Dangerous Temptation (Dark Dream 1)

It took me a few long minutes to settle under his calming hands, one stroking at my hip, the other over the hair streaming down my back. Only the sound of his harsh breath and my hiccoughing, diminishing cries filled the echoing solarium.

I stared unseeing at the mosaic tiles at the bottom beneath the water as I tried to dredge my mind up from the depths of my body’s firing synapses. With a start, I came back to myself, mind clearing, thoughts as clear as those tiny tiles lining the pond.

“Oh my God,” I whispered, head dropping between my shoulders, hair curtaining my face.

My shame.

I’d almost orgasmed from Tiernan spanking me.

With a freaking bamboo switch like some kinky, shameless whore.

Like someone without pride.

Like someone without the last name of Belcante, without the proud, noble Constantine blood.

The shame coursing through me like cold water through my steaming veins misted my eyes and made me want to cry for different reasons.

Tiernan seemed to sense the change in me and silently stepped away to give me space.

I stood instantly, then winced as the pain in my backside flared brilliantly, giving way to a duller ache in the muscles I’d held clenched for too long. I couldn’t look at Tiernan. Everything in me repelled from him, because he had done this to me.

It had been in me to give, I’d known this for years, this acute ache for something rough and wrong.

But he’d been the one to beat it out of me.

And I was freaking terrified that now this deviant thing in me had seen the light, I wouldn’t be able to put it to rest again.

Especially not around him.

“You’re a monster,” I croaked, because he was and in that moment I hated him with everything in me, more than I ever had before.

He let me turn on my heels and walk away stiffly through the cover of foliage leading to the door.

It was only when I was deep in his caged jungle that his voice, rough as gravel, called blandly out to me.

“You keep breaking my rules, little thing, and I’ll just keep coming up with inventive punishments.”

As far as threats went, it was the best he’d ever issued.

* * *

Later that evening, after I’d showered away some of the shame, read an Iron Man comic to Brando with Ezra carefully signing along because Brando wanted to learn American Sign Language, and finished my homework, there was a knock on my door.

When I opened it, Walcott stood there holding a tray with a pot of tea and a little covered basket.

“What’s this?” I asked in a voice that was threadbare from moaning and crying earlier.

Walcott’s face was mottled with severe scar tissue, but I wasn’t sure if I’d ever seen kinder eyes. He smiled slightly at me as he passed me the tray, then reached out to squeeze my wrist before he turned back down the hall.

When I set the tray on my bed and carefully sat my burning bum on the cool silk sheets, I discovered what was on the tray.

Peppermint tea, a banana, a new bottle of aloe vera and anti-bacterial ointment, a roll of gauze and an ice pack.

Use the anti-bac ointment and wrap the tattoo. The aloe and ice are for your behind. I hope you think of me every time it aches.

—TM

I flopped back against the pillows and stared at the canopy above me, fighting to understand the beast of a man who had beaten me, aroused me, then sent me some kind of fucked-up care package to mend me in the aftermath of his fury.

Much like the chaotic mix of painful pleasure he had eked out of me, Tiernan was becoming a dangerous temptation I was less and less certain I could avoid.

Chapter Seven

Tiernan

Bryant Morelli could have been on a poster for a Hollywood movie about Wall Street just as much as he could have appeared on one about the mafia. There was no doubt he exuded wealth, power, and virility. It was evident in the expensive power suit he wore from the time he took breakfast in the great dining room to the hour before he went to bed, in the expensive watches and penchant for foreign whiskey, cars, and cigars. But he had never been able to successfully hide his baser origins. He worked out religiously every morning, lifting weights sixty-something-year-old men usually left to younger generations. As a result, he was thick through the neck and shoulders, his hand quilted with muscle and some calluses that seemed at odds with his suave businessman persona. He was born poor to parents with high expectations for their eldest son and they’d raised him to be thirsty. So thirsty, that even decades later, having amassed one of the greatest fortunes in the United States, he was still parched, still driven to seek water from every possible well.