Dangerous Temptation (Dark Dream 1)

I had never felt so alone in my entire life as I sat there in the corner of Aida’s room, my mother dead in her bed, my brother down the hall due to wake up any time with questions and curiosities I had no answers for.

For one, brief, horrific second, I wished I was dead too.

“Ma’am,” the operator called through the phone where I’d dropped it unknowingly to the floor beside me.

I forced my numb fingers to curl around the plastic phone and bring it to my cheek. “Yes.”

“Is there anyone you can call?” she reiterated. “Even a teacher from school, a friend, or a boyfriend, maybe?”

Boyfriend.

Maybe…

Tiernan.

My head swam as I struggled with the choice. I barely knew the tattooed billionaire with the full mouth and cruel smile. He’d only dated Aida for three months and he didn’t seem like the kind of man to harbor any kind of heart, let alone a sympathetic one. I couldn’t imagine how he would react if I called to say that my mother was dead and…and Brando and I were orphans.

But did I really have a choice?

Aida was gone. Dad was dead. And it seemed my only hope for salvation lay in a man I was certain was a demon in a thousand-dollar suit.

Without answering the operator, I crawled to the bedside table and retrieved Aida’s ancient iPhone. Tiernan was her most recent call.

My sweaty finger left a smear on the glass as I pressed against his name.

Three long, jarring rings later, a rough voice answered.

“Tiernan Morelli speaking.”

I was too grief struck to recognize his last name, to register exactly who he had just proclaimed himself to be, otherwise, none of the nightmares that followed might have ever happened.

Instead, dumb with tragedy, I whispered, “T-Tiernan? It’s Bianca Belcante. We…I mean,” I sucked in a breath like a drowning woman. “I need your help. Will you come?”

Chapter Four

Tiernan Morelli

I need your help.

I sat in my windowless office at Iniquity three stories beneath the teeming city streets with Bianca Belcante’s sweet, lightly southern-accented voice ringing against the walls from the speaker on my desk.

I need your help.

The words were simple, yet the meaning was profound.

Mostly because I realized no one in my entire thirty years on this planet had ever asked me for help. I was the third brother of four in my eight-sibling family. My younger siblings went to Lucian for advice or Leo for protection. Not me.

I wasn’t the kind of man you went to for help unless it involved violence or retribution.

Morellis weren’t shiny and clean and we didn’t pretend to be like our rivals, the Constantine family.

How fucking dull.

The Morellis liked their cracks and fissures, their sins and the inevitable repentance that followed. The grit and the shadows, the slightly broken.

Their imperfections made them a dark force in New York City’s high society.

But even for the Morellis, there was a line.

And the third son of Bryant and Sarah Morelli, Tiernan Morelli was not just slightly broken.

He was irreparably damaged.

The black sheep.

The dark horse.

As insignificant to the family as he was dangerous to them because they didn’t understand him. They couldn’t.

How could the smart Morellis relate to a deeply dyslexic man?

How could the gorgeous Morellis look such a scarred man in the face?

How could the blue blood Morellis accept a man who was born under a cloud of suspicion the family had spent years trying to hide from society?

I was an other and in a family like the Morellis, there was no room for lack of conformity, no space for individuality. You were one of them or you weren’t.

I’d spent the last thirty years of my life trying to prove myself to them. To my father, Bryant, who still tried to rule the family from the shadows even though technically my eldest brother, Lucian, had taken over the company last year. And maybe, in a twisted way, to Lucian and Leo, my older siblings. We had no relationship. Is that because I was forced to do the unthinkable by Bryant on my twelfth birthday? Or because, even before that, there had always been whispers about me, a tension surrounding my presence in the family all because of the shade of my eyes? Whatever the reason, we weren’t close. I tried not to care—and failed.

Not Morelli brown. Not even my mother’s McTiernan grey.

But a bright, pale green like sun-bleached jade.

Those eyes had set me apart immediately, but my other imperfections had only solidified the divide.

So, I did what I could to make myself valuable to the family.

Lucian ran the family empire, Morelli Holdings.

Leo ran his own subsidiary in real estate. They were successful, and more importantly, legitimate businessmen.

And me?

I was the one Bryant went to when the dirty work needed to be done. The one who controlled the shadier interest of our family, with a few of my own healthy ventures on the side.