by Jessa Kane
I would love to put her on the edge of her idiotic father’s desk and make him watch as I untie her bikini top and suck on her nipples. Make her whimper again. Entice her thighs to open, welcoming me home. Make the fucking fool who didn’t guard Arya well enough watch as we lose our virginity to each other.
He’d deserve it. For not recognizing the treasure that was his daughter.
Six attempts on her precious life—six—before this motherfucker decided she was valuable enough to keep her under lock and key.
Even if her life wasn’t in constant danger because of her father’s profession, I would have watched her, though. As obsessive with this girl as I am, I had no choice. As soon as I had the means, I bought a condo right across the street from their home, my bedroom window directly facing Arya’s, so I could track her movements closely, be aware of the rare times she left the building. And if that failed, if I happened to be out on the rare occasion she left, the tracking device in her phone would have signaled me.
Call it wrong, call it illegal. I don’t give a fuck.
She’s been mine since she handed me that orange eleven years ago—and I’m about to officially claim her. Finally. I’ve waited so long to share my home with her. To have her shaking and moaning beneath me. To see her smile before the sunrise. So goddamn long.
The way she went soft when she realized my true identity, the boy from the subway steps, will knock the breath out of my lungs forever. Every time I think about it.
Up ahead, I see some bodies lying motionless near the poolside. “Put your face in my neck, sweetheart,” I say quietly, gratified when she does as she’s told.
With my men following us closely, weapons ready just in case, I carry Arya down a flight of stairs and into a private corridor that leads to her parents’ penthouse, not bothering to wait for an invitation before striding inside. The idiot mother and father are in hysterics, shouting at a police operator, who is on speakerphone. I nod at one of my men and they divest Arya’s mother of the phone, smashing it against the wall. The rest of them leave to search the penthouse for any remaining guests that aren’t dead or didn’t flee to safety.
“Hey!” Arya’s mother screeches, the giant diamonds quivering in her ears with indignation. “What…who are you? Please don’t kill us! Please! We have money!”
“Oh, Arya,” her father says, looking green. “Thank goodness, you’re okay.”
“Why weren’t you out there looking for her yourself?” I ask through my teeth. “After all, it was one of your enemies that showed up to the party with a rifle.”
“You don’t know that for sure,” he complains.
“Yes, I do.” He’s about to find out that I make it my business to know everything that could possibly touch his daughter. “Let’s speak in your office.”
“Thomas,” her mother says, backing away from my men nervously. “Why is he holding our Arya like that? Tell him to put her down. Make them leave.”
Before I can speak, Arya responds for me. “This is my guardian angel, mother. I told you he was real. And he just saved my life.” She nuzzles her face against my shoulder and sighs. “Again.”
“I told you to stop spouting that nonsense,” Thomas blusters, but his mouth snaps shut when I spear him with a look. “What do you want to discuss in my office?”
“The fact that I’m taking your daughter home with me. Where she belongs.” I jerk my chin at the door located on the right side of the corridor and he pales. That’s right, I know where your office is. I know every room in the house. I know every hair on her head. “After you.”
Thomas’s throat bobs and he stomps off toward the office.
“Don’t let her make any calls,” I say, referring to the mother. Then I step over the broken pieces of her phone and follow Thomas, Arya’s sweet body still locked in my arms. I’m not letting her out of my sight ever again. Where I go, she goes. End of story.
Arya’s father takes a seat behind his desk and I settle us into a chair facing him.
“Am I to understand that you know who was responsible for the…the…” He uses a handkerchief to mop the back of his neck. “The massacre that just took place on my goddamn roof?”
“You’ll find out eventually. The bodies upstairs won’t have any identification on them, but you’d piece it together.” I shrug. “Or I could make your job easier, tell you now. As long as you don’t try and stand in my way when I take your daughter.”
He scoffed. “I can’t do that. You and your associates are criminals, too, just like the men lying dead above our heads.”
I incline my head. “That is true.”
“And acknowledging that, you think I’d willingly relinquish my own child to you.”
“In a minute you won’t have a choice, so I’m advising you to think carefully.”
While he’s sputtering, I give in to my need to check on Arya, tucking my jacket in around her so she stays warm in the air conditioning. Her cheek is pressed to my shoulder, her beautiful doe eyes serious, maybe even a little nervous over the nature of the discussion I’m having with her father. But she stays in my arms, trusts me, doesn’t try to leave me—and her loyalty twists my stomach into a pretzel. God, I love her, I love her so much it burns.
“You’re mine now,” I whisper, leaning down to kiss her soft mouth. “You’re mine now and everything is going to be okay.”
She nods trustingly. “I knew you’d grow up to be brave,” she whispers.
Christ, now I can’t swallow. Is it going to be like this all the time now?
It was hard enough keeping a semblance of composure when she was across the street or nearby in public. Holding her, having all that sweetness at my disposal twenty-four seven is going to fucking kill me. At least I’ll go with a smile on my face.
Unfortunately, I’ll need Arya to understand that I might worship the ground she walks on, but I’m not a good man.
I’m a very bad man, actually. I kill people when necessary, I extort, I make deals with the many devils in this city. It’s how I built my empire, so I’d have something to offer her. A place to keep her safe. I worry what she’ll think about me, if she’ll change her mind once I’ve laid everything out bare, but that’s a tomorrow problem. Her father is today’s.
“Here’s a better question, how did you know these men would be attempting to assassinate my daughter tonight? Maybe you’re responsible.”
It’s kind of amusing how proud of himself he is. “Any time you lock someone up or sanction one of the crime families in this city, I find a mole. Whether I pay one of them to talk or insert somebody myself, I find a way to get information before it’s even available. For instance, I know you’re two steps behind every single one of your conquests. But not me.” I let my fingertip travel over Arya’s knee, slowly up the outside of her thigh. He watches me, his cheeks puffing out, but he correctly senses he can’t stop me. “I can protect this girl a thousand times better than you can. I have been for years.” I lean down and kiss her mouth, licking the seam of her lips slowly until she starts wiggling around in my lap. “Understand me when I say that I allowed you to keep her until she finished high school and turned eighteen. But it’s over now. She’s going to be my wife as soon as I take my edge off.”
“You’re vile.” His face is mottled red now. “How dare you talk like this to me about my daughter! Arya, get off his lap immediately.”
I run my thumb back and forth on her inner thigh. “You’re going to pack up everything you own, Arya,” I say without taking my eyes off her father. “You’re not coming back here.”
“Will I still be able to run my dog adoption website?” she whispers up at me.
“Of course you will,” I assure her. It’s remote, requiring no actual contact with real life people who could do her harm. I’ve watched her run the operation through the window of her bedroom for years, my pride in her almost melting me.
“This is outrageous!” Thomas explodes, picking up his phone. “I’m calling the police
.”
With a sigh, I take an envelope out of my pocket and slide it across his desk. He eyes it warily for a moment, then picks it up. When he sees the pictures inside, the blood drains from his face. They are photos of him barbequing with the secret family he has stashed away upstate. A wife and two sons. Just another thing to distract him from protecting my future wife, like he should have been. I have no sympathy.
“Don’t try and stop me from taking her. If you do, or if you try and lay a finger on my organization, those will find their way to every news station in the city.” I stand with Arya in my arms, giving in to a little temptation by settling her butt on the edge of the desk, fisting her hair and tilting her head back. I slide my tongue into her mouth and French her perfect little unkissed mouth while letting her father know with my eyes, in no uncertain terms, who she belongs to now. Who she’ll belong to forever. “Mine,” I growl, rocking against her pussy once, before scooping her back off the desk. “After we leave, Thomas, you’ll wait five minutes, then call the police. Tell them the gunmen turned on each other. The cameras have been out for hours, so when you tell them I was never here, they’ll have no choice but to believe you. And your daughter is perfectly safe at a friend’s house. Do I need to repeat anything?”
Thomas clears his throat, still staring at the pictures. “No.”
I turn and walk out.
Holding her in my arms, knowing she’ll sleep beside me tonight, I feel whole for the first time in my life. But there’s one component to claiming Arya I didn’t anticipate.
Now that I’ve made her mine, I’m terrified out of my mind of losing her. Or her being hurt in my care. And a million other little things. It’s like my heart is suddenly walking around outside of my body and I can’t sew it back in.
No. No, she’ll never be hurt on my watch.
I won’t allow it.
But what if the universe doesn’t care about my rules?
3
Arya
Just like that, I’m out of my glass prison.
Honestly, even after having my parents basically ignore me for the last eighteen years, I feel a little guilty when Damian carries me out of the house. All my mother and father can do is stand there looking dumbfounded watching my guardian angel’s men wheel my luggage out in charged silence.
At least, they’re silent until right before we step into the penthouse’s personal elevator.
“You don’t know what you’re getting into,” my mother calls, her mouth in a bitter twist. “Just wait until she gets upset. She won’t seem like such a prize then!”
Shame burns my face and I bury it in Damian’s chest.
My mother is right.
Ever since I was a child, I’ve thrown terrible tantrums. Loud, whopping destructive ones that are probably the reason my parents pawned me off on paid staff. It’s why I can’t be too mad at them for leaving me alone so often. It’s hard enough to deal with the emotional outbursts—I can’t imagine what it’s like to be on the receiving end.
I’m not a spoiled brat. If someone tells me I can’t have something, I don’t get upset or demand to get my way. It’s when there’s something truly important on the line that my muscles seize up, my throat turning raw until I can’t do anything but scream in frustration.
For instance, if one of the puppies on my adoption website has a new owner all lined up, but they change their minds at the very last minute, I have been known to rip down curtains, smash picture frames and hiccup cry until I pass out. I’m not sure where the frustration comes from, but apparently there is a very deep well of it. It hasn’t run dry yet!
A man opens the back door of an SUV for Damian and he sets me carefully on the white leather seat, getting in behind me. There is a hulking driver in the driver’s seat with an earpiece and he stares straight ahead, even when I say hello.
“They don’t speak to you,” Damian says, pulling me up against his side and draping an arm over my shoulder. And he doesn’t elaborate.
“Um, Damian? About what my mother said—”
“You don’t have to explain, Arya.”
“I feel like I should.” I turn as much as possible in his embrace. “Since we’re going to be living together.”
He tips my chin up, brushes his thumb across my lower lip. “You won’t have reasons to get upset now that we’re living together. It’s irrelevant.”
“Oh.” I watch through my periphery as the driver steers the SUV into a tunnel. “Where are we going to be living together exactly?”
“The Hamptons.” His rapt attention is glued to my mouth, his body crowding closer, and that suspicious tingle between my legs is happening again. Like it always does when I smell oranges. Or when I know he’s near. “I’ve never lived in this place. We’ll be moving in for the first time together.”
“Where do you live normally?”
He visibly debates for a moment. “Across the street from your family.”
My jaw drops. “All this time? You were right across the street?”
“Yes.”
“Damian?”
He hums his response while reaching up to press an overhead button, raising a partition between us and the driver. Along with the tinted windows, the sudden privacy makes the spacious back seat feel like its own world. And when he reaches over and steals his jacket back, leaving me in nothing but my blue bikini, the atmosphere seems to clench in anticipation. Of what? I don’t know. But with him fully clothed and me in nothing but a few strategic triangles, I’m suddenly short of breath and achy in odd places.
“What did you want to ask me, sweetheart?” he prompts, running a finger from the hollow of my throat down, down, not stopping until he can circle it around my belly button.
“Uhhh…” I wet my dry lips. “Ummm…oranges. You always smell like them. That’s not because I gave you one all those years ago. Is it?”
His hand spans my ribcage, squeezing, testing. “Why wouldn’t that be the reason? Arya, you changed my life that day. Made me feel like…I could be worth a damn. Why wouldn’t I eat half a dozen oranges a day to remind myself of you?”
The center of my chest feels funny, along with those secret parts of me and it’s almost too much. Too overwhelming how he…commands me, body and mind. “I only sort of liked oranges when I was a kid, but…the first time you rescued me when I was thirteen, I started craving them again.”
“I don’t think oranges are what either of us is really craving.” Slowly, his big hand wedges beneath my knee closest to the window and pulls, pulls it toward him until I have no choice but to flop back on the seat, gasping as he suddenly looms above me, settling between my thighs with a loud groan. “I should have left you wrapped in the jacket. Feel how hard you’ve made my cock in that flimsy little bikini? Christ, I could eat you alive. I fucking might.”
My cheeks flame at his use of the word cock.
I’ve never heard it used before, especially not in a hoarse, masculine growl, but with his thickness rubbing sensuously against my core, it’s easy to understand what he’s talking about. “I-is that what…do you mean your…?”
His heavy breathing catches and he stops moving, regarding me under heavy eyelids. “What do you know about sex, sweetheart?”
“Well…” What is that wet sensation between my folds? What if he notices? God, I would die. Maybe I can talk until it dries. “I was pretty young when my parents decided to home-school me. Right before high school. And I didn’t really have many friends to ask about…things. A lot of the kids I went to school with, their parents worked in trading and no one wants the DA paying too close of attention, right? So the other girls stayed away and…well, I know the general shape of a man’s part…” My cheeks flame at the word part. “And that women and men have to sleep in the same bed to make babies. They have to do more than kissing, right? I just don’t know what that something is.”
In clear disbelief, he searches my eyes. “What about books you’ve read?”
“I read mostly fanta
sy. They don’t go into much description, if any.”
“The internet?”
I slap a hand over my face. “I look at puppies.”
For long moments, he doesn’t move or say anything, then the breath he’s been holding shudders out and he pins my wrists overhead, diving into my neck and attacking the sensitive slope with his teeth. “I’m sorry, sweetheart.” He suctions his lips to my skin and sucks, sucks hard until I cry out, my heels coming up to dig into his ass. Yank him closer, push him away, both. “I’ve been mentally fucking you for so long, I forgot what an innocent little thing you are. My cock, Arya…” He looks down between our bodies, groaning, watching our lower bodies connect, roll together. “My cock is the part of me that’s going to fit nice and deep inside that pretty virgin pussy and pump until you’re pregnant. Do you understand?”
Damian
Again, I have to remind myself to slow down.
Control the lust.
It’s just that my need for her has been building and building for so long, it’s at a fever pitch now. So chaotic that I feel like I’m going to snap. I just want to be trapped inside her goodness, as deep as I can go. I want to drown myself in her. I want to feel her virginity give way and see the knowledge in her eyes that I’m the center of her universe now. That there is nothing and no one else. Just me. Just us.
If I fuck her now, I’m going to scare her.
In the weeks leading up to her eighteenth birthday, I didn’t jerk off once. I wanted to save every drop of it for her pussy. But it was a mistake. A big one. Her innocence is turning me on even more than I anticipated and my dick is wrestling for space in my jeans. Damn, damn, damn. If I put it inside her now, there will be no going slow. What I want to do to that tight hole between her legs would be downright abusive.