Page 61 of Irish Brute

Someone is crying—quietly at first, then with more and more desperation. It’s a woman, moaning something in a language I don’t understand.

I have to find her. I have to help. She sounds frightened, forlorn. She sounds like she’s alone in the universe, and I’m the only one who can save her.

I swing my legs over the side of the bed, bending low to pick up my sleep shirt. Before I can find it, though, Braiden’s hand closes over my shoulder.

“Lie down,piscín,” he orders.

“I have to help her,” I say.

He swears under his breath, and I’m not sure if the words are English or Irish. “Help who?” he asks.

I gulp a steadying breath, so I can hear her again, so I can point to where she’s standing above us.

Silence. The crying has stopped. The moaning. The sobbing. I wait to hear the heavy thing dragged again, but nothing moves.

“I heard it,” I say to Braiden in the dark. “Upstairs. On the third floor.”

“There’s no one there,” he says.

“I heard her! There was a woman! She needs help!”

His hand spreads wide across my back. “You were dreaming,piscín.”

“I know what I heard!”

He pushes himself up on one elbow. “Do you?”

And sitting here, on the edge of Braiden’s over-size bed, I wonder what I really do know.

I know he spanked me for merely touching the door that leads upstairs.

I know I craved that attention, longed for it, even as I questioned what sort of woman permits such a thing.

I know I let him punish me in the greenhouse, forcing orgasms I couldn’t resist.

I know I let him punish me again, in this bedroom, denying orgasms I needed.

Braiden does things to me I’d never let any other man do. He touches me in ways I’d never allow. And I want him to do it. I’m desperate to know how much more he can give me. How much I can take.

So it makes sense that I’d dream about the forbidden space above us. My subconscious would create a reason for me to go up there. My sleeping brain would justify what I want. What I crave.

The truth echoes in the silence around us. If there really was a crying woman, why would she go silent the instant Braiden spoke?

Lie down, piscín.

That’s what he told me to do. That’s the only thing that makes sense in this huge old house, with its creaking beams and its nighttime drafts.

My dreaming brain played tricks on me.

So I let Braiden pull me back beside him. I allow him to cover me again—with his arm and with his leg and with his chest against my back. I melt into the solid warmth of him, the certainty, the truth.

And I sleep the rest of the night without waking.

I wake to find myself alone beneath the heavy duvet. Squinting at the clock on the nightstand, I see it’s 8:52. Almost an hour past the start of breakfast.

My sleep shirt is folded into a neat rectangle beside the lamp. I pull it on quickly, rubbing my arms hard to keep from shivering in the cool bedroom air.

I’m halfway to my room when Grace Poole steps out of the nursery. “Ma’am,” she says, ducking into her strange, old-world curtsey.