Page 1 of Exposing Adonis

Chapter 1

Callum

Strathlachlan, Scotland

Whenawomanwhocould take on the world with a butterfly knife comes to you with pleading eyes, open hands, and spread thighs … you don’t say no.

You cannot look upon that holy sight and deny anything a goddess might ask of you. You grab your sword and become her champion. No questions asks.

Lea was shirtless, her breasts bare like a Greek statue, laying on the green, leather love seat. Surrounded by the books, globes and maps that had been passed down from one MacLachlan to another, she looked like she belonged. Like a mermaid on a rock, drawing me in. I couldn’t help but salivate at the sight of her. Pert brown nipples tempted me, and I had to resist the urge to take her again.

She asked for help. And I was the perfect white knight to answer her call.

She quivered from the intensity of our last fuck. She almost collapsed, and I barely had time to catch her and draw her onto my lap. She was exhausted, her eyes heavy from lack of sleep.

“Next time you need something from me, you ask. No tricks, no games. Do you understand?” I whispered into her bleached hair.

She still smelled like the recycled scent of the airport, traveling clothes, and the parts of myself I had placed inside her. My cologne, my musk, my seed mixed with her jasmine scent and poisoned my lungs with the idea of eternity.

My arms, my blood coursed with the feeling that all was right in the world, and that fate had delivered us right here.

“Yes. I swear,” she whispered, weak and boneless in my arms.

“Do that again, and I’ll punish you for it.” She shivered. My threat. My promise. It did something to her that wasn’t unpleasant or unwanted. “Now, tell me what you need from me, darling.”

She took a breath. Then another, letting it out. I ran a finger up and down her bare arm, over her breasts, down to the hardened, lean abs that led to her shaved pussy. I waited, letting the silence hang because she needed the time. She needed the moment. And I wanted to service all of her needs.

“My brother.” Her voice was soft. And I can’t say that her brother was something I really wanted to think about when she was naked in my arms. “He was out there, at the camp when it got overrun. He was evacuated but Doctor Laurant was left behind …”

“Chloe?” My eyebrows came together, and my hands stiffened. “He knows her?”

What did her brother want with a little cabbage like Chloe Laurent? She had been the youngest of the boarders at St. Michael’s School. The suitcases were bigger than her. Her family didn’t even come to deposit her in Montreux. There was only a black-clad chauffeur who dragged her to the principal’s office and left.

I was thirteen when I met her. She was seven years younger, such a tiny, weepy little thing. She cried all night long in her room until Pippa snuck in and sang her to sleep.

“We both know her.” Lea’s voice was slow, and quiet. Like she was in confession. “Him more than me. He’s been her assistant at the camp every time he goes out there.”

I nodded, letting that information wash over me. The brother knew our little cabbage.

“He wants to rescue her,” she said. “He thinks that it’s his … my …ourfault that she’s a hostage because we …”

“You killed the Butcher.” I finished for her.

She nodded. “I was supposed to. But because of everything, he went in my place.”

The wheels in my head turned. That feeling of fate, the stars aligning, washed over me. I was in the moment. I was right where I was supposed to be. Holding this woman, on this couch, in my home. We both belonged there.

There was a power in the air that was drawing us closer, moving us down a path that I couldn’t fight. I didn’twantto fight it.

My mind, and my obligations, told me it was too soon. I had known this girl barely a week, if I counted from the day I invaded her family home.

She also wasn’t one of us. Like me, and Pippa, born into mergers, not marriages. My own mother had succumbed to my father’s coldness. His selfish possessiveness.

A wife. A son. We were just props. Property. Things to enrich his image. Pippa understood what that was like. So we made our pact to marry each other, and merge our properties and treat our children better. But as time wore on, I had no desire to wed, or bed, the world’s Sexiest Woman, according to the fashion magazines. Five fucking years, and Pippa was as delicate and flippant as ever. We were no more connected than when I walked into a jewelry store and picked out the largest diamond there.

In fact, she and I drifted apart. A friendship of laughter and teasing evaporated like mist, and in the place of my old school friend was a woman who demanded my presence at galas, jewels, and an ever-growing list of demands for honeymoons and summer vacations. The more I gave in to her child-like demands, the more I realized that she could never handle my brutish desires.

Lea was nothing like her. She was strength, and cold violence that only heated when my hands touched her skin, or my voice teased at her ear. She matched me, flame for flame and we burned bright together.

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