Chapter 6
A weekafter the engagement party, I’m in the dojo after work, practicing a sword kata. Years of empty-handed fighting and knives have ruined me for fighting with any kind of range, and it’s not like swords pop up a lot in my line of work. I’ve ended up fighting with chairs, splintered boards, and, once in Bucharest, a potted plant. But never a sword.
It’s less about the weapon itself and more about pushing myself into every possible corner of readiness. I don’t know when I’ll be needed as a saint again, and I don’t want to become soft—and anyway, softness at Lyonesse wouldn’t be wise. The man behind Mark’s stabbing is still in the wind, and who knows how many other people want to kill my future husband. And now I’ll be a target too, merely by virtue of the ring on my left hand.
I don’t have time to be anyone’s target.
I spin and thrust, and my balance is steady, the point of the sword is steady—but my wrist is turned wrong.
With a sigh, I lower the sword and go back to the center of the room, preparing to start over. Which is when the bell above the door rings.
I’ve grown up hearing that bell every day since I was twelve, barring the weeks my father and I spent in London and the tasks my uncle set me to. The bell is the sound of my teenage years, more so even than the sound of my best friend Bryn’s laughter or the murmuring crush of the hallways between classes at my Manhattan prep.
But it shouldn’t be ringing now—not when I’d told Sister Mary Alice that I’d lock up tonight. Not when I’m the only one here.
I turn and see Tristan step through the door, his eyes making a quick, efficient sweep of the space before landing on me. Even from here, they are green enough to stop my heart.
“Hi,” he says. And clears his throat. He’s in his usual uniform of a black suit and earpiece, the jacket tailored for movement, although there’s no avoiding the cling to his shoulders and upper arms. When he walks toward me, I see the beautiful, painting-like features that first arrested me on a sunny Irish day—the dark, enviable lashes, the delicate but full mouth. The straight nose and perfect jaw. He doesn’t even look real, and if it weren’t for the freckles he’d acquired while on the yacht with me, I’d believe him inhuman. Some kind of angel sent to regard my failures with sorrowful-eyed pulchritude.
“Hi,” I say. My voice is only breath. No sound. I think of his fingers inside me the other night, of him bending me over a small chapel pew. Of his hot tongue between my thighs as the waves slapped against the hull of the yacht. “I thought Jago was picking me up.”
Tristan’s eyes are scanning the dojo again, so he’s not looking at me as he answers. “He is. He’s outside. But Mark has asked for you to join him for dinner tonight, and he tasked me with cajoling you.”
His expression is the expression I’ve come to expect from him since we’ve left the sea: alert and impassive and just this side of scowling. A soldier’s face, which he still is, in a way. Mark’s private soldier. But I see the faintest ember of curiosity behind his eyes, the way they linger over the racks of weapons and the mats in a battered stack against the wall. The old red carpet, worn and thin enough to spin on easily, the framed Bible verses on the walls, which had been hung crooked and have only gotten crookeder with time.
“It’s run by nuns,” I say, and then I almost smile at the disbelieving look on his face. “Well, sisters, if you want to get technical.”
“Karate nuns. All right.” He looks at me in my gi, my black belt knotted neatly around my waist, and then at the sword in my hand. “So this is where you go before and after work every day?”
I can’t look at Tristan’s mouth without thinking of it on the curve of my breast. Panting against my neck as he drove between my legs. Tristan is my kingdom in the desert, my bread out of stones.
And why? Why do I want him so much? I haven’t overslept an alarm in ten years; I haven’t gone a single day without praying a rosary; I have killed and nearly been killed in return but never been caught. And yet I can’t hold my own against green eyes and a good heart?
I set the sword carefully on the rack—it’s a bokken, a wooden training sword, but it pays to treat training weapons like the real thing—and turn to find him closer. Only a few feet away.
It’s the closest we’ve been since that night in my room, and it’s the most alone we’ve been since the yacht because there’s no one here, no one at all.
And suddenly, it feels very, very important that he knows it.
“The other students have gone,” I say. I can’t believe the sound of my own voice, the implication of my own words, but neither can I stop myself. “The sisters too. We’re alone.”
His face changes, snow melting into spring, and I can now see the struggle. The obsession. A burn in his stare, a hunger to his mouth.
And I know, I feel it, I get it, because it’s me too, it’s mirrored in me, twinned in me. With Mark, I’d been told over and over again that my own lust wouldn’t be a sin, only a weapon to use against him. But this—this is sin.
Lust, adultery. Deceit. Choosing my own weak and human desires over the will of God.
I want to be good. Like the apostle Paul, I want it so, so badly, and yet I cannot help being bad.
He slowly untucks the earpiece from his ear and lets it hang from his collar. “It’s been so hard to stay away from you,” he says, his voice low and hoarse. “At night, I hear your dreams, and I want to break down the fucking door to help you. When I wake up in the morning, I think of you on the other side of the wall, warm and sweet, and I think of how it would feel to slip inside your room and get in bed beside you. And when I saw the bite on your shoulder at the engagement party…”
I flush.
“You’re killing me,” he finishes. “You are killing me, Isolde.”
We are so close, and I can hear the hard rush of his exhales, and I’m so used to keeping everything inside myself, holding my entire heart and mind and body on the point of a knife, but with those black-pooled eyes, that expression like he wants to carry me out of a burning building and then fuck me while the ashes blow over us, I can’t bear it.
I can’t bear it.
Everything was ordained for me—martial arts, my major, my cover job as an antiquities’ appraiser, and my real job as a saint of the Church…and, of course, my future as Mark Trevena’s bride.
But not him. Not Tristan.
He’s the one thing I’ve chosen for myself.
Our mouths are nearly touching, and I’m trembling. My nipples are hard under my sports bra as I smell him, Irish Spring and something sharp and minty underneath it. Aftershave.
I inhale him and inhale him, that same scent that drugged me on the open ocean. I grew up smelling colognes so expensive that the perfumer came to our penthouse to deliver them personally, and yet it’s the simple smell of soap and aftershave that makes my mouth water.
His breath is warm against my lips, and I can only see suggestions of his face—a single green eye, the furrow between his brows, the helpless part of his lips. His shoulders block out whatever light has sunk through the skyscrapers to make it to the dojo windows.
I press my hands to his chest and feel his heart slamming against his ribs. So I find his hand and press it above my left breast so that he can feel the same slamming in mine. We are twins in this, and all I want is to rip apart any last thing that separates us. Weddings, black belts, medals of valor, anything that makes us different from one another, because we are the same at the core of it all. Children of God made wicked by the clever words of a serpent.
Tristan’s mouth is almost on mine now, brushes, whispers of lips.
“I have to feel your cunt again,” he says. My lower belly clenches at the dark need inside his words.
“Yes,” I say against his mouth. I drop his hand to fumble with the knot of my belt, to untie my gi jacket. The thick fabric is hardly sexy; neither is the utilitarian underwear I’m wearing beneath it, but it doesn’t matter. The minute Tristan shoves his hand—his right hand, the one with Mark’s black and silver ring on his first finger—down my pants and finds my sex, we both groan.
He wastes no time, his fingers seeking the center of me and pushing inside. I’m mostly wet, but not quite, and the bite of friction as he wedges in has my toes curling on the thin carpet. Heat shimmers below my navel, burning my thighs, burning my chest and throat and mouth, and I’m already on fire, already quivering. I think I could come just from this, from his hand shoved down my pants, a little bit of pain to sweeten the fullness and the stretch.
I hold on to his jacket as his eyes hood and his fingers move slowly, testing the tight muscles of my cunt.
“I need this so much,” he says. “I think about it all the time.” He says this last part in a broken whisper, like he’s ashamed.
I press my face to his chest. It’s me who’s ashamed, me who needs it, needs this one thing that God can’t see.
I hear Tristan’s heart beating as he searches my body, rubs the inside of me, and the sound of my wet pussy getting fingered is so raw and the soap smell is so wonderfully and simply him, and I say the words without even knowing really what they mean, just knowing that they’re true all the same:
“You’re the only thing that’s real.”
He pulls back enough to look at me, his jaw tight, his lashes making shadows.
“I don’t feel real at all when I’m with you,” he tells me. “Like I’m in a dream. And it’s a dream where nothing matters but you.”
Our eyes meet, and I wish I could stop fucking myself on his fingers, but when I move my hips, the heel of his hand grinds against my clit and sends sparks shooting up into my stomach. And I’m so close—I’m quivering and trembling and it’s been days since I’ve been able to come properly, with wild lust and a little bit of pain, and?—
A shrill noise pierces the air, sudden and jarring: Tristan’s phone.
He doesn’t move his hand from where it’s penetrating me and instead uses his left hand to answer the call.
“Thomas,” he says, in an efficient, detached voice. A soldier’s voice, I think, ready to drop into action. If someone shouted ten-hut, he’d be instantly at attention, with flawless posture and his hands laced behind his back, still wet and shining from where they’d been.
“Yes,” Tristan says to the person on the other end of the line. His eyes flick down to where his hand is still shoved down my pants. “Yes, we’ll be right there.”
He hangs up the phone, and our eyes meet in the gloam of the empty dojo.
“Jago is double-parked,” says Tristan. “We have to go.”
My orgasm is close enough that my belly is cramping with it, and all I want to do is lock this pretty man inside this room and make him tear me apart. I want him as wild as he was on the sea; I want to see, over and over again, the rupture between his inherent goodness and his surrender to sin.
But cold and bitter reality is pouring in. If I have any hope of using my impending marriage for the Church…any hope of getting into that server room…the marriage has to come first.
I find Tristan’s hand and pull it free of my cunt. He puts his fingers in his mouth and sucks them, his lashes fluttering.
I readjust my clothes and step away, my pussy slick and my chest caving in.
“Let’s go,” I say hollowly, and together we get my things, lock up the dojo, and then leave.
Halfway to the penthouse, the ordinarily silent Jago says, “Mr. Thomas.” His voice is neutral.
Tristan doesn’t respond, doesn’t look up expectantly like a man waiting to hear the second part of a sentence. Instead, he twists so he can look out the rear window.
“What is it?” I ask, turning to follow his gaze. There’s a line of vehicles behind us, a mix of taxis, corporate SUVs, and delivery trucks.
“The old sedan,” Tristan murmurs, “a few cars back. We saw it on the way to the dojo too.”
Being a Catholic means that one rarely believes in coincidences; being one of my uncle’s saints means that I believe in none at all.
I study the car. “Same driver?”
“I think so.”
The car doesn’t follow us for long, though. One more turn and it peels off, heading east. Tristan and I both sit back.
“You’re safe,” he promises me. “Goran and I would never let anything happen to you. And you know Mark wouldn’t.”
I smile at him. He’s so unbearably sweet sometimes.
“Thank you. That does make me feel better.”
* * *
When we get home,Mark is setting the table for dinner. He’s wearing black trousers and a white button-down, clear holdovers from the suit he wore earlier, but his feet are bare, and his sleeves are rolled up to expose forearms layered with muscle. On his left forearm is a tattoo—a bird seen in profile, rendered all in black.
He pauses to observe us as we walk inside, three wineglasses hanging upside down from one of his massive hands. I’m still in my gi, and hopefully Mark attributes any lingering flush on my cheeks to training.
“Ah, my two,” he says, and he doesn’t say what we’re two of, but perhaps the cool and yet fond possessiveness in his voice makes it clear. We’re two of his. However hired Tristan may be, however arranged I am. We’re still his.
I try to feel unsettled by that presumption, and I nearly succeed.
“Sir,” Tristan greets. “Do you need help with anything?”
“Not at all. Everything is ready.” Mark sets the glasses down with silent precision and then goes back to the kitchen, returning with a plate.
“I should change,” I say, even though my mouth is already watering at the sight of dinner: creamy spaghetti twirled into a rose-shaped nest, flecked with black pepper and tiny pink rosebuds.
“Nonsense,” Mark says firmly. “Sit.”
I sit without thinking, and the corner of his mouth is pressed inward as he sets the dish in front of me. An almost smile.
“Good girl,” he says softly, and my heart flips in my chest, once and hard.
I look away, at the nearby window and the stretch of Manhattan on display outside. And then I curse myself.
I want to seduce him; I want him to trust me. I need to shelve my reflexive pride and let him see the effect he has on me.
Because that part is all too real.
But when I look back, he’s already in the kitchen getting the next plate, and Tristan is sitting next to me, working at the button on his suit jacket because he forgot to unbutton it before he sat down. It’s his right hand, the hand he had down my pants not thirty minutes ago, and my skin prickles and hums. I can see the tendons moving across the back of his hand, the nimble crook and flex of his fingers as he works the button through the hole.
And then Mark is next to me, pouring chianti in a ruby splash inside my glass, his own hand strong and adroit. Underneath the delicious aroma of the food in front of me, I can pick out the notes of him, thunderstorm and earth. His free hand is braced on the back of my chair as he pours, and when he’s done, I swear I feel the end of my ponytail move, like he couldn’t resist touching it.
My clit is so swollen that I feel it, feel the pressure of my thighs as I sit there, and I don’t realize I’m shifting in my seat—squirming—until Mark sits down next me.
“Everything all right, Isolde?” he asks.
Even though it’s an eight-person table, we are all sitting clustered at one end with me in the middle. On one side of me, I have a hero; on my other side, a devil.
One I want to fuck.
The other I’ll have to.
My clit leaps, surges. Oh God.
“I’m fine,” I murmur.
The corner of Mark’s mouth presses in again. “Good.”