I whimper again as his hand tightens on the back of my neck, and I don't know if he's hard or just pressed so tight against me that I can feel it, but his cock is right against the cleft of my ass.
And my traitorous body comes alive, pulsing with raw fire and arching against him despite everything I think I don't want.
"Sweetheart," he growls. "I'm no bad boy. I'm just a very dangerous man."
I pant, feeling his lips tease against the nape of my neck. His hand slips into my hair, and I gasp sharply as I feel him pull it tight.
"You don't know a thing about me," I hiss.
"I know this gets you hot."
"It does not," I barely whisper, my whole damned traitorous, mutinous body pulsing for him - aching to feel the raw fire I felt when he yanked me against him and kissed me like that, back at the bar.
"That a fact?"
I swallow as his words drip like honey into my ears, not daring to say a thing.
He spins me around, making me gasp as we come eye to eye, and I moan as he presses into me, his thigh going between mine as he pins me to the wall.
"Princess, we both know why you were at that place tonight."
"Fuck you," I hiss, twisting in his firm grasp "You don't-"
"Looking for something dangerous? Looking for something bad so you could pretend you weren't such a goody-good girl for one night?"
My lips purse, the fire raging behind my eyes.
And I hate how right he is, in a way.
"Sweetheart, girls like you are a dime a dozen in a shitty Southie dive bars like that. You went there tonight looking for something big bad and scary enough to make that uptight, prudish, good-girl pussy dripping wet."
My eyes go wide as saucers, my breath actually catching at his filthy words.
"Just like I'm sure it is right now, for me."
The blood roars through my ears, and I freaking whimper at his words. At his words, and the tattoos, and the scars, and the way he's such a man. I whimper at how rough, and dangerous, and disturbingly gorgeous he is.
I whimper at how fucking right he might be.
… Especially about that last part.
"You're disgusting," I spit back.
"And you love that I am."
His powerful hand slips over my hip, and I shiver as I feel his fingers trace over the bare skin between the bottom of my shirt and the top of my skirt. His hand hesitates there, his powerful grip tightening slightly and making my body tremble.
And I hate how wet I am.
It's mutiny is what it is. It's my traitorous body saying yes while my head is saying no. I want him to stop, but I'm dying for him to keep going. I want him to let me go, and I never want his filthy hands to leave my skin.
His hand slips over my skin, and the room sways as I close my eyes, melting under his rough touch.
Suddenly, his hand freezes, his muscles tense, and I open my eyes.
I shriek as he suddenly yanks me up, throws me over his muscled shoulder, and starts to march across the room. I gasp as I realize we're going straight for his bed, and suddenly, everything about how wrong this is comes roaring to the surface. Through my adrenaline, and the booze, and the insanity of this night, I somehow push away the dark stranger fantasy - I push away the man I kissed like a crazy person and concentrate instead on the dangerous guy who's abducted me and brought me here against my will.
He throws me down onto the bed, and suddenly, it's too much. Suddenly, I'm doing what I've been swearing I wouldn't let him see me do.
I cry.
The tears come hot, trickling down my cheeks as the sob wrenches from my throat.
"Please," I gasp out, curling into a ball. "Please don't do this."
I close my eyes tight, and the room goes quiet.
Finally, I open them to see him staring at me, frowning, his lips tight. He shakes his head.
"Who the fuck do you think I am?"
"I - I don't know."
"Who."
"I don't know!" I scream. "A bad person!"
I gasp as he lunges at me, his arms going to either side of me as he half hovers over me on the bed.
"You're right, little girl," he snarls, making my heart leap into my throat. "I am a bad person. I'm a very bad man." His hands move to my wrists, and my traitorous body betrays me again as I shiver at the sound of that baritone in my ear.
"But I'm not that kind of bad man."
His powerful hands yank my arms above my head. He grabs a cord of some kind - this one fabric, not plastic, and ties it firmly around one wrist before he loops it over the metal of his headboard and then does the same to the other wrist.
He moves off of me, grabbing more ties and doing the same to each foot individually, keeping me pinned on my back to the bed.
"Please," I whisper. "What are you going to do with me?"
"I haven't decided yet," he says evenly, his eyes fixed on me. "But keep breaking my fucking furniture and we're going to have problems."
He whirls and strides to the far side of the room. He flips a switch, killing the lights in my half of the loft before he slumps down onto one of the sofas.
The adrenaline is fading. The booze is fleeing my body. And slowly, my eyelids feel like cement.
I'm barely aware of giving up fighting it as I slowly let my body sink into the darkness.
Chapter Seven
Connor
She struggles for another half an hour, still pulling at those binds as if she's going to break free.
She won't. Leaving her alone before was a mistake, one that I won't make again.
The thing is, I don't make mistakes. Not ever.
It's so wrong I could laugh. Because it seems tonight has been my night to finally cash in my chips on "mistakes." Going to that meet tonight without knowing exactly what I was getting into. Having Mikhail with me, instead of one of the Saints. Not seeing the obvious setup until I'd walked right into it.
And her. Literally every single thing about her since the second she yanked me around by the shirt in that bar. And from that second on, there isn't a single thing I haven't fucked up where she's concerned.
I shouldn't have kissed her - not before I walked into something as serious as that meet. I shouldn't have taken her after, either. A single bullet, an extra shot of whiskey tonight, and an extra prayer with Father Murray on Sunday, and that should have been that.
And I can keep going.
Shouldn't have left her alone when I went out to call Liam, and I sure as shit shouldn't have put my hands on her like I did when I caught her trying to escape.
And here I am doing another thing I shouldn't be doing where she's concerned.
Thinking about her like this.
Thinking about that small, tight, lithe little body writhing against me. Or those pillow-soft lips whimpering into mine, or the way her breath caught when my hands touched the bare skin of her hip.
I take a deep breath, closing my eyes and tensing and waiting. Eventually, the creaking of my metal bed stops. Her panted strains stop. I almost want to go check on her, like she's a fucking infant or something, but I restrain myself.
She goes quiet, and when I strain my ears, I slowly start to hear the rhythmic breathing.
She's out.
I exhale slowly, groaning and laying back on the sofa. There's no adrenaline rush here, I lost that a long time ago. Sure, I'm still worked up about the gun fight earlier, but where a younger me would still be buzzing from it like I'd just done a whole gram of coke myself, the older me who's seen too much is just tired.
Another day, another mess to clean up.
It's funny to think how we all ended up doing what we do in the Saints. For Liam, it was easy I guess. The enforcer. The muscle. He's not a thug by any means - I mean my kid brother's got brains that under different parenting and with different formative years might have gone on to kick some serious ass at college. But then, this ain't that, and "what ifs" mean shit in Southie. And as it happens, Liam just happens to also be that guy who excels at knocking sense into those who don't want to see reason.
Me? Well, I've always fixed problems. At first, it was "how to get us food" when Mom was drunk somewhere and Dad didn't come home for a week. Later it was how to convince our teachers that everything was fine, and that, no, our dad wasn't gone, he was just working double shifts these days, so there was no need to call CPS.
Fixing problems is in my blood. Cleaning up the messes, sweeping the dirt under the rug, and making issues go away is what I do, and I've done it well since becoming a Saint.
Gray, our youngest brother, was just too young when we all got caught up in this. When our dad finally took off, and when Aela's father, Jack Reilly, stepped up and found a family in Southie to basically adopt us instead of letting us get lost in the foster system, it was an easy next step into the Saints. He didn't recruit us, and to be fair, Jack was pretty against kids like us having anything to do with the life until we were old enough to make more rational decisions about our lives.
But then, you grow up fast on the streets of Southie, especially back then with the ever-present looming turf war with the Russians, not to mention the Feds crawling up everyone's asses and knocking down doors every other day.
Liam and I fell into doing what we did well. Gray was too young, but he got caught up in it anyways. Caught up, chewed up, and spit out.
And now he's in jail. Busted and tossed in the same night Sheila died.
I rise from the couch and stride to the small bar cart by one of the big factory windows. I grab a glass and a bottle of Jameson and head back to drop myself onto the couch. I pour and raise a toast to my youngest brother.