Page 77 of Stolen Rival
A laugh bursts from me. “?‘Let me lead,’ he says. You have met me, right?” I try to follow his footsteps but instead of being graceful and light footed, it’smewho steps onhistoes.
When his face crumples, I wince. “I told you I didn’t get lessons.”
“And now we know at least one of us wasn’t lying.”
“Oi!” I squeeze his hand with as much strength as I can. He doesn’t even flinch. “If you weren’t so shite at leading, I’m sure I’d pick it up a bit faster.”
He picks me up and plants me on his feet like Da used to do when I was little.
“How about you try lettingmelead for a minute?”
His rebuttal is instantaneous. “No.”
“Oh, that’s right. Your need for control. Tell me, where did that come from?”
His face twists, and for a second, I get a glimpse of vulnerability. Then his mask sweeps into place. “Comes with the job.”
He’s lying, but he won’t tell me the real reason. Not today, maybe not ever.
He pulls me against his chest, one hand slides onto the small of my back, and the other holds my hand next to our bodies. His touch doesn’t feel foreign to me anymore. It doesn’t feel like I’m in the hands of a monster the way it used to a short while ago. And I’m not certain how I’m supposed to feel about that.
Everything is so fucked up, so confusing.
For a few moments, he guides me around the space, long, slow, and yes, actually graceful movements around the kitchen like he’s in a ballroom. Every time he breathes in, his chest brushes against mine, making my nipples pucker through the thin fabric of my nightgown.
I let my head fall onto his shoulder as he dances me around the room. The sound of his heartbeat is soothing, the touch of his bare skin sears mine, and the longer we dance, the more my resolve to keep my pussy closed for Mahoneybusiness wavers.
Fuck.
I’m absolutely going to sleep with this man tonight. But he’s got to promise not to be a dick about it first.
Chapter 38
PATRICK
Dancingaround the kitchen in the middle of the night with my wife was not something I ever thought I’d be doing. Yet here we are, and the oddest thing about it is that it doesn’t feel odd. It feelsright.
In my line of business, weaknesses that can be exploited by my enemies are something I have avoided for years. And make no mistake, Sorchaisa weakness. But it’s too late to keep fighting the inevitable. Somehow the scrappy little redhead with a clear death wish, considering how she has spoken to me from the very beginning, has burrowed beneath my skin. Which makes it even more important that I never let my feelings for her show outside of this house.
Whatever it takes, I have to control the narrative, make it known that she’s a means to an end, not someone I care about.
I slow, then stop. She climbs off my feet, but as she begins to move away, I tighten my hold, caressing her lower back in clockwise circles.
The truth is, I don’t want to let her go. Intimacy is a challenge for me, tied yet again into my fear of losing control. I havespent years honing my aversion to it. As the eldest son, I’ve always known my duty, even if I was thrust into leadership long before I was ready. But I’m tired.
Tired of always having to be the strong one. Tired of having no one to pour out my troubles to. I can’t talk to my brothers. Being raised in a mafia family doesn’t allow for vulnerability. If I sat them down and told them how exhausted combining Dylan’s business interests with my own has made me, and at the same time trying to figure out where the Mahoney’s former empire fit, they’d laugh and crack a joke. Tell me this is what I wanted and to get over myself.
They’d be right. Ididwant this. I still do. But that doesn’t mean I can’t have a fucking whine about it on occasion. Except publicly, that’s exactly what it means.
Then Sorcha went and showed genuine interest in how I’m doing and opened a floodgate inside me that I can’t close. Iwantto have someone to talk to, to share troubles with, and despite how this union came about, I think that one day, she might fulfill that role.
There will always be a piece of her that hates me for what I did to her family, but if she searches deep inside, she will understand it, too. Her father and brothers might’ve kept her out of the business directly, but she’s lived her entire life in our world. She knows that if I’d let what the McCarthys did to the O’Sullivans go unpunished, they’d keep coming until me and mine were in the ground.
I graze my fingers up her sides until they brush the curve of her tits. The sound of her breathing picks up, an obvious signal of arousal. She’s braless beneath her nightgown, and I take full advantage, gripping roughly, my fingers and thumbs pinching her nipples simultaneously. She gasps, head thrown back, the creamy column of her neck extended for my pleasure.
Dipping down, I kiss her throat, her jawline, run my teeth over her earlobe. My cock thickens, unrestrained in the gray tracksuit bottoms I threw on before leaving my bedroom. Her pelvis tilts, her body seeking friction.
I span her waist and lift her, setting her down on the kitchen worktop. Parting her legs, I step between them, and her nightgown rides up, revealing shapely thighs. I shove it further up her legs until I get the answer I wanted.
