by M. O’Keefe
It was violent.
“What are you doing?” I whispered.
“Giving you what you want.”
“Not . . . not like this.”
I braced my hands against the door and shoved, but he put his mouth at my neck at the tender skin behind my ear and he bit me. I couldn’t control the tortured moan in my throat. His mouth traveled down my shoulder, planting wet, open-mouthed kisses as he went. Sucking and biting, and I collapsed back against the door. I was angry? Why was I angry?
“You’re scared of your shadow,” he murmured, pulling the skirt of my dress up with one hand as his other cupped my breast, pulled my nipple taut until I cried out in pleasure and pain. This was too much. He was too much. I’d jumped into some kind of deep end with a man who disdained me, and I couldn’t find the will to stop him.
Where was my pride?
“Do I want you?” he breathed as he slid his hand down over the soaked satin of my barely-there thong. I shuddered and tried to escape, but he literally held me in the palm of his hand. I couldn’t tell if he was being mean or sarcastic. I couldn’t tell if he was playing a game or being honest. I didn’t have the experience or the confidence to make sense of this.
I just knew that I wanted him. Mean, sarcastic, whatever I could get from him.
He pulled the wet satin out of his way, and then he was touching me where no one had touched me for years. Years. I’d even stopped touching myself. Sex was a chore. And no part of my body wanted it.
But now . . . oh my god now, my body wanted everything. Anything. Whatever dark depraved thing he wanted to do to me, I wanted it times ten. I couldn’t breathe for the desire filling me. His fingers slipping over every inch of me, and I was on my tip toes, my head thrown back. I didn’t care what he said. Or what he thought if he would just make me come.
So long, it had been so very, very long.
“Look at you.” His voice was cold, and I whimpered. “So needy. So desperate.” He said it like it was wrong. Gross.
“I’m sorry,” I choked.
The hand that had been torturing my breasts came up to my throat, and he held me with my head arched back.
“For what?” he asked. “What are you sorry for?”
Wanting him so much. Being so needy.
Everything.
“I’ll leave,” I breathed. “Just let me go.”
I whimpered as one long finger slid down over my clit. Pressing hard enough to fill my body with sparks.
“No,” he groaned, and my knees gave out. He held me by my throat and the fingers inside of me. “It’s too late for that.”
“Then what do you want?” I twisted against his body. He was a silent steady pressure against my back.
“That girl at the party who was about to run off into the night. I want her. But she doesn’t exist anymore, does she?”
I whimpered in pain. My soul. My body. Everything was hurt by his words.
His fingers against my clit were rough and hard, and no one had ever touched me that way so I had no idea how much I liked it. How his hand around my neck made me feel caught. I couldn’t resist. I couldn’t refuse.
All I could do was stand there and take the pleasure he was forcing on me.
“Oh, look at you,” he said, his voice dark with disdain and desire. “Look at how you love it. What could I do to you?” he asked and licked my earlobe before sucking it into his mouth. “I could fuck you. Right here, couldn’t I? Put you on your knees and feed you my cock until you couldn’t breathe.” All of it. He could do all of it. But I didn’t have to say it. He felt it in my body. My total surrender. My breath was coming out in pants and moans, and I needed his fingers inside me. Inside. I was going to die if he didn’t put something, anything inside me.
Two fingers pushed hard inside me, and I was shuddering. Sobbing. The orgasm I needed a breath away. Two.
“I could stop,” he said, and he did. His fingers still inside me. His hand around my throat applied no pressure. I couldn’t move. Push him away even.
But I didn’t. I closed my eyes and tears rolled down my cheeks. I waited, but so did he.
“Jesus, Princess. If you want it, ask for it.”
Like he knew how hard I’d been conditioned not to. How my self-denial was so deeply ingrained. “I promise you,” he said. “I promise that girl in the ball gown cracking jokes, that if you just ask, if you just say it. I will give it to you.”
“Please.” It burst out of me with perfect manners. “Please, don’t stop. Make me come. Please.”
“There you go,” he said, like he was proud of me, and his fingers were a madness inside my body. In my throat there was a keening sound I couldn’t swallow and would embarrass me when I remembered it tomorrow. And I wanted him to pull up the back of my skirt and undo his pants. I wanted him inside my body in a way I’d never wanted anything ever before.
He wasn’t doing it, so I tried to help it along. Pulling up my skirt, reaching behind me for his pants. The hard steel length of his cock in his pants.
“No.” His hands left my body to slap my own hands against the wall. “Like this.”
And I could have fought, but he’d already said it. I was a mouse. And I let him touch me the way he wanted. Hold me the way he wanted. Against this wall, my hair falling down my face like we were strangers. Animals.
I let him make me come in a wild ecstatic explosion of pleasure and pain. I cried. I might have screamed. I was light, and I was dust. And I was so far out of my body it was relief.
But I imagined all those things he said to me. I imagined him fucking me against this door, or the desk. I imagined the taste of him on my tongue.
I imagined . . . oh god . . . I imagined that savage mouth against mine.
The sweet violence of his kiss.
And I wanted him all over again. More, even, than before. It hurt how much I wanted his kiss.
It took me a moment to realize where he’d been a living breathing blanket damp with sweat against my back, there was only cool fresh air.
He wasn’t holding my neck. His fingers were not between my legs.
Ronan wasn’t touching me at all. I couldn’t feel him even an inch away. On shaky legs I turned, my skirt falling back down to the floor, hiding the thong pulled to the side, my slick thighs. The mess he’d made of me.
He stood by the desk, his hands sweeping his dark hair away from his face. His fingers, I could see were wet from being inside my body. Wet from my come.
“Fix your dress, Poppy,” he said.
“My . . . dress?” the words didn’t make sense. Was it English? My brain had short-circuited.
He pointed at my chest, and I realized the bodice was gaping, revealing my breasts. The silk torn. “Cover yourself.”
Another unwanted memory. The senator on our wedding night standing over the bed where I lay naked.
You’re not much to look at, are you?
Shaking my head didn’t change the memory. Or what had just happened here. I tugged the bodice up as best I could, holding my hands over my skin. Wishing I could cover myself.
This dress cost ten thousand dollars, and it was ruined. I felt ruined.
“You leave first. Go straight to your car. You look like you’ve been fucked against a wall.”
I understood what was happening. The rejection. It had been inevitable, in a way. This was what I got for wanting something.
Anything.
But I was not a child on my wedding night. I was a woman who’d endured enough of a man’s disdain.
“Fuck you,” I said through gritted teeth and reached for the doorknob. He moved so fast I didn’t get it open before he was right in front of me again. His fingers cupping my face.
“Keep your blood up. You’re going to need it. Be smart. Now, go.”
I jerked my head out of his grip and was out that door like an Irish devil was on my heels. But of course, when I turned at the end of the hallway, he wasn’t there.
I had no idea where my
purse was, so I left it and my phone, and I stepped out onto the windy 27th street and, like magic, there was my car. My driver. My life operating as it always had.
When I felt somehow . . . changed.
“Ma’am?” my driver said. The wind whipped his coat away from his body, lifted his pale hair off his head.
“Yes?” We stood by the open door. A storm was blowing in from someplace.
“Are you all right?” he asked. He had a nice face my driver. And he was younger than I thought.
So much sudden concern from the men in my life.
“I think so. Yes,” I said and climbed into the back seat. He slammed the door behind me and then we were pulling away from the curb. The party.
The car ride home I spent squashing the lingering fires in my body. Distancing myself from the memory of his fingers around my throat. The open-mouthed kisses on my neck. I pushed them away and framed them up like they weren’t my memories. It was exactly what I did to survive being married to Jim. They were a book I read. Or a movie I saw.
The shame of having to do it again was unwanted, so I turned it into anger.
And I seethed with that anger all the way up to Bishop’s Landing.
The house was dark. And I was alone. The alarm beeped as I entered the front door, and I punched in the code to make it stop.
Theo, the driver, lived in the cottage at the end of the property. Jim’s bodyguard was no longer around. It was just me and seven empty bedrooms. An office wing. A formal dining room. Eight and a half baths.
There was so much room, and I rattled around inside it like a lost toy.
In the dark I went to the drink cart in the sitting room, and I poured myself a glass of something that burned as I shot it back. I poured myself another one and took off my light-as-air, pencil-thin Jimmy Choo stilettos and walked barefoot with my drink through the kitchen and the sliding glass door to the pool deck. Another drink and with nowhere to put the glass I heaved it at the far end of the patio stones where it smashed spectacularly.
Tonight . . . tonight had to be the end of something. Or the beginning. The way Caroline changed the speech. The way I came apart in Ronan’s hands only to be tossed aside the second he’d taken me apart. I was being used by everyone. Enough.
I lit a fire in the small fire pit I’d made out of bricks and stone, and I took off the dress and the thong and naked in the moonlight I burned them.
Shivering, I watched my old life burn.
My blood was up. And I was ready for a fight.
9
The next morning, my head pounding from my night of fury drinking, I walked the two miles over the ridge from my house to the giant Constantine compound on the very top of the hill. The 300-year-old mansion was known as The Queen of Bishop’s Landing. Originally an apple orchard and farm, the land got sold bit by bit, but the house never changed hands. Hundreds of years of Constantine matriarchs and patriarchs, adding wings and electricity. Bathrooms and theaters. Tennis courts. Guard houses. Swimming pools. Manicured gardens. Helicopter pad.
Since the last troubles with the Morellis, it had been heavily guarded with armed men on the various balconies and in guard houses along the long driveway. Winston had bought the houses closest to the compound, so for a mile in every direction it was Constantine land.
My parent’s old house was part of that. The willow tree and pond.
Rumor was that the Morellis used to have a house on this hill. I didn’t know if that was true or not.
It was damp in the early sunlight, and the fog clung to the hedgerows and the tall trees. Despite the compound and the bulldozing of houses, most of Bishop’s Landing was still forested.
I walked the overgrown path up the hill. The turret on the Constantine mansion was obscured by mist. I bypassed the driveway and used the old wooden gate built in the side of the fence set deeper in the woods. Mom showed us this fence when Zilla and I were girls, when we were in and out of this house like it was our own. I hadn’t used it in years. But this morning, in my muddy Wellingtons and bedraggled ponytail – it seemed right.
I knocked on the door and squeezed the water out of my hair, waiting for one of the maids to answer.
“Poppy!” It was Denise. My favorite. She’d been around the longest and remembered my mother. “Ms. Constantine didn’t tell me she was expecting you.”
“She told me to come by last night.”
“Did you make an appointment?”
“Nope,” I said, stepping inside the foyer. I wiped off my boots on the rug. I liked Denise, but I wasn’t going to be sent away. “Is she in her office?”
“Yes,” Denise said. “But why don’t you let me—”
“I know the way, Denise. It’s fine.” I gave her a blinding smile. The kind of smile I gave servers and photographers when they noticed a bruise on my wrist and their eyebrows went up. It was my no further questions smile.
Caroline’s office was up in the turret. And I took the wide sweeping center staircase up to the second floor and then the smaller staircase to the third, and in the corner by the old nursery and the maid’s quarters was the final staircase up to her throne.
Justin had a desk at the top of the stairs. “Poppy!” he cried as he stood. “You don’t have an appointment.” He looked down at his desk like this unexpected interruption was going to send the whole house of cards to the floor.
“You’re right,” I said and pushed my way into Caroline’s office anyway, right past him. The room was windowed on three sides, and the ceiling was gorgeous refurbished mahogany. All the décor cream, white, and gold with accents of pale pink.
In the middle of the room, standing opposite her desk was a man with his back to me in a black suit. I knew in a heartbeat who he was.
Ronan.
I had not anticipated him. And my body lurched with memory and shame. The urge to run was not small, but I stood there. I stood there, and I folded up those conflicting memories and I put them away. I wasn’t stupid. And I wasn’t a little girl. It was time for me to stop acting like I was.
And more importantly it was time to stop being distracted by what he did to me.
Who is he? I wondered. And how did he get so close to Caroline? So fast? That office in her building that I’d been sure was for family; it was clearly his. Which meant he was deeply inner circle.
“Poppy?” Caroline asked, looking around Ronan to see me in the doorway. Her eyes went wide at the way I was dressed. Jeans and wet hair, muddy boots. An old raincoat I found in the gardener’s closet. “Are you all right?”
At that, Ronan turned, his face registering nothing. Not surprise or happiness or anger or disdain. Not even the memory of my ass grinding against his cock as I came so hard I left my body.
Nope. Ronan stared at me like we were strangers. And that was just great with me.
He’d worked some magic on me last night. Not just my body, but in my head, too. Pushing me out of that trap I’d lived in, too terrified to ask for what I wanted in fear of it being taken away.
Too terrified to want anything.
I felt stronger for having asked for something, even if it was something as strange as that man’s hands on my body. Even if getting what I wanted sent me someplace dark and shameful.
Sex was so easy for some people. Why was it always a Greek tragedy for me?
“I’m fine,” I said. “I was hoping we could talk?” My gaze flicked to Ronan, and I took great pleasure in sniffing dismissively. “Alone.”
“Of course,” she said. As she stood, she nodded at Ronan who turned and walked for the door. Brushing so close to me I could see that scar under his neck. I watched him go, all but daring him to look at me.
Of course, he didn’t. Because in the end, I was a senator’s widow, the good friend of his boss, and he was the help.
Now who is the coward? I thought. But didn’t necessarily feel better for the thought.
The door closed behind him, and Caroline gestured to the ivory chairs in front of her de
sk.
“You’re mad at me,” she said.
“I am,” I said. “Those things you changed in the speech—”
“The new foundation was something your husband and I were working on. He signed the papers just a few nights before . . .” she trailed off.
“He put a bullet in his own head?” The crassness was a surprise. It was shades of my sister coming out, and I understood how delicious it could be to be irreverent. To say what I wanted.
“I was going to say ended his life, but okay, we can go your way.”
“I’m not upset about the foundation.” I crossed my legs, my muddy boots dripping on the floor. That, too, felt good. “You know what he did to me. How he treated me.”
She nodded carefully.
“Then why make me lie about what a kind and decent man he was?”
“Because we wanted those people to donate money, and if you didn’t put an end to the rumors—”
“Rumors?”
Her level gaze met mine, and I saw the pity, and I could not sit there and bathe in it.
I stood up, and she grabbed my hand.
“You were so young and everyone knew the situation with Zilla and your father,” she said quickly, as if she were apologizing. But Caroline didn’t do that. “You put up a good front,” she said. “No one ever suspected how bad it was.”
“Is that supposed to comfort me?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it’s crappy comfort. People knew he hurt me. They just didn’t know how bad it was? So comforting.” Oh god, sarcasm. Who the hell was I?
I looked at her, hard in the eyes, remembering how she turned me away. How she told me I needed to make it work. And I owed her a lot, but not this. Not anymore.
“I’m not doing that again,” I said. “I’m done lying about him. About my marriage.”
Caroline put her hands up. “I understand, and I won’t ask that of you again. Okay?”