CONNOR
Iwant very badly to punch something. I very nearly do—there’s a boxing setup in the back of my warehouse, and the idea of wrapping my hands and going several rounds with just me and the bag is undeniably appealing right now.
But the idea of the warehouse just brings back thoughts of Saoirse earlier tonight, her firm ass squirming in my lap, her back against the wall as her fingers had brushed over the strip of skin just above my jeans, teasing me, pulling her in.
I should have fucking called her bluff.What would she have done, I can’t help but wonder, if I’d done what I wanted to and tried to fuck her up against that wall? If I’d turned her around, yanked those jeans down to her creamy thighs, and plunged my cock balls deep into her the way I’d pictured?
From the way she’d reacted to me, there and in the elevator, I almost think she might have let me. But a few pieces of information suggest that she wouldn’t—one, that she keeps she’s insisting she’s a virgin despite what she’d said to me at the beginning of the night, and no girl wants to lose her virginity bent over in a back-alley warehouse hallway–and two, that if she’d lost it to me, that way or any other, her value as a carrot to dangle in front of me and lead me back to Boston would have been greatly diminished. As far as her father is concerned, anyway.
In theory, I’d prefer her with a few miles on her already. But as I think about it, about another man with his hands on Saoirse—including my brother—I feel a hot, unfamiliar burning in my gut that can only be described as jealousy. It’s not a feeling I’m used to, and it’s not one I particularly enjoy, either.
In fact, it makes me more averse to the situation than I already am.
With the warehouse off the table, I try to think of where else I can blow off some steam. First off, I need to get out of this fucking hotel. The glass-walled elevator makes me think of Saoirse, too, of her head tilted back against the glass as her pussy drenched my fingers, her slick, hard clit throbbing as I made her come—probably for the first time in her life unless she masturbates.
Fuck.The thought of Saoirse rubbing frantically at her clit, her slender fingers buried between her pretty, soft folds as she makes herself come, is enough to make my fading erection roar back to life. She’d sounded sogood, moaning in a way that made me long to hear the noises she’d make impaled on my cock. Her body was so responsive that I’d taken it as proof that she really did have experience with men.
But now that I think about it—and goddamn it, I can’t seem tostopthinking about it—I remember the way she’d grabbed my wrist, preventing me from sliding my fingers inside her. I’d thought at the time that she was just close to coming and wanted me to touch her clit, but now I wonder if it was that she’d never been penetrated in any way and wanted to stop me before I did.
I can only imagine her father’s reaction if he’d known that I’d fingered his little virgin princess to orgasm in a hotel elevator.
I also can’t believe that virgin princesslet me do it.
The two things feel very hard to reconcile—Saoirse’s uptight personality and sexual innocence and what she let me do to her in this very elevator. One possibility is that she found me so attractive that she lost all sense of her virtuous shyness. While I’ve never been one to have an overabundance of modesty, I can’t imagine she wasthatovercome.
Maybe she was, but the more likely answer is that she didn’t want to put me off and fail at getting me up to her room and embroiled in her father’s schemes—and that idea just pisses me off all the more.
I’d thought I was getting laid tonight, and all I’d gotten was fucked in an entirely different sense.
I stride out front, handing the valet my ticket and collecting my bike. The minute I’m back on the road, I open it up, losing myself briefly in the feeling of speed and the wind whipping past me, the roar of the engine in my ears. A part of me wants very much to keep going, to put all of this in my rearview, and a small voice—the one that convinced me to leave Boston in the first place—tells me that I could do exactly that. I could keep going, leave London, start over again somewhere new. I don’t have to go back to Graham or Saoirse or anyone else. Jacob could take over the gang.They’d be fine.
I could disappear the way I did when I left Boston. I’m fucking good at it.
But I know, deep down, that I’d hate myself if I did. I meant it when I told Graham and Saoirse that what I’ve built here means something to me. It’smine, built with my own sweat and blood, not handed to me because of who I was born to. I refuse to let Graham take it from me.
There’s Liam to think of, too.
In fact, other than Saoirse, he’s all I think of as I drive to my favorite pub, parking my bike and walking into the warm, heavy, beer-scented air.
“Davies!” The bartender raises a hand in greeting, and I nod to him, taking a seat a little ways away from any of the other patrons as he slides a beer over to me without asking, my usual.
“Thanks,” I tell him, reaching for it. “I’ll take two shots of whiskey, too, though. Whatever you’ve got.”
The bartender looks at me with a keen eye. “Rough night?”
“You could say that.”
As far as I’m concerned,rough nightis putting it mildly. Besides falling into Saoirse’s honey trap and seeing Graham again for the first time in years, not to mention the threat to my brother—I’d found out the news about my father.
I’d assumed, all these years, that he was alive and ruling the Kings, probably with my bastard half-brother at his side, but ruling nonetheless. It had helped me sleep easier after the way I left things, believing that if I ever wanted to mend them, I could go back.
Now I know that while I’m certainly being pulled back to Boston, there are no mending things with my father—because he’s dead.
I tip back one of the whiskey shots, clenching my jaw as it burns down my throat, leaving a bitter taste despite the quality of it. I don’t deny that my father earned a punishment for doing what he did. I’d wanted no part of his original schemes, and he’d taken it much, much further than that. Butdeath?
The Kings have always been archaic in their punishments and as prone to violence at the time as the Bratva, certainly more so than the Italians. But the thought of my father on his knees for the bullet that ended him doesn’t sit right with me.
He could have been stripped of his title, money, and family, kicked out of Boston, the way I’d suggested they do with Liam and his Russian wife. But instead, they’d agreed to my father’s death—and not even because of a table vote.