Chapter Twenty-One #3
We’re all quiet. Not a sound comes from any of us because we’re stunned.
“Holy shit.” Jonas whispers as if afraid to break whatever spell she’s cast over us. Holy shit indeed.
Damon pushes away from the wall and takes her chin in his hand.
“Let’s make you some breakfast.” Raven begins to shake her head but he tightens his hold on her.
“Yes, ma charmante violincellist. You just took your medication. You need food in your belly and sleep. You remember what happens when you disobey. ”
My ears perk up. She avoids my gaze, that same pink atop her cheeks from earlier and puts the cello back quickly.
Jonas turns and squats down so she can piggyback him.
She slides onto his back and they go up the stairs.
Her shirt rides up and her gorgeous ass is in my face and I’m so torn between being mad and happy since I’m behind them.
Feast. Torment. Rut.
Memories of her taste explodes on my tongue as if I’m tasting her all over again and I inaudibly groan. At the top step I shuffle into the hallway behind them. “I should probably go.”
Raven finally looks at me, brows knitted together, big brown eyes wide in confusion, a little pout on her lips and she shakes her head.
“Nonsense. There’s enough eggs and vegetables in the fridge. I’ll make toast, omelets and coffee.” Archer says, stepping around me and headed back toward the kitchen. “Go into the living area. I’ll let you know when I’m done.”
His kindness makes me feel… unsure about everything.
I find my way to the living room where there’s a large charcoal sectional and I sit in the unused chaise part of it.
Even if the home is empty, there are parts of this home that feel like Raven.
Above the fireplace is a large flat screen, on either side of it are more recessed bookshelves, lined with unread books and a few knickknacks.
She truly tried to make this house into a home before her accident.
“Here,” Jonas deposits Raven into my lap and when we bounce and she almost topples over, I grab her by the waist with inhuman reflexes. “I need to find the remote.”
Raven points to a location over by the side of the couch. She sits up and tries to leave my side but Jonas catches her movement. “No baby. You have to rest your leg. And your feet. What do you want? I’ll get it for you.”
She points to the bookshelf on the right and Jonas goes, like a good puppy and starts pointing at the books. “Which one?”
She shrugs.
“Any of them, huh?”
She must grin because Jonas' fingers roam over the titles and he picks one and brings it back. Queen of Wrath and Vengeance. She opens the book and immediately flips the pages and sticks her nose in the crease and sniffs, settling back into the sofa beside me. I was right. They’re unread.
She must have hundreds of books that have simply just been waiting to be read by her.
She tries to cross her legs but goes against it and when she puts her heels against the couch to put her knees up, she winces.
I grab one of the throw pillows and put them under her legs.
She blinks at me, a slight tilt to her lips and snuggles against the back of the couch.
Before she gets too comfortable, Jonas throws a blanket over her and she sighs.
A book, a fire, an oversized sectional and a blanket.
These are the things that make Raven Monroe, a born billionaire, a practical heiress… happy .
I lean closer to read over her shoulder and she moves so I can see better. Her scent once again infiltrating my nostrils, and it takes everything in me not to grab her by the silky strands, pull her back to me, thrust my tongue between her lips to tongue-fuck her mouth.
Taste. Rut. Rut. Feast.
Twenty minutes later we’re on chapter two after a very fucked up prologue when Damon brings in trays full of food and mugs full of coffee and reusable bottles of orange juice and water. He hands a specific one to Raven. “Decaf.”
She hands it back and tries to take a different one. Jonas and I chuckle when it happens twice more and her brows furrow in anger. She’s adorable and the exchange is mildly entertaining.
“Little bird,” Damon’s tone is stern. “You need to be able to sleep. So if you drink this coffee, it’ll be for the flavor . Not the stimulation.”
She swipes the coffee for a water bottle with a huff. I’m with her. Decaf is merely a placebo.
Jonas has the college football station on, watching the highlights and reruns RMU missed out on due to the campus being closed and the game being canceled in memoriam.
We’re all digging into the best omelets I’ve ever fucking tasted when a News Bulletin comes up showing a former RMU Quarterback and Chase’s picture beside him. For a second, I almost think it’s Riordan. The pair look almost identical .
“… Quarterback was found this morning, dead in a bathtub at the luxurious De Novo Hotel. A tragedy, Prescott, 27, had just buried his cousin, also a Quarterback for the RMU Yellow Jackets Friday evening. Sources are currently calling it an alleged suicide. The family wishes to be left alone. We have no further information at this time.”
Raven tenses beside me and her eyes close. When she opens them, they all share a look.
“Shit.” Jonas mumbles. He puts his plate on the coffee table and hangs his head, shaking it slowly. Raven puts her plate beside his and climbs into his lap. He puts his arms around her waist and inhales her scent.
A lover comforting her lover.
Where jealousy should spike, it merely ebbs and quickly disappears. “Friend of yours?” I ask.
Jonas nods. “I just saw him yesterday at the funeral. It’s wild.” He looks at Raven and offers a soft smile. “I’m okay baby, I promise. I wasn’t close with him like I was Chase.”
I look over at Damon, whose plate is also now on the tray, his ankle is propped on his knee, and his thumb is rubbing against the length of his middle finger.
Silver eyes take in the lovers, not an ounce of jealousy scribed on his face.
He watches them with a burning intensity and even shirtless and in his pajama bottoms, he looks every bit like the psychiatric doctor he is, analyzing their behavior like two animals caged in a zoo.
His zoo.
But there is no malicious intent behind his usual cold, calculating stare. There’s a warmth, a softness for them. He catches me watching him and a smirk forms. “Little bird, how about you take Jonas upstairs for a nap? I’ll join you shortly.”
There. There is when a sting of heat, an unfamiliar emotion twists in my chest, as I watch the young man get up, holding Raven in his arms, and trudge up the stairs that I can place that unfamiliar spark of emotion between desire and envy.
Catch. Feast. Rut. Claim.
My lizard brain, the most Neolithic, primal part of my brain, wants so much to be buried inside this woman. This beautiful fucking mute and I don't understand it .
Why?
She wouldn’t be able to moan, to gasp, to sigh a breathy little sigh, cry out my name – none of the things that would satiate the beast inside and yet…
to feel her thighs tremble around me, her pussy throb while I shoot my cum deep inside of her, the thought of her face contorted in conquered ecstasy, hair spread around a pillow like a halo has me hard.
“Penny for your thoughts?”
“I believe my thoughts are a bit more expensive.”
Damon laughs. “Well, can’t say I didn’t try to shut them up for you. Maybe another trip to Inferno for you tonight, then?”
“Shut up.” I reply in an annoyed huff.
Damon stands and heads to the back door just when I begin to hear the unmistakable sound of a man praising his lover. As I step through the door and out onto the covered porch. “Oh, Harrington?” I turn, the handsome prick grinning like a starved wolf that just caught a bird.
“I want to thank you for being such a great professor and thoroughly teaching your student how to… swallow.” He slams the door in my face.
Like I said, PRICK .
That spark in me rises, that disturbing jealousy flaring. The victors are cashing in on my spoils.
I walk the trail back to my own back yard through the rain that’s now a steady drizzle, grumbling, imagining all types of scenarios in my head.
Scenarios that all contain the various positions I’d imagined putting her in and they morph into something far more disturbing that include Jonas and Archer.
I shake them off. When I take her, and I will, it will be alone .
I don’t know when and I don’t know where or how or even why , but all I know is Raven deserves to be punished.
She’s been a good girl, I’m sure, for them …
but for me, she’s always fucking bad. The intolerable short skirts.
The fishnets or thigh highs. Flashing her panties.
Being in the goddamn restricted section of the library.
Nibbling on the tip of her pen while I’m teaching, biting her lower lip when she doesn’t understand something.
Her defiance. Spitting on me, fighting me …
It's only a matter of time before she acts up again. She can’t help it. It’s instilled in her to fight and I can instill it into her to crave discipline. My form of discipline.
By the time I reach my back gate I’m so fucking hard I could punch a nail into the wall.
I enter the threshold of my home. Other than the low hum of the refrigerator, silence greets me.
There is no warmth to my home. It’s dark because all the blinds, save one, are closed.
When I step into my kitchen, a cold cup of coffee waits for me.
There’s no arguing over it.
There’s no television on.
No smells of someone making breakfast.
No sound of a book’s page turning.
No music.
Just dead silence.
It unsettles me. It never has before I’ve always preferred the quietness but now…
now it’s just too loud. I hear the soft rumble of an engine as it slows to a stop.
From where I’m standing I watch a black jeep with illegally tinted windows park on the side of the road between a few trees, hidden and out of sight.
I go on about my day, clean my already clean house, go down to the basement that isn’t a library or a soundproof room, it’s a home gym. I work out, then go back up to shower, make myself a sandwich, order the trashy novel Raven and I were reading on her couch so I can read it myself.
The Jeep is there when I go to sleep.
It’s there when I wake up on Sunday morning.
It’s gone when I go to the market for groceries.
It’s back when I climb into bed Sunday evening.
My thoughts drift to Raven, like usual, then back to the blacked-out Jeep nestled in the trees.
A knowledge from my own experiences makes alarms go off in my head. All the signs are there.
It’s a stake out.