Then Bianca, so much older in age and soul, those big blue eyes filled with history I wanted to unearth like an archeologist. I wanted to pillage her for treasure, use her for my schemes and other, darker desires that seemed to surge further with shocking regularity.
My hand twitched where it lay on my thigh, remembering the sharp impact of the bamboo cane against the sweet, lush curve of her kilt-covered ass. The sweet schoolgirl bent over for me. It was a provocative image, but too generic. I hadn’t imagined when I ordered her to bend over for me that I would be like wet steel beneath my trousers as her pain blossomed into pleasure, her tears so pretty, her cries like music.
“You’re old enough to be their father.” Sarah’s voice interrupted my salacious memories. “The teenager, Bianca, isn’t it? She’s pretty?”
I shot her an unamused glance. “Not all of us fancy jailbait, Mother.”
She laughed at me, her tragic eyes flashing with mirth. In a way, they reminded me of Bianca’s. Unwittingly, I wondered if Bianca would end up like her one day, tragic enough to drown her sorrows in a bottle and her regrets in a pill-induced fog. A shiver of dread dripped down my spine like ice water.
“They shouldn’t make gardeners so cute,” she said coyly.
“And pool boys?”
Her eyes sparkled as she shrugged. “The odd instructor too. Those yogis are so limber.”
I shook my head at her, but it felt good to make her laugh. I didn’t usually evoke that response in people, and she didn’t usually give it.
“Are you attracted to her?” she asked, because she thought being my mother meant having the right to invade my privacy.
For the most part, I let her.
Her possessiveness was unhealthy, but it was all I had.
Still, I didn’t tell her about the way my body responded to Bianca. About how the sight of her tears when I wrenched off her locket made my dick hard. How my blood burned when she took up her verbal foil and sparred with me. How I’d almost tossed her into the pond and fucked her among the waterlilies after taking that bamboo switch to her ass. She wasn’t afraid of me, which was rare, but even more unique was the glimpse I caught sometimes in that bright blue gaze that suggested she might want me to hurt her. After last night, I was sure that she did.
The idea was dangerously arousing.
All that unblemished golden flesh under my punishing grip, those too-ripe-for-a-girl curves slapped and bitten until they were marked as mine if only for one night.
Oh yes, I was attracted to her. The scent of her alone made me want to trace the source to that fluttering pulse in her neck, always beating madly around me. It was half the reason I loved to aggravate her.
She was so pretty when she was angry.
And I learned last night, she was even prettier when she cried.
It was growing increasingly impossible not to imagine wedging myself into that snug virgin cunt just to see her cry as I forced her to take all of me.
I may have slept with her mother, but the sex was nothing but a transaction, my attraction to her hardly serviceable.
It should have disgusted me, maybe, to think of fucking her daughter.
A better man wouldn’t have dreamt of it.
But I was not a good man and I didn’t want to be.
“Are you going to tell me not to get involved?” I asked drily. “Now is a little late to start acting maternal.”
She pursed her lips at me for the barb, but otherwise only shrugged, stirring her olives in the glass with one manicured finger. “You’re already involved in her life. Fucking her might be the cherry on top of the humiliation cake. There’s nothing Caroline hates more than fraternization between our houses. Though, even I shudder to think what Ice Bitch might do to her if she got the chance.” She cocked her head at me. “Which begs the question, what happens afterward?”
“Afterward,” I echoed, not because I hadn’t thought about what happened after I succeeded with my plan, but because for the first time in my life, I was unsure of the answer.
“Do you feed her to the Constantine dogs and see how they might humiliate and ruin Lane’s bastard child? Do you let them fend for themselves?” She paused long enough for the silence to take on a shape, an eloquence all on its own. “You can’t keep them, obviously. Strays don’t make good pets, Tiernan.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I assured her, but my lungs felt twisted up in my chest thinking about turning them over to foster care, seeing them split up between different homes. I wondered if The Gentlemen of Lion Court would stay with me or go with the Belcantes if I did banish them, their loyalty transferred to the orphans. “But I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
“The Constantines deserve what’s coming to them,” she muttered darkly before draining her martini and getting up to pour another.
I hesitated before asking the question that had gone unanswered my entire life. “Do you hate them because Bryant loved Caroline first? Or does it have something to do with my real father?”
I knew the look of sour disapproval on my mother’s face the way I knew the sky was blue. I’d seen it every single time I had tried to broach the topic of my parentage since I was twelve and first cared enough to ask about it.
“Don’t be silly, Tiernan, Bryant is your father,” she said woodenly, reciting lines from a script.
“Don’t bullshit me, Sarah,” I warned. “You promised you’d tell me one day and I’m of the mind that day is today.”
Her hand shook slightly as she lifted her martini glass to her lips and drained it. “I don’t want to talk about this. It-it’s not good for my nerves. You don’t want to make your mother sick, do you?”
“No,” I agreed. “But in that same vein, you don’t want to make your son upset, do you? All of those maternal instincts must be crying out from keeping me from my real father for so long.”
She scoffed lightly. “He is no better than Bryant, so don’t go crafting some silly fairytale about it.”
“Nothing about my life is a fairytale, why would this be any different? I still want to know the truth.”
Her lips flatlined. “Not now, Tiernan. Perhaps…if you’re successful if ruining those Constantines, I’ll tell you the truth, however sordid it may be.”
“Swear to me,” I demanded, taking her by the shoulder so she was forced to face me, to read the look of brutal assertion in my eyes. “If I succeed, you’ll tell me what blood runs through my veins.”
There was a war in her eyes, fear clashing with resolve and anger, maybe even a little bit of guilt. Finally, she sighed and stared longingly at her empty glass before fixing her glazed eyes on mine. “Fine, Tiernan, if you succeed, I’ll tell you about your father. Though, ruining the Constantines should be reason enough for you. They deserve what’s coming to them.”
My entire life, I’d been raised to believe the same, but for the first time, I noticed a crack in the foundation. Technically Bianca and Brando were Constantines. Lane’s blood ran through their veins, but they had been raised Belcantes. I had no idea who my father was, but I’d been raised a Morelli. It was who I was, regardless of my parentage. Could the same be said for Bianca and Brandon?
The dangerous truth was that I wasn’t entirely certain anymore that they deserved what their father had bought them.