34. Aaron
34
AARON
“ Y ou better be careful,” Grayson said, setting down his mug of noxious-smelling black tea when I entered his office at Richmond Electric.
“You’ve come to see me twice in twenty-four hours. People might think you miss me.” The slight smile on his face disappeared when I took a steadying breath.
“There’s been a complication with the contract.”
My older brother’s eyes narrowed.
“So you’re here to tell me that you fucked up and even worse, you fucked with my money.”
“Guess all your talk of being there for me as an older brother was bullshit. Surprise, surprise.”
“Fuck you, Aaron. Don’t bring that into this. This is business.” He rose from his chair and loomed over me. “I put my company on the line for you.”
“This is why I didn’t want you involved”—my voice rose—“because I didn’t want to owe you anything.”
“Well, now you do,” he snarled. “I have a lot of money tied up in a lot of projects. The new power contract in Europe, the port contract on the West Coast. I burned networking capital on this with the Feds.” Our father’s fury, his rage, was etched on my brother’s face.
I won’t let him see me frightened.
I wasn’t a kid.
But he read me anyways.
Grayson visibly tried to control his breathing, school his features.
“I don’t know what you did, and I don’t care, but you better unfuck this right. Now.” His voice was flat.
“I can’t.”
“I’m not asking you, Aaron.”
“She’s a virgin,” I forced out.
“What?” Grayson snapped.
“Daisy Coleman…” I worked my jaw. “Is—”
“I heard you.” Grayson turned to pace.
He and I had practically memorized our father’s rants that echoed around the stuffy, damp cellar decades ago.
How he verbally laid into my mother because, when he’d snatched her off the street one night, he’d thought she was younger and more inexperienced than she actually was. He hated Emily because she wasn’t a prized virgin. Told us that the rest of the girls were virgins, and he was special because he’d been their first.
“I can’t do it, Grayson,” I begged. I was going to vomit. “I never should have gotten involved. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. This whole thing is crazy.”
“You need to figure something out. Bribe her. Pay her. Can you get her a sex therapist? Why don’t you ask Betty to talk to her? What’s her holdup? Is she scared?”
“She…”
But he read it on my face. Cold, calculating. Our father’s mirror.
“ You . It’s you. You’re the problem.” He made a disgusted noise. “Just suck it the fuck up.”
“I knew it! I knew it,” I yelled at him. “I knew you were just like him. That’s why I told our brothers to stay the hell away from you.”
“Fuck you, Aaron. I’m nothing like him. This isn’t personal. It’s business.” He was snide. “Businessmen don’t choke at the last minute and fail .”
Ice filled my veins.
This was why Grayson was the only one of us who ever had any hope of besting our father. Because no one else was that cruel.
“That’s…” Grayson shook his head, face softening, “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sorry.”
“Fuck you.” I was vibrating with rage. “Fuck you. I hate you. I’ve always hated you.”
“ Aaron .”
I grabbed my bag.
“Aaron, just talk to her. Figure something out. Aaron!” Grayson called. “Aaron, I’m sorry.”
“I’ll pay you back for Coleman Mining. Just send me the bill,” I snapped from the doorway. “Then you and me? We’re done.”
The problem was I wanted her too much, I decided when I slammed the door to my study, blowing off Jared as he offered to fetch me something to eat.
I told him to tell the servants to just get out. I needed to be alone. I couldn’t stand to even hear people breathing right now.
I cared about Daisy too much. I’d been waiting for her for too long.
Now here she was, her and her soft body and trusting eyes, her innocence , just waiting for a man to take it, to crush it. To show her what pleasure really meant.
I believed you were allowed to write off one massive failure in your life. Mine happened at age ten, when I failed to kill my father.
I didn’t have another.
Daisy couldn’t be another failure.
I needed a plan. I needed to think. To recenter.
The lever felt cool under my hand.
The secret door unlocked with a dull metallic clang that echoed into the damp depths below the house.
Not even the servants knew about this secret underground chamber—let’s not call it a cellar, it was certainly nicer than where I grew up.
I’d done the work myself, cleaning off the slime, rewiring the lights, building the damp-resistant furniture piece by piece in the night.
No one could know about it.
One of the Richmond brothers re-creating his own windowless prison?
It was practically a cliché.
People would talk.
I stripped off my shirt as I descended into the cellar. The sconces flickered on the water from the spring that fed the underground canal.
The damp hit my skin.
Welcome home.
The bitterness stuck in my throat.
I’d worked so hard, pushed myself so far, and it meant nothing.
All because of Daisy.
It was always because of her. She was always there to fuck with me—in school and now my business. My whole life was imploding.
Because she was a fucking virgin.
I sat down heavily on one of the oversized couches, its teak frame absorbing the shock.
There was a solution. There were multiple solutions, in fact. If I wasn’t going to sleep with a virgin, then she needed to lose it to another man. Then I’d sleep with her.
If she were any other woman, I’d hire an escort for her myself—keep my soul intact and my money in my bank account. Shit, I’d have already had it done.
However, Daisy didn’t know I was lying earlier that day. The thought of another man taking her, his cock being the first she ever rode?
I wanted to peel off my own skin.
Since that day on the beach when we were teenagers, I’d secretly craved it—taking her virginity. Because I knew I wanted it so much, that meant I couldn’t have it. I’d gone through the last fifteen years believing that she’d lost it in high school with the exchange student, or sometime in college at the latest.
Yet she’d been saving herself.
For who?
I wanted to believe it was me.
I shuddered thinking about her. Her big tits, the pink nipples in my mouth.
My cock was half-hard when I palmed myself through my slacks. I had never even allowed myself to jack off to the thought of her, not even when she wore that yellow bikini at the graduation party a decade ago that made me ask her if she tasted like a banana split. Her face had turned red, and then she slapped me in front of everyone.
If her entourage hadn’t been there in my office today, I might have even given in then, since she baited me. That was what she was doing, had always been doing.
She had been saving herself for me.
My cock was thick and heavy in my hand. I groaned while I thought about her whimpering as she felt a cock in her pussy the first time.
No, her ass.
Both.
She'd be so tight. So fucking tight.
I was crossing so many boundaries right now.
My hips jerked into my hand as I thought about making her suck my dick first, her round pink mouth wrapping around my cock, choking on it. Her shock at the huge length down her throat.
“Fuck, Daisy,” I murmured. “I bet you feel so fucking good.”
I froze when I heard a little whimper, like the sound of a little mouse.
Or a woman .
“What the fuck?”