Page 92 of Iron Blade

I leaned down to kiss her and she slightly turned her head away. I grinned, feeling the tug of joy on one side of my lips as I recognized the game we were now playing. We were the couple in the portrait, and she knew it.

“I will take no for an answer… if you mean it.” I grabbed her chin in my hand, turning her face to kiss her, my tongue conquering as she moaned. “Just say the word.”

I meant the safe word. A blush crept up her cheeks, and I was delighted to see the flush beneath her warm, tanned skin.

She played her role beautifully, trying to pull away, but still giving in when I sucked her tongue in my mouth. Her hand came up to wrap about the nape of my neck. Then she pulled it away, as if realizing that she was giving in to something she should deny herself. I grabbed her face in my hand, keeping her mouth locked on mine as my hand delved down to lift her skirt and cup her gorgeous, full arse.

She stiffened, then gasped, her body pulling away and drawing me closer at the same time. A beautiful contradiction, showing me the depth of who she was. It was magnificent. The resistance. The fight. A kink I didn’t know I had, but now that I did, it was consuming.

Like an endless hunt, where I coaxed my little prey out, tempting her to show me the wanton desire I knew her body was capable of.

I pried my lips away but didn’t try to let go of her. Why would I? Why would I ever place space between us when there need not be?

“We don’t have time,” I lamented, placing a kiss at the base of her throat, feeling her pulse against my lips. “Or I would take you right here. I would take you on every surface, until you were nothing but a heap of used and sated lust, filled to the brim with my seed and growing my child in your belly.”

She gasped, and I chuckled.

“I will keep you ripe with children,” I swore under my breath. “Or I’ll die trying.”

“That’s one hell of a threat, Eoghan.”

“No threat,” I chuckled, nipping at her clavicle. “A promise.”

I stepped away, and felt cold when I did so. I allowed the space between us to grow just for a moment, as I ran into the closet, to pry out a black dress, covered in green lace. I pulled some emerald green high heels from a row of shoes and came out with them in my hand.

She stood still as I worked around her, slowly unzipping her black dress and letting it fall to the ground, kissing her bare shoulder. In nothing but her bra, her panties still missing from when she tried to search for them this morning, I got a glimpse of the glory of her body. I knelt behind her, running my fingers along her curves, the backs of her thighs, to the curve of her glorious calf and her delicate ankle.

I slipped her heels off, one at a time, offering her my shoulder so she could balance herself. Then I placed the new shoes on each delicate foot, feeling like the humblest, most loving servant. I rose, taking the dress and slipping it over her head, and letting it fall over her body, hiding the glory of her form. A form that belonged to me. A sight that was for my eyes alone.

I gloried in the intimacy of zipping up the back, her hair tucked over her shoulder as the dress formed to her curves.

What a privilege to be a husband, and to be a servant to the most glorious wife. In all my days, I had never felt more right and more important. Not seducing and taking… but in serving the woman who deigned to let me call her that precious word: Wife.

Chapter thirty-one

Your Hand

Kira

Ihad to spend dinner with the madman.

This was why Blink didn’t believe I was cut out for deep cover. I wasn’t like him. He could be friendly with anyone, even if they were guilty of the vilest things. I’d think he was a psychopath, but in truth he was just very gifted in his line of work.

Despite what people believe, not every spy goes undercover like this. Most of us live ordinary lives, and passively gather intelligence through observation. Others, like me, had lives constructed to support those operations. I was never meant to sit across from a man I loathed.

Men like Alastair Green, and their loan sharks, were the reason my father died. The reason why I had suffered under their boot, paying interest rates up to fifty percent - though the interest was really just a suggestion. They could have charged one hundred percent, and I would have paid it because I was fighting for my father’s life.

When the money didn’t save my father, he gave up because of what paying those loans had done to me. I snapped. My life was in shatters and I was forever changed.

It’s painful what a human can do when they have been stripped of their pride.

Eoghan’s saving grace was that he had put a stop to most of those activities among the Irish. No loan sharks, no strip clubs. They appeared to be getting out of the drug trade and legitimately moving into construction and mercantilism. The art gallery did for the Greens what strip clubs did for the Durantes, but with far less human misery.

Eoghan hadn’t stopped the violence though. Protection money was still paid and owed, and the skirmishes between the Durantes, Vasilievs and Greens still made law enforcement shudder in their violence.

That must be why two burly men stood at the dining room door, their blazers obviously concealing pistols on their torso. Their hands were crossed in front of them, their eyes scanning up and down the room. In particular, one of them looked at Aoibheann, my mother-in-law, in a way that unsettled me.

I don’t know how to describe it, other than seeing that man’s face made me instinctively want to cover my wine glass.

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