Page 124 of Tide of Treason
When the door cracked open minutes later, I looked up. She stood barefoot, blouse gaping, wet hair dripping a line down her spine. She didn’t look murderous; she looked tired of pretending she wasn’t. Eyes too bright, mouth too soft. If desire had a sound, it was the pop of a vein in my neck when she said, “Get in.”
I slid past her knees.
The door clicked shut.
I couldn’t breathe. I sat on the edge of the bathtub while Kayla reached for a towel and dropped it on the counter. The same one she never let anyone touch.
“I’m going to undress you,” she said. “And you’re going to sit still.”
Right.
Okay.
Fine.
I stayed so still my bones started shaking. Stepping between my open thighs, her hands came to my jaw, cool and sure, mouth close enough to breathe her name. I was half-hardfrom nothing but this—how her fingers played with my hair, the way her pencil skirt brushed my skin when she twisted her torso to lean closer. She pulled the sling off my shoulder, careful around tender, aching muscles.
Then, she began to pop the buttons on my jeans.
A lazy sigh crawled out of my chest and got eaten by her mouth. Silk and skin and the expensive bite of her shampoo filled my senses, leaving me starving. Delicate fingers wrapped around my shaft. I shuddered. Grabbed her hips, but she caught my hands and pressed them to the edge of the tub.
Truth? I never thought I had a pregnancy kink. Not consciously. Although the math was there, unforgiving, hard as a fist. First time I got my virgin-dick between Kayla Sforza’s thighs, she wound up carrying mykid. Jesus. Call it virility. Call it dumb luck. All I knew was, I’d ruined a woman built for marble and iron, and now every inch of me throbbed with the need to do it again, to see if lightning would strike twice.
“Fuck,” I breathed. She had my dick her fist and my neck in her mouth, sucking a mark over my pulse point when I muttered, “You planned this . . . didn’t you? Knew I’d knock you up and get addicted in one go.”
She pressed her lips to my ear, a smile in her voice. “I planned to come. You simply exceeded expectations.”
Famous last words, right there.
An entire cartel worth of violence fizzled out, reborn as something gentler but no less lethal: devotion. And when the lows came, I’d let her sit with me in the dark. When the highs hit, I’d let her pull me back to earth. She was the gravity I’dspent my life trying to outrun. Turns out I never wanted to fly. Not if it meant leaving herbehind.
36 | Kayla
30 years old
Present day
The next morning,I found his toothbrush beside mine.
A shirt in my closet.
His boots lined up next to my heels.
The shelf he’d built was full now. Wallet. Watch. Gun. A photograph of Abel.
Backing up, a sharp jab pierced my foot. I hissed a curse under my breath, leaning against the closet wall while an earring stamped its crescent moon impression into my heel. The aftermath of Lucius face-fucking me into oblivion on the plush carpet, apparently. My heart thudded with amused annoyance. Four orgasms, if we’re being modest. Five if I was counting the one he coaxed out of me with nothing but his mouth and that brutal, adoring growl ofmine.
They say you never really know a man until you’ve seen his toothbrush.
His was black. Sleek. Branded with something German and unnecessarily aggressive.
We didn’t match.
We did.
We made a pattern nobody else could see, only felt in the way the walls vibrated when we argued, the way the bed frame whimpered through every truce.
Sidestepping his watch on the floor, I plucked my bra from the chandelier (don’t ask) and padded into the bathroom where the steam still clung possessively to the mirror. Mamma had left a voicemail somewhere in the middle of round three. I’d checked it this morning, half out of guilt, half to remember what the outside world sounded like.
