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Page 12 of A Trap So Flawless (Titans and Tyrants #4)

Darragh

I drive Valentina to the townhouse I’ve started renting.

I’m not going to have her in my grandda’s house – the house I won’t even own or control if I marry her.

There isn’t a bed for her in Callum’s place.

I’ve been sleeping, if you can call it that, in his office this entire time, unwilling to lie down in either my old bed or his.

This townhouse is on the very same road, though, and stands facing the fenced-in grass and gardens of St. Stephen’s Green. There’s nowhere to park immediately at the building, so I take the car to the nearest parking garage. When we emerge on foot, there still isn’t a cloud in the goddamn sky.

Should have fucking known she’d bring the sun with her.

I’m half-blinded. Starved for light and slayed by it at the exact same time.

“It’s beautiful here,” she admits in a low voice as we pass under the Fusilier’s Arch, a great stone entrance to St. Stephen’s green. Trees spring up all around us, like a forest that’s somehow been forgotten in the middle of the city.

You’re beautiful here.

I would have sworn that I hadn’t – could never have – forgotten how terribly beautiful she is.

But having her here in my reality is an acrid reminder that half-dreams and tortured sessions of longing don’t do her any sort of justice.

Even with her newly blonde hair in a loosely-tied mess, no makeup on her heart-shaped face, she’s the most painfully perfect thing I’ve ever been witness to in my entire putrid fucking life.

“Almost makes me want to forgive you for bringing me here against my will,” she goes on, tipping her head back to admire the tree branches and leaves above while I admire the dappled caress of light on her face.

“Never asked for your forgiveness.”

“Your kind never does.”

“My kind?” I stop walking and grab her hand, pulling her into the shadowy place behind the thick trunk of an ancient sycamore tree.

The trunk is easily twice the span of Valentina’s shoulders as she leans back against it and crosses her arms over her chest. Tourists and photographers mill along the paths, but I ignore them, solely focused on Valentina.

“Your kind. The kind of man you are,” she explains, annoyed, like I’m an errant child who should understand this by now. “You’re all the same. You and my cousins and…”

“And your daddy?”

I watch her throat work at the mention of her father. She breaks eye contact and looks down at roots that have broken through the grassy ground. Her eyes are shiny.

Fuck no. She can cry about the fact she’s here with me if she wants to. But I will not watch her shed tears for her piece of shit progenitor. Not after everything he’s done.

“But I’m not like them, am I, pet?” I ask, softening the harshest edges of my voice until my words slide like silken malice.

My right hand goes to her throat, palming the exquisite flutter of her heartbeat.

My thumb presses – and none too gently – to the throbbing place below her jaw.

“Doubt your cousins or your daddy have ever done what I’ve done with you.

I doubt they’ve ever seen you with your legs spread and-”

“Shut up!” Her hand smashes against mine, smacking it away from her neck with surprising force. “Just… Just shut up, Darragh!”

I catch her hand out of the air, sliding my grip down until I hold her wrist. She’s shaking. It makes me want to hurt somebody. Makes me want another Jim Shaw strapped to a chair in a warehouse.

“You had to know that I would come for you.”

She violently yanks her hand from my hold. I release her, otherwise I think she’ll keep on pulling and pulling until she breaks her own wrist.

“But you didn’t come,” she hisses, her brows drawing together. “Did you?”

“Didn’t exactly receive an invitation to your special day with Sal, now did I?” I spit in reply. My head throbs. So does my chest. And my dick. “You lot waited until I was out of the fucking country to put on that lovely little ceremony.”

“I still thought…” She bites off her words and looks away.

“Thought what?”

“Thought you’d come. Thought you’d stop it.”

Everything slants. Like someone’s punched my centre of gravity and left me dazed and reeling.

What? She thought I’d show up and fucking save her? If I’d gotten there in time to stop the wedding, she wouldn’t have been watching bikers kill her husband and her father.

She would have been watching me.

I wouldn’t have stopped just to spare her feelings. I would have torn the place apart. And then I would have carried her wailing away through the carnage, stepping over corpses as I went.

“I told you once,” I remind her grimly, “that heroes don’t exist in our world. I’ve always been the villain in your story.”

“A hero takes the high road for the good of everyone,” she replies.

A breeze makes the leaves above her ripple, sending golden light dancing across her skin, her lips and eyelashes.

For the first time in my life, I want to taste sunlight.

“A villain would do whatever it takes to protect what’s theirs. ”

“Are you admitting that you’re mine?”

“I’m saying I was never supposed to be his.”

His. Salvatore Di Mauro’s.

“Did he touch you?” I’m holding her again without even realizing I’ve raised my hands to do it. I cup her jaw, my thumbs stroking the places her tears have dried, fusing my gaze to her face. “Did he hurt you? Kiss you? Try to fuck you?”

So help me God, I will dig up his goddamn corpse if he has. Just so I can fucking defile it in her name.

“No. But he might have hurt me eventually. His first wife died recently by falling down the stairs.”

She flicks and bends her fingers in the air, making little quotation mark gestures around the word “falling.”

“So that’s who Vinny chose to replace me?” I ask, incredulous and so fucking angry that I can barely think. “That’s who he married you off to in my absence?” My eyes narrow. “That’s who you married? You willingly walked down the aisle knowing this shit?”

“It wasn’t willing! I didn’t have a choice!”

“Please. You didn’t have a choice? What happened to the bold little negotiator who played chess with me in Toronto?

Where’s that stubborn Titone spirit?” I move closer, shoving my thigh between both of hers.

I drink down her muted gasp like it’s water in the desert.

Like it’s heaven. “Or maybe you’re only that manipulative and defiant when you’re dealing with me. ”

“What can I say?” she replies, forcing firmness into her voice even as colour floods her cheeks at the placement of my thigh against her clit. “Maybe you bring out the worst in me.”

“And you bring out the weakest in me.”

She has no idea how vulnerable I am now that she’s got her claws in me. Not a fucking clue in that pretty head of hers. If she could comprehend it, if she could feel even of a fraction of what I feel…

She wouldn’t be marrying other men and then running off to London, that’s for goddamn sure.

But even if I can’t seize her fucking soul, I know I can at least have some effect on her body. I drop my right hand, sliding it between us until it finds the waistband of her leggings and dips inside.

“Darragh!”

I ignore the way she says my name, half plea, half outrage, and let my fingers skim down to the softest, secret parts of her.

My middle finger finds her clit swollen and needy, and the place below is hot and wet.

I suppress a groan, grinding my teeth together and pressing my forehead to the top of her head.

“Not here!”

“Yes, here.”

Yes, here. Here, between her legs. Here, at the junction of holy wonder and hateful lust. Here, where I would get down on my knees, renounce myself, and fucking worship.

But of course, that isn’t what she means. She means, not here in public. In the open. In this pretty wooded place where someone could see that I’m making her fall apart. But this tree is in a bit of a sheltered corner, and my body blocks both her and the movements of my hand from view.

“Worried someone’s going to see me making you come like this?” I rasp against the fragrant warmth of her hair. “You’ll be fine. If you can keep your voice down, that is.”

I plunge my middle finger into her, and just about collapse at the sensation. The molten suck of her flesh. The silken quivers building with her arousal. I curl my finger, start to stroke her from the inside, and feel her entire body shudder in glorious response.

She may have married someone else. She may have tried to run away. But she will never be able to escape what I can make her body do.

What I can make her want.

My dick throbs. Tension radiates up and down my spine.

I need her to admit it. Need to break down that Titone pride, let it crack and shatter like glass, and force her to kneel among the pieces while she comes.

Need to know that at least some small, toxic part of her still wants me.

I still my hand.

“Ride me.”

Valentina’s eyes fly open. Both her hands shoot to my wrist, grabbing tightly.

“What?” she pants.

“You heard me. Ride my fucking hand.”

“Are you crazy?!”

“Yes,” I mutter. “Next question.”

But I guess she doesn’t have any questions left for me now.

All she has left is her will, and it is buckling.

I can literally feel it happening. I can feel the rhythmic twitching of her swollen inner walls.

Her tongue darts out to wet her lips, and I make a rough, involuntary sound of need.

As if worried someone’s heard me, her eyes skitter away, scanning and vigilant.

“Don’t look at them,” I groan. “Don’t look at anything but me.”

She closes her eyes, the stubborn little thing.

But then, with a nearly shy sort of subtlety, she rocks her hips against me. She inhales softly at the same moment that I let out a haggard breath.

“More,” I demand, skimming my lips along the edge of her ear. “You can do better than that.”

Her head tilts back against the bark of the trunk. Sun slides between branches. She’s all gold and brown and pink. Cheeks and lashes and lips. She looks like some sweet forest nymph or glittering fae. Are there Sicilian faeries?

I guess so. Because I’m looking at one. I’ve got my finger inside one, and she’s starting to rub herself on me more greedily now. I refuse to move my hand, refuse to help her in any way as she slowly fucks herself onto me.

“Oh!” she suddenly gasps. “No! I-”

She tries to stop, tries to pull my hand away, but it’s too late. Her fingers lose all force at my wrist as she comes.

Jesus fuck. Holy Mary, mother of God.

My whole body lights up like I’ve just taken a hit of the most potent shit in the universe. So profoundly perfect, and so fucking addictive, that no one could cook this sensation up in a lab even if they tried. Valentina’s in my veins without so much as a syringe to do it.

This is what I should be trying to escape. The spasmodic nirvana of her hold on me. The caustic clarity she brings me. Vicious fucking bliss.

Valentina’s got her hands over her face. For a moment – a moment that feels like a blow – I think she’s crying again. But when she speaks through her fingers, her voice is croaky with exhaustion, not teary.

“I’m so fucking tired.”

You and me both.

I haven’t slept properly since before Halifax. More than three weeks now.

She probably slept like a baby this entire time. Knowing I was gone.

The agony of absence – this destructive withdrawal – is pain that only goes one way.

I need Valentina rehab. I need some fancy fucking program with steps and sponsors and someone to save me.

But as I pull my fingers from between her legs and lick them clean, feeling both savage and serene under the clear light of St. Stephen’s Green, I don’t think I actually want to be saved.

I want to be damned.

So long as she’s the one to do it.

So long as I get to drag her down with me.