“I hate you,” she spat, and maybe she did.
I’d ripped her away from everything she’d ever known in Asshole, Texas, to bring her into the big, bad world of Morellis versus Constantines, to use her as a means to an end. I’d treated her poorly because, at first, she was just a tool, a vaguely annoying one. Then, she irritated me for different reasons. No one had sassed me, talked back to me ever. It was surprisingly refreshing and shockingly arousing. I wanted to shut up that smart mouth with my tongue, my fingers, and my cock.
“Your hatred feels an awful lot like desire,” I noted, dipping to drag my teeth over her fluttering pulse point, my free hand palming her chest beneath her neck where the skin was warm and flushed and her chest heaved with ragged breaths. “Have you ever fucked someone you hated? Have you known what it’s like to bring an enemy to their knees with pleasure? The sense of power, Bianca,” I sighed, my breath feathering over her open, pliant mouth. “It’s heady.”
“You could never bring me pleasure.” Oh, but the words were as flimsy as a house of cards just waiting for me to blow them over.
I pressed closer, notching my hips between her thighs so they were forced to splay open to accommodate my bulk, my cock up against the heat of her panty-covered cunt. She shivered so violently she broke open her bottom lip on the hook of her teeth.
I watched the blood bead, knowing I had to taste it on my tongue. “Are you trying to tempt me, little thing? I’ll only warn you once. My iron control exists for the safety of others, of you. Once I snap, there is no coming back until I have exactly what I desire, and my desires are entirely black.”
“Fuck you,” she snarled.
And it was a red flag before a bull.
I had no choice, no other instinct, but to answer.
Violence, like she’d once said, as a response.
My mouth was on hers before she could blink, my tongue sweeping across her lower lip to collect that bright copper tang of blood. A moan, hers or mine, reverberated through me like a struck tuning fork.
Like a melody following the same ardent tune, I hauled Bianca up from the table by one arm around her hips and kissed her until she couldn’t breathe.
Because I didn’t want her to protest.
Couldn’t stand the thought of leaving the warm, silken sanctuary of her mouth flavored as it was like milk and sweet candies.
I plundered her mouth again and again, fucking it the way I wanted to fuck her, until she was a boneless mess of wet flesh and tousled blonde hair.
She didn’t just take it, she begged for it with every line of her arching, vibrating body; tits stamped to my chest, hands suddenly twisting in the short strands at the back of my head, clawing at my neck to bring me closer so she could suck on my tongue the way I wanted her to suck on my cock.
A small nagging voice that sounded unsurprisingly like my father’s, but also like my mother’s, sang at the back of my mind, reminding me that I was kissing the enemy.
Reminding me that I was about to fuck up everything by fucking her.
I wrenched away with the last, tattered remnants of my control, intending to end the chaos. But Bianca stared up at me with those velvet blue eyes ringed in long, frilly lashes, her gaze entirely dark with longing, her mouth a wet, red-bitten mess from my hard-edged kisses.
And I thought, so this is what it’s like to lose control.
This is what those poets and artists paint with words and oils.
Madness brought on by the acute ache of longing.
I could feel her invading me, filling the hollow cavities of my insides with blue the same color as those pretty eyes, with light cast out like a beam from her smile.
Anger chased on its heels, impotency and rage that she would so easily derail everything I was working for. I gritted my teeth, hand tightening in her hair until she winced and gasped but didn’t protest. I could take her, let myself have this, and still do what I needed to do.
I was Tiernan Morelli, lord of sin and shadow.
Some sweet little thing with a halo for hair and a soul like an old, complex storybook wasn’t going to bring that man to his knees.
No one could.
But I could bring Bianca to hers…
“On your knees,” I demanded.
Chapter Ten
Tiernan
“On your knees,” I ordered again when she didn’t immediately obey, desire chewing off the end of the phrase, giving me away.
Bianca hesitated still, licking that swollen mouth with the plush top lip I wanted to stretch thin around my cock.
For a moment, I thought she wouldn’t do it. I thought I’d pushed too hard and lost the thread of her desire instead of tightening it. I told myself to be happy, satisfied. She couldn’t handle me and I should never have thought to let her try.
But then, like a length of ribbon unspooling off the edge of the desk, she slipped to her feet, then sank gracefully to her knees.
My cock kicked hard in the confines of my pants, spitting precum.
I caged her in before she could second-guess herself.
Before I could second-guess myself.
I stood before her, legs slightly braced, the tented fabric over my erection right in her face. When I tipped forward to plant my hands on the table over her head, she was effectively locked in, caught between my cock and the drawers of the desk at her back.
“Take me out.”
Her hands trembled, but it wasn’t with nerves. She was excited, shivering with it as she fumbled with my belt, each tooth of the zipper a slow unhooking that made me grind my teeth impatiently. A small smile pressed between her lips, a secret, feminine satisfaction because she knew that she might have been caged, about to suck my cock like a good little thing, but that she was the one in control. My most valuable appendage slapped against my stomach, spraying precum on my shirt as she brought it into the open.
A soft, nearly indecipherable hum of approval, of hunger, before she wrapped her small hand, finger by finger, around the root of my thick cock.
Without direction, she dipped forward to lap at the wet on the red tip. Her hum, that time, was louder.
My knees fucking shook. I tightened my grip on the desk and braced my feet wider apart, head tipped down to watch that blonde head as she slowly licked me over, a kitten lapping cream.
It was too much and not enough.
I wanted to fuck her face, dip in and out of her throat, use her until her voice was wrecked and ruined for days.
But I didn’t.
For some inexplicable reason my fevered brain refused to dive into, I let her explore with her soft fingers and tongue until I was a sweating, raving beast caged in by my own control.
After a few long minutes, Bianca tipped her gaze up to me and the sight almost unmanned me. An angel on her knees for a monster, holding my dick like it was holy, like she had been made and born to worship it always.
“Make me,” she whispered so quietly, I wouldn’t have heard her if the room wasn’t as quiet as an altar. “I want—will you make me?”
A groan tore up the passage of my throat. I was moving before I could consciously respond, my hands gliding into that silken hair to fist tightly, my hips already canting forward. I delved too deeply into that hot cavern of her mouth, sliding over her tongue until I was wedged at the back of her throat. She gagged around me, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes, but when I went to pull out, she clutched her hands around my thighs and bit into my flesh with her nails.