Mr. Beautiful

by R. K. Lilley

  "Come here," he said, voice low and guttural.

  The most unnerving shock went through me, but I went.

  I was standing almost close enough for our chests to touch when he reached up with one hand, gripped my thick braid, and began to wrap it around his heavy fist. He did this until his knuckles were digging into my scalp and then he pulled a little harder.

  It stung, but it wasn't the sort of pain you wanted to shy away from. Not at all. It was the kind you wanted to lean into, to explore to its fullest, because you knew that just on the other side of that pain was intense pleasure.

  "How rough can you take it, Lourdes?" he asked, bringing his mouth very close to mine.

  I was trying not to pant. "I don't know," I replied honestly. "Why don't you show me what you got?"

  He smiled, and this time, it very nearly reached his eyes. "You asked for it."

  For my Breathing Fire fans.

  Thank you for being so patient with me.

  The second book in this series has long been in the works. It is close to my heart, and I'm hoping to have it finished very soon.

  So here is a bit of never before released info about Crossing Fire. These books were meticulously plotted out when I first started this story, over seven years ago. The love story in the book was always so screwed up that it was nearly hopeless, and the history between Jillian and Dom was always a story in itself, though it wasn't one I was necessarily going to give to the readers in its entirety. The mystery of it sort of tickled me. The torture of what you do and don't know. This still holds true, but as I've worked on book two, it's changed shape with the evolving plot of the story, and I'm excited to tell you that this book has turned into a journey of past and present, of before and after, where you will get to see Dom's POV over the years in a very unique and twisted way.

  Translation: You will get some of the dirty details of Jillian and Dom's past, and many scenes in Dom's point of view.

  Here's a little teaser for you:)

  CROSSING FIRE (HERETIC DAUGHTERS #2)

  JILLIAN

  I was a fool. A masochist. A glutton for punishment. I was the type that kept picking at a scab, keeping the wound open until it scarred, then scratching at the scar until I created another deep, jagged cut.

  Knowing all of this, I still found myself seeking out the grove, yet again.

  "More," I spoke, my voice throaty with need.

  I said it to the blood red water, and that evil water answered.

  I knew it would, even before I saw the creature emerge.

  It didn't take long to present itself. A white body, that odd, wrong, creepy as hell presence, was out of the water and nearly to me in the strangest motion. It never looked like it was moving fast, but it covered ground between one blink and the next.

  It paused when it reached me, and I clenched me teeth.

  I felt like a junkie looking for a fix, and perhaps I was. My fix just happened to be pieces of my past, our past.

  And I just kept coming back. I wanted to eat every scrap of meat off this dysfunctional bone, then split it open, and suck out the marrow.

  "Don't draw it out," I told it, my voice harsh. "I don't have much time."

  "You know how it works here, first-born," it breathed on me. "Time stands still."

  Wasn't that just the brutal fucking truth of it?

  Without another word, it struck my neck and took me under.

  Some part of me remained while I was in his head, in his past now, and the more I did it, the stronger it was. I could form thoughts as a watcher now, cohesive ones.

  And as I came into his body for this memory, I thought: Oh no, not this one. My heart can't take this memory. It's too much.

  Not only did I see what he saw when I came into his memories like this. I also felt what he felt. And the instant I got there, I felt the pain.

  It was fathomless. Infinite. Never ending. So flooring I wanted to sink to the ground and never rise again.

  Raw, oozing agony.

  Pulsing, bleeding anguish.

  Thrumming, gushing torment.

  Mental, physical, spiritual, I was tormented on all fronts.

  I was looking at a very somber Sloan. She had a manila envelope in her hand, but she was shaking her head, over and over.

  "You don't need to see this, Dom," she told me, a weak thread to her voice I'd never heard before.

  I held out my hand. I had to see. I already knew it would be bad. My lover had left me, breaking all ties, leaving chaos in her wake, and the harder I looked for her, the more damage I found.

  That was Jillian for you. She never did anything half-assed. Never pulled any punches when she was being self-destructive.

  She should have known me better. I'd never stop looking for her, no matter what she'd done.

  No matter what things she'd destroyed, what laws she'd broken, what beliefs she'd set asunder.

  I would save her from herself. That was my job. She needed me as much as I needed her.

  She'd already broken our blood bond, parts of me breaking with it. What could be worse than that? What could a manila envelope hold that was more profoundly detrimental to me than the loss of her, the only woman I had ever loved?

  Sloan handed me the evidence, and I asked her for a moment alone.

  "Please, Dom. Don't look."

  I shook my head, and she left. She knew me better. I was resolute.

  I stood there for a long time before I opened the envelope, time bracing myself, staring at the thing like it held horrors I could not bear to stomach.

  It did, of course. I'd known it as soon as I heard there were pictures, had it reinforced when I saw the defeated look on Sloan's undefeat-able face.

  My hands shook as I pulled out the stack of photos and began to flip through them.

  I was three pictures in when I began to shake so badly that I fell to my knees.

  Six pictures in when I began to wretch.

  Ten pictures in when I began to weep.

  Not only had she left me, broken oaths, severed bonds.

  She'd been unfaithful, done the thing she knew would break me the most, and with a man I despised. She'd shared her body, all of that beautiful flesh that belonged to me, with my enemy.

  I was blind in my agony, lost in my pain, but even crippled and broken, I knew there was calculation behind this thing she'd done.

  Why? And . . .

  How could she?

  It didn't matter what she'd done. And it didn't matter why she'd done it. I'd still never stop looking for her. What I'd do with her when I found her, well, that wasn't a productive line of thought.

  Turns out, hate didn't kill love. In some extremely fucked up cases, the two things could coexist together.

  But him. Him. I knew what to do with him. To him I'd show no mercy. Not an ounce of it. I had a target now, a focus for the unadulterated fury that had gripped me from the moment she'd broken our bond.

  Heads would roll.

  Here's an extra little treat for fans of Tristan & Danika. I couldn't help myself. I love them so much.

  LOVELY TRIGGER BONUS EPILOGUE FROM TRISTAN'S POV

  TRISTAN

  That morning I'd learned everything. Every awful thing that I'd put Danika through revealed to me at last.

  I'd been nothing so much as a mess on the floor after that, after she'd left me with a few last debilitating shots.

  I'd managed to make it off the floor, eventually.

  Baby steps.

  And eventually, hopefully within a few days, I'd be able to function again, able to think up a proper plan, and work up the nerve to go and get her back.

  Frankie came to see me that night.

  Her jaw was set, her eyes animated. She looked ready to raise hell.

  I loved hell-raising Frankie best, even on my worst day.

  I let her in.

  She didn't waste any time. "So that's it then? You're just going to give up now? You're gonna lie down and die, let the love of your life wal
k away?"

  I held up my hand. As much as I hated to interrupt an impassioned speech . . .

  "Of course I'm not giving up," I reassured her. "Thought never even crossed my mind. I'm just . . . building up my artillery for the next battle. She pulled out some heavy guns in our last round. I need a few days to recoup, let some of these fresher wounds heal.

  "Oh Tristan," she said sadly.

  "The person you love the most on this earth is the one most able to hurt you," I said softly. "And Danika does nothing in half measures. I'm not gonna lie, she did some damage back there."

  Her cute little hell-raising face scrunched up like she just might cry.

  I reached for her hand. "I'm okay. I'm fine. I know what I need to do. I have so much clarity now, and most of the things she said, well, as much as they broke my heart, I needed to hear them."

  One week later, reinforcements in hand, I knocked on Danika's door.

  She opened it, eyes wary, sad, six long years of heartbreak pouring out of them.

  I'd be fixing that. I'd be fixing everything.

  If it took the rest of my life, I'd fix it all.

  We had a surprisingly peaceful marriage, for the most part. No one was more surprised by that than I was.

  We'd been at war for so many years that we were good at it. In general, I found that people tended to keep doing the things they were good at, even if those things were destructive.

  And oh boy were we good at waging that futile war on each other, at fighting a battle where both of us did nothing but lose.

  But when that awful war was finally over, we stopped fighting, for the most part.

  I decided that we must have just gotten it all out of our system. Both of us had suffered a lifetime's worth of pain early on.

  And now, at last, our golden age of peace.

  Ming had just turned fifteen. We were celebrating, a small party with just the family.

  She beamed at me, words coming out of her mouth that I did not understand.

  She was petite and slender, and just a beautiful girl, inside and out. And she was brilliant, top of her class.

  And coincidentally, at that moment, she was attempting to give me, her father, a heart attack.

  "You what?" I asked her. I'd heard her wrong, obviously. There was no way she'd just said that to me.

  "I'm going to senior prom with Alex Bancroft, a senior."

  I started shaking my head. She'd said it again, repeated the same crazy words.

  "The hell you are," I finally got out.

  She didn't seem to hear. "It's the best thing ever," she explained to me. "He's really cute."

  "He won't be cute when I destroy his face," I told her. I held up an open hand and smashed my fist into it, grinding it hard against my palm. The palm represented this bastard Alex's face.

  She blinked at me, cocking her head. "Dad, you are so weird."

  Danika intervened, and I was grateful. She spoke teenage girl much better than I did.

  She put an arm around Ming, patting her back, and guiding her from the room. "Let's go talk about this away from the boys, sweetie," she told her.

  "I'll kick his ass for you, Dad. Don't you worry about it," Nikolaj said behind me, sounding gleeful and bloodthirsty about it. "And then I'll kick him in the balls so hard that he'll have to stay home from prom to ice his nuts."

  I turned and glanced at him, lifting a brow, trying not to smile. He lifted a brow back at me and started popping his knuckles. Our oldest son cracked me the hell up. He'd been born with a sense of comedic timing, and a fun-loving spirit.

  He was tall, his hair darkening since childhood into a dirty blond that he kept long enough to fall into his startling blue eyes. He was slender to the point of thin, but you can bet your ass that my boys knew how to fight.

  My girls, too. I taught them all well.

  The girls especially fought dirty as hell. It tickled me to no end. I was just waiting for someone to mess with them and get the surprise of their lives.

  "Language!" Danika called from a few rooms over.

  "She has supernatural hearing," Jared said, drawing my attention. He was sitting at the table, eating his second piece of cake. "It's scary. We should all be afraid." He pointed at Nikolaj. "Especially him. You don't even want to know the things he does in the bathroom."

  Jared was a riot, too. I covered my mouth to muffle the sound of my laughter. If Danika heard me, I'd be getting another lecture on not encouraging the boys to misbehave.

  It wasn't my fault, they were both incorrigible.

  "Jared, knock it off!" Danika called.

  "See," Jared whispered, grinning at me. I grinned back. He looked like me, was built like me, but sometimes I swear I saw my brother peeking out of his playful silver eyes.

  "Heard that!" she yelled.

  He bit his lips to try to hold the laughter in.

  Cleo came charging into the kitchen, iPad in hand. "Hey Dad, you want to take a look at this face you guys are planning to destroy?" she asked archly, her curly hair wild, her eyes mischievous.

  We'd adopted her a year after Jared as born, domestically this time. Her parentage had been a mystery. She'd been abandoned. All we'd been told was that she was a mix, and all we knew for sure was that the mix was beautiful.

  Her beauty was wild. It was huge. The room could barely contain it.

  She was the baby of the family, and we all doted on her, even Jared, though he was only a few months older.

  "Yes," I said with no hesitation.

  "Hell yeah," Nikolaj chimed in.

  "Um, duh, yeah," Jared added.

  The boys swarmed me, huddling in close so we could all see, my hands automatically going to the top of each boy's head and ruffling.

  She showed us the screen of her iPad.

  I glared at the picture of Alex Bancroft. I hated his face.

  "I hate his face," Jared said.

  I started laughing and couldn't stop.

  "Asshole," Nikolaj added.

  "Nikolaj, language!" Danika called.

  "Bastard," Cleo said, glaring at the picture. "I hate him, even if he is cute."

  "Cleo, language!" their mother barked out again. She could barely be heard over my laughter.

  "Tristan, stop encouraging them!" She raised her voice louder.

  "Duncan is coming over, hope you don't mind. I just texted him," Jared informed me. "I know we're having a family day, but isn't he basically family?"

  "Why didn't you tell me?!" Cleo screeched, moving out of the room. "Now I need to do my hair!"

  I lifted my brows. "Yes, he's family, but how is he getting here?"

  "He has a chauffeur, remember?"

  I went to check around the corner, making sure Cleo was out of earshot. I moved back to Jared, voice pitched low. "Listen, I want you to do something for me."

  He nodded, eyes wide with excitement. "Sure, Dad, what's up? We doing another prank on Mom?"

  "Maybe later," I said.

  I waited a beat.

  "I heard that!" Danika yelled. I grinned. Tormenting my beautiful wife was one of life's greatest joys.

  "Listen," I told him again. "I know Duncan is your best friend. And he's a great kid. Seriously, I love that kid. But you need to do something for me. A brotherly duty. I want you to be sure to let him know that he's never to go near your sister. You have my full approval to kick his ass if he even looks like he's going to."

  He smiled and rolled his eyes. It reminded me so much of my brother that it made my breath catch.

  You'll never be gone, I thought, not for one day. He'd passed over twenty years ago, and I still felt so close to him. He was a part of me, and the passage of time couldn't change that.

  "You do realize they are only eleven, Dad, right?" Nikolaj called out sassily.

  I shot him a look, a dad look that said, 'Watch it, son.' I pointed down the hallway, where Cleo had run off. "She's already doing her hair for him. It's never too early to start keeping an eye on your sisters, b
oys. And Duncan is a Cavendish, so you should both know that, though he's family, that means he's extra trouble. As your mother would say, he's trouble with a capital T."

  "You do realize what you're doing to our sons, don't you?" Danika asked me later, when we were alone in our room, getting ready for bed.

  I grinned. "Those two, Lord." I shook my head. "They crack me up."

  "Yes, I know. They have well developed senses of humors, there is no doubt. But they're little hell raisers. Seriously. They're little mini yous. Did you know that Jared can already pick me up? He lifted me clean off the ground and carried me from the living room to the kitchen yesterday, just because I told him he couldn't. He took that as a dare. Sound like anyone? It's insane."

  I couldn't hide my huge grin with any success.

  "And Nikolaj. Don't even get me started. He was trying to skateboard off the roof of a house the other day, because someone dared him to. What am I going to do with those boys?"

  "And what about our girls?" I asked her. "Our little sarcasm generators? You gonna pretend they didn't get all that sass from you? And if you didn't notice, they also never turn down a dare, and neither do you."

  "I'm perfectly capable of turning down a dare," she said firmly. She'd never admit it. I hadn't gotten her to cop to it even once, but we both knew she was as bad as I was when it came to being challenged.

  "I gave the boys an okay to go open season on Duncan if he looks even remotely like he's making a move on Cleo."

  She laughed at me. At me. Loud and mockingly. "They are eleven, you caveman. Slow your roll. And what about the boys, with Imogen and Isabella? How come you aren't worried about that?"

  I went and grabbed her, throwing her over my shoulder, tickling her in revenge to the mocking.

  "It's not the same," I told her. She thought it was sexist, but it just was. Our baby girls were to be protected from boys for as long as we could manage. That was the order of the universe.

  I tossed her onto her back on our bed, getting on top of her, wedging my hips between her legs, cupping her beautiful, smiling face in one hand, the other tracing softly over every beloved feature. Time had done nothing to diminish her beauty. I personally thought time had enhanced it, added to it with still more depth in those eyes of hers that enslaved me at a glance.