CHAPTER 4 #2
“This is—you’re both—I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Then leave,” I said, lifting my head just enough to meet Marcus’s eyes. “No one’s keeping you here.”
Marcus didn’t move. Of course he didn’t move. His chest rose and fell with shallow breaths, his pupils blown so wide they’d nearly swallowed the brown of his irises, and his hands stayed planted on his thighs like I’d told him.
“I’m staying,” he said. “I’ll be quiet. I’ll be—I’ll be good.”
“You’ve never been good a day in your life,” Cole muttered, but there was no venom in it. Just brotherly fatigue, the kind that came from decades of shared history.
He fucked me harder after that. The sound of it filled the bar—skin on skin, his grunts, my gasps, the rhythmic creak of the bartop’s frame as it absorbed the force of his thrusts.
Cole’s hand stayed planted on my lower back, pinning me in place, and his other hand found my hip and gripped hard enough to bruise.
The pendant lights swung imperceptibly above us, their chains catching the air currents stirred by our motion.
My orgasm built slowly this time. Not the sharp peak he’d drawn out with his mouth, but a deeper, more structural thing—an earthquake rather than a lightning strike. I could feel it in my thighs first, then my belly, then the tight clench of my internal muscles around his cock.
“I’m close,” I warned.
“Not yet.” He slowed, frustratingly. “Not until I say.”
“Cole—”
“You wanted to be ruined. Ruin takes time.”
He pulled out of me completely. I whimpered at the emptiness, and he shushed me with a hand smoothing down my spine. Then he gripped my hips and dragged me backward, off the bartop, until my feet hit the floor.
“Knees,” he said.
“Where?”
He guided me to the customer side of the bar—the side where I’d stood for three months, wiping down tables and tallying register receipts and pretending I wasn’t completely gone for my ex-firefighter boss.
The floorboard there had a crack in it that he’d been meaning to replace.
I knelt on it now, the old wood cool against my shins.
Marcus watched from his stool. His vantage point had shifted—he was seeing us in profile now, Cole standing behind me with his cock slick and ready, me on my knees with my ass pushed back in offering.
“You’ve been so good,” I said to Marcus. “Haven’t you?”
His throat bobbed. “Trying.”
“He’s trying,” Cole agreed. “It’s a new experience for him.”
“Will you come in my mouth?” I asked, tilting my head back to look up at Cole. “After you’ve taken what you want?”
A muscle in his jaw jumped. “Is that what you want?”
“It’s what I’ve wanted since the first night you kissed me. I want to taste you.”
He hauled me up by my upper arms and kissed me—hard, possessive, his tongue sweeping into my mouth like he was claiming territory. When he pulled back, both of us were breathing hard.
“Bartop,” he said. “Back on the bartop. On your back this time. I want to see your face when I come undone.”
I scrambled back onto the walnut, not particularly graceful about it. My knees still smarted from the floorboards. A bead of sweat traced a path between my breasts, and I could smell myself on Cole’s skin—that musky, intimate scent that belonged to the two of us alone.
He climbed onto the bartop with me. The frame groaned under our combined weight—it was built for leaning, not for fucking—but it held. His body covered mine, chest to chest, his heart hammering against my sternum.
“Eyes on me,” he said.
“Always.”
He thrust into me, and this time there was nothing controlled about it.
Nothing deliberate. He fucked me like a man possessed, chasing his own release with single-minded focus, and I wrapped my legs around his waist and held on.
His cock pistoned into me, fast and deep, and the sounds we were making had gone completely animal—grunts and moans and the wet slap of flesh meeting flesh.
Marcus had stopped pretending to look anywhere else. His gaze was locked on the place where our bodies joined, and his hands were trembling on his thighs.
“Cole,” I gasped. “Cole, look at me.”
He did. His eyes were wild, almost black, the scar through his eyebrow silver in the pendant light. Sweat plastered his hair to his forehead. He was beautiful. He was wrecked. He was mine.
“Come inside me,” I said. “I want to feel it.”
His rhythm stuttered. “Mara—”
“Please.”
That was what broke him. His hips slammed home one last time, and I felt the hot pulse of his release deep inside me—felt him shudder and moan and bury his face in the crook of my neck as wave after wave rolled through him.
His fingers dug into my hips. His breath came in ragged gasps against my skin.
And I held him through all of it, my hands cradling the back of his head.
The silence that followed was enormous.
Cole’s weight pressed me into the bartop, his body still trembling with aftershocks. The pendant lights had stopped swaying. The refrigeration hummed its eternal hum. And Marcus sat on his stool, utterly still, his knuckles white on his thighs.
After a long moment, Cole lifted his head. He looked at me—really looked at me, his expression more open than I’d ever seen it. “I love you.”
The words landed in my chest like a stone dropped into still water. Ripples spread outward, touching everything.
“I know,” I said. “I love you too.”
He kissed me. Soft this time. Tender. The kind of kiss that said more than words ever could.
Then he pulled out of me—gently, carefully—and slid off the bartop. His jeans were still bunched around his thighs. He pulled them up, fastened his belt, and turned to face his brother.
Marcus hadn’t moved. His eyes were red-rimmed, and the bruise on his cheekbone looked stark against the pallor of his skin.
“You okay?” Cole asked.
“No.” Marcus’s voice cracked. “I don’t—I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.”
“You’re supposed to go upstairs and sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.”
“What is there to talk about? You just—and she—and I watched—” He pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes. “Jesus Christ, Cole. What the fuck was that?”
“That was Mara choosing me.” Cole’s voice was calm but not unkind. “She could’ve chosen differently. She didn’t.”
“And you would’ve been okay with that? If she’d—”
“If she’d wanted you to join us?” Cole glanced at me—still sprawled on the bartop, still catching my breath. “I would’ve been okay with whatever she wanted. That’s what loving someone means, Marcus. It means their happiness is more important than your ego.”
Marcus dropped his hands. His face was a ruin of conflicting emotions—jealousy, shame, longing, and something else. Something that looked like grief. “I don’t know how to do that.”
“I know. But you can learn.”
I sat up slowly, wincing at the ache between my legs. My sweater was still draped over the back bar where Cole had tossed it, and I retrieved it now, pulling it over my head without bothering with the bra. My jeans followed, though I left them unbuttoned.
“Marcus,” I said. “Look at me.”
He did. Reluctantly. Like looking at me was a punishment he was forcing himself to endure.
“I wasn’t going to say yes,” I told him. “Even if Cole had offered. Even if he’d been okay with it. I wasn’t going to say yes.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not you I want.” The words were brutal in their honesty, and I saw him flinch. “I’m sorry, but that’s the truth. I’m not interested in a threesome. I’m not interested in sharing what Cole and I are building. Whatever this is between us—it’s for two. Not three.”
“Then why make me watch?”
“Because you needed to see it.” I tucked a strand of sweaty hair behind my ear.
“You needed to see your brother happy. You needed to see that he’s not just the guy who cleans up your messes.
He’s a human being who deserves to be loved, and I’m going to love him.
And if you can’t handle that, you should leave. ”
The ultimatum hung in the air. Marcus stared at me for a long moment, and I could see the war happening behind his eyes—the urge to run, the urge to stay, the urge to say something cruel that would push us both away before we could reject him first.
“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” he said finally.
The admission seemed to cost him something.
His shoulders slumped. “I’ve burned every bridge I had.
This is—you’re the last people on earth who haven’t given up on me.
And I just watched you—” He gestured vaguely at the bartop. “I don’t deserve your kindness.”
“No,” Cole agreed. “You don’t. But you’re getting it anyway.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re my brother. And because I’m tired of being angry at you.” Cole crossed to where Marcus sat and extended his hand. “Come on. Get up. You’re sleeping in the studio tonight.”
Marcus stared at the offered hand. For a moment, I thought he might refuse—might slap it away and storm out into the night the way he’d done an hour ago. But then he reached up, and his fingers closed around Cole’s, and Cole hauled him to his feet.
They were the same height. The same broad shoulders. Standing face to face, the resemblance was almost disorienting—like looking at two versions of the same photograph, one slightly older, one slightly harder.
“The things you saw tonight,” Cole said, “you keep them to yourself. They’re not for anyone else.”
“I know.”
“And tomorrow, you start earning your keep. The drywall in the basement. The walk-in cooler. You work, you stay sober, you pay your debts. Those are the conditions.”
“And if I can’t?”
“You can.” Cole clasped his brother’s shoulder. “You just haven’t had a reason to try before.”
Marcus’s gaze slid to me. “You’re really okay with this? Him letting me stay?”
“It’s not my bar,” I said. “But yes. I’m okay with it.”
“Even after I said all that shit about him having a hero complex?”