17. Jamison
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
JAMISON
My mouth was a fucking traitor around her. Why did I continue to say the wrong thing, repeatedly. My spiral affected work. Because, all I wanted was to work on things with her. Yet— when I’m around her I make every situation worse.
I stayed awake all night watching beach cameras.
The St. Cross beach house sat along Harlan’s southern coastline. Weston’s family used it during summer events, regatta weekends, and whatever polished coastal rubbish St. Cross Crows called relaxing. The exterior cameras belonged to Harlan security infrastructure.
Which meant they belonged to me.
Technically.
I told myself that mattered.
I was checking the perimeter because Weston had taken Sienna from an event tied to my region, and Sienna remained adjacent to a Crow contract until Damius finished dismantling my life for entertainment.
Security.
That was all.
A security review. At two in the morning…from my private casino office. With a bottle of whiskey beside me and six screens showing the same stretch of sand from different angles.
Perfectly reasonable.
Sienna appeared on the eastern camera at 12:37 a.m. I knew the time because I had watched the timestamp change for twenty-nine minutes before she came into frame. She followed Lucille and Amara toward the beach steps.
Weston was behind her.
Laughing at something Elias said while keeping himself close enough to Sienna that any normal person would think he was being protective.
I knew better.
Crows did not drift by accident, crows positioned.
Weston positioned himself half a step behind her and to the left. Where he could look attentive without looking possessive.
The bastard had always known how to make a cage look like manners. I leaned back in my chair and watched Sienna reach the sand.
The cover-up came off.
My hand tightened around the glass.
She wore a black bikini.
Small.
Thin ties at her hips. For a second, every rational thought in my head went silent.
Then Weston looked at her.
My glass cracked.
I looked down at it. Whiskey leaked over my fingers.
Again.
I was developing a problem with glass. I set the ruined drink aside and kept watching.
Sienna laughed when Lucille ran into the water and immediately screamed about the cold. Amara followed more carefully, holding Callum’s hand until a wave reached her knees. Elias dove straight in because Elias apparently had the survival instincts of a labrador with generational wealth.
Sienna stayed at the edge at first.
Her toes touched the water. Weston stood beside her, saying something I could not hear.
I didn’t need audio to know the shape of it.
Reassuring… something that made her look up at him. He held out his hand.
The whole office went still around me.
Sienna looked at it…then she took it.
She took Weston’s fucking hand.
He guided her into the water slowly, wave by wave, keeping his grip loose enough that she could let go whenever she wanted. She didn’t. Her free hand lifted her hair away from her face when the water reached her waist.
Weston laughed at something she said.
Then a wave hit them both.
Sienna stumbled into him.
His hand went to her waist.
My chair scraped back so hard it struck the wall behind me. For three seconds, I was standing without remembering I had moved.
Later, when they got out, I watched him hand her a hoodie around one in the morning. His hoodie. Crow crest with St. Cross branch signet. Sienna took it. I turned off the screen before I went down to the garage and drove to them myself.
The urge stayed under my skin until sunrise.
When morning came, I felt more possessive, and no where near rational.
The kind of possessive that made men in Harlan cross streets when they saw me coming, even before I gave them reason. The city had learned to read my moods like weather warnings. Today, every warning system should have gone red.
I showered, dressed in black, smoked three cigarettes before breakfast, and still smelled her on my hands.
Impossible.
She hadn’t touched me in days.
But my head didn’t care about facts. My head kept replaying the back seat of the car. Her on my lap. Her black hair in my fingers. Her little gasps against my mouth. The way she had kissed me back before she remembered I was drunk and likely to ruin anything she handed me.
I had relived that night too many times.
Usually in the dark with my hand around my cock.
In my head, I fucked her right.
In my head, I knew exactly what to say.
I took my time with her. I stripped her slow. I made sure she knew she could stop me. I made sure she knew I wanted her with every awful piece of myself. I kissed her until she stopped apologizing. I put my mouth on her clit until she forgot the word sorry existed.
In my head, she trusted me.
In reality, I couldn’t say one fucking word right.
That was the problem, well one of theme, typically there were several.
By nine, the city had started paying for my mood.
A syndicate meeting in the lower casino turned ugly before it officially began.
Which resulted in bodies.
Reeves handled disposal logistics with the blank calm of a man who understood my family as weather.
I told him to replace the carpet, bleach the lower lift, and have fresh coffee in the adjacent room because apparently the rest of the syndicate meeting still had to continue around corpses like we were running a family luncheon.
By lunch, Harrison had disappeared into a private office to threaten three more families. Marcel had gone silent, which meant someone else was probably discovering consequences. Reeves was dealing with bodies. Harlan’s underworld was scrambling around our moods like rats before floodwater.
Sadly for Harlan, the city had to deal with Crow men having emotional problems. I refused to call mine that.
I had a business problem. Sienna was simply attached to the issue. That was all.
At two, Veil pushed the first feature.
ST. CROSS HEIR TOURS HARLAN CLASSICAL GALLERIES WITH BELLEMERE BALLET STAR.
I stared at the headline in my office. Then opened it.
The video began outside the Harlan Museum of Classical Human Craft. Weston stood beside Sienna on the front steps like he had any right to be there. He wore navy today. Soft linen. No tie. Sunglasses tucked into the opening of his shirt. His whole body arranged to say effortless.
Sienna stood next to him in a white summer dress.
Black hair down. She looked like something the city did not deserve.
The Veil caption slid across the lower corner.
A quiet afternoon with Weston Crow and Sienna Bellemere as they explore Harlan’s forgotten human art wing. Sienna had loved that place before Weston learned the address.
The footage showed them in the gallery, standing before some painting of a girl near a window.
Sienna was speaking with both hands, animated in a way I had not seen in months.
Her eyes lit up when she explained something.
Weston looked down at her, listening with that careful expression designed to make the whole world think he had a soul.
He didn’t give a fuck about old paintings.
He gave a fuck about being filmed giving a fuck. The optics of standing beside Sienna in a place she loved, letting Harlan see him listen where I had dismissed. He was building a narrative with every attentive nod.
Fucking bastard.
I knew what he was doing. Revenge. Weston and I had been due to settle things months ago.
Normally, Crow cousins sorted out their issues on the island once a year. Crow Island retreat. Family ring. No politics. No women. No guards inside the circle. Just blood, fists, and old grudges getting beaten into something manageable before they turned into expensive problems.
Weston and I had a deal dispute from the last cycle.
St. Cross had wanted a coastal entertainment route I had already claimed through Harlan nightlife. He said the water made it his. I said the money made it mine. He smiled in that polished way and suggested we settle it in the ring.
We were supposed to.
Then scheduling shifted.
Damius moved the family retreat. Harrison had an execution schedule conflict. Marcel refused to leave Emmie during a difficult week. I got buried under Harlan business. Weston and I never fought.
Now here he was. Taking revenge with my fiancée in galleries and bikinis.
Fucker.
I watched the Veil clip twice.
Then a third time because Sienna smiled at a painting in the middle, and I wanted to know what she had said right before it.
I couldn’t hear it properly over the edit music. I threw the remote at the wall. The screen survived…the remote didn’t.
“I don’t care,” I said to the empty office.
No one answered.
“I don’t fucking care.”
By evening, Harlan had taken enough damage for one day.
Two contracts were terminated. One private club lost licensing.
A councilman’s son was removed from a table so quietly his friends didn’t notice for six minutes.
I approved a port seizure I might have delayed on a better day and refused an investor concession with language that made the man’s lawyer go pale.
Every decision was defensible. Most were even correct. The speed was the issue. My mood had teeth, and Harlan kept putting fingers near its mouth.
At nine, I went home.
The penthouse felt too large when I entered.
I poured whiskey and didn’t drink it. I smoked half a cigarette and let it burn out in the tray. Then I opened the beach cameras again.
Bad idea.
I knew it before the first feed loaded. The St. Cross beach house appeared under moonlight.
Tonight, the lower deck was quiet. Chairs stacked neatly. Towels gone. Floodlights dimmed. No Sienna in a bikini. The absence only let my mind fill in the rest.
Sienna at the beach last night…wearing his hoodie.
Sienna in the gallery today, looking at old paintings and spoke like effort mattered because she had spent her whole life giving effort to people who didn’t deserve it.
Sienna in my lap.
I shut the cameras off. The room went dark. For a while, I stood there with the city behind the glass and my own reflection staring back.
Black shirt.
Tattooed throat.
Scar near my jaw.
A man who could run Harlan, dismantle rivals, frighten investors, and arrange bodies to disappear before lunch. But could not tell one woman he cared without making it sound like a threat.
My hand went to my belt.
I stood in the dark, unfastened my trousers, and wrapped my hand around my cock. The first stroke hit hard because I had been half-hard since the gallery clip. I closed my eyes.
She was there immediately.
Mine.
In my bed this time, black hair spread across my sheets, eyes wide, mouth soft and bruised from kissing me.
Just Sienna.
I climbed over her in my head, slow enough that she could see me coming. My mouth found her throat first because I had become obsessed with it. The fragile line of her neck. The way her pulse jumped there when she was nervous. The way she tilted her head.
I kissed down to her chest.
In the fantasy, she was naked beneath me. I sucked one nipple into my mouth.
Her back arched. My hand tightened around my cock. I groaned into the empty penthouse.
“Be good for daddy,” I muttered.
Everything stopped.
My hand.
The fantasy.
The word sat in the dark between me and the window.
Daddy.
Oh fuck.
No.
No, that was not casual.
Other men used the word like a kink. A dirty little thing said in hotel rooms and forgotten by morning.
For Crows, that word had devotional weight.
It was not father, or some soft domestic bullshit.
It was claim, shelter, discipline, worship, and obedience turned intimate. The word a woman used when she trusted a Crow man to be powerful without being careless. It meant she could call and he would come. His hand would protect before it punished. It was pure uttered devotion, given to her alone.
Emmie used it with Marcel. Because he had earned the right to hear it.
Sienna had never called me that. She could barely take my hand anymore.
My cock throbbed in my fist. Because apparently shame had no power over want when Sienna was involved. I stood there breathing hard, staring at my own reflection in the glass.
“You have a fucking problem,” I told myself.
My reflection did not argue.
Then my mind betrayed me again.
Sienna beneath me.
Eyes wide.
Black hair tangled around my fingers.
Her mouth parting as I corrected her softly.
Daddy.
Not Jamison, baby. Because in the dream I had earned it. She was mine and open under me, trusting me. The fantasy rebuilt itself around the sound. My hand moved again, slower this time, harder on the upstroke.
In my head, Sienna trembled beneath my mouth. I kissed down her stomach, spread her thighs, and took my time like I had promised myself I would. No rushing.
Mine because she wanted to be.
“Daddy,” she moaned in my head.
My hips jerked into my fist.
“Fuck.”
The sound ripped out of me.
I gripped the edge of the bar with my free hand, head dropping forward as the fantasy turned filthy and tender at once.
I imagined sliding into her slowly, inch by inch, holding her face so she had nowhere to look but at me.
I imagined feeling her body take me, tight and perfect, her nails in my shoulders, her voice breaking around that word again.
Daddy.
I came with my teeth locked and one hand braced against the bar, the force of it dragging a harsh groan out of my chest. For several seconds, I did not move.
I opened my eyes.
My reflection stared back.
Hair disordered. Hand braced hard enough to make the tendons stand out. Cock still in my grip. Sienna’s name and that word still burning through me like something holy and obscene.
I cleaned myself up with rough efficiency and fixed my trousers. Then I stood there in the dark, staring at Harlan like the whole city had conspired to make me honest. I had a problem.
A real fucking problem.
I wanted Sienna Bellemere in ways that had stopped being manageable.
I wanted her body. Her mouth. Her trust. Her hand in mine again. Her voice filling rooms I had made too quiet. I wanted to be the man she called when she was scared and the man she crawled toward when she wasn’t.
I wanted daddy from her, which meant I wanted a level of trust I had spent three years poisoning before she ever thought to give it.
The worst part was that some deep, ruined place inside me had finally named what it wanted.
Devotion.
From Sienna.
And I had taught her I was the last man alive who deserved it.
These fucking feelings continued to rip through me. Disgusting. I checked the time. Three in the morning. I grabbed my jacket. Notified my driver. Did what I always did when something got too much.