Chapter 15
Aran
She sleeps like someone who hasn’t felt safe in years.
I know this because I don’t sleep at all.
I lie on my back with my gun on the nightstand and my eyes on the ceiling, and I listen.
To the house. To the street. To her breathing, which goes from shallow and ragged to deep and even over the course of an hour, her body finally surrendering to exhaustion even though her mind fought it every step of the way.
At some point, she rolls over, and her knee touches my thigh. She doesn’t wake up. She just stays there, one point of contact, like her body found me in the dark and decided that was enough.
I don’t move.
I stare at the ceiling and think about Nessa Doyle.
Connor’s daughter. My cousin. A woman who orchestrated her own kidnapping, manipulated a prisoner exchange, planted an ambush, and walked out of a hotel in broad daylight while the rest of us were wondering what the fuck was going on.
That takes planning. That takes connections.
That takes years of being invisible while learning exactly how visible everyone else is.
She’s good. But good people make mistakes, and her mistake was involving Aoife.
I turn my head and stare at her sleeping face.
This woman, this tiny blonde woman, has done something to me that has never happened before.
She has made me feel something other than being in control.
She makes me lose it. She makes me kill to protect her.
She is feisty and funny and strong, even when she should be terrified out of her wits.
Not many people would be taking this as well as she is.
And when I was inside her, fuck. That was it for me.
Done. Finished. Whatever I had before her—control, detachment, the ability to fuck someone and walk away without a backward glance—she burned through all of it in one night.
I don’t do this. I don’t keep women. I don’t think about women, and I certainly don’t lie awake watching one sleep while planning how to dismantle anyone who comes within breathing distance of her.
I get up. Careful. Slow. She doesn’t stir.
I pull on joggers, pick up my gun, and move through the house in the dark. I check every window. Every door. The new deadbolt holds when I test it. The cameras show empty streets and the neighbor’s cat sitting on a wall. Nothing moves that shouldn’t.
I stand in the kitchen and look at the floor. Clean. The crew did good work. No blood. No marks. If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t know.
But I know.
I pour a glass of water and drink it standing at the counter, staring at the spot where the shorter one fell. He had a crowbar. A fucking crowbar against a Glock and six foot six of trained killer. What did he think was going to happen? A polite negotiation?
Someone sent them knowing they’d fail. That’s the part that sticks. Two men, decent enough to break a reinforced lock but not good enough to survive what waited inside. They were a message, not a mission. A probe. Someone testing the perimeter, checking response time, seeing what I’d do.
Now they know.
Now she knows. Aoife. She knows I have and will kill to protect her.
I’ve claimed her, made her mine in ways that no one else ever will be.
She doesn’t understand. Not yet. But she will.
When she processes what happened. When she goes over and over it in her mind, wondering what she could’ve done differently to avoid all of this.
She will know there is nothing and no one who could’ve kept her from me.
“Did I wake you?” I ask, not turning around as I hear her light footsteps.
“Only because you weren’t there,” she says quietly.
It makes me turn. Faster than I probably should.
“Don’t read into it,” she says before I can make a wry comment about her missing me. “Your bulk is easy to miss.”
I smirk despite myself. “Bulk.”
“You’re enormous. It’s like sleeping next to a wall that breathes.”
She’s standing in the kitchen doorway in my t-shirt, hair wrecked, bare feet on the tile. Her eyes are puffy from sleep and crying, and she’s hugging herself again, arms crossed tight over her chest. But she came downstairs. She came looking for me.
I set the glass down. “Water?”
She nods. I fill a glass and hold it out. She crosses the kitchen to take it, and her eyes drop to the floor. Right where the shorter one fell. She doesn’t know that. She can’t know that. But something in her face shifts, like the room itself is holding a residue she can feel.
She drinks the water in three long pulls and sets the glass beside mine.
“Go back to bed.”
“Can’t sleep.”
“Try.”
“I did, and then you left me.”
Left me.
The words are out there, and she can’t take them back. She looks up at me with those expressive green eyes, and I move closer, fisting her hair in my hand as I tilt her head back. “You didn’t want me to leave you,” I murmur.
She shakes her head, her eyes daring me to mock her.
I won’t. Not with this.
She steps into me without resistance, her forehead pressing against my chest. Her hands stay crossed over herself for a second, then drop, and her fingers curl into the waistband of my joggers like she needs something to anchor to.
I wrap my arm around her and hold her there. My other hand stays in her hair, fingers threaded through the tangles, keeping her head against me. She’s shaking again. Not the big, visible kind. The deep kind that lives in the bones and works its way outward.
“I keep seeing them,” she whispers into my chest. “The men. I didn’t even see them, but I keep seeing them.”
“That’s normal.”
“None of this is normal, Aran.”
She’s right. I don’t argue. I just hold her tighter and feel her breathing slow against my skin, each exhale warm and unsteady.
We stand there for a while. Long enough that the trembling fades to something manageable. Long enough that her grip on my joggers loosens from desperate to just holding on.
“Come on,” I say eventually, easing her back. “Upstairs.”
She doesn’t fight me when I scoop her up into my arms, cradling her. That alone tells me how far past empty she is.
Back in the bedroom, I strip off as she crawls under the covers and curls onto her side. I get in beside her, and this time, I don’t leave a gap. I pull her into me, her back against my chest, my arm around her waist.
I press my mouth against the back of her head and breathe her in. She smells like my shampoo.
“Aran,” she whispers.
“Yes.”
“Don’t leave me again.”
“Never,” I say more fiercely than I should’ve.
She turns her head and then her body. She pushes me over and crawls over me, straddling me. My cock is already hard, ready for her when she grips it tightly, tugging on me as she grinds down. Her pussy, is hot, wet, and when she rises, guiding my cock inside her, she soaks me.
I grip her hips, bruising her skin as she sinks, taking every inch with a sound that is somewhere between pain and relief and something holier than both.
“Fuck,” I breathe, watching her face in the dark. Her eyes are closed, her lips parted, her hands braced on my chest. She rolls her hips once, testing, adjusting, and the wet heat of her clenches around me so tight I see white behind my eyelids.
She lifts the hem of the tee and pulls it over her head, exposing her perfect tits, her nipples like bullets, begging me to bite them.
She sets the pace this time. Slow. Deliberate.
Rising until I nearly slip free, then dropping back down with a force that punches the air out of both of us.
Her nails dig into my chest, and I let her take what she needs because this isn’t about me.
This is about her clawing back something that got stripped from her. Control. Agency. The ability to choose.
She chose me.
Reaching up, I cup her tits, pinching her nipples until she cries out. I twist them gently, feeling her tremble on top of me.
“You’re fucking beautiful, Aoife,” I murmur as she rides my cock like I’m hers.
Her eyes open and she smiles, “Say more things like that.”
“You’re mine,” I say, my hands sliding down to grip her waist. “Every inch of you. Every sound you make. Every time you come on my cock, that’s mine.”
Her hips stutter, and I feel her clench around me. She likes the words. She’ll deny it later, but her body is a terrible liar.
“You’re the strongest woman I’ve ever met,” I tell her, thumbing circles on her nipples as she rides me.
I sit up underneath her, changing the angle, and she gasps as I sink deeper. My mouth lands on her neck, her collarbone, the swell of her breast. I take her nipple between my teeth and bite down, not enough to hurt, just enough to make her buck and grip my hair.
“More,” she demands.
“Greedy,” I murmur against her skin.
“You started it.”
I did. And I’ll finish it.
I wrap one arm around her lower back and drive up into her, matching her rhythm and then breaking it, forcing her to follow mine.
She fights me for a second, her hips trying to keep their own tempo, and I love it.
I love the stubbornness of her, the refusal to give up control even when she’s impaled on my cock and shaking apart.
I grip her hips and lift her before slamming her down, taking over complete control, and she makes a feral sound. It’s raw and broken, and it vibrates through my chest where her hands are braced.
“That’s it,” I say against her throat. “Take it.”
She does. Her rhythm dissolves into something frantic and uncoordinated, chasing it, chasing the edge. She’s getting close because her cunt is gripping me in rhythmic pulses that make my vision blur.
I pump her up and down on my cock like a little doll, and she lets me. She doesn’t protest, she doesn’t try to stop me. She lets me use her like a fucking doll, and it makes my cock jerk wildly inside her.
“Fuck, Aoife. You’re fucking perfect. Sexy. Mine.”
“Aran,” she cries out as her orgasm crashes over her, her whole body seizing around me, cunt clamping down so hard I can barely move.
Her back arches, her fingers claw at my chest, and the sounds coming out of her mouth are beautifully wrecked beyond language.
I feel every wave of it, every pulse and squeeze, and it drags me under with her.
I bury myself to the hilt and come so hard my grip on her hips goes white-knuckled. My jaw locks. My vision tunnels to nothing but her face, twisted in pleasure, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes, mouth open on a silent scream.
She collapses against my chest. Dead weight. Boneless. Her heart hammers against mine, two different rhythms that slowly, eventually, start to sync.
I hold her there. Both arms around her. My cock is still inside her, still hard, still wanting more, and neither of us moves to change that. Her breath comes in hot, broken bursts against my neck, and her fingers uncurl from where they were digging into me and go flat against my skin.
We stay like that. I don’t know how long. Long enough that her breathing evens out and the shaking stops. “Did you like that?” she whispers.
“I fucking loved that.”
“I mean, using me, making me fuck you like that.”
I hold still. “Did you?”
“Answer me first.”
“It was fucking perfect. Didn’t you feel me go harder inside you?”
“Yes,” she whispers in my ear. “I did. Feeling you so turned on was fucking hot.”
“Aoife,” I practically whimper her name. “What are you doing?”
She pulls back and looks in my eyes. “Living. I could’ve died more than once today. I didn’t. Because of you.”