Chapter 23
23
SAMANTHA
A fter an improvised dinner filled with laughter and flirting—and more dishes piled in the sink than anyone should have to face in the morning—Braiden and I steal back upstairs. It’s dark in the corridor; the only light is moonglow from the window at the end of the hall.
I think I catch a moving shadow before we get to Aiofe’s door, but that might be my imagination getting the better of me. I take care, planting my feet on the thick carpet runner. The last thing I want is for the child to peek out, to pin me with her curious eyes, offering her silent assessment of what I’m doing with her guardian.
I don’t stop until I get to my own room. My door is ajar, the way I left it when I went to my office this morning, more hours ago than I care to think about. I can see the corner of my bed, neatly made with my soft white comforter.
I bargained for this room. I made it a term of our agreement. I insisted on the arrangement because I knew our marriage was only one of convenience.
And the thought of going in there, alone, makes my throat swell closed.
Braiden’s fingers twine with mine. “Come along, piscín .”
He leads me to his room.
The bed is more of a wreck than I remembered. Before we started…whatever he just put me through…the bed was made European style—no top sheet, just a winter-weight duvet. We kicked the burgundy-and-green comforter to the foot of the bed. Now, it’s slumped over the footboard like the carcass of a stag.
The room still smells like sex.
I pause, one step through the doorway. What am I supposed to do? Do I have to wear my collar? Does Braiden actually think we can go another round?
I know I can’t. My legs feel like they’re carved out of mahogany. When I take a deep breath, I find muscles between my ribs I never knew I had.
“Braiden,” I say, because I’m trained to confront challenging situations. That’s what law school was all about.
“Hush,” he says.
I watch as he crosses to the bed. He straightens the duvet with a single yank, letting its feather-filled chambers drift over the bed. He flips back the near corner and turns toward me.
“Are you taking the jacks first, or am I?” he asks.
“My toothbrush is down the hall,” I say. I don’t know if I want to move it. I don’t know if I want this change.
“Bring it here,” he says. “This is your room now.”
And just like that, my decision is made.
That’s what being with Braiden is all about. He decides things. I don’t have to question, don’t have to think.
But I always have my veto in my back pocket. I can safeword. I can say no.
I brush my teeth in my own bathroom. I change into my gray sleep shirt. I glance at myself in the mirror quickly enough to avoid a thousand questions—what the hell I’m doing here, what my future is with the Captain of the Fishtown Boys, where I think any of this is heading.
Padding down the hall holding my toothbrush, I wish I’d brought a pillow too. I want something more substantial to hold onto. Moral support.
Which is an awfully strange expression, when Braiden and I have just spent the evening doing a wide range of utterly immoral activities.
He’s standing by the bed when I return. He’s clearly splashed water over his head; his hair stands on end. I can smell the mint of his toothpaste.
And he’s not wearing a stitch of clothing.
“I…” I can’t keep from looking at the dresser, at the drawer that holds my collar.
“I sleep in the nip, piscín .”
I swallow and nod.
“That’s all I’m asking of you. Sleep.”
I can’t help but look at his cock. He isn’t erect. Yet.
He closes the distance between us and reaches out to slip a stray lock of hair behind my ear. “I want to wake up next to my wife. Do you have a problem with that?”
I shake my head.
“I’d like to hear her say a word or two as well.” He grins as he says it, the smile transforming his face from calculating brute to charming boy.
“I— I’d like that too,” I say.
He gets into bed first. He holds up the duvet, extending an invitation that feels nearly formal.
I can still change my mind. I can remember an early meeting I have to take tomorrow. I can decide to wash my hair.
But I cross the room. I put my toothbrush on the nightstand. I reach for the hem of my sleep shirt.
It feels wrong to keep wearing it, like I showed up to a picnic dressed in clothes meant for the office. I pull the gray cotton over my head and drop it on the floor by the nightstand. He waits for me to climb onto the mattress and settle on my side, facing the door.
When he reaches across me, his weight feels like a promise. But he only reaches for the lamp, turning it off at the base.
I exhale slowly.
I hear him breathing in the dark. I feel the heat of him, radiating against my back. I smell him, cedar and spice, or maybe that’s my own arm I smell, because he’s touched every inch of my body.
Eyes closed, I try to find the shadow-fog trail to sleep. But my mind overflows with memories of what we did here, just an hour or two before. My belly swoops as I think of how close he got me, how many times. How he knew my body even better than I know myself.
I stretch my legs, trying to ease something between an itch and a pang. I spread my fingers wide on my pillow, desperate to bleed off some of my nervous energy.
“Stop thinking,” Braiden says, his voice scraping the bottom of the range for human ears.
Those are the words he said to me, right before he short-circuited every nerve in my body. It’s not likely they’ll work now. Not when I’m remembering every devastating move he made.
“ Piscín, ” he says, swallowing the word in a way I’ll never learn to imitate. “Sleep.”
I want to. I need to. But I’m terrified I’ll do it wrong. I’ll ruin whatever we have, whatever this strange attraction is between us, whatever our utterly unlikely marriage is turning out to be.
His arm settles over me like a weighted blanket. He flexes his wrist and pulls me closer, until my back is spooned against his chest. He throws one leg over mine, anchoring me into position.
His breath is warm on the back of my neck. Each hair on his arm, his leg, his chest writes a separate private message against my skin. His cock lies against my bottom, quiet for now.
“Sleep,” he says again, and this time it’s an order.
There’s no question that I’ll do what he tells me. My resistance simply melts away. His command is actually the thing I desire most in the world.
So I sleep.
I jerk awake in the middle of the night. Slipping out from under Braiden’s sheltering arm, I pull away from the heat of his chest, even though I immediately start to shiver. I sit up in bed, knowing I heard something urgent, something important.
There. Something is dragging across the floor upstairs. It sounds like an enormous snake, slithering scale by scale above my head. The noise is ominous. Threatening. I catch my breath, to better make it out over the pounding of my heart.
Someone is crying—quietly at first, then with more and more desperation. It’s a woman, moaning something in a language I don’t understand.
I have to find her. I have to help. She sounds frightened, forlorn. She sounds like she’s alone in the universe, and I’m the only one who can save her.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed, bending low to pick up my sleep shirt. Before I can find it, though, Braiden’s hand closes over my shoulder.
“Lie down, piscín ,” he orders.
“I have to help her,” I say.
He swears under his breath, and I’m not sure if the words are English or Irish. “Help who?” he asks.
I gulp a steadying breath, so I can hear her again, so I can point to where she’s standing above us.
Silence. The crying has stopped. The moaning. The sobbing. I wait to hear the heavy thing dragged again, but nothing moves.
“I heard it,” I say to Braiden in the dark. “Upstairs. On the third floor.”
“There’s no one there,” he says.
“I heard her! There was a woman! She needs help!”
His hand spreads wide across my back. “You were dreaming, piscín. ”
“I know what I heard!”
He pushes himself up on one elbow. “Do you?”
And sitting here, on the edge of Braiden’s over-size bed, I wonder what I really do know.
I know he spanked me for merely touching the door that leads upstairs.
I know I craved that attention, longed for it, even as I questioned what sort of woman permits such a thing.
I know I let him punish me in the greenhouse, forcing orgasms I couldn’t resist.
I know I let him punish me again, in this bedroom, denying orgasms I needed.
Braiden does things to me I’d never let any other man do. He touches me in ways I’d never allow. And I want him to do it. I’m desperate to know how much more he can give me. How much I can take.
So it makes sense that I’d dream about the forbidden space above us. My subconscious would create a reason for me to go up there. My sleeping brain would justify what I want. What I crave.
The truth echoes in the silence around us. If there really was a crying woman, why would she go silent the instant Braiden spoke?
Lie down, piscín.
That’s what he told me to do. That’s the only thing that makes sense in this huge old house, with its creaking beams and its nighttime drafts.
My dreaming brain played tricks on me.
So I let Braiden pull me back beside him. I allow him to cover me again—with his arm and with his leg and with his chest against my back. I melt into the solid warmth of him, the certainty, the truth.
And I sleep the rest of the night without waking.
I wake to find myself alone beneath the heavy duvet. Squinting at the clock on the nightstand, I see it’s 8:52. Almost an hour past the start of breakfast.
My sleep shirt is folded into a neat rectangle beside the lamp. I pull it on quickly, rubbing my arms hard to keep from shivering in the cool bedroom air.
I’m halfway to my room when Grace Poole steps out of the nursery. “Ma’am,” she says, ducking into her strange, old-world curtsey.
“Good morning,” I say, fighting the urge to tug at the hem of my sleep shirt. I speed walk into my own room and close the door behind me.
Shower. Hair. Makeup. Clothes.
I make it to the breakfast table by 9:15. I’m hoping—praying—Braiden will be engrossed in one of his five morning newspapers. Instead, he’s engaged in an animated conversation with his brother, gesturing emphatically at Madden with his butter knife.
He breaks off a statement, mid-word.
“Good morning, Mrs. Kelly,” he says.
His eyes track my every step as I cross the room, his lips curving into a voracious smile. His fingers flex around his knife.
He might as well hire decorators to splash new paint on the wall, floor to ceiling letters that shout, “I fucked my wife last night.”
“Good morning,” I say.
My inability to meet his eyes in front of Madden makes him laugh out loud. “Coffee, love?”
At least he isn’t calling me his kitten. “Please,” I say. And then, because I have some semblance of manners, I force a smile as I turn to my brother-in-law. “How are you this morning, Madden?”
He smirks. “Better rested than some,” he says.
Braiden cuffs him on the ear before setting my coffee on the table.
Before I can take a sip, Fairfax comes in from the kitchen. He’s carrying a covered plate that looks like he stole it from some fancy hotel’s room service. Whisking off the silver lid, he says, “Himself said you’d be delayed this morning. Your eggs will be up in no time.”
Grace. Madden. Fairfax. They all know I spent the night in Braiden’s room. I have no doubt Fairfax already has orders to move my possessions down the hall, to make the transition as if I’d never spent a night in the guest room.
Of course he does. His entire reason for working in this house is to make Braiden’s life easier. My husband is a king. He has an army of servants to do his bidding.
Is this how Eliza felt after she married Don Antonio? Was the Russo house filled with speculation that first morning? What did they hear, the night my cousin lost her virginity to the man who eventually murdered her?
Suddenly, I miss Eliza with a pang so sharp I wonder if I cracked a rib last night. I close my eyes, and I can picture the two of us, huddled under the blanket on her narrow twin bed, gaping at a dirty magazine she found under Gianni’s mattress. We rotate the page left, then right, trying to figure out where all the arms and legs connect to the sweaty, twisted bodies.
Jesus, we were naive children.
She’s gone.
The only reason I’m living in this house is because Braiden chose to spare me from the violence that took my cousin.
“Samantha?” Braiden’s voice cuts into my reverie. I realize I’ve been staring at my coffee like it holds the secret to the universe.
I force a smile as I look up.
“Kelleher’s here,” he says. “Waiting in the surgery.”
I’m not afraid of the doctor, of giving blood, of starting to take the Pill. But I’m mortified that Madden’s watching this exchange.
But Braiden isn’t. Braiden couldn’t care less.
So I put down my coffee. I push back my chair. I head upstairs with my husband, where Dr. Kelleher makes me feel like everything we’re doing is boringly routine. After drawing blood, he recommends a shot instead of pills for birth control. When I agree, he takes care of the injection with taciturn efficiency. After a couple of weeks for my body to adjust, I’ll be protected for three months.
Braiden waits until the doctor leaves before he kisses me. “Be ready to leave at seven this evening,” he says.
“Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“I don’t like surprises,” I say.
“You’ll like this one.” He’s almost out the door when he turns back. “You’ll want to wear one of your skirts.”