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She rolls her eyes, scoffing. “Please. Like the former cybersecurity engineer of a tech company couldn’t figure out how to contact me if he really wanted to.”
“Oh, I wanted to. Badly.” My thumb strokes over her cheekbone, rough against her perfection. “But I have a reputation to protect. I can’t very well come off as some desperate beta male.”
Blinking, she shakes her head, pulling away from me. “Can we just…” Trailing off, she sighs, nibbling on her plump bottom lip. “Can you tell me what you want me to do, so we can get it all over with?”
“Are you tired of me already?”
She makes a face, her mouth twisting into a mangled frown. “I barely know you.”
“But youwanttogetto know me.” My free hand falls to her hip, gripping the fabric of her dress between my fingertips.Goddamn, she’s so fucking soft.Clay I’m going to enjoy molding.
“I didn’t say that.”
I tsk, cocking my head. “Kitten, I need you to stop lying to me. You think I can’t smell the truth on you? It’ssweet. Saccharine. Your lies are bitter and off-putting.”
“Oh, jeez, I’m sorry. I forgot I was here to cater to your fucking needs.”
There’s my little hellcat.Her fire sends a live wire straight to my dick, and I grind my pelvis into her, loving the gasp that escapes her as she tries to fight the attraction boiling between us. “I’m going to have the best time fucking the insolence out of you.”
“Yeah?” She grins, her misery dissipating, replaced with burning desire. It catapults her forward into me; her hands flatten against my chest, claws digging into my black dress shirt, and her tongue darts out, swiping at the corner of her fuckable mouth. Stepping up on her tiptoes, she links a hand around my neck, dragging me to her; her lips graze the shell of my ear, making my throat constrict. “Good fucking luck, Ivers. I won’t make it easy.”
If I don’t disconnect right now, I’m going to bust a nut in my fucking slacks without any kind of stimulation. Like a thirteen-year-old virgin. A shiver skates along my shoulders as I wrench myself away, ignoring the burn searing my balls at the denied release.
Soon.
“I’m gonna hold you to that.” Flicking the end of her nose, I step back until there’s a safe, respectable distance between us. “And believe you me, I fully intend to collect.” She grumbles something unintelligible, and I start to walk away, leaving alone. Pausing, I turn, piercing her with my gaze as she stands, trying to collect herself. “Juliet?”
“What?”
Narrowing my eyes, I drink her in one last time. “Don’t fuck anyone else in the meantime. I’d hate to have to murder someone.”
* * *
When I get home, Fiona’s sitting on the front steps of the ivory tower we live in—an incorrect moniker dubbed by the King’s Trace papers. Really, it’s more of a gothic mansion, inhabited by Ivers since we first crossed over from Ireland in the late eighteenth century. With its sprawling gardens, the tall, ivy-covered walls and stained-glass windows, it looks more like a church than anything else, though no deities exist inside.
They can’t, when a family of unholiness lurks in its depths.
“Where the hell have you been?” she asks, popping a pink bubble against her lips as I approach. “Out prowling the cemetery again for our dear brother’s ghost?”
“Nope. Caught a cab from Stonemore, since Boyd left me up there.” It’s well past midnight, and she’s sitting in a pair of pale yellow pajamas, dark red hair wrapped in a towel.
“What were you doing in Stonemore?”
Sighing, I flop down on the stone steps beside her. “Working.”
An elegant eyebrow raises, suspicious. “You don’t have a job.”
“Not officially.” Pressing my lips together, I turn my face up to the full moon, basking in its fluorescent glow. Hoping she doesn’t push further.
While Murphy and I spent our childhoods making our parents prematurely gray, Fiona was always the more responsible one. Thegoodchild, a princess necessitated by two hellions before her. It certainly made our mother’s life easier, especially since her diagnosis, but it forged a wedge between us I’d been trying to hack away at for years.
Since Murph’s death, particularly. As if my soul had fragmented when it left my body, leaving behind a part desperate for some kind of emotional attachment. For someone to get me.
Still, I can’t tell Fiona exactly what it is I do for a living; she knows about Ivers International’s ties to organized crime, knows that our father pulls more weight with the Irish mafia than he cares to let on, but she doesn’t know about finishers.
Doesn’t need to. She’s as innocent as someone like us can get. Cursed to share blood with evil.
“Well, Mom’s been worried sick over you. Says she can’t rest unless she knows you’re safe in the house.”
