36. Deargán
DEARGáN
Iwas well prepared for Ravenwood’s aftermath. Liath would sulk, bristle, punish me with silence or temper. That would have been predictable. Manageable. I didn’t expect what I got.
I opened the door to my therapy room at Magdalene’s before our next session and froze.
She sat in my chair.
The side lamp was on. My files were stacked neatly beside her like she’d been reading them.
The sight landed low in my gut, sharp and unwelcome.
She had entered my territory without permission.
“Please,” she said, gesturing toward the chair across from her, the patient’s chair, “sit down.”
As if she owned the fucking room.
I closed the door behind me slowly and turned the lock, the click sounding louder than it should have.
This was strategic. She was hunting for a weakness.
Okay, Liath. Let’s see what game you’re playing.
I sat down in front of her, studying her, looking for her usual tells. Her brows, her shoulders, the color of her cheeks.
But for some reason, I was reading nothing.
Not yet.
“You’re angry with me,” I said, my opening gamble.
I watched her cheeks for heat. Studied her eyes for tears. A tremor in her jaw.
“No,” she said, not a trace of emotion in her voice.
I adjusted my approach. “This is some sort of punishment for Ravenwood.”
Her mouth curved faintly. “Not at all. I enjoyed our excursion to Ravenwood. It was… illuminating.”
For a fraction of a second I floundered, irritation flashing hot at my own lapse. Then I remembered her mirror-touch synesthesia. All I had to do to unravel her was to touch myself.
I leaned forward, letting a small silence stretch between us as if I were considering her data point. Then I lifted my thumb and stroked it slowly over my lower lip, deliberate, measured, replicating the rhythm that had unraveled her in group.
“Really?” I asked quietly. “What exactly was so illuminating about it?”
I watched her pupils. Her breathing. Waited for the telltale shift, the flush, the hitch that signaled her body had betrayed her again.
Nothing.
Her eyes flicked briefly to my mouth, then back to my eyes. A slow, knowing smile touched her lips.
Understanding landed sharp and immediate.
She knew exactly what I was trying to do.
A faint crease formed between my brows. The mechanism had worked before.
Now it didn’t.
The ground shifted beneath the certainty I had built around her. I had researched her weaknesses. I had mapped them carefully.
Apparently, I hadn’t mapped everything.
Something in her posture changed, then.
Subtle. Easy to miss if you weren’t watching closely. And I was always watching closely.
Her shoulders loosened. Her weight shifted forward, not retreating, not defensive, but deliberate. Like she had reached a decision and was about to act on it.
She leaned forward, elbows on the chair arms, eyes bright and steady, holding my gaze a second longer than necessary, as if measuring the exact distance between us.
“Are you trying to make me come, Doctor?” she asked softly. “Maybe, if you beg nicely, I’ll let you.”
Heat flared in my chest before I could contain it.
“You’re projecting,” I said, leaning closer.
She leaned in even closer, so close I could feel her breath on my cheeks. “Am I?”
I don’t know what happened. My mind short-circuited. A glitch. I had no answer, and for a moment, no strategy.
She stood and leaned fully into my space, her hands on my armrests, close enough that I could feel the heat of her body before she touched me.
She paused there for a fraction of a second, giving me time to stop her, to reassert control, to end this before it began.
I didn’t move.
A faint shift in her expression told me she had noticed that.
She slid onto my lap, her thighs parting to straddle my hips, her warmth pressing against my cock.
I should stand. Push her off me. I should stop this.
I didn’t.
“You’re testing me,” I said, my voice coming out rougher than I intended.
She smiled. “Yes.”
Then she kissed me.
Her mouth was warm and soft, her lips pressing with a confidence that stripped the air from my lungs. The faint sweetness of her breath hit first, then the slow glide of her tongue against mine, unhurried, exploratory, as if she were cataloging the texture of me.
If I gave in, I could ruin everything.
The thought flashed and dissolved as I deepened the kiss.
The heat of her soaked into me through every point of contact, her hips grinding against me, moaning low in her throat when I kissed her back.
My hands moved of their own accord, sliding up her skirt, my thumbs teasing along the lace of her cotton panties before curving around her ass.
A groan broke out from me. From her. I gripped her hips and ground my aching cock against her.
For a moment, I was not a doctor. I had no plan. No ulterior motive.
I was just a man who wanted her.
Wanted Liath.
She reached down between us and rubbed her hand along my cock through my pants.
“Doctor,” she whispered, “Bron…”
I hissed, biting back a curse, my chest tightening at her use of my name. “Yes?”
Her fingers tightened over me.
“We shouldn’t,” she breathed, her mouth brushing mine even as she pulled down my zipper, “someone could walk in.”
I repressed a needy groan. “I locked the door.”
Her hand paused, just before she reached into my pants. “If I begged you to make me come, to really make me come, would you?”
“Yes.”
“On your fingers?”
“Yes.”
“On your tongue?”
“Fuck, yes.”
“All over your thick cock?”
A groan cracked from my lungs, my chest seizing at her filthy mouth, an unbearable ache lashing through me that almost broke my restraint.
“I’d make you come until you forgot your own fucking name,” I breathed, the words tearing out of me. “I’d bury myself inside you and ruin you for anyone else.”
“That’s what I thought,” she whispered against my lips.
Then she pulled back.
My mouth followed hers for a fraction of a second before I forced myself still, my mind reeling.
She nodded, her voice even. “What a fascinating experiment.”
“Experiment?” I echoed.
“I wanted to test whether desire would destabilize you.”
I froze.
She was using my framework. My vocabulary. My words.
She reached up and straightened my tie, smoothing the fabric with deliberate care, as if correcting an error in presentation.
“Thank you,” she said softly. “I understand you much better now.”
She stepped back up off my lap and smoothed down her skirt.
I remained seated, hands braced on the arms of my chair to keep myself anchored, trying to understand how I’d let the ground shift under me so completely.
My pulse slammed hard against my ribs, my cock still aching, the absence of her weight hitting like withdrawal, heat lingering on my skin where she’d been.
She paused beside me. Her fingers brushed my shoulder as she leaned down, her mouth close to my ear. The warmth of her breath tightened something low in my abdomen.
“You lose control when I make you want me,” she murmured. “And you hate that.”
Then she straightened and walked to the door. She did not look back.
The door unlocked, then clicked shut behind her.
My hands were still gripping the chair when the silence settled. I adjusted myself and zipped up my pants, furious at the reaction of my own body.
Did she want me when she kissed me back, or was it calculated from the start?
I replayed the kiss in my mind, searching for tells. I hadn’t caught them. I’d only seen what I’d wanted to.
Her breathy groan. A tremor in her fingers. I thought they were all real.
Apparently not.
For the first time since she arrived at Magdalene, I wasn’t certain I was the one controlling this… experiment.
The habit started as a corrective measure. During the day, I began to follow her throughout the asylum grounds.
I positioned myself where she wouldn’t see me. Behind the stone archway. Inside the tree line. On the upper balcony overlooking the courtyard.
I kept my routes casual, timed with staff movements and patient breaks, the sort of presence that didn’t invite comment.
I told myself this was risk assessment. I was observing my target.
I tracked her patterns. How long she lingered. Who she gravitated toward. How often she laughed.
Patterns soothed my mind. Patterns made the world legible. She should have been legible by now, and yet each hour brought a new deviation in her that did not align with the profile I’d constructed.
She sat with Dervla on a courtyard bench as I watched from behind a stone statue, their bodies angled toward each other with the ease of familiarity.
Liath’s shoulder dipped, her head tilting, her lips near Dervla’s ear as if sharing something private. The intimacy of it landed wrong, scraped at something in me that had no place in a treatment plan.
My jaw locked on reflex.
Dervla responded and Liath tipped her head back. The cadence of her laughter was wrong. Too open, too easy.
Dervla’s mouth curved up, genuine and unguarded, her black fringe shifting, her shoulders loosening. My gaze lasered in on Dervla’s hand brushing Liath’s arm.
Heat rose in me, fast and irrational.
She isn’t supposed to need anyone except me.
Dervla was a threat to my control over Liath, a hindrance to my plan. Later, I would decide whether Dervla needed to be dealt with.
More irritating was the kiss that kept replaying in my mind, returning without invitation, inserting itself into moments that had nothing to do with her.
The warmth of her mouth. The feel of her weight and heat grinding down on me. The moment my body had stopped being mine and started being hers.
Then the moment pulled away, her withdrawal cold and planned.
Her knowing smile.
The way she called our kiss, the kiss that had me burning out of control, a fucking experiment.
She had been strategically testing me.
I had lost complete control.
That night, my feet moved before my thoughts could catch up, carrying me down the quiet corridor toward her door. The hour stretched late, the asylum long since surrendered to sleep, but I walked as though sleepwalking, my pull toward her like a noose around my throat, tightening with every step.