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She furrows her brow. “Oh!” She leans closer and lowers her voice. “Is it…petite?”

Jesus.

“It's okay, Lamiano. Tons of women can’t come from penetration anyway. And remember, it's not the size of the boat, it’s the motion of the ocean⁠—”

“Are you done?”

“Emasculating you? Please. I’ve got like ten more dick jokes in the chamber⁠—”

“Because if you are,” I growl quietly.

Bella gasps in surprise when I suddenly lean in close, my lips brushing her ear.

“I was going to say that I won’t be fucking you because…” My voice drops. “You wouldn’t survive the way I fuck, little nightmare.”

I relish the way her eyes widen and her mouth falls open. Then I stand without another word and walk away.

12

BELLA

You wouldn’t survive the way I fuck.

I’d like to ignore the throb of heat that spikes through my core whenever I think of that prick growling those words into my ear.

Alas, my vagina doesn’t seem to have checked its email and read the memo.

I swallow back the memory of those words and the accompanying aforementioned heat and clear my throat as the elevator doors open.

A tall, broad-shouldered, leanly muscled man with a sharp glint in his eyes and a jaw carved from stone stands between the elevator and the rest of the gorgeous penthouse apartment.

He’s in black slacks and a pressed black button-up as he regards me coolly with his arms folded, as if figuring out the most efficient way to butcher me into sellable chunks.

I keep my face utterly neutral as I meet his hard look dead-on, not backing down an inch, even though he’s easily a foot taller than me.

“Psycho,” I mutter, my lip curling into a small warning sneer.

“Killer,” he drawls back, letting his Irish accent wash over me.

A grin spreads across my face. “Qu'est-ce que c'est?”

Cillian smiles broadly at our running Talking Heads joke as he drops the “stern” act and steps aside to let me exit the elevator. The second I’m out, I turn and throw my arms around him in a big hug. He chuckles as he hugs me back.

I’m not actually related by blood to Cillian Kildare. He’s uncle to my aunts Neve and Eilish, and my uncle Castle. But he and I have a special connection and have since I was a kid.

Since…you know… He’s just like me.

Like, exactly.

I know my parents love me unconditionally. But I also know that what I am at least partially scares them.

Like, what do you do when your seven-year-old daughter turns her Barbie Dreamhouse into a literal kill room, complete with plastic wrap all over the walls, Barbie herself holding a massive butcher’s knife fashioned from one of my dad’s razors, and Ken bound, gagged, and dumped in the Dreamhouse whirlpool with blood-red Kool-Aid for the water and his face cut off?

Yeah.

That.

At first, they thought I’d been secretly watching shit on TV I wasn’t supposed to. I hadn't. Then they took me a childhood trauma specialist to see if I was being bullied or abused at school.