Dark Baby: Captive Romance (Scottish Doms Book 2)

by Esme Devlin

  She turned around and motioned me to follow her down the stairs.

  “You look like you’ve been to war.”

  “I feel like it.”

  “We’ll sort you out, love.”

  Would they? I felt like I was in way over my head. We entered the kitchen, and she nodded towards the stools that surrounded the center island. It was a beautiful room, polished oak worktops and white wooden doors. The quartz floor shone as the spotlights from above reflected from it, and the place smelled clean and fresh. Pine.

  “Sugar or salt? Or would you prefer a wee bit cream and syrup in it?”

  “Uh, that sounds nice. Thank you.”

  “Just the way James takes his,” she smirked.

  “Where is he?”

  Eva shrugged. “He never tells me where he goes or what he’s doing. No doubt something for that god-awful man.”

  “You mean Davie Kimber?”

  “Ah, so you know him then?”

  “He’s… how we met, I guess.”

  “You’re in trouble.” It was more of statement than a question, as if she already knew.

  “I was… Am. I’m not sure.”

  She handed me the steaming bowl and took a seat in the stool opposite me.

  “You don’t need to tell me anything you’re not comfortable sharing.”

  I smiled and took a sip of the warm, sweet cream that coated the oats.

  “It’s not that I’m not comfortable sharing… I just don’t really know how to explain it myself. It’s messy.”

  “Always is where my James is concerned.”

  “I don’t know what side he’s on.”

  She paused for a moment while she sipped on her coffee. “James is on his own side, never doubt that. But you’re here — and that says a lot.”

  I nodded and finished the rest of my porridge quietly. Eva said nothing else. It was an easy silence though, not awkward at all. When I finished, I went to wash up but she shoo’d me away and told me not to be so silly. I stood watching her, feeling utterly useless.

  “I normally go to the 11am bingo. I’d miss it, but I’ve already told Jean I’ll meet her. Will you be all right on your own? I’ll only be a few hours.”

  “Yes, of course. That’s fine.”

  I’d find some way to amuse myself, and to be honest the prospect of some peace pleased me. As much as Eva seemed lovely, so much had happened over the last 24 hours and I felt as if I needed time to process that.

  Something had changed between James and I. I didn’t know what, but it fucking scared me. He scared me, but at the same time, he was the one protecting me now. I was no longer sure just how much of this was pretend. It had been about survival, and in some ways it still was. But now it felt as if we were trying to survive together.

  I wandered around the house for almost an hour, although discovered most of the rooms locked. When my feet grew weary, I found a magazine in a drawer in the living room and sat down on the sofa to read it. It had been so long since I had read anything. It was obviously Eva’s, the type that contained the most sensational stories of betrayal and deception alongside crosswords and top tips. Julie, 44 from Surrey, advises that cereal boxes make the perfect magazine stand! Barbra, 53 from Hampton needed Halloween decorations so stuck some fucking googly eyes on a tampon and turned it into a ghost. What the fucking flying fuck. This was mental, but it was good though. Reading you can get fucking lost in. It’s hard to think about the fact that you killed someone the night before when you’re trying to complete a shitting word-search.

  James returned just as my patience for the magazine was wearing thin and I had wandered off to the kitchen in search of something to eat.

  “Do you not have anything that doesn’t require 30 minutes of cooking time?” I asked, my eyes raking over his open cupboard. Everything inside was an ingredient, not something I could just eat.

  I turned around and noticed he had my hold-all bag in his hand. He shrugged in reply. “Eva takes care of all that stuff. Might be a tin of soup in the back, if you look hard enough.”

  Using my hands, I pushed myself up on to the counter and folded my knees under me until I could see what was on the middle shelf. The top shelf was still unachievable.

  “What the fuck are you doing,” he laughed. “Get down before you fall and break your neck.”

  “Oh weesht, I do it all the time.” I poked around a little and found a tin of lentil soup in the back. Setting it down on the counter, I jumped down.

  “I brought you in a steak pie from the bakers,” he chuckled.

  “Oh great, you couldn’t have told me that before I climbed all over the counters?”

  He set down the white paper bag on the island and I made my way over to the stool.

  “How did you get my bag?”

  He didn’t answer me straight away; Instead, he opened up the bag with the pies in and pulled one out before taking a huge bite.

  “Sorry, I’m fucking starving,” he chuckled. “I went to your place.”

  “You went to my house? How did you know where I lived? How did you even get in?” The thought of him, in my home, poking around all my things made me uncomfortable.

  “I have ways and means. I thought you needed some clothes and shit,” he said, as he took another bite and nodded down to my dress.

  “You could have taken me with you,” I protested, a fraction sharper than I had intended it to sound.

  “Aye, so your brothers could take you from right under my nose? You want that?”

  He put his food down and stared at me. Shit. I was forgetting what the whole point of this was — to get him on my side.

  “No. I told you, I have no intention of going back.”

  “If that’s true, then what’s your problem? I’m trying to keep you safe.”

  “There is no problem. What did you get?”

  “Just a few essentials. If you need anything else, let me know and I’ll have Eva pick it up from the shop. I’m not going back to your house, too risky now he’ll have woken up.”

  “What? Who? What do you mean?”

  He looked down at the table and took another bite of his pie.

  “Forget I said anything.”

  “James. Tell me.”

  “Drop it.”

  “No, I fucking won’t,” I cried, slamming my food down and standing up as the stool scraped back across the tiles. “You’re not leaving me in the dark. This whole thing was my fucking idea. I told you we would do it my way and now you’re hiding things from me? Whose side are you on?”

  “Not Davie’s, anyway. If I was, do you think you’d be here? Do you think you’d even still be alive?”

  “I don’t fucking know. I can’t read you. And just because you’re not on Davie’s doesn’t mean you’re on mines.”

  He got up and walked around the island until he stood right before me and then lifted me easily up onto the top of it.

  “You look so fucking beautiful when you’re angry.”

  He was staring at me intently and my eyes wandered around the room, trying to find something — anything — to look at, so long as it wasn’t him. He was too fucking handsome; I knew I would lose my resolve if I looked too long. I was terrified of losing something else too.

  His hand went to my chin, and he pushed my head in his direction, but still my eyes remained lowered.

  “Why won’t you look at me?”

  “I don’t want to?”

  “You want my undivided loyalty, and you can’t even fucking look at me. That says more about your own loyalty than anything that could ever come out of your mouth.”

  I looked up at him, and my breath caught in my throat as my eyes settled on his own dark ones. His stubble was showing; casting dark shadows across his tanned face, and I could see the tension behind them. “I’ve done everything you asked. I’ve given you my whole fucking life. You took it and I haven’t fought you, not once.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t fight with your fists, remember?”
He spat the words at me.

  I remembered. It felt like so long ago but I fucking remembered, and I didn’t have an answer for him. Turned out, he wasn’t expecting one. His mouth came down on mines and knocked the thoughts straight out of my head. His hands parted my legs to make room for him and I wrapped them around his waist, my exposed pussy rubbing against the harsh fabric of his jeans.

  His hands fumbled with the zipper on his jeans and within seconds, his cock was out and rubbing against my entrance. My legs gripped around him tighter as I tried to pull him into my body. Enough teasing, I wanted him to fuck me, hard and fast, and then we could go back to the mistrust we found so easily. He slid inside me and my arms clutched around his neck, tucking my fingers under the back of his neckline to feel his hot skin. He smelled fucking divine, like sex and lust and danger. My hands moved over his body, his clenched arms, so large while they gripped on to my thighs. All the while he pounded into me, the both of us racing against each other to reach our climax. His chest, solid as a rock and with well-defined muscles, moved up and down as he panted and thrust himself into me. “Do you fucking remember now? What you said to me?” He breathed in my ear.

  “I remember.”

  “And do you remember what I said to you?”

  I moaned in reply. What had he said? He had said a lot. I couldn’t think straight, not with him stretching me, not while I was so fucking desperate to come.

  “I said you’d made a deal with the devil. And there was no walking away from that.”

  “I remember,” I cried. I just didn’t think he was serious.

  “I meant what I said, little girl. Every… last… fucking… bit. Forever.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to think about this, not right now.

  “You need to come, baby?”

  “Uh huh,” was all that could escape my lips. I nodded my head as he kissed me, his tongue invading my mouth, sending hot sparks straight through my body and into my core.

  “Come for me. Come on my cock like a good little girl.”

  He pushed himself inside me, so deep I could feel his balls connecting with my ass as it half hung from the table. He would make me work for this, but I could barely move, my legs connected with nothing but air. I panted in frustration, my eyes begging him to fuck me, to put an end to this need that was taking over my body.

  “I can’t.”

  “You can. You fucking will. I want to hear you scream my name.”

  I pushed him off me and stood up. “You need to lie down,” I demanded.

  He threw me a wicked smile and nodded, but not before whisking my dress up over my arms and throwing it on the floor in a heap. He picked me up and carried me through to the living room, sitting us both down on the sofa. I straddled him, expertly sliding his cock back inside me. I got into my own steady rhythm, my hands clutching his head while he kissed and suckled my neck and my breasts, barely moving but filling me, nonetheless.

  His name rolled off my tongue like a prayer, barely a few moments later. My head rolled back and his mouth came down on my nipple, biting it hard which only added to the waves of sheer ecstasy rushing through my body. When his name turned to whimpers, he lay me down on the sofa and fucked me again, but I was already too lost to register any more of it. He pulled out and came on my stomach, just as he always did, and I closed my eyes and turned my face away while trying to regain some of my sanity.

  “You brought me my book,” I exclaimed, “and perfume! Mascara — Seems you’re not quite the big evil caveman you make out to be?!”

  He chuckled and shouted back through the bedroom door as he walked down the hall. “Don’t fucking get used to it! Brat.”

  I smiled and took my little bag of toiletries into the bathroom with me, pushing the plug down and turning on the taps. He hadn’t packed my favorite bubble bath, but I supposed I could forgive him — he’d taken pretty much everything else that was important, including the book I was half-way through when I’d been dragged out of my house unexpectedly weeks before.

  I settled into the steaming hot bath and closed my eyes for a moment, just enjoying the soothing feeling it was giving to my aching muscles. He’d fucked me like he always did, hard and without mercy. I wondered if I’d ever be able to go back to normal sex, with an averaged sized man. He had said ‘forever’, but I wasn’t naïve to think it was anything more than something that got him off. It did seem to get him off. Could you define that as a fetish, I wondered? Foreverness. I couldn’t help but giggle. I had to give it to him, we were arguing before and then we just… stopped.

  I cast my mind back, before the fucking started, to the thing that we were arguing about.

  He said that someone would have woken up, but he wouldn’t say who. As much as I enjoyed the sex we had, it was grating on me that he expected me to buy into his ‘forever’ shite when he was still clearly keeping things from me.

  I pulled the plug and got out of the bath, determined to find out who he was talking about. Wrapped in a towel, I headed down the stairs and found him in the kitchen. Eva must have come home, and she was chopping vegetables, her back to us.

  “Can I have a word?”

  James turned around and looked from me to Eva.

  “In private?”

  I nodded and headed to the living room, specifically avoiding making eye contact with the sofa.

  “What’s up, babe?” His tone was light.

  “Who has woken up?”

  His face changed instantly, and he didn’t answer straight away. The silence stretched out before us and I wondered if I should press him further. Long pauses gave people more time to lie, to get a story straight. I didn’t know him well enough to tell if he was lying… yet.

  “Your brother.”

  “Which one?”

  “Jed.”

  “Why would Jed have woken up? I don’t get it.”

  His hand went to his temples, and he took a deep breath.

  “Davie shot him.”

  “Davie shot him?” I repeated. I don’t know why, I heard him fine, but they were words I didn’t want to hear. As much as I hated him at times, he was my brother. My blood. I felt as though the room was too small. I could feel my heart start to race in my chest and my thoughts were running at 100 miles a minute. I needed to do something. I needed to help him. I was always the one to help him, and the other two. Every cut, every wound. I nursed them better because that’s what family do, and because I felt every bit of their pain myself.

  “He’s alive. He practically walked away. I heard he had gone to Dr. Patterson’s place and was doing fine,” he added, coming closer and rubbing me along the tops of my arms, like that would help. Dr. Patterson. He provided the best treatment dirty money could buy — better than anything I could have done for him. I’d trained as a hairdresser, not a medic. But I still felt so fucking helpless. I imagined him sleeping, as big and brutish as he was he had the face of an angel. Almost innocent. Helpless. My eyes stung, and I closed them quickly before tears threatened to spill over.

  “How did this happen?”

  “We met him to get Sarah back. Jed was walking away, and Davie just fucking shot him. I wasn’t expecting it — had no clue he would do that. He missed though, deliberately. Davie wouldn’t have missed that shot if he was trying.”

  “He wanted him alive?”

  “I’m certain he did.”

  “Why? He could have ended it. Mark and Elliot would be nothing without Jed.”

  “I don’t know. He’s never done this before. Not in all the years I’ve known him.”

  “He wants to make Jed suffer,” I stated.

  “Probably.”

  “We need to move now, James. I mean it. He’s planning something — he knows I’m here, and he’s just waiting for the right moment.”

  “Do you think I would let that happen?”

  “How would you stop him? You’re one man. And you’re not always here!”

  “He won’t kill you. He woul
d make me do it.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “And if he orders you to do that? What will you do then?”

  “You know what I’ll do. If it comes to that, I’ll do it. We need to make arrangements first though. We need to bide our time.”

  “What arrangements?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  I took a step back from him.

  “I won’t be kept in the dark, James. I’m telling you now. Whatever this thing we have together is, it will not be that way.”

  “If I keep you in the dark, it’s because it’s safer there.”

  “You don’t get to decide what’s safe and what isn’t. I’ve been around this shit since before I learned to skip in the playground!”

  “And from what I can tell, you’ve been running from it since then.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I saw how often you moved away, Megan. Found all of that when I found your current address. And I did some digging when Davie told me to take you. You’ve never been part of your brother's world, always fighting it. Granted, you’re not some flower that needs wrapping in tissue paper, but I think I’m slightly more qualified than you to decide what will keep you alive and what won’t.”

  Fucking wanker.

  “So teach me.”

  Chapter 16

  JAMES

  2 WEEKS LATER

  Megan was getting restless. For two weeks straight she paced around the house; eating, sleeping, sitting on my cock, and plotting Davie’s ruin.

  Davie was becoming unbearable. He knew I had taken Megan home with me but I maintained I would eventually return her and put her to work. Just as soon as I’d broken her. I told him she was still lashing out, volatile, aggressive. Not a punter in Scotland would pay money to fuck her. Just the day before he had suggested getting her addicted to coke or meth or whatever, so the process would go faster. It took everything not to smash his face in right there.

  He had also made up his mind about Sarah. Her foot was healing nicely and I couldn’t use it as an excuse any longer. He wanted to see her suffer for what she had done. I must admit, I underestimated him. I hadn’t expected him to be so cold and calculated when I told him that her and Jed were ‘a thing’. I hadn’t expected him to take it as a personal fucking insult. Sarah was young- a lovely wee thing, but fucking naïve. That was his fault. I held Davie solely responsible for that. He’d sent her away, to live her life with no clue that this world even existed. You hear about it all the time, victims falling for the men who did them wrong. You couldn’t blame her. Megan was doing the same to me. At least, I hoped she was.