Chapter 20
20
PATRICK
A fter I ease out of Fiona, I unfasten my belt from the headboard. I help her to lower her arms, making sure she doesn’t move too fast, doesn’t set off waves of cramps in her toned, stretched arms. The knots around her ankles take more time; she’s pulled them tight by straining against the bed.
She’s still dazed, but she’s free and curled onto her side. It’s safe for me to go into the jacks, to take care of the johnny. Back in the bedroom, I pull my last pair of boxer briefs from my duffel. That’s enough clothes for me to head into the kitchen.
After I fill a glass of water at the sink, I open the refrigerator. I want to layer slices of sharp cheddar onto crisp, sweet apples. I want to peel clementines and section out tiny half moons that I can slip between her lips. I want to unwrap chocolate, sweet with milk, like something inside a Christmas stocking.
She doesn’t have any of that. The only thing in the fridge is leftover Chinese food. We’ll get to that, but water will have to do for now .
I climb onto the bed and pull Fiona onto my lap. I help her with the water, giving her a sip at a time, making sure she doesn’t get too greedy, taking care not to spill.
I hold her as she settles back into her body. I rub arnica into her wrists, and I smooth the cream into the creases etched around her ankles. I tell her she’s my little girl.
After I set aside the plastic jar, she runs her finger over the knuckles of my right hand. “You have a lot of scars,” she says.
“They come with the job.”
She sets her palm against the wrinkled flesh on my left shoulder. “What happened here?”
“I was shot.” She doesn’t need to know about the Fishtown Boys’ bratva enemies.
She traces the long ridge above my liver. “And here?”
“Knife.” No reason to tell her I was foolish enough to open my front door to some mafia goons who thought I was carrying the clan’s cash.
“And here?” She traces the long gouge across my right thigh.
“Shot again.” That’s one I took for Kelly, when the two of us went after the Colombians, before he ever stepped up to captain.
She kisses the raised skin on my shoulder. “Don’t get hurt again, okay?”
I don’t bother lying, telling her I won’t.
Her fingers spread across my biceps, closing around the dark lantern of my lighthouse tattoo. “What are you covering up here?”
“Not covering up,” I say. “I got it after my wife died.”
Even half-asleep, she’s not stupid. She sees that the lighthouse is dark. That the storm clouds threaten. I watch her start to ask questions, stop, start again, give up. Instead, she runs a nail down the inked side of the lighthouse. She ends up touching Athawn’s broken lifeline.
“And when did you get this?” Fiona asks.
“The same time. My son died too. ”
She swallows the rest of her questions. She grew up in Southie. She knows how easy it is to track down stories about the past.
So instead of pushing for more, she nuzzles closer to my side. I offer her the glass and make her sip until it’s empty.
After that, she dozes for a while. I sit up, leaning against the headboard while she stretches out beside me. My hand lingers over her hip, my fingers spread wide.
Sleeping, she looks so young. All of her fierceness is drained out of her. All of her fight.
What the fuck am I doing? Living in a Back Bay brownstone—a far cry from the rough Southie streets where I grew up. Playing with a sub who has a wild praise kink—because I’ve never been with a woman as quick to come as Fiona when I tell her she’s amazing.
I’ve never been a pleasure Dom. Sure, I’ve left my women satisfied. I’ve given them what they want. What they need.
But I’ve never had a woman who needs pure pleasure. Fiona’s not ready for anything really rough. Sure, she dresses like she wants to be fucked hard against a brick wall in a back alley. And she’s willing to take a little correction. But after what Madden Kelly did to her, she needs to take it slow.
I’ve never played Daddy before. The thought of any shitehawk going after an actual child disgusts me. I’d gut him, prick to chin, without a second thought. But protecting Fiona? Keeping her safe from herself and the rest of the world? Making her see that she doesn’t always have to be the one fighting, the one in ball-busting charge?
That’s satisfying in a way I can’t begin to describe—except it suits my brain squirrels just fine. My mind feels…settled.
Calmed.
Fiona wakes sometime after sunset. She stretches at first. Burrows in closer. Then, all at once, she comes awake. Her eyes look wild against her smeared makeup .
“Go on, Scáthach ,” I tell her. “Take a shower. And then we’ll eat some dinner.”
Scáthach is better than little girl right now. The Irish word doesn’t make her worry about what we’ve done. What we’re doing.
I get dressed while the water’s running. She takes longer than she needs to, and I consider going in to complain about the delay. But my little girl deserves some time to herself. A chance to think. Some space to adjust, just as I’ve had for myself.
She finally comes out of the bedroom, her hair toweled dry, her face scrubbed free of makeup. She’s wearing a pair of black yoga pants and some sort of knit top that looks like it belongs underneath legitimate clothes. I think they call those little bits of string spaghetti straps. All I know for sure is I could snap them with one quick tug.
Her bruises are healing well—better than I ever would have predicted back in Philadelphia. She’s young. She’s healthy.
And she’s ravenous.
Reluctantly, I turn away to open up the fridge. “There’s enough Chinese food?—”
“I want pizza,” she says.
“All right. Pizza.”
She digs in the bowl on the counter and comes up with a menu. The restaurant answers on the first ring. Caesar salad, she orders, and garlic bread and mozzarella sticks. An extra-large pizza with pepperoni and sausage and olives.
“Anchovies?” she asks me, and I feel like it’s a test.
“Whatever you want,” I say.
“Extra anchovies,” she tells the person taking her order. “Two liters of Coke. And some of those cheesecake bites.”
After she’s given her credit card number and hung up, I look around the living room. “Do you have half a dozen friends, coming to join us?”
“Don’t tell me you aren’t starving too.”
She’s right. And I’m tempted to start eating now, before dinner arrives. I pull her close, easing my hands under that flimsy little top. She leans back, letting me hold most of her weight, sighing as my lips find the pulse point in her throat.
“They work really fast,” she says. “The food will be here in twenty minutes.”
“I work fast too,” I growl.
“Liar,” she says. But she laughs, low and throaty. The only reason I don’t strip her out of her clothes then and there is that she was right, earlier. I am starving.
It takes twenty-three minutes for the food to arrive. We’re both still dressed by the time the buzzer sounds from the front door, but we’re breathing like we’ve raced to the top of Bunker Hill.
“I’ll be right down,” Fiona says into the intercom. And then to me, when I reach around her to open the door: “I’ll be back in a sec.”
“You’re not going down there alone.”
Annoyance darkens her face. “What? You think the pizza-delivery guy will kidnap me?”
“I think it’s impossible to be too cautious.”
“Let me guess. You’re going to carry your big long gun downstairs and scare the crap out of some poor schmuck who’s earning minimum wage on his bike.”
“Not a bad idea. Wait here.”
As I shoulder past her to the bedroom, I can see she wants to protest. But she wants to eat more. So she lets me retrieve my Glock and shove it into my waistband, at the small of my back. She lets me follow her down the stairs. I watch her open the door to the street and collect a pizza box and two grocery bags from a kid who looks like he’s five seconds away from leaving it all on the doorstep.
Upstairs, Fiona eats like she hasn’t seen food in a year. She downs two pieces of garlic bread and a mozzarella stick before I have plates on the counter. She pours extra dressing onto her salad, then cleans her bowl with crust from her first piece of pizza. Two monster slices later, she’s finally starting to slow down, but that doesn’t keep her from making satisfied little mews of contentment as cheesecake melts across her tongue.
Two pieces of pizza are more than enough for me.
To fill the time, I ask her stupid things. Who sings her favorite songs. What’s her favorite movie.
She names three singers I’ve never heard of. When she pulls up their music on her phone, they all sound the same—anguished girls with high, thready voices, spitting out the word fuck in the middle of complicated rhymes about boys who screwed them over.
Fiona has never seen The Shawshank Redemption. So after we put the leftovers in the fridge, we settle on the couch and watch my favorite film on her phone. She curls up against me like a kitten. We both ignore my full-blown hard-on, because Morgan Freeman deserves that much respect.
Fiona doesn’t love the movie.
“It’s just a bunch of men,” she says. “It can’t be one of the best movies of all time if there aren’t roles for women.”
“There’s Andy’s wife,” I remind her. I know that’s not enough to win the argument, but I want to wind her up. I’m thinking Fiona and I can go a round or two, that I’m ready to see if I can make her scream Daddy as she comes.
But before she can deliver a scathing reply, she yawns—and not some dainty, catch-it-at-the-back-of-her-throat little ladylike yawn. Her mouth opens like a cobra’s, and her tongue curls up as a sound like half a scream scrapes her throat.
Obviously embarrassed, she winces like she’s nursing a physical blow. She catches her lip between her teeth and glances at the front door, like she expects me to pack up and leave.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s go, Scáthach .”
“What does that mean?” she says, like she hasn’t asked before.
I play dumb. “What does what mean?”
“Ska-ha? ”
“That’s something only Daddies know.” I say it because I want to get a rise out of her. I want her to stop thinking about how she just yawned like a banshee.
“That’s absolute bullsh—” She swallows mid-word.
I know she won’t stop swearing forever. I don’t even want to apply my rule outside this game we’re playing. She can say whatever she wants when we aren’t actually fucking.
But I love the way she’s suddenly thinking, suddenly aware of everything she says.
“What’s that, little girl?”
“Nothing,” she mutters.
“I’ll tell you what,” I say, because playing games with her is fun. “I’ll tell you what Scáthach means if you show me what’s inside the cigar box Oona gave you.”
She looks scandalized. “Never! No one’s looked inside that box.”
“Well, then.” I don’t push. I can wait until she wants to share.
But I see the way fatigue is shaping her face. Her eyes are heavy. Her lips are soft. “Come on,” I say. And then I repeat: “Let’s go.”
“Go where?” She’s suddenly wary, like a cat ready to hide beneath a table.
“To bed. Before I have to carry you there.”
She’s so transparent, my little girl. She juts her chin. She gives a sidewise glance to the crotch of my jeans where, mercifully, my cock has decided to behave. She licks her lips, ready to say something designed to get a literal rise out of me.
I shake my head. “Be good.”
And she must truly be exhausted, because she obeys.
But at three in the morning, I’m the one who wants to go another round. I pad into the jacks to piss, and I come back with another johnny. I’m hard enough to roll it on before I climb back into the warm space beside Fiona.
I spread my hand across her belly, and she wriggles close. I lean down and whisper in her ear, “You’re gorgeous when you sleep.”
She’s barely half-awake, but her body reacts like a cat hearing a can-opener. I can’t see her blush in the darkened room, but heat rises off her back in waves. I slip my hand under the waistband of the skimpy little shorts she’s wearing as pajamas. “You feel so good, little girl.”
Her eyes stay closed but she moans a little, and her hand reaches between her legs. Her fingers thread with mine, and we find her clit together.
“I’m so proud of you, for what you took this afternoon.”
We circle around her clit, catching it between our fingers. We dip into her sweet pussy and spread honey across her throbbing pearl, again and again and again. And when she breaks, we cup her smooth mound, holding her steady, pulling her close.
I slip into her from behind, which is easy because she’s soaked. She trembles when I sink home, and I don’t know if she’s coming a second time, or if it’s still the first, drawn out long and slow.
All I know is she feels like silk beneath me. She smells like cloves and lemons. She sounds like she’s laughing, soft and low, like we’re sharing the best joke in the world.
And when I come, pulsing hard inside her, I know it will be a while before I get back to Philadelphia.