I should’ve taken it and given her a good hard fucking slap for her Constantine name if nothing else, but I didn’t want it. I wanted nothing more than my bed upstairs. Fuck heading back into NYC; it would have to wait until morning. I looked at the clock and it was already far later than I’d imagined. The Elaine effect, no doubt, turning the minutes into hours with her chatter.
“Get up to bed,” I told her, and gestured to the doorway. “Fuck off and take your snarky mouth with you.”
She hovered in her seat. I stared at her from across the room.
“I mean it,” I said. “Don’t hang around until I change my mind. My temper is fucking short.”
I guess she came to her senses. She was up like a shot and straight on past me, only stopping to turn around in the doorway and fix me with those pretty blue eyes.
“Thanks,” she said, and walked away.
I didn’t know quite what the fuck she was thanking me for, but it didn’t matter. The way my stomach did a lurch at her smile was all I needed to know.
Elaine Constantine was no fucking good for me. I should stay the damn hell away from her and drive back into NYC where I belonged.
Fuck knows why I climbed the stairs anyway.25ElaineI heard Lucian walk past my room on the way to his. I heard the way he paused outside mine. My heart raced like a train – two conflicting emotions at once. On one hand the instinctive fear of having a man outside my room was enough to make me feel sick and pull the covers up higher, and on the other . . . on the other . . .
I shouldn’t even face it. There’s no way I should be feeling what was on the other.
He continued on by, and a fresh wave of goddamn something bloomed up in me. Hurt. Rejection. Hell knows. One thing I did know was that I wanted Lucian Morelli to want me. I couldn’t lie about that to myself anymore. No matter how many times I tried to deny it. I wanted Lucian Morelli to want me. I needed Lucian Morelli to want me. Jeez, what the fuck?
I heard his door close at the end of the landing, and I felt so alone that I pulled the covers up over my head. I knew it would happen. It had to. I’d been revisiting memories I’d been running away from for years. I had no coke or alcohol to block it out, and that began to take its toll on me. I felt sick and desperate for the substances I relied on . . . and more . . . I felt sick for more than that. I needed more than that. God help me, I needed more than that.
Life inside here was messing me up in ways I’d never known. I wasn’t even thinking about life outside anymore. I wasn’t thinking about the inter-family conflict that was brewing because of me, or how frantic people like Tristan and Harriet would be to bring me back. There were a few of them at least. I hadn’t thought about the news reports that might be running on the TV or how Lucian was keeping me away from them this evening. Who knows what they’d be saying now?
Beyond all that, I was torn between thinking about the monsters from my past and the monster down the hall. There it was in the balance – monsters from my past, or monster down the hall . . .
I chose the monster down the hall.
I’d spent years believing that touching myself where it felt good was a bad thing, but I couldn’t stop my fingers slipping down between my legs as I thought about Lucian. I was thinking about the ferocity in his eyes, and how strong he’d been in the kitchen, and how angry he’d looked as I told him about the men who’d fucked me up. I was thinking about the curse in his tone, and how powerful that was, and how his fingers were so firm as he’d sliced the salami. I was thinking about stupid simple things mixed with his beastly soul. If he even had a soul. He was a Morelli, after all.
I shouldn’t have touched myself and thought about him, but I couldn’t stop. I thought right back to Tinsley’s masked ball where he’d first laid his hands on me and just how much that had swept me away. I thought back to the fear I’d felt in Jemma’s apartment when he’d cornered me there, and just how different I was feeling now to the drugged-up mess who’d wanted to die at his hands – because that was the other thing that was changing . . . I wasn’t so sure I wanted to die anymore. For real, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to die.