Page 58 of Sinful Desires
I should’ve let go. Everything in me knew that. But my hand stayed. My thumb moved without thought, driven by something darker. My other hand grazed the side of her neck, catching the heat, the blood, the way she held everything in.
The sound she made wasn’t a gasp. It was softer. Thicker. A breath caught deep in her gut, stuck there like it didn’t want to leave. Then her eyes found mine again.
She gave me the kind of look that made a man forget where he was. What the fucking rules were. Why he was supposed to follow them.
I let go, too fucking fast.
She stared at me with that dark glitter in her eyes, her lips curving around something slow and lethal. Then she tipped the champagne back, swallowing the whole thing. Her tongue dragged across her bottom lip.
“Relax,” she said, voice thick with venom and silk. “Don’t be like my father.” She leaned in, too close, her breath warm against my neck. “But if you wanna play daddy?…” She winked. “Just say the word.”
Putain de merde.
“Shut up.”
She tilted her head. “Make me.”
I ran my tongue over my teeth. “You wouldn’t survive me, Miss Harper.”
And I fucking meant it. Every word. Because if I had her,trulyhad her, there’d be no going back.
My fingers twitched, aching to touch her again, to claim her, even as my mind screamed to stay away.
She blinked, just once.
I didn’t even get a full second to feel the blood-thick heat throbbing in my dick before her father appeared in the doorway, dragging all the oxygen out of the room with him. His eyes landed on me like he already wanted me gone.
Her mother trailed behind, face buried in her phone, and her sister looked like she’d rather be anywhere else.
I took a sharp step back, hands behind my back, my coat long enough to hide my arousal, thank fuck. The last thing I needed was to greet the Harper clan with a fucking hard-on like some perverted Buckingham Palace guard.
“Good. You’re here.Finally.” Lucius Harper barely glanced at her. Just reached out and took the empty champagne glass from her fingers. “Everyone’s waiting. Your sister already chose your dress. Three songs, like we agreed. Hurry.”
His voice was clipped, rehearsed. The kind of tone a man used when issuing orders to staff, not daughters.
“Schiaparelli,” Kiara added, already halfway through a yawn. “It’s black. Classy.”
Francesca Harper didn’t bother looking up from her phone. “Oh! Anddolcezza, some concealer, please. You look like you haven’t slept in a month.”
They all spoke at once. Over each other, like she wasn’t there.
Scarlett stood there, arms crossed tightly across her chest, her eyes pinging between them like she was trying to find a way out without running.
She’d once said she hated her father. I believed her. Men like him always dressed their violence in designer suits.
But she’d never said a word about her mother. Or her sister. She looked somewhat like the former, but nothing like the latter.
One daughter blonde, soft-spoken, glittering in curated elegance. The other? Red hair like blood and a mouth full of fire.
In all the years I’d spent tracing her history, scraping pieces of her life from the internet and security archives, I never found a single photo of her without that hair.
Blood red.
Like she wanted the world to know exactly how much damage she could do.
And fuck me if I didn’t want to be the one to see what she looked like before she’d learned to paint herself in warning signs.
When had she started dyeing it? And what exactly was she trying to hide?
