But then something strong and cool wrapped around my ankle from under the tall bed and yanked my foot out from under me. I fell to the ground with a garbled cry that no one would hear in the colossal, mostly empty home. My back hit the plush Persian carpet with a thud that sent the breath catapulting from my body.
Before I could orient myself, he was on me.
Crawling from beneath the bed like some nightmarish monster in the night, Tiernan pressed the entire length of his body to mine, hands manacling my wrists and pressing them up above my head. I was too shocked to put up much resistance and by the time it occurred to me to struggle, I was caught irrevocably in the cage of his body.
And then, for a small moment, I forgot everything but the feel of his heavy form crushing mine to the ground and the way that ignited something in my core. The scent of him in my nose, masculine and heady, and the sight of his face, scarred yet so handsome it took my breath away in a different way than my shock had before it.
If I craned my head up just a little, I could lick that ropy scar just as I had only days ago.
It was shocking how much could change in a single week and how fast nostalgia could grow.
“Hello little thing,” he whispered with dark satisfaction as he stared down into my face. “I thought it was time we had a talk.”
“I called the house a thousand times to talk to Brando, you could have spoken to me then! This doesn’t feel like talking,” I snapped, writhing against him in an effort to buck his weight off me, but Tiernan was two hundred plus pounds of finely-honed bulk. He wasn’t going anywhere unless he wanted to.
His thick brows cut into his forehead as he pressed his groin harder into mine, pinning me still at the same time making me feel his half-hard bulge. “If you want to skip the talking, I can be convinced.”
“Get off me and get out,” I demanded, leveraging my chin in the air so it almost collided with his. “I don’t want to talk to you now or ever again.”
“And what of Brando? You’ll have to talk to me if you want to see your brother again.”
Air leaked out of my mouth like a puncture wound as the reality of his power over me settled in. “Would you really use my brother against me like that? That’s low, even for you.”
“Even for me,” he murmured, as if testing out the taste of my hatred on his tongue. “Who do you think I am, Bianca?”
“A fucking monster,” I growled, rearing up to snap at him. “A lying, manipulative bastard.”
He stiffened at my words, something dark crossing his features before he could control them into impassivity again.
“Because I didn’t tell you who I was?”
“Because you lied to me every single day I lived under your roof. Because you played dangerous games with not only my life, but Brandon’s! How could you ever think that was forgivable?”
He stared at me calmly, absorbing my features like an artist trying to render every detail. “Did you not play games, too? When you decided to come to Bishop’s Landing, the home of your father’s people, and not tell me, the guardian who was appointed to protect you, that you were the daughter of Lane Constantine?”
“I couldn’t trust you with that and you proved me right,” I spat, trying to wrench out from him again. “Get off me, now, or I’ll scream.”
“Scream,” he invited on a slow drawl. “Draw Caroline and Winston Constantine up here. Let them see how…close we are. Explain to them how close you are to them, in ways they never even dreamed of.”
“Stop it,” I hissed, but my anger was waning into hopelessness. Why was it that I never had the power? How could little old me stand up to these behemoths? These men and women who hadn’t taken ‘no’ for an answer in so long that the word was a foreign language to them now. “I was doing what I thought was best.”
“So was I,” he countered, dipping to speak the words against the corner of my mouth. “I was wrong then, but I thought I was doing what was right.”
I froze, confused and terrified by his admittance. I didn’t know what to do with his regret.
I couldn’t handle it.
“Don’t.” I turned my head hard away from that warm mouth on my skin and closed my eyes. “Don’t you dare.”
“You’re wrong now,” he continued as if we were having a pleasant conversation sitting side by side at a café and not on the ground of his enemy’s home. “Give me a chance to prove it just like you did. Come home with me to Brando and The Gentlemen, sweet little thing. That’s where you belong.”