Cataclysm (Four Horsemen #4)(20)

I decided to lay it all out for her. Scarlett should know the lengths we went to in order to find her.

“You searched Tonya’s?”

“Mmm, we broke in. I wasn’t going to ask Fletch, even though he has the keys. I’m not fucking talking to him after he landed me in the shit with my mother.”

Scarlett’s stroking grew more insistent. It was making me uncomfortable, but not because I didn’t want her touching me. My problem had to do with the fact she’d looked like a damn queen when she’d butchered Mason. All that blood covering her clothes. The blood that had got on me when I kissed her. Not to mention the provoking words she’d come out with. All of it fuelled my desire to paint her lithe little body with welts and fuck her until she cried from my brutality.

Fuck, I need to rein this in.

“When are you going to tell her about me?”

“After we’ve handled Stuart.”

“Are you going to be honest about all of us being a thing? You know, we can’t exactly hide that from her, Rosie and Frankie’s parents.”

I hadn’t exactly thought about it, even if she was right.

“I don’t see how we can keep the truth from them.”

“I can’t even imagine what she’s going to say.”

I didn’t want to. In fact, it was a conversation I would quite happily avoid forever. Our families likely wouldn’t approve of our unorthodox relationship with Scarlett. And they would be unhappy about us hiding the truth about her return from them too.

“Are you going to let me get on with telling you about the past week?”

She nodded, her hand leaving my side and running down my stomach. I tensed under her exploration, not wanting her to find out what her proximity was doing to me right at this moment. Before she could get too far, I removed her hand from my stomach and placed it on my thigh instead. Scarlett didn’t protest, but I could feel her eyes boring into the side of my head.

“Once we worked out how Mason gained access to the building, we had to put in extra measures to prevent anything like this from happening again. We’re going to keep you safe this time, little wisp. We don’t care what it takes or the cost. We won’t let anyone take you again.”

“I know,” she whispered into my shoulder. “I trust you.”

Her hand curled around my thigh, her fingers stroking along it. I fought against the urge to press her hand against my cock. It was getting really fucking uncomfortable now.

“It wasn’t easy to find you. Mason has a property in the city, but the one he took you to isn’t in his name. We searched his London flat for clues about where he’d taken you. Then we tracked down his associates when we turned up nothing. West beat some sense into them, but even they had no fucking clue. Francis searched his flat again and had to break into the safe he had hidden under the floorboards. That’s where we found the deed. It was in his mother’s name. And his mother isn’t Garrett’s wife. Not his real mother, anyway. We found his birth certificate there too. Quite the fucking scandal Garrett had to cover up there.”

Even as I told her this, all I could focus on was where her hand was. I didn’t question why I found Scarlett so fucking distracting. She was my very own siren. A woman I couldn’t resist under any circumstances.

“He had an affair with a woman he worked with, and she ended up pregnant. Two months after she gave birth to Mason, she was found dead in the canal by a single gunshot wound to the back of the head. It was from a police issue weapon, so pretty fucking suspicious, but they never found her killer and Mason was raised by Garrett alone.”

“No wonder he turned into such a creep.”

I almost snorted. Mason was more than a creep, but that was neither here nor there.

“The moment we found out where you were, we came for you, little wisp. We drove all night to get to you. None of us has slept much in the past forty-eight hours.”

Her hand moved higher as if she wanted to soothe me with her touch.

“You must be exhausted. I’ll let you sleep.”

I caught her hand in mine, pulling it away so she wouldn’t notice how fucking hard I was for her. Scarlett shifted next to me, tugging her hand from mine. I thought she was going to move away from me, but no. The girl damn well decided she was going to touch me right where I was aching for her.

“Or not. Did I do that?”

“You know very well you did,” I muttered, trying not to groan when she started stroking her hand along my length.

You are going to kill me one day.

“Was it all the blood?”

I felt like telling her to quit it, but it felt too fucking good.

“You, the blood, watching you kill again. All of it, little wisp. You make me so fucking crazy.”

Our voices were low, so they didn’t carry to the front. West was still asleep. We weren’t exactly disturbing him, either.

“Then let me take care of it for you.”

Scarlett shifted and started unbuttoning my clothes without a second fucking thought. The moment she wrapped her small hand around my cock, I gritted my teeth. This wasn’t going to do. I didn’t want to come all over myself. Gripping the blanket, I tugged it up before planting my hand behind her head and shoving her underneath it.

“Wrap your lips around it,” I hissed before settling the blanket over her.