Chapter Forty-Six #3
“Put aside the damage it’d do to you to marry a strange woman you have no attraction nor affection for. What about Katya? She is young and hopeful. She deserves a man who would at least try to be a good husband.” I couldn’t believe he’d made me a Katya defender.
“I’ll make her happy. I’ll give her free rein and the option to take a lover. I’m not gonna be my father and Luca.”
I believed him. He was just ferociously loyal and dedicated enough to his family to sacrifice himself for everyone else’s benefit.
“But you’ll be miserable.” I jabbed my finger in his chest. “You’ll live a lie. You’ll never experience a great love, a truly sensational fuck. You deserve both, goddammit.”
His jaw ticked, his heavily lashed whiskey eyes warning me to drop it. I couldn’t. I cared about him too much.
“Why’d you agree to this?” I pushed.
“Loyalty, devotion to the Camorra…and power.” His smirk was lazy, playfully decadent. “It was my one chance to push Achilles out of the race. I took it.”
“What about Luca?”
Enzo shrugged. “The Camorra’s closing rank around him. He’ll likely become the don, but I’ll still be the consigliere, next in line. Occupational hazards are common in our field of work. I’ll be waiting in the wings—”
“Enzo, get lost,” a brutally gruff voice commanded. One I knew perfectly well to belong to my own filthy god. Achilles materialized from the shadows, dripping menace and authority, arduous prowess poured into a Prada suit.
“I’m sensing a theme here.” Enzo ran a finger over his jaw.
“You’ll be sensing my knee on your windpipe next if you don’t fuck off.”
“I love it when emotionally constipated men finally let it all loose.” Enzo passed me the half-smoked joint with a wink. “Sorry, sugar. Gotta go make sure I still have a bride in that bullet-infested room.”
Achilles stared me down, waiting for an acknowledgment.
“Everyone okay back there?” I fixated on the birdbath across the pool, refusing to address my little jealousy fit from earlier.
“For now.” He tugged me up by my elbow, grabbing the joint mid-suck and tossing it into the pool.
“You thought she was here for me.” His dark gaze fell to my mouth.
That’s all it took for my traitorous thighs to clench at the memory of him serving me with one earth-shattering orgasm after the other. Who said lust only made men stupid?
“I wouldn’t care either way,” I huffed, but the bite was gone from my voice.
“You’re a very bad liar, Piccola Fiamma.” His thumb brushed my cheek, leaving fissures of pleasure that made my spine tremble. “Admit that you’re jealous.”
“I can’t admit something that’s not true,” I maintained calmly.
He produced a baffled, enraged snarl. I could tell he was losing his patience. Only this time, he was no longer able to punish me with a spur-of-the-moment idea that’d throw me into the arms of depression.
“Let me take you out after dinner. Somewhere fun,” he ground out.
“I’d love to, but I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I already have a date tonight,” I lied.
Anything to put more space between us. I wasn’t ready to give up so quickly.
Plus, if he really did change, he would let me have my freedom.
We weren’t together. I could date other people.
Kiss them. Screw them. I wasn’t his property, and he’d better remember that.
“That’s a shame.” His demeanor was still ice-cold, his tone dry and amused. “I’m afraid you won’t be able to make it.”
“Why not?”
He shoved me into the pool, going down with me.
The splash reverberated in my ears as we pierced the water, sinking under the surface.
His lips crashed down on mine underwater.
Hard, demanding, relentless. Our limbs tangled, the water cooling our skin.
We were in the deep end, both literally and figuratively, and I never wanted to come up for air.
Our tongues lapped at each other, devouring one another.
I wrapped my legs around his waist as he pushed off the bottom of the pool.
We broke the surface, still fused in this slow, drugging, erotic kiss.
I ground against him, running my fingers over the scars on his face.
“M—more,” I panted, fingers curling over soaked fabric, clawing at sculpted muscles. “I want more.”
“More what?”
“More everything.”
A growl of satisfaction poured from his mouth into mine.
His words from last week ghosted over every inch of my needy flesh.
“When I kiss you again, you’re going to be willing and begging for it.”
“Admit that you were jealous.”
“I wasn’t—”
He reached between us and pushed his pants down, as he freed his cock, holding it by the root and dragging the crown along my slit through my underwear. “Admit it, Tierney.”
My pride was eviscerated into smatterings in that moment, and all that was left was a throbbing, hot ache between my legs and adrenaline that made me tremble like a brittle leaf.
“I was,” I growled, kissing him harder, sinking my teeth into his skin, and making the kiss about sex and not about emotions. “Next time I see her standing next to you, I’ll break both her legs. Now, fuck me.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He tucked my underwear to the side roughly, pushing inside in one go.
I broke the kiss breathlessly, angling my head to the twinkling lights coming from the mansion. “Your family is ten feet away. They can watch me corrupting you through the window.”
“Let them have their fucking fill.” He devoured my neck, thrusting into me. “This is not sex, Little Flame. It is ownership.”
The way he filled me made my mouth water, and I met him thrust for thrust, the golden gleam shining from the dining room our backdrop. All the people inside it could easily guess what we were doing in the pool if they turned to look in our direction, but I simply didn’t care.
I raked my fingers through his wet hair, the orgasm building inside me. Achilles had one hand on the small of my back. The other was pinching and teasing my erect nipples through my wet dress.
“My jealous little flame,” he teased, his lips finding my nipple and closing over it. The heat of his mouth against the coldness from the water gave me goose bumps everywhere. “You thought I’d give you up so quickly?”
“Sh—shut up,” I grunted. We drifted to the shallow end of the pool, so I was able to ride him faster, with more desperation than I cared to admit.
To make this about lust and not about love.
About pleasure and not about submission.
I couldn’t be that girl anymore. The girl who wanted to die because she wasn’t exactly what he needed.
His teeth closed in on my collarbone, hot tongue swirling over cold skin as he moved to my other nipple. “I’ll never give you up, Tierney. If I can’t have you, no one can.”
His words were all I needed to fall apart between his arms, screaming his name to the sky, relinquishing control to the orgasm that ripped through me like a storm.
No decency lived in the way we climbed out of the pool afterward, soaked and flushed. Achilles threw a towel over my shoulders and stepped ahead of me to conceal me from view.
I secretly hoped Katya got a front-row seat to our antics in the pool. That should extinguish any inappropriate ideas she had about her future brother-in-law.
I was about to sit down on a lounge chair when Achilles shoved me against one of the walls in a hidden corner, crowding me with his impressive height.
“Move in with me.” A demand. Not a request.
It must’ve been my head injury, but I actually didn’t think it was a bad idea. Not that I could tell him that outright. “I just refused to go out with you, and now you’re asking me to move in?”
“No, you just had mind-blowing sex with me. That cancels your rejection.” He scowled. “You know you want to. My sister’s driving you mad.”
“That’s not a good enough reason to move in with someone.”
“Then do it for another reason.”
“Such as?”
“That no one will ever take better care of you. No one will devote their entire fucking life to you the way I do. No one will go against their family, tradition, and self-preservation like me.”
He was right, of course, but for some reason, that stunned me.
I was so used to his love being laced with something punishing and cruel that I hadn’t stopped to think that Achilles hadn’t been the same person since I got shot.
He tended to me without expecting anything.
He nursed me back to life, even though he didn’t have to.
My broken pieces weren’t his to pick up. But he still mended them.
But that wasn’t the only reason I was considering moving in with him.
I knew it would soothe the aching part of his soul that I’d fractured.
“I started having nightmares again.” My teeth munched on my lower lip. “I…I scream and cry in my sleep sometimes.”
“I saw when we were at the cabin.” He ran his fingers over his damp hair. “I can handle it.”
“I want a different room.”
He grabbed his own towel and ran it through his sooty, wet strands. “Done.”
“No surveillance—I come and go as I please.”
His lips gravitated to mine again, and we met halfway for a kiss.
“Done.” His teeth clamped around my lower lip, and he sucked it into his mouth, releasing it with a pop before lapping it with his tongue to ease the sting.
“No sex, either, until I say so,” I said. “Orgasms cloud my judgment.”
“We don’t want that.” He nuzzled my neck, dropping addictive kisses along my sensitive flesh.
“And I want a one-night stand.”
He ripped his mouth from me, glaring. “Why would you need a one-night stand with your future husband?”
“Not with you,” I said boldly. “I’ve never really dated anyone else.
Never had the privilege of living life as I pleased because of you.
All I could do was hook up with people like a thief, hoping you weren’t looking.
If you’ve changed like you claim you have, you’ll prove to me that I am free,” I breathed out.
“Free to choose you…or anyone else, if I wish to.”
Sleeping with someone else seemed as appealing as getting shot in the head again, but I wanted the option.
I craved some kind of a guarantee he wasn’t going to treat me like an object he bought, like other made men.
For the past few years, I had been sexually starved because Achilles couldn’t handle me having a love life.
All the while, he screwed women left and right without a care in the world, rubbing their existence in my face.
I needed him to prove to me he was a choice, not a decree.
“No,” he snarled.
“I’m not asking, Achilles,” I said quietly. “This is not about sex.” I shook my head. “You need to show me you can protect me from your own rage.”
His foreboding glare would terrify anyone else, but all I saw in his face was the resignation of a man too far gone to back out of any arrangement, including one that could very well kill him, to have me.
“I’ll do it whether you allow it or not,” I clarified.
“One time,” he growled under his breath. “One, Piccola Fiamma.”
“One time,” I repeated, my face so hot I fought the need to touch it to cool it off. “I want to know you mean it when you promise me that I’m free.”
He searched my face, curling and relaxing his fist beside his body, trying to gain control over his fury. His pulse fluttered over the side of his neck. I licked my lips, trying to think of something comforting to say.
“And don’t worry, I won’t bring him home or anything…when it happens.”
“You want no surveillance and to hook up with a random?” He bared his teeth. “You better know you’re bringing him home, so I can save you if shit goes south.”
My heart skipped a beat. How ironic it was that this man was going to finish me with his kindness after trying to destroy me for years with his malice.
“Does this mean you’re game?” The only reason my jaw wasn’t on the floor was because I was positive I was hallucinating.
He ran a hand over his jaw, tilting his face to the sky. “I swear to fucking God, Tierney, if this is some ploy to get me to lose my mind…” He didn’t finish his threat, his jaw clenching tight. “Fuck. One time. One time. I can do it.”
I stared at him in disbelief. Could he?
“And I want to be there when it happens,” he growled.
“That’s a terrible idea,” I whispered, transfixed.
“You’re a terrible idea.” He patted his pocket, just to find out his cigarette pack was soaked and ruined. “I don’t fucking care if it kills me. I’ll always put your safety first.”