Page 51 of The Mafia Enforcer's Temptation

“I’m Irish, I’m fucking charming as hell,” he says. “People fall over themselves to get to my, ah, personality.”

I grit my teeth. People? He means women.

He pulls my thighs up, angling me so that penetration is deep even when he doesn’t move, and though he came, he’s still hard, and I can feel his piercings as my walls stretch around him.

I’m his prisoner in this position and I know it’s deliberate.

But he wants the truth about why I hate him. And the truth is clear. At least, it should be to him. He should fucking know thename of the man he killed. The young man who’d barely had a real start in life.

Again, I’m struck by the guilt that feeds the hate.

It’s a different guilt than the kind I have for leaving Tatiana.

Stan and I weren’t really friends, just relatives who were getting to know each other, and we made a pact when he came home from college to figure out how to take over after Dad died.

It’s how I met Paddy, too.

Learned all those skills with the little homemade bombs, how to handle a gun, things I never thought I’d ever need, but it was all impossibly exciting.

And I needed exciting.

Do I tell him all that? Remind him of Stan? Ask how could he kill someone he didn’t even know?

I close my eyes.

There are two deaths I was witness to.

Seamus keeps slowly rocking into me and that pressure lazily builds.

Easily. He can do it easily.

The outrage is hard to grasp, so I focus on the type of person he is. Another of an endless line of men who want and want and take everything, even what’s not theirs.

Me. Lives. My birthright.

He’s no different.

“Open your eyes, Ava,” he says. “You hate me. Why won’t you tell me why?”

“Because why on earth would I share a thing with my enemy?” I say, snapping open my eyes.

His dark-green eyes glitter. We keep having sex with our clothes on. Like we can’t even manage to get to the point of nakedness, the need too much to deny for those precious minutes of undressing.

“Because you married your self-proclaimed enemy, sweet thing.”

He kisses his way down my throat, stopping to suck on my pulse, to bite. The sensations that follow are exquisite, and they bloom through my blood, making me push up into him.

He pulls back a little, and when the ripples stop, he resumes the slow, deep thrusts, keeping me there on an edge of almost bliss.

It’s cruel, being able to make me feel so damn good, to have him be so handsome and yet so ugly and empty underneath.

“You stole from me,” I say, settling on my crest. “And you’re a murderer.”

“What did I steal? Your sense of virtue?”

“My Volkov crest.”

“I’ma murderer??” He licks my nipple and then moves up to nibble along my lip, and finally, he lifts his head, plants his hands on either side of mine, and pushes in deep, holding. “You’d have killed me, sweet thing, in Romanov’s grounds, in that building site if it suited you, and I don’t think I’ve actively tried to kill you. Yet.”