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“Oh my God,” she gasped as the head of my cock stretched her wide. She’d had my fingers and been tight around them.
My brain was short-circuiting, and my body wanted so much more, but I held her there. Every muscle shaking. The tip of my cock bathed in fire.
“Oh my God. It’s good like I thought. Just like I thought.” Her eyes pinned me to the bed. “I’ll leave tomorrow and maybe I’ll never see you again. But you’re going to go back to your cold life and every woman you meet, every woman you touch—you’re going to wish they were me.”
She said it like that hadn’t been true since she’d stepped out into the side yard at the party. Since the moment I’d met her.
She rocked back and forth, and my hold on her weakened. She took another inch of me. She was slick and ready but still small, and my cock was far bigger than my fingers. She winced as she stretched, and that wince was like a cold shower.
I am only an instrument of pain, and my only job was to protect her.
This wasn’t protecting her.
My hands on her waist lifted her. My cock slipped free. She arched, trying to get it back.
Her eyes met mine. She knew what I was doing, and she’d begged before without swaying me. She’d taken two inches of me inside her body, claimed it for herself. But I could give her no more. Not without hurting her.
I repositioned her over my body so my hard cock pressed against her clit. She twitched and arched, fucking herself against me.
Poppy closed her eyes as if the sight of me was too much, and I watched her every move. Her every facial expression. I drank down her cries and her sobs. Her sighs and her screams.
While she burned me to the ground. I filled myself up with her.
We held each other, kissed each other—too hard. We made it hurt all the way up until the second it was pleasure.
I pushed her and pushed her until she begged to come, and then shaking and sobbing, she begged me to stop.
The ruin happened to both of us.
I had hard callouses on my hands. A thousand scars. My thumbnail was all fucked up from getting stepped on by some bloke in a fight. I had no nerve endings in two fingers on my right hand from grabbing the business end of a knife. Callouses were good. Solid reminders of who I was. Of the kind of man I was.
A hard man. A killer. The kind of man who did the work that needed doing. I hadn’t second-guessed it or thought about it in years. I’d known in my father’s house exactly who I was. And everything after that just built up the callouses.
Poppy had no callouses. She was nothing but soft skin looking to get hurt. And this next part—it was going to hurt her.
A lot.
Because at the end of this, she needed to not look back at me. She needed to run from me like I was the threat. Because I was. All this shit for the last few days didn’t change that I was the worst thing for her. That I was the part of her life most likely to get her hurt.
Or killed.
And to prevent that—well, it was time to build some callouses.
I pulled myself out of the bed and into another shower. I dressed in my own clothes that Sinead had laundered, made a fresh pot of coffee, stared out the windows, and made more plans.
Plans four levels deep. Contingencies and emergencies.
• If Zilla wasn’t in the house in London.
• If Zilla was, but she’d been found by the Morellis or, perhaps worse, the Constantines.
• If I’d blown the window and someone from either of those families had figured out where we were and heading into the village in an hour was the equivalent of walking into an ambush.
• If Poppy refused to be left at the safe house.
This was how I used to operate until Poppy came in and distracted me. It was how a man stayed alive in my line of work. And with every plan, every step I made in my head away from her, I found myself settling back into the man I’d been. The cold dark in the back of my brain took over and I let it be the only thing that mattered.
I had one job: Poppy’s survival. And I was the greatest risk to her.
She had to break—her heart had to break—so she could be stronger. And if I had to do it, then I would.
When the edge of the eastern sky turned pink, I stood in the doorway to the bedroom with a focused mind and scar-tissue heart.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Poppy
I dreamed about my sister. We were at the top of the sledding hill in Bishop’s Landing. Snow had gotten in between her boot and the bare skin of her leg and she was crying that it hurt. I was trying to scoop it out with my mittened hands, aware her reaction to this snow was . . . a lot. Too much, maybe.
