Dangerous Temptation (Dark Dream Duet #1)(54)

This time, the tears weren’t anything but ugly.

As ugly as my words.

As ugly as my heart.

When I closed the door on her, it felt final, fatalistic. Something newborn in my chest, tender and small but growing since Bianca entered this house, withered and then died.

I staggered against the closed door, a hand braced against the lion statue flanking the office. I gave myself one single moment, brief as a lit emergency flare, to feel panic and grief, despair and yearning.

When I straightened after that, adjusting my diamond cuff links, the ones Bryant gifted me after my first and second kill, I walked down the hall the same man I’d been before.

Before the office encounter.

Before the Belcantes lit Lion Court up from within.

Before that fated evening, what felt like eons ago, when Bianca opened the door to her pitiful house and accepted my rose.

Tiernan Morelli, the monster, and not Tiernan Morelli, the man.





Chapter Eleven





Bianca

We didn’t speak for two weeks.

I couldn’t even blame it entirely on Tiernan, because I was avoiding him just as assiduously as he seemed to be avoiding me.

Fourteen days and I still didn’t know what to make of the incident in Tiernan’s office.

I wasn’t so much shocked by my reaction to his domineering manner as I was by the extent of my longing for it to happen again. I’d always harbored dark, wicked thoughts. Always dreamed of being bent and twisted like origami into the shapes of a man’s choosing. It shamed me, because I was a smart, independent, young woman with a spine and a healthy dose of self-respect. What kind of woman loved being throat-fucked until her voice was ragged for days? What kind of woman loved to be used like a wet hole for a thick, gorgeous dick? What kind of woman thought being called “a good little thing” was the sexiest thing she’d ever heard?

Me, I guess.

There was no getting around it.

My nipples hardened into jeweled peaks every time I remembered being filled up, clutched tight, and fucked in the face. It was hard to understand that my deviancy could exist separately from my identity, but I forced myself to carefully detach the two, like stuck pages in a magazine.

I did research on it, found out it was called pain play, rough sex, Domination and submission.

I found examples of deviancy in art, because that was a medium I always turned to for solace and for understanding. I found a Rembrandt sketch of a monk breaking his vows with another man in a field of corn. My favorite artist, Pablo Picasso, had a rather astonishing collection of erotic art, including La Doleur, a painting depicting a woman shamelessly fellating a man in the same manner I had sucked off Tiernan. Artists from Michelangelo to Cezanne and Correggio who had painted scenes of the beautiful mortal, Leda, seduced or raped by Zeus in the form of a swan. The same Japanese artist known for the famous The Great Wave off Kanagawa created an erotic tangling of a nude female and a massive sea monster.

It proved to me that humanity had always been transfixed by the sharper edges and darker corners of sexuality. It soothed me to know that if I was a deviant, so were many of the brilliant artists I’d idolized since my youth.

My sexual predilections were mollified, but not the painful, unreliable stirrings of my heart.

I couldn’t research how I felt about Tiernan because I didn’t know how to put it into words.

I was, in a sense, captivated by him. In the way a child was afraid of the monsters under his bed yet refused to look beneath it, to banish them in the light forevermore. Some part of me liked that I didn’t understand him, that he could be cruel and heartless, then unquestionably, erratically kind.

Case in point, the day after he fucked my throat raw and told me I was a better whore than my mother, he took Brando to an appointment with the top neurological surgeon in New York City. They had him on a new regime of drugs meant to help with the increasing frequency of his seizures. They also had him booked in for laser interstitial thermal therapy in January when he was off school for winter break.

I’d locked myself in a bathroom stall at Sacred Heart Academy in the middle of my fourth-period math class to cry when Brando had called from Tiernan’s phone to tell me the news.

And then today, when I’d returned home from school exhausted from a chemistry exam I’d stayed up the entire night prior to study for because I needed perfect scores in the subject to go on to university for art conservatism, he’d rocked me again.

I’d stared at the lion’s head door knocker for a long moment while I gathered my composure in case I saw Tiernan and was forced to interact with him before I pushed into the house.

Chaos met me.

The house rang like a cacophony of bells with child and adult laughter and a distinct noise that was unmistakably canine.

A deep, alerting bark.

I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the dark of the entrance hall, then gaped as clamor sounded in the hall leading back to the kitchen and seconds later a streak of grey shot into the hall between the legs of a suit of armor.

It came bounding toward me on legs capped with white feet, its compact body shaking with the force of its wagging tail.

The dog didn’t slow down as it reached me, barreling into my legs, then weaving around them like a herding sheepdog.

“What the hell?” I asked before I could curb my language because I noticed Brando had come into the hall after it, followed shortly after by Walcott and Ezra.