Font Size
Line Height

Page 20 of A Trap So Flawless (Titans and Tyrants #4)

Valentina

O ver the next few days, we fall into some semblance of a rhythm together.

During the day, Darragh continues to work with Rowan, trying to decipher the reasons behind his grandfather’s death. In the evening, I cook dinner for him – for both of us – and watch as sleep and food help to slowly soften the starkest angles of his jaw and cheekbones.

At night, he fucks me, usually more than once. And then he falls into a deep sleep beside me. Sometimes, when he’s asleep, I lie awake and trace his tattoos with my eyes, my fingertips, my lips. He almost never stirs.

Other times, when he’s asleep, I creep away to another bed, just to try to find some distance from him. But whenever I do that, I wake up in that other room with his long limbs locked around me.

I don’t ever hear him when he comes. Sometimes, in the morning after those nights, he seems as confused to wake up in another room as I am to wake up with him beside me in the bed.

It makes me wonder if he sleepwalks.

After a week of this, I decide that I’m as sick of my blonde hair as Darragh is.

I take the afternoon to dye it darker. Luckily, Darragh bought enough dye for me to fully colour my thick hair twice.

The result is a dense, uniform shade the colour of dark roast coffee.

Not a strand of green to be seen, thank goodness.

I put time and care into blowing my hair out in big, shiny waves, then put on a short, slinky black dress and do my makeup.

I observe the results, alone in this bathroom that isn’t mine, in the city I’ve never visited until now, and feel more like myself than I have in weeks.

When Darragh sees me that evening he stares at me in silence for so long that I start to feel a little self-conscious.

“What is it?” I run my hands down the silky front of my dress. Darragh’s throat bobs, his eyes tracking the movement.

“In the future, I’d appreciate a warning,” he finally says.

“A warning for what?”

“For the next time you plan to come before me looking like my own personal wet dream come to life.”

I smirk, feeling a rush of giddiness, because this is the only way I’ll ever have power over Darragh, and it’s a heady fucking feeling.

I’m about to make a cutesy remark about how warning him would have taken all the fun out of this, but before I can even open my mouth, he’s with me, his hands at my hips, his nose thrust against my throat.

“Love your hair like this,” he growls, his lips brushing my earlobe before he nips it. “Have you eaten yet?”

“No. I was going to make some pasta.”

“Leave it.” He draws back and runs his thumb along my chin, just below my lower lip. “I want to take you out.”

Now I’m the one who needs a warning. The only place Darragh’s taken me so far was that pharmacy for the morning after pill.

“You want to… to take me on a date?”

I can’t imagine Darragh ever doing a thing like that, and his next words only hammer that feeling home.

“Don’t know. I’ve never been on a date,” he says with a shrug. “But if that’s what you want to call it, then that’s what it is.”

It seems strange to consider anything we do now a first date. Not after all the things we’ve done and seen. But I feel a stupid little niggle of excitement at the idea anyway.

“Where?” I ask.

“I have a place in mind.”

He tells me it’s not far, so we walk. The air is cool and crisp, the sky unusually clear as night takes hold.

I think this is the coldest it’s gotten here so far.

I haven’t looked at my phone, read a newspaper, or even been listening to the radio.

After I do some quick mental math, I realize that today is the first day of October. I’m briefly stunned by that.

Being in Dublin with Darragh…

It almost made me believe that time was standing still.

A chill sweeps through me. My bare arms prick with goosebumps. I don’t do anything to draw attention to the fact I’m cold. I don’t cross my arms or rub at them or complain.

But Darragh notices. Because of course he does. In a wordless, casual movement, he drapes his leather jacket over my shoulders. His hand coasts down the leather, then touches beneath it, his knuckles brushing the exposed part of my upper spine.

As darkness falls and the lights come to prismatic life, I think that maybe my eyes are beginning to play tricks on me. It looks like the lights are reflecting on…

“Is that water?” I ask, gaping at the dark span of river ahead. I don’t know why I’m so surprised to see it here. It’s not like Toronto doesn’t have rivers.

“That’s The Liffey.”

The Liffey…

That’s the water they pulled his grandfather’s body from.

Tourists and locals mill along the banks, laughing and taking selfies, completely innocent to what this water has done to Darragh.

When we reach the fencing that separates the river from the land, I risk a glance up at his face.

I only see him in profile, but he doesn’t look upset.

He looks like he doesn’t feel anything at all as his eyes – one brown, one hazel-green, both dark – gaze blankly upon the water’s rippling surface.

He's let his hand drop away from my back. It hangs at his side. And then it curls into a fist.

That fist never touches me. It hurts me anyway.

I grab it with both hands. Darragh flinches, as if I’ve woken him from a deep sleep, then turns to me.

As I work to pry his fingers from the clenched fist, he watches me with faint bemusement, like I’m a small, wild animal who’s crawled my way into his house and he’s trying to figure out how I’ve gotten there.

He lets me pull his fingers apart. I slide my own between his and squeeze.

We’re holding hands.

It’s weird that it isn’t weird at all.

I was standing on Darragh’s right side, so it’s my left hand interlocked with his. He raises our hands together in the air, observing the way our fingers fit together. His gaze snags on my bare ring finger.

He hasn’t said anything about the ring since Toronto.

Hasn’t told me to put it on, or, if he thinks that I don’t have it anymore, told me that he’ll buy me another.

Sal got shot in the head. While we don’t know for sure about Papà, there’s no reality where I’m not a widow right now.

There’s nothing really standing in his way.

Except the will.

It should be a relief. A relief that, while Darragh obviously wants to keep me with him for now, he no longer seems to consider us engaged.

So somebody fucking tell me why it’s not? Why, instead of relief, instead of feeling like there’s freedom ahead of me, if I can only survive long enough to get there, I’ve only got this empty ache of loss?

Darragh distracts me from the question, tugging me along by the hand.

“Come on,” he says. “We’re nearly there.”

He takes me across an elegantly curving bridge – apparently called the Ha’Penny Bridge – and once we’re on the other side it’s a short walk past old stone buildings to Darragh’s intended destination.

It’s a pub, and when Darragh opens the door for me, the smell of beer, meat, and warm bread hit me at the same moment that a fiddle song stops.

Clapping and cheering breaks out, and a young server with a moustache hustles over to me.

“I’m sorry!” he shouts over the sound of the applause and cheering. “We don’t have any tables available! It’ll be about a forty minute wait. We’re always really busy on our live music nights, and-”

His words die in his throat as his eyes rise with almost comical slowness to something – or someone – behind me.

“You were saying?” Darragh asks.

The poor server looks like he’s about to piss himself.

“I’ll show you to your table, Mr. Gowan!”

The table is actually a booth raised a little off the main floor. Darragh motions for me to sit, and I slide onto the bench that faces outwards towards the rest of the restaurant. From here I’ve got a view of the bar, the musical duo with their fiddle and drum, and the lower tables.

“I feel a little overdressed,” I say as I hand Darragh his jacket, exposing my cleavage and dress.

“Something tells me that you look precisely the way you want to right now,” Darragh says.

It’s annoying how right he is. How much I feel like myself again with this hair, this dress, the high heels, and the makeup. I expect Darragh to sit across from me in the booth, but I should have known he wouldn’t. He sits beside me, sliding over until I’m trapped between the wall and his body.

“You’re supposed to sit on the other side, you know,” I tell him primly, even as my body reacts with pure pleasure at his nearness.

“And how would you know that, pet?” he asks silkily.

“When you’ve never even been on a date yourself.

” He grins, his straight white teeth giving a wolfish gleam.

“Unless you count that time I crashed your fancy rooftop dinner with fucking Fabbri.” He touches the front of my throat.

“That time I ended one life. And claimed another for my own.”

If I save your life, he said to me as I choked in his arms, that life becomes mine.

His grin has faded. His eyes fall to my mouth. His fingers crawl their way to the back of my neck, gripping the base of my skull. My lips part involuntarily, like my body is inviting him in before my brain can catch up.

And even once my brain catches up, I don’t try to stop it.

His kiss is slow, languorous. But there’s nothing lazy about it. It’s a thorough unravelling of my senses, leaving me so hot and dizzy that when he slides his hand beneath my dress, toying with my clit through my panties, I whimper and welcome the touch.

Until the band starts up a new song. And I remember where the hell we are.

I snap my eyes open and try to flee. But the wall is in the way and there’s nowhere to go.

Darragh keeps his hand where it is, stroking idly over my quivering flesh, but he straightens up and leans back, watching the music like he isn’t about to make me come under the table.

The server chooses that moment to return to the table. I squeeze my thighs together so hard I probably cut off blood supply to Darragh’s fingers. I see him smirk in response just before he slides his hand a little further down, letting it come to rest on my knee as he orders himself a Guinness.

“Red wine, please,” I croak. I clear my throat. “And some water. And some food. Whatever you recommend.”

“She’ll have shepherd’s pie,” Darragh says.

“I was asking what he recommended,” I say, quirking a brow at Darragh as the server leaves. “You know, the guy who actually works here?”

“How about you eat what I recommend,” Darragh says, pinching my knee. “You know, the guy who spent years here?”

“I know you grew up in Dublin, but-”

“No. Here .” He sweeps his other hand through the air, indicating the entire space. “Callum owned this pub. It was the first business he ever bought. When I wasn’t at school once he got me re-enrolled, or boxing, I was here.”

I look at the pub with new eyes, taking in the beautiful wooden bar, the tables that look handcrafted, the thick, dark beams that run across the ceiling.

“How old is this place?” I ask.

“At least five hundred years old. Maybe more.”

I contemplate the weight of that fact as the server brings our drinks. I take a sip of my red wine. Five hundred years. All that history.

And not just history in a broad sense, but Darragh’s history. From the sounds of it, he spent a good portion of his teenage years here.

This is the sort of thing he’d be losing by marrying me. Not just money, which he’s already got ungodly amounts of. But places like this. Places like that townhouse, with his old bed and his trophies and his memories.

It’s not just about a will. It’s not just about what he feels entitled to as Callum’s heir.

It’s about having every good part of his old life in Ireland ripped away from him. It’s about carving a big, gaping hole in his past and trying to patch up that hole with, what? A marriage to me?

What could I even offer him, what have I ever offered him, besides some toxic combination of my lust and my fury? When he gave me that ring in Toronto, I told him that I hated him.

And then I went and married someone else.

I chug my wine, trying to drown out these feelings. This inadequacy. This grief.

When the shepherd’s pie comes, I eat it because he tells me to.

It’s so good. Warm and filling. I think of Darragh, young and angry and orphaned, eating the exact same thing in the exact same place more than a decade ago. I think of him now, never being able to eat this here again, unless he comes in and orders it as a regular customer, as a stranger…

And I know, in that moment, that I can never keep him.