He cups my jaw, angling my face to his.
Time freezes.
Then suddenly, he’s kissing me.
The world stops turning. Everything else fades away as Achilles ignores the cum all over my mouth as he crushes his lips to mine andclaimsthem.
His kiss is annihilation.
Subjugation.
An all-consuming conquest that turns me to liquid fire and shatters me.
A broken whimper tumbles from my throat as he pulls away, his teeth raking over my bottom lip and pulling on it before letting it slip from his mouth.
“Good girl,” he murmurs.
His eyes gleam.
“Next time, maybe you’ll be brave enough to walk into the woods,” he growls. “Maybe we'll find out what it takes for you to say that safe word.”
Then he’s gone, like a shadowy wraith.
Like a lingering dark fantasy and beautiful nightmare all wrapped up together, leaving me trembling as the darkness swallows me whole.
17
ACHILLES
“So,Aunt Neve found out about your little cabin?” Lochlan asks me over the rim of his pint glass before he takes a sip.
Loch and I are sitting in the Seven Bells, the oldest bar in Hawthorne Hollow, though I doubt its claim to being the oldest bar in the country. There’s a place in Newport that supposedly opened in 1673, and Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop in New Orleans has famously been in business since around the same time.
But who knows.
This is still one of my favorite spots to escape reality whenever I’m in town. It’s right on Commercial Street, across from the fisherman’s wharf and the piers that jut out over the harbor, so there’s always something interesting to look at through the dusty, wrought-iron windows. It’s old, weathered, creaky, totally unpretentious, and most importantly, people leave you the fuck alone.
Hawthorne Hollow is small and quaint, but with a working waterfront. The bar is slow tonight: typically it's full offisherman and lobsterman who want a cold beer, a hefty pour of whiskey, and no one to bother them at the end of their day.
Aka,mykind of place.
“She sure did,” I grunt as I take a gulp of beer.
“How’d that go?”
I give him a look. “How did Neve Kildare take it when she found out her darling son owned an off-grid murder cabin in the woods? Take a wild guess.”
He grimaces. “Fuck, sorry bro.” He shrugs. “Could have been worse, though.”
“Oh? How?”
Lochie cocks a brow. “It could have beenmymurder cabin in the woods. Then we'd really have something to worry about.”
I smile wryly and clink my glass to his as a dark look crosses his face. “If you'd inherited O’Conor's crazy, Loch, we’d know by now.”
He grimaces and takes a heavy pull from his beer.
We kid around about it from time to time, but I know it truly does worry him.
