Dirty Twisted Love

by Lili Valente

  “And I believed you for years,” he continued in a softer voice. “I believed you loved me and that you’d died an innocent woman who’d had her life, and her chance at happiness, stolen away from her. Stolen away from me.”

  Her throat ached. “Please, Clay, let me at least try to explain.”

  “But I know the truth now. And I have enough evidence to put you in jail for the rest of your life.” He placed a hand on her forehead with enough pressure to send a fresh rush of fear washing through her. “I know you’ve been helping Marlowe Reynolds smuggle drugs inside your sculptures. I have pictures, audio, and your fingerprints on the bags you sealed inside the plaster. All I have to do is press send on an email to my department head and I’ll have a warrant to take you in.”

  “No, you can’t,” she said, knowing it was a stupid thing to say the moment the words left her mouth.

  But she wasn’t thinking clearly. All she could think about was Jasper out in the world alone and her behind bars unable to see her son ever again.

  Clay’s hand slid into her hair, fisting in the strands at the top of her scalp as he leaned closer, growling his next words into her face, “You don’t tell me what I can or can’t do. You don’t manipulate people or make up the rules to the game. Not anymore.”

  He released her and sat back, continuing in a more controlled voice, “From now on, your job is to give me what I want when I want it. That’s your purpose and the quicker you get used to it, the sooner this will be over.”

  “So what do you want?” she said, anger rising inside of her. “To punish me, hurt me? Go ahead. I know I deserve it for the things I did, but I’m not that person anymore. I swear I’m not. And I have people depending on me, innocent people who need me to stay out of jail.”

  “Like our son,” he said, knocking the wind out of her. “I know about Jasper. I saw him get onto the plane with your friend. I hope you said a meaningful goodbye because that was the last time you’re ever going to see him.”

  “No!” For the first time since she woke up, her voice was strong. “You can’t. He needs me!”

  Clay’s lip curled. “He doesn’t need you. I wouldn’t wish you on my worst enemy, let alone my son.”

  “He does need me,” she insisted, anger and fear pumping through her, making her tremble. “Jasper loves me and I love him. We’re a family. I swear to you, Clay, I love him more than anything in the world. Everything I’ve done since the day he was born has been for him.”

  “For him.” Clay smiled, an ugly smile that made her feel smaller than she had in a long time. “You’ve been smuggling drugs for one of the most dangerous men in the world for your son? Surely even you realize that doesn’t sound like something a real mother would do. Real mothers go out of their way to protect their children from danger. They don’t offer it an engraved invitation.”

  “I never told Marlowe about Jasper. He doesn’t even know I have a son,” she said, tears rising in her eyes. “I’ve done my best to protect him. If I’d had a choice, I would have been out a long time ago. I didn’t know the way Marlowe worked when it started. I was only planning to work for him for a year, maybe two, just until I could make enough money to—”

  “You had money. I know who your father is.” He shook his head, a sharp burst of laughter escaping his lips. “Did you have fun that summer, pretending to be a cocktail waitress and slumming with Jackson and me? Fucking both of us while you turned the men who loved you against each other?”

  “This isn’t about you,” she said with a sob, sending the tears in her eyes spilling down her cheeks. “Or Jackson. Or me. Or the ugliness in the past. This is about a smart, sweet, amazing little boy who loves and needs his mother. You can’t take me away from him. You can’t, Clay, or you’ll be as terrible a person as I was back then.”

  His eyes flashed with cold rage, but Harley couldn’t seem to stop words from streaming out of her mouth.

  “No, you’ll be worse,” she said, sniffing hard. “Because you weren’t raised by a mother who couldn’t stand the sight of you and a father who encouraged you to be a vicious piece of shit. You had parents who loved you and laughed with you and told you how wonderful you were. You were whole to start with, Clay, you didn’t have to learn—”

  Before she realized he was moving, he was on the bed, looming over her with his hand around her neck.

  “And then you destroyed me!” he shouted, the hatred in his eyes making her tears flow faster as his grip tightened, wrenching a gagging sound from her throat. “You killed the person I was, you poisonous cunt! You are toxic and if you think I’m going to let you so much as speak to Jasper through the bars of a prison cell, you’re out of your fucking mind.”

  Harley squirmed beneath him, her body writhing as her vision grayed around the edges and the backs of her eyes began to pulse.

  Years ago, she could never have imagined herself and Clay in a position like this. No matter how angry he might have been, Clay wasn’t the kind of person to take out his rage on another person, especially a woman tied to a bed, helpless to defend herself. But he wasn’t that man anymore. He was a monster, a monster she had created and now he was back from the dead, crawled out of his grave to take retribution.

  They said karma was a bitch, but at that moment Harley knew karma was a devil with the face of the man you loved, slowly choking the life from your body as the world went dark.

  Chapter Six

  Clay

  Clay forced his hand from Harley’s throat and stumbled away from the bed, his arms shaking at his sides.

  What the fuck?

  What the fuck had he almost done?

  He’d brought Harley here to force her to tell him where Jasper was and facilitate the handoff between whoever had the boy and Clay’s people. This wasn’t about hurting her—at least not any more than he had to—let alone killing her.

  But hearing the self-righteous note in her voice and seeing her cry as if she were the one who deserved pity and compassion, he’d just…lost it.

  She was still breathing—she was unconscious, but he could see her chest rising and falling—but if he had kept his hand at her throat for another minute, maybe two…

  However long he’d had left before he strangled a woman to death with his bare hands, it had been too fucking close. He never should have let himself lose control. He had to get out of here, away from her, and pull his shit together. As much as he hated to admit it, she was right—if he stooped to her level, he would be no better than she was.

  Grabbing his hat off the dining table in the corner, he pushed through the screen door and out into the increasingly hot morning. Shoving the hat on his head—no need to make it easy for any drones cruising the area to see his face; he would have his ass handed to him if his superiors learned he was here without permission—he headed for the trees behind the officer bungalows.

  Once he was in the shade, concealed by the thick leaves of the rainforest that covered most of this island, he braced his hands against a thick, softly peeling trunk and dropped his head. He closed his eyes but opened them again almost immediately. When he closed his eyes, all he saw was Harley’s tear-stained face and the way the veins had stood out on her forehead just before she’d lost consciousness.

  He had killed before—in combat and in more shadowy ways in his work for the CIA—but those people had been strangers. Strangers who had signed up to fight for an opposing military force, or who had a dossier of crimes a mile long. He had never killed someone he knew personally, let alone someone he’d fucked so many times he could still remember the little sounds she made when she was about to go over, her pussy squeezing his cock until he thought he’d die from how right it felt to be inside of her.

  You didn’t fuck her; you made love to her.

  You made love to her and asked her to marry you, and if that truck hadn’t come out of nowhere, she would have been your wife.

  Clay pulled in a deep breath and let it out through clenched teeth, hating how wild
he still felt. He couldn’t dwell on the way things had been with Harley—how she could make him laugh until his stomach cramped, or the way her smell had swirled around him as they moved together, making love all night with the windows open and the sea breeze blowing across their sweat-slick skin.

  She still smelled the same. Even with the sour scent of sweat and fear rising from her body, he could catch the notes of citrus, sea salt, and eternal summer lingering in her hair. For a moment, when he’d been holding the glass for her to drink and the breeze had blown through the window, the smell of her had tugged at something low in his body.

  He hadn’t gotten hard, but he’d definitely gotten thicker. And that was enough to scare the shit out of him.

  He couldn’t believe she still had the power to make him respond. After all he’d been through, after all the pain and rage and having six years with his son stolen away from him, he should be immune. But he wasn’t. He still wanted her as much as he hated her. He could still look at her long legs and imagine them wrapped around him while he sank into her softness.

  But it would be different now. Now, he wouldn’t make love to her. Now, he would get off on taking something she didn’t care to give, from taking what he wanted and not giving a shit if it brought her pain.

  In fact, pain would be good. He wanted her to hurt.

  He had never touched a woman in anger and until this moment the thought of taking a woman against her will had sickened him. Rape was for useless, pathetic bullies who needed to violate weaker people in order to feel powerful. But the thought of Harley beneath him, tears streaming down her cheeks as he fucked her hard enough to make her breasts bounce wildly on her chest didn’t repulse him. It made his balls tighten and heat spread through his pelvis.

  Before he could push the sickening mental image from his mind he was rock hard, his cock straining the khaki shorts he’d changed into on the ferry.

  With a groan, Clay turned and leaned back against the tree, staring up at the tiny black birds dancing through the canopy. He tried to clear his mind of the twisted shit—to think of how physically exhausted he was after almost twenty-four hours without sleep or how many things could go wrong before he had Jasper in a plane with him headed back to Maryland—but his thoughts were a pit bull straining against a leash.

  They kept coming back to Harley, to her smell and her arms bound to the headboard and how much he wanted to rip the filmy white shirt she was wearing in two and get his mouth on her tits.

  Fuck. Now he was even harder, his balls aching and his swollen shaft desperate for relief.

  With a soft curse, he loosened the drawstring on his shorts and reached inside. He took himself in hand, wrapping his fingers around his feverish cock and squeezing. He let his eyes slide closed as he began to work himself up and down, using the pre-come welling at his tip for lubrication. He had to get off—preferably to something other than the ugliness swirling through his head—and get his focus back in the right place.

  Head falling back against the tree, he thought of Adeleh, the Persian woman he’d lived with for a few months in the Gostan Valley. Adeleh was one of the loveliest women he’d ever seen, a beauty with full breasts that overflowed his hands, plush, rounded hips, and dark eyes so sexy just a glance across a darkened room was almost enough to make him come. She was the opposite of Harley: dark to her light, curvy to Harley’s boyish figure, and as kind and generous as Harley was intense and demanding.

  Fucking Adeleh had been nothing but a pleasure, a way to ease the loneliness he felt being stationed in a foreign country and for her to begin to overcome her grief over losing her husband. Love had never been in the cards—his heart was a wasteland and hers too broken to allow that depth of emotion—but they’d had passion in spades.

  As Clay’s hand moved faster, he thought of their last night together, the way Adeleh had straddled him, positioning his cock at her entrance and slowly lowering her hips until he was encased in her heat. He remembered the way her long black hair had formed a curtain around their faces as she leaned down to kiss him and the feel of her breasts heavy in his hands, seeming to grow even heavier as he squeezed and rolled her nipples. He remembered the way her breath had rushed out across his lips as she moved faster, riding his cock with her hands braced on his chest.

  He was thrusting into his hand, imagining that it was Adeleh’s slick body, when the images flickering behind his closed lids shifted. Suddenly it wasn’t black hair spilling around him, but silken brown curls.

  Adeleh’s solid weight vanished, replaced by Harley’s lighter frame.

  “You know this is what you want,” Harley said, the muscles in her arms flexing as she gripped the headboard above him. “You want to be so deep inside of me I’ll feel you for days.”

  “Shut your mouth.” He rolled them over, taking control with a sharp thrust into her heat, drawing a moan from low in her throat as the head of his cock butted against the end of her channel.

  Fuck, she felt so good, so tight and wet, her inner walls fitting around him like a glove.

  “I don’t want to shut my mouth.” She locked her ankles behind his back and clenched her thigh muscles, pulling him impossibly deeper. “You know I like to talk.”

  “I’m not in the mood to listen,” he snapped, grabbing her legs behind the knees and forcing them up and out, until she was spread wide, completely vulnerable to him as he withdrew and slammed his cock back inside her, sending pain flickering across her features. “So keep quiet. Or I’ll find something to shut you up.”

  “God, Clay.” Harley arched beneath him, grimacing as he fucked her so hard the flesh of her thighs rippled as he drove home again and again, the tension in his body building until the base of his spine burned and every nerve in his body was crackling with electricity. “Yes. Fuck me. Use me. Hurt me.”

  With a growl of frustration he pulled out and flipped her over onto her stomach, roughly kneeing her thighs apart before shoving into her from behind. As soon as he was back inside her tight cunt, he wrapped his hand around her neck, covering her mouth as he brought his lips to her ear.

  “You don’t speak,” he whispered, his free arm banding around her waist, holding her captive as he thrust into her, hard and deep. “You don’t deserve a voice.”

  She moaned, her breath warm on his hand as she spread her thighs wider. Clenching his jaw, Clay accepted the silent invitation. He rode her hard, pounding into her until she whimpered and his balls ached from slamming into her pussy at the end of each thrust. But he didn’t pull back; he held her tighter and fucked her harder.

  Harder, harder, until she screamed into his hand.

  She screamed and bucked beneath him, her cunt clutching at his dick, coating him with a gush of slickness as she tumbled over. He joined her with a guttural sound, his cock jerking as he came so hard his chest felt like it was turning inside out.

  Clay opened his eyes to see his cock thrusting through his own fist, the thick length pulsing as his come splashed out to coat the leaves at his feet. He bit his lip, fighting to stay silent as he jerked and pulsed, riding out the last waves of the best orgasm he’d had in years.

  In years.

  Fantasizing about fucking Harley had gotten him off harder than being with a beautiful, sweet woman who he considered a real friend, the kind he would drop everything and fly back to Iran to help if she were ever in trouble. He hadn’t raped Harley in his fantasy, but he wasn’t messed up enough to consider that a victory. At least not yet.

  No, he wasn’t a monster, but if he stayed on this island alone with Harley Mason long enough, he would become one.

  The real Harley hated him for trying to take her son away. She wouldn’t give consent, let alone spread her legs and silently ask for more. If he gave in to his twisted longing for her, she would fight him. And then he would find out if he was the kind of man who would take a woman against her will.

  He swallowed hard as he tucked himself back into his boxer briefs. He didn’t want to find out if th
at kind of evil lived inside of him. He didn’t want to be that man and he refused to let Harley bring more misery into his life.

  Which meant he had to get what he needed from her and get rid of her as quickly as possible, no lingering on this island, no taking his time coaxing the truth from her.

  As much as he hated to bargain with the devil, it might be best to make a deal. Better to offer her a reward in exchange for her cooperation than to spend a month or more here alone with her, slowly losing his mind from a mix of wanting and hating.

  A plan forming, Clay made his way through the forest to a hidden beach surrounded by thick foliage where he stripped to the skin and dove into the cool waves.

  As his body sank below the surface and the ocean swept by overhead, Clay let the salt water wash away the evidence of his release, wishing the sea could wash away his sick longing for Harley as easily.

  Chapter Seven

  Harley

  Harley woke up in a rush, her heart pounding and her body electrified by fear. Her eyes flew open, blinking fast as an unfamiliar ceiling and ceiling fan swam into view. She swallowed hard, wincing at the aching in her throat, wondering what had awoken her and why she was so terrified.

  As the bruised flesh around her windpipe contracted, it all came rushing back.

  Clay.

  His hand at her throat.

  The world going black and the certainty that she was about to die.

  To die without seeing Jasper again, without being able to tell him she loved him, or without having the chance to write that letter she’d always meant to write: the one that thanked him for transforming her heart and giving her the most beautiful years of her life. She’d started the letter a hundred times, but it seemed dangerous to write words meant only to be read if she died before her son was old enough to have the conversation in person. It was like writing a will. She’d never done that either, not wanting to tempt fate by preparing for the worst.