Page 172 of Morally Black Betrothal

“I want to stay here. On this farm. Wherever you are. In a home I never had.”

Whatever I’d been expecting him to say, it wasn’t that. Certainly not with his accent as thick as it had ever been, caught up with his emotions.

“I want to come home to you covered in flour, smelling like sugar, with food on the stove and my ring on your finger.Fuck.” With another punishing thrust, he was deeper than ever. “I want to fuck you in every meadow on this place, and then I want tostrip you down on this counter and lick every inch of your body for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, just because I can. Because you’d be mine to feast on whenever I fuckin’ want.”

He yanked me closer, slowing his movements but practically tunneling inside me.

“I want to rip this condom off and fill you so good you’ll be pregnant in seconds. I want to fuck a baby into you every hour of every day just so I know you’ll always belong to me.”

His eyes turned black, daring me to look away.

Instead, I came.

“BRENDAN!”

My body seized, and he followed me over the edge on a howl, both of us clinging to each other like we might float away with the dust motes.

When the world came back to us, it was with a distant whistle of wind through the maples and the sweet song of a bird, far from home, but somehow happy just where it was.

But just when I was about to kiss this beautiful man and present him my own confession—that he could have all those things, if only he had the guts to ask me for real—Brendan spoke again.

“I want the impossible,” he whispered against my temple. “And maybe I want it that much more because I know I can never have it for real.”

I didn’t move for a long time. Didn’t dare turn my face, lest he see the tears threatening to spill. I was too afraid of what he’d read there.

Too afraid to ask him why, exactly, he thought he could never have the dreams that maybe we both shared.

Or else too afraid to ask why I wasn’t enough.

40

BURNT CINNAMON ROLLS

Brendan

The numbers on my laptop screen blurred together as I stared at the acquisition documents that had been sent over from Ezra Huntington’s office, complete with my electronic signature.

…whereas BLACKGUARD HOLDING is the seller of the Note and Mortgage made by DANDELION FARM and EZRA HUNTINGTON is the purchaser…

There it was in writing: proof of my betrayal.

The document went on, every line a stab to my gut, each signature a nail in the coffin of the first good relationship—the first real love—I’d ever had.

If I hadn’t known before I was a bastard, I would have then. Only The Black Prince would save his company by destroying the woman he loved.

My cell phone buzzed on the desk of my home office, pulling me from my brooding.

I answered immediately. “Tell me you found something.”

Liam’s heavy sigh blew through the speaker. “Dude, I’ve been over the contract a dozen times, and all I can say is that I really wish you had come to me with this before signing. Why the fuck would you do this without consulting legal?”

I don’t know, probably because getting Simone’s niece out of danger was more important to me than checking the fine print.

Instead, I grunted. “We can’t claim extortion or something like that? The threat of litigation might get him to rip it up, don’t you think?”

“Thought of that already, but you don’t want that either, not before the board votes you in. Meanwhile, the sale is iron-clad. Rescission clauses are minimal, and none of them apply here.”

“Fuck.” Then I swore some more, resurrecting some of the filthiest curses I’d learned in the gambling dens of Southie. “There’s gotta be something. A loophole, a technicality. Anything. That farm is all she cares about in the world.”