Page 20 of Twins for the Enemy

His knees dig into the mattress, anchoring him between my thighs.

Without a word, he grabs the hem of his shirt and pulls it over his head in one fluid motion.

His torso is cut from muscle and shadows—broad chest, defined abs, and a trail that draws my gaze lower.

Power coils beneath his skin, every inch of him carved for sin.

His eyes darken with hunger as he reaches for his belt. The sound of the buckle coming undone is a sharp, metallic promise. He keeps his gaze locked on me as he pulls the leather free and unzips his pants with deliberate control, every motion infused with tension .

His eyes never leave mine, charged with possession and need. It pins me in place, leaves me open, exposed—and aching for everything he’s about to give me.

When he wraps a hand around himself and strokes once, my breath catches. He’s thick, long, and already so hard it makes my thighs press together in a desperate pulse. He’s not just ready—he’s showing me exactly who I belong to.

I try to pull him closer, my legs twisting around his legs and my hands gripping the firmness of his upper arms. As he lowers himself, I feel myself sink deeper into the mattress. It’s still softer than I’d ever expect it to be, but the weight of Kieran’s body against me is even more of a comfort.

This is new. While I still want him, need him, completely and desperately, there is a mirror to that desire. I am protected. I am treasured to the point that I couldn’t even fracture myself without him holding me tight enough that the pieces wouldn’t fall away from each other .

When he pushes inside me, my head falls back, looking up at those handholds on the rock climbing wall.

I may as well be climbing, because that’s what it feels like as he moves—deep, steady, possessive—slower than the other times, but it’s slower in the way like waves breaking against the shore instead of a tsunami crashing down.

He buries himself again and again, each stroke hitting places that make me gasp and cling to him. My heels dig into his lower back. His groan rumbles against my neck as he dips down to kiss the hollow of my throat, his breath hot against my skin.

It’s not adrenaline flooding my body, but a kind of awe for the way the world works.

The intensity builds. The waves start to crash down faster. His hips slam harder, my nails carving red lines down his back. And just when I think I’ll fall apart, his hand finds my face, anchoring me. And he kisses me.

It’s slow, almost reverent. Like he’s giving me something fragile, something that lives in the space between our mouths. I can almost taste it, a sweetness that tingles on my tongue.

He looks down at me. My heart tumbles in my chest.

Oh.

This is intimacy. This is what makes people soft, makes people crazy, makes people run.

It’s insane to think this isn’t what created the twins. It should be. It’s enough to make two beating hearts. It’s enough to breathe life into a million newborns.

It’s enough to make me shatter in a way that he can’t even stop.

The orgasm surges through me, a whole ocean of tides taking me to the edge of the world. It’s so good that I can barely breathe. My body tenses enough that it would hurt if the pleasure weren’t pushing every other feeling out.

Kieran curses above me, his body jerking as he spills inside me. He holds himself there, buried deep, his arms shaking as he slowly starts to come down. He takes deep breaths before his body starts to relax, and my body answers his stillness.

I place my hands on his arms, pretending to push him over, and he lets me, settling down to the left of me.

“Some of your house staff might think you were in trouble,” I say. “From how much you were cursing God.”

“I wasn’t cursing God,” he says. “I’m very grateful toward any higher power right now.”

“I don’t think goddamn is a sign of gratitude,” I tease.

“Well, the staff isn’t here, so they couldn’t have been that concerned.”

“Maybe they were watching when we weren’t looking,” I say. “You seem like the type that would hire peepers.”

“Only for the gardeners.” He runs his fingers through his hair. The sweat makes it protrude upward. “I don’t think you’re one to judge, Farah. You’ve eavesdropped on every conversation you could. With Ellie and I, with my future brother-in-law… ”

I laugh. “Yeah, I’ve learned to not do that. Sometimes, you hear things you don’t need to hear.”

“Such as?”

I raise my eyebrows. Normally I’d run my mouth. But now, considering it, I’m not exactly sure this is the right time.

“You’re hesitating,” he remarks. “I can’t imagine what I said that would steal away the defiance in Farah Todd.”

I tuck my hair behind my ear. “Well, it’s complicated.”

“Yes, because our relationship before this has been simple.”

“Robert Young,” I blurt. “You talked about having closure because he’s dead.”

Surprise ripples across his face, but a guardedness quickly replaces it.

“Yes,” he states. “I do have closure over that.”

“I just…” I take a deep breath. “I don’t know what th at means.”

He considers me. From the tension in his shoulders, I expect him to stand up and leave, return to our pattern of him acting like I don’t exist after we’ve slept together.

But he doesn’t move.

“I’d always told Olivia that if she drank at a party to call me, so I could drive her home.

I made it clear that if she didn’t do that, I wouldn’t forgive her.

She always called me.” He looks down at the space between us, where some of the mattress is starting to restore itself and forgetting where our bodies’ imprints were.

“One night, I was driving her home. Robert Young, a drunk fucker, crossed the center line. He didn’t even have his headlights on.

I swerved to avoid him, but he hit the back of the car.

Olivia and I slammed into a telephone pole.

Olivia died shortly after we got her to the hospital. Robert Young died instantly.”

I let out a slow breath and reach for his hand. Kieran hadn’t killed him. I expect Kieran to pull away, but he flips over his hand, so my fingertips brush against his palm.

It’s strange how tragedies happen without any reason or connection between the perpetrator and the victim. Like Helena Porter and how she became a victim just because I felt the need to call Neal. I made an innocent woman pay for my weakness. For my lack of good judgment.

The tension in my body eases as Kieran leans forward, his kiss rough enough to grind down the abrasive thoughts in my mind.

I’d felt divided between a coward and a loose cannon, but lying beside him, it doesn’t feel like I’m split in two.

He didn’t make me reckless; it was a part of me that’d buckled under the weight of my fear of my father and my responsibility toward my brother.

He’d lifted the weight and pulled it off like it was a jacket that I’d put on to protect me from the explosions of other men in my life.

He scoops up the compass in one hand and lays down on his stomach. Possessed by the braver side of myself, I trace his shoulder muscles, then let my fingers trail down his spine. He looks over at me with a smile that’s more real than anything outside this room.

He rests his chin on his arm. “You’re more than I could have ever asked for.”

“You did say I was a handful.”

“That’s true,” he says, caressing my arm.

He watches his hand like he can’t quite believe our skin is touching.

“But in a good way. Your chaos and your kindness are unexpected and necessary. I’ve never met someone that I can just lie next to and not be thinking about clients or revenge or how to get her out of my house. ”

“Yes, you’ve made it very apparent you don’t want me out of your house,” I tease.

He leans forward and I kiss him. It’s a quick, flirty kiss, but as I pull back, his arm tightly wraps around me, yanking me closer so he can kiss me harder.

His hands grip my ass, his mouth opening my mouth, and my breasts pressed against his chest. My hands move to his neck.

When a slow rumble passes through him as my thigh slides between his thighs, I feel it against my palm.

We could stay here all day, getting so familiar with each other that we could never wash each other off.

Kieran’s phone pings loudly. He kisses me deeply once more before slowly getting up. I gently pull back down on his shoulder.

“Ignore it,” I plead.

“It’s the surveillance system,” he says, squeezing my hand before gently placing it down on the mattress. “It’s probably just an animal, but I still need to check.”

As he grabs his pants to find his phone, I enjoy the view of his back again. I wish I’d traced more of it while he was lying here. I wish I’d drawn up a pact on his skin, making him promise that I’d be more than a flicker of a memory, no matter what happened.

He turns back toward me and I can already feel how flimsy the moment is.

“What?” I ask .

“It’s your brother.” He stands up, grabbing his boxer briefs and pants. He yanks them up, the simmering anger apparent in his harsh movements. “I’ll deal with him. Stay here.”

“Wait.” I quickly stand up. “I want to talk to him.”

“No,” he states, barely glancing at me. “Did you already forget what happened when you visited him? I’ll deal with it.”

“What happened isn’t his fault,” I say. “He’s my brother. I’ll talk to him.”

“Farah,” he sighs. “You don’t understand—”

“I understand my brother very well,” I interject.

“You’re the one who doesn’t understand. My father…

my father was a piece of shit. Whenever I did something that would make him mad—which could be anything—Neal would redirect that anger toward him.

And that messed Neal up. He started doing drugs to cope with everything.

Everything he’s going through, it’s because of me. ”

“It’s not because of you. ”

“It is.” I grab my clothes, yanking them on just as roughly as he’d taken them off. “We could talk around it all day. I understand my father is responsible for what he did, but it doesn’t change how I feel about Neal. I owe him.”

“You don’t owe him anything,” Kieran says, his hands clenched at his sides. “He made his own choices. He’s older than you. He—”

“Stop, Kieran,” I say. “Watch what you say about him. He’s my brother.”

Kieran lets out a heavy breath, glancing over at the doorway. I expect him to storm away and throw Neal out like he’s desperate to do, but he doesn’t move.

“I don’t care what Neal does,” he says. “Unless it involves you. He’s a threat to you. He got you into that situation with the drug deal. That whole thing could have been far worse, and he doesn’t… he isn’t capable of prioritizing you right now.”

“Whether or not I care about people isn’t dependent on if they can prioritize me,” I say. “And that situation with the drug dealer wasn’t that bad. I owe Neal. At the very least, I owe him a conversation that doesn’t include you.”

Fully dressed now, I stride past him, avoiding his gaze. As I’m about to pass through the door, I feel his grip on my arm. It’s not tight and he doesn’t yank on me, but it’s enough to make me stop. I look up at him.

“For two months, I searched for you,” he says.

“I knew your full name from before, but even with all of my resources, I couldn’t find you.

You weren’t using any credit cards, you weren’t using a cell phone, and you didn’t keep in contact with your roommate.

You were a ghost. I was desperate to find you. ”

My heart is pounding in my chest. The puzzle pieces start to fall into place. I want to place my hand over his mouth and stop him from talking, but my hands are frozen at my sides.

“From my research, I knew about your brother’s addiction. I went to him. I offered him a fix. He resisted for less than ten minutes. He let me listen to all the voicemails you left him. He let me write down the number to your burner phone.”

“I don’t believe you,” I bite out. I shake my arm loose from him and continue out into the hallway. I try to push away his words, but they crowd inside my head.

Neal was the only one who knew where I was. Kieran is intimidating, I know that more than most, but if Neal had known about that, he would have wanted to protect me from him.

Neal couldn’t have cared less that I was Kieran’s prisoner.

It’s nothing new, so it shouldn’t hurt.

But it was the last strand holding me up.