Bianca hissed softly as she studied my hand under the light of the Tiffany lamp on my desk, my skin cut up by cubes of colored light. “This looks bad, Tiernan.”
Tiernan, said casually. It was rare to hear it like that, like she was a friend or family, unafraid and unintimidated.
I wanted to give her reason to fear me, see her eyes fill with tears as I taught her how to take my pain, how to give me pleasure.
I spoke through gritted teeth. “It’s nothing.”
It was less than nothing, I’d been torn open by Bryant so many times in so many spectacular fashions that it was quite literally nothing to me.
“Who did this to you?” she demanded, as if she wanted to scold a child for getting into a tussle on the playground.
I wasn’t sure what made me be honest. Maybe I wanted to shock her. Maybe I wanted to admit to someone who didn’t know him that Bryant was and had always been the monster Bianca probably thought I was too.
“My father.”
She blinked at me in that way she had that was somehow endearing. “You’re serious?”
I shrugged one shoulder and repeated, “It’s nothing.”
Solemn blue eyes studied me for a long moment, but she didn’t press. Instead, she just clucked her tongue. I watched as she opened the metal box and pulled out materials to stitch the skin together. She was the most maternal seventeen-year-old on the planet.
“You’re dreaming if you think I’d let you anywhere near me with that,” I drawled, tugging my hand away.
“You’re not the first person I’ve stitched up,” she said blandly, wedging my hand between her thighs so I wouldn’t move, her lower lip tucked between her teeth as she prepared the needle and surgical thread.
My fingers twitched to travel up the crease to the warmth of her pussy just inches from my reach.
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Like I said, Aida dated a lot of men. We didn’t have the money to go to the hospital every time one of them beat her.”
Anger flared through me so quickly, I couldn’t breathe for a moment. “Did any of them fuck with you and Brando?”
If they had, I’d hunt them down and kill them myself. It had been too long since I took a life and those fuckers deserved it.
“Mmm,” she said, refusing to look at me as she bent to take my hand. The needle pierced my flesh, but I didn’t flinch. I was used to it and she had a surprisingly steady hand. “None of them cared for Brando. A few of them made passes at me. One of them backhanded me.” She shrugged carefully so she didn’t hurt my hand. “He was super rich, so Aida didn’t like it, but she broke up with him the next day. I had a black eye for two weeks.”
After a pause, she said softly, “Stop moving.”
I hadn’t realized I was shaking. Her words had struck at my chest like a hammer to a gong, fury vibrating through me so hard my teeth ached.
I wasn’t a good man…fuck. But beating a kid?
Only the worst kind of monsters hurt children.
I knew because my father was one of them.
I knew, because once, he’d tried to make me one too.
“His name,” I demanded.
Bianca looked up at me then, her heart-shaped face shadowed against her halo of blonde hair. She seemed shocked by my response, mouth open and lax, hands limp holding my own.
“You spanked me the other day, is that so different?”
“Entirely,” I barked. “You knew the rules, you broke them. I gave you a punishment and you didn’t even fight me on it. That is not the same as being hit senselessly by a brute just because he’s a miserable fuck and you remind him of what he will never have.”
“Why do you care?”
“His. Name. Bianca,” I growled.
“What’re you going to do?” she asked, head cocked, a dark thread of curiosity in her tone.
I didn’t answer.
“Hurt him?” she asked, eyes narrowing, cheeks flushing a pink the same shade as her lips. “Hurt him for hurting me? An eye for an eye?”
“No one hurts what’s mine,” I ground out, even though I could barely hear the words through the roar of blood in my ears.
I was already calculating how long it would take to get to Bumfuck, Texas, again. If I could get out tonight and be back for the meeting with Faire Developments at three the next afternoon.
“I wasn’t yours then,” she countered mulishly. “I’m not yours now.”
She gasped when I turned my hand over in her hold, the skin stitched back together and stinging, to grip her wrist tightly.
“You live under my roof, you sleep in one of my beds, I pay for your very existence. You are mine, Bianca, and the only man with the right to hurt you is me.”
I watched, fascinated, as her eyes flared blue, then black with obvious arousal. So, the pretty little thing liked my aggression, my possession.
A growl worked through my chest, but I didn’t let it loose.
The air in the office felt suddenly too close.
“Do you want to hurt me?” she whispered, the pulse in her wrist fluttering like hummingbird wings under my thumb.
I stood up slowly, looming over her, casting her all in shadow.
“Yes,” I hissed softly, dipping my head so my breath fanned over her face. “I’m the kind of man that finds pleasure in pain. I’m the kind of man who makes a woman scream and cry because she doesn’t know how to take the intensity of the things I do to her body. I’m the kind of man that would make a woman crawl and beg for me before I deigned to put her out of her misery by setting her on my dick.”
“Oh,” she said, almost inaudibly, more a breath than sound. “That’s, ah…oh.”
With my free hand, I found that tangled length of hair and wound it around my fist, tugging her head back so harshly, she gasped and her mouth bloomed open like a perfect pink rose. Her innocence contrasted to that dark, yearning curiosity was an intoxicating combination that made me feel as though I was about to lose my mind.
“You wouldn’t know how to handle me, little girl,” I taunted her.
Fire flashed in those sapphire eyes, tightened that full mouth.
It only made me harder to see that sass and spark. Made me wonder if she’d fight harder to get my cock inside her if I teased and denied her for long enough.
“I’m not into old men,” she retorted, but her breath was too quick, her cheeks stained. “I’m not into being hurt.”
“You were yesterday,” I pointed out cruelly, my grin a weapon. “You writhed and moaned from the strike of that cane on your sweet ass. I thought you might even come for me, untouched.”
“Not likely,” she snapped, breathless.
“That sounds dangerously close to a challenge,” I noted darkly, tugging her hair a little harder just to hear her hiss, just to have her back arch high enough to brush her breasts against my chest.
Their rigid peaks pressed into my pecs.
“You wouldn’t,” she said, but she didn’t sound convinced because even a skilled liar couldn’t have made that true. “You dated my mother. That’s disgusting.”
The grin that claimed my mouth was wolfish, full-on hunger and greed. I used my hand on her wrist to raise her right hand and brush her own fingers over the nipples beaded behind the thin fabric of her shirt. “You don’t seem disgusted to me.”