AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I’m not used to it. I don’t know what the hell to do with it. So, I just sit there with my eyes closed and my chest hurting and I fucking take it. I take it like pain and bullets and blood, because I know what to do with violence and her music, the poetry of her perfect fucking soul, feels like an assault.
Eventually, the song comes to a sudden and silent halt. I keep my eyes closed for a long moment before cracking them open again. The flush in Deirdre’s cheeks has ebbed away, leaving her pale under her freckles.
“That’s not your usual style,” I say.
“Yeah, well, I’m not in my usual sort of mood,” she fires back. Something in her cracks, sorrow bleeding through her anger. “You’re going to ruin this for me.”
“Ruin what?” I ask in a careful, measured tone.
She lifts her violin up again and gestures to it with the bow.
“This! This was something I shared with my mother. Something special. And now I, I…” She sighs and looks away. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to feel the same way about it again.”
Something is ticking inside my head. Like a clock. Or an artery about to pop.
Something I shared with my mother… You’re going to ruin this for me.
This wasn’t something I had considered before. That by taking and taking and taking from her, I’d be eroding the one thing I was trying so desperately to get a hold of. That by trying so hard to have her, to control her and to cage her, I’d be destroying something precious, something I love.
No.
Need, desire, want.
Not love.
Fuck.
When I first saw Deirdre up on that balcony, it wasn’t just the quality of the sound that got its hooks into me. It was the emotion. The pure, inescapable, excruciating joy. Joy, and the way it was balanced against a poignant sort of pain.
I look at my songbird, really look at her, and I don’t see a hint of joy inside her now.
“What do you need?” I rasp. “I’ll give you whatever you need to perform properly. To play how you want to.”
Perform properly. Yeah, sure. Because that’s what I care about. That’s what nearly drove me out of my fucking mind when I thought she was about to drown in the bathtub. The performance of it all.
I guess Deirdre thinks what I said is just as stupid as I do. She scoffs and shakes her head.
“What I need? What I need is freedom!”
The ticking in my head gets louder, harder, like a heartbeat.
I lift my arms and gesture to the size of the room around us, just one of many in my sprawling structure of a house.
“You can be free inside this cage.”
Her eyes narrow.
“Not while you’re in here with me.”
My hands shoot out without me even meaning for them to. I clasp her waist and haul her into my lap. Her legs are spread, her cunt pressed to my aching shaft. She tenses, and I half wonder if she’s about to clock me on the side of the head with her violin. But she and I both know my skull isn’t worth damaging the instrument, not to mention the fact that I’ve got a hard fucking head so it probably wouldn’t do any good, anyway. She lays her violin and bow down carefully on the bed just as I tighten my hold on her.
“I’m not going to be on the outside of the bars looking in, Songbird. I’ve been doing that since you were eighteen and I am fucking done.” I pull her closer, dragging her against my hard-on. “Besides, weren’t you the one who just complained about the fact I haven’t been here for the past five days?”
Her eyes flare.
“That wasn’t a complaint! It was… an observation.”
“Yeah?” I breathe. Fucking hell, she smells so good. Feels so good. “Well, I have an observation of my own.” I meet her gaze steadily. “You are a goddamn liar, Deirdre O’Malley.”
