still be feeling now.
The shower door opens and I jerk back.
She steps inside, naked, her skin gleaming, her curves glorious.
I am frozen in stone. I can’t move or I’ll grab her. But to try to look away—I won’t be able to.
The spray lashes her legs and waist, crossing the slope of her hip. She steps closer to me and it sprinkles over her breasts and up to her neck.
“I didn’t get a turn,” she says, her voice straining to make sound, ragged like she’s been screaming. Maybe she was back on the bed when I was . . . it was all so much I don’t know.
I know what she means, but I don’t want to think it. If she’s suggesting what I think she’s suggesting, I don’t know if I can take it. I don’t know if I can stop her. I don’t know if I can resist the need raging through me enough to tell her no.
Her face is lax like she’s satiated, but she moves with tension, as if begging for something.
She stands before me, my head blocking the spraying water from her face.
“Tell me no,” she pleads.
“I—can’t.” Even as my tongue stutters, I’m getting hard, desperate for what she’s offering, what I shouldn’t accept.
She reaches for me. Her hand wraps my cock and pulls.
I shudder.
“Make me stop,” she whispers, her eyes fixed on where she’s touching me, where the feelings she’s lighting in me will soon make me senseless.
“No. Don’t.”
She pauses. “Don’t?”
I should push her away, but instead I grasp her hand and move it for her, showing her what I’m needing more than I can bear to stop her.
She obliges, following the stroke and grip motion I show her. It strangles my ability to communicate, even with my hand. I drop my hand, only able to make sounds of encouragement when words fail me.
She kisses me, and her lips on my lips, where I still taste her from between her legs—to taste her mouth again, it’s like I missed her, like in the ten minutes I was away from her I lost a piece of myself.
I clutch her face and beg her with my mouth to keep going with her hand, to not stop until she wrecks me. I want her to take away what I hate of myself and leave behind only a skeleton of what makes me.
She pulls away, dropping her hand, and I growl in frustration, reaching for her. She scolds me with a shake of her head, pushes my hands away, then sinks to her knees.
I die a little, watching her descend in front of me. Just the sight of her there does things to me, things that make me want to make her mine, hard enough and pure enough that the whole world knows it. Until she knows it and she’s as imprisoned to me in body and soul as she now is physically.
She opens her mouth wide and stares up at me. Her tongue, pink and wet, waits easily as the drops from the shower drip down her cheeks. She wants me to do it.
Helpless not to, I place my distended cock on her tongue. She doesn’t close her mouth but stays in wait, forcing me to choose my own torture. With a finger beneath her chin, I lift it and she wraps her lips around me. When she still doesn’t move, I place a hand on her head and press her down onto me.
I watch her eyes for signs that it’s too much—that I’m deep as she can take. But her eyes are nothing but willing, revealing a desire for me to give to her this way as much as I gave her the orgasm before. Suggesting that even this act will be as much about me fulfilling a need in her as was me giving her an orgasm.
My
need to pour into her, to release into her, is no less than it was then. She is the vessel of my passion, the destination of all my darkest needs. There are no boundaries of what she will accept from me. She wants it all.
She takes all of me, swallowing my cock until it disappears within her, the acceptance awakening a desire in me I hadn’t known I possessed. I begin to move her head and she lets me, taking my needs, my wants, and making them her own. Stealing everything that flows from me and sucking it into herself like life-giving solace.
My cautions, my fears, my reluctance to let her take so much from me—gone. With each bob of her head, it drifts away into nothing, until all that is left is my animal need to come hard and long in her mouth.
Her cheeks hollow and she does things to me that I can’t see or will with my hand on her hair. Her tongue, her mouth providers of hidden pleasures I cannot know, but which will undo me.
The orgasm roars through me without warning, pounded from me and wrenched away without my control. Wild and unbridled, I ride it as her mouth rides me, taking all of it.
She swallows me down, her eyes closing in bliss, mine unable to close for the sheer paradise of watching her loving the taste of me.
Wanting to see it, I pull out of her as I finish, watching the final traces of my come linger on her lips before she laps it up greedily with her tongue.
Too greedily. Like one taste of me is not enough. Her eyes tell me she’s insatiable for more.
Which I cannot give. I forgot for too long of a moment why she’s here. Why I’m here. What I’m taking from her—her freedom.
Which makes what I’m taking from her with her consent wrong.
Her expression falls in exhaustion and she sits back on her heels, dropping her head. Demure and supplicant—to me.
All wrong.
I should lift her, take her back to the bed like I did last night. But I can’t. To touch her would be to take more from her. It’s a more that she is willingly giving me but . . . no.
Remorse is not something I feel.
I cannot feel it. Not over this. It would be a betrayal to the mother I have set out to avenge. But it doesn’t mean I have to spend another moment with this woman at my feet.