Dangerous Temptation (Dark Dream 1)

She claimed the first aid kit with a little cry of “huzzah,” and moved around the desk to my side.

I watched her mutely, too intently as she hesitated, then sat on the desk in front of me, wedging herself between it and me, our legs pressed together. When she took my hand, I was struck by the contrast between the two of us. She was paler, skin silky under downy white-blonde hairs, her fingers long and thin capped with her perpetually chipped nail polish. Against my dark skin, the bold stamp of my cherub tattoo slashed open by a knife wound, I looked heathen, uncivilized.

I felt it too.

The scent of her was in my nose, doing things to my insides. I wanted to press her back with a strong hand in her sternum, pin her there while I kicked her legs wide and buried my mouth at the source of her sweet scent, in that young pussy already inches from my face.

Fuck me.

I’d never been a man driven by sex because I wasn’t a man driven by pleasure.

I’d only known pain and solitude. Jerking off dry to feel the harsh friction of my own hand was enough to satiate me most days, and when it wasn’t, I fucked one of the endless women who threw themselves at me at Inequity because I was wealthy and dangerous.

Never anything like this, just a woman’s scent enough to get me hard as fucking nails.

I wondered if her ass was red and welted from the bamboo cane and felt my dick weep against the fabric of my suit pants.

Bianca hissed softly as she studied my hand under the light of the Tiffany lamp on my desk, my skin cut up by cubes of colored light. “This looks bad, Tiernan.”

Tiernan, said casually. It was rare to hear it like that, like she was a friend or family, unafraid and unintimidated.

I wanted to give her reason to fear me, see her eyes fill with tears as I taught her how to take my pain, how to give me pleasure.

I spoke through gritted teeth. “It’s nothing.”

It was less than nothing, I’d been torn open by Bryant so many times in so many spectacular fashions that it was quite literally nothing to me.

“Who did this to you?” she demanded, as if she wanted to scold a child for getting into a tussle on the playground.

I wasn’t sure what made me be honest. Maybe I wanted to shock her. Maybe I wanted to admit to someone who didn’t know him that Bryant was and had always been the monster Bianca probably thought I was too.

“My father.”

She blinked at me in that way she had that was somehow endearing. “You’re serious?”

I shrugged one shoulder and repeated, “It’s nothing.”

Solemn blue eyes studied me for a long moment, but she didn’t press. Instead, she just clucked her tongue. I watched as she opened the metal box and pulled out materials to stitch the skin together. She was the most maternal seventeen-year-old on the planet.

“You’re dreaming if you think I’d let you anywhere near me with that,” I drawled, tugging my hand away.

“You’re not the first person I’ve stitched up,” she said blandly, wedging my hand between her thighs so I wouldn’t move, her lower lip tucked between her teeth as she prepared the needle and surgical thread.

My fingers twitched to travel up the crease to the warmth of her pussy just inches from my reach.

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Like I said, Aida dated a lot of men. We didn’t have the money to go to the hospital every time one of them beat her.”

Anger flared through me so quickly, I couldn’t breathe for a moment. “Did any of them fuck with you and Brando?”

If they had, I’d hunt them down and kill them myself. It had been too long since I took a life and those fuckers deserved it.

“Mmm,” she said, refusing to look at me as she bent to take my hand. The needle pierced my flesh, but I didn’t flinch. I was used to it and she had a surprisingly steady hand. “None of them cared for Brando. A few of them made passes at me. One of them backhanded me.” She shrugged carefully so she didn’t hurt my hand. “He was super rich, so Aida didn’t like it, but she broke up with him the next day. I had a black eye for two weeks.”

After a pause, she said softly, “Stop moving.”

I hadn’t realized I was shaking. Her words had struck at my chest like a hammer to a gong, fury vibrating through me so hard my teeth ached.

I wasn’t a good man…fuck. But beating a kid?

Only the worst kind of monsters hurt children.

I knew because my father was one of them.

I knew, because once, he’d tried to make me one too.