Beautifully Cruel (Beautifully Cruel #1)(46)

“Then maybe I shouldn’t be under this roof.”

Her voice is quiet and steady. Irritation flares inside my chest. I don’t bother with more conversation because I know it will only be an argument. I simply pull her back to the edge of the bed and pick her up.

She mutters, “This is ridiculous.”

But she doesn’t fight. She hides her face in the crook of my neck and lets me carry her back into my bedroom, silent and sleepy, her body lush and warm against my chest.

When I set her down on the bed, she curls into a ball again and peeks up at me from under the edge of the fur throw. I know she’s trying to look mad, but a woman’s eyes are never as soft as when she’s looking at the man who just made her come.

My lips curve. With a faint sense of surprise, I realize I’m smiling.

Loosening my tie as I gaze down at her, I say, “You screamed my name.”

She rolls her eyes, then squeezes them shut. She mutters, “The ego on you.”

“Both times.”

“Anytime you’d like to stop talking, it would be great.”

I pull my tie over my head and drop it to the floor. Then I shrug out of my suit jacket, tossing it aside. I kick off my shoes and discard my belt. As I’m unbuttoning my shirt, Tru opens her eyes again. She watches me as I pull off my shirt and let it fall from my fingertips to lie on top of the jacket.

Then she bites her lip and her eyes go wide.

I stand unmoving and allow her to look at my bare chest. The light is low in the room, but there’s enough of it for her to see everything.

The tattoos. The muscles.

The scars.

She sits up abruptly. The fur throw slips off her shoulders and pools around her waist, exposing her breasts, but she doesn’t notice. She’s too busy staring.

After a moment, she reaches out and touches me.

With the tip of one finger, she lightly traces a scar that follows the shape of my ribcage. Though it’s faded to white now, it’s as thick and vicious as the day it was made.

She says, “This must’ve hurt.”

“Aye.”

She glances up at me, examines my expression for a moment, then drops her gaze back to my chest. She slides her finger down my ribs and across my stomach, to a knot of scar tissue near my waist. “And this?”

“It didn’t tickle.”

Her eyes flash up to meet mine. She whispers, “Don’t joke.”

She’s solemn and still, her eyes shadowed with some bad memory that has nothing to do with the marks on my skin.

I cup her jaw and stroke my thumb over her cheekbone, wanting to make that pained look in her eyes disappear, wanting to push her back against the mattress and shove inside her again and make her cry out my name until she’s hoarse.

Wanting to make her mine for good, which can never happen.

With effort, I set all those competing emotions aside. “You really want to know?”

Her voice comes very small. “Yes.”

“That scar is from a wooden stake.”

She jerks her hand away as if she’s been burned. She repeats faintly, “Stake?”

She looks so horrified, I wish I’d lied. “Let’s just say I didn’t trip and fall onto it. We’ll leave it at that.”

When she just keeps staring in horror at the scar, I kneel between her knees and take her face in both my hands. “It was a long time ago. I was a boy.”

“A boy.” Her face drains of blood.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

She looks at me like I’m a complete idiot.

It confuses me, until she says, “Liam. I’m not upset. I’m pissed off. What kind of an animal would drive a stake through a boy’s stomach?” She huffs. “And please tell me he spent the rest of his life in prison.”

I answer without thinking. “No. I killed him. But later on, after I’d grown up.”

She looks deep into my eyes. Her own are fierce. After a silent, bristling moment, she says quietly, “Good.”

Several things dawn on me at once. The first is that I continue to underestimate her. The second is that Declan was right: she’s much tougher than she seems.

The third is that I lied when I told her falling in love is a luxury I don’t allow myself, because I’m sliding so fast down that slippery slope it might already be too late to stop it.

When I speak, my voice is thick. “Why does that make you happy?”

“I don’t know.” She pauses, thinking. “Maybe because justice is so rarely served that it’s really gratifying when it finally happens.”

“You think what I did to him is justice for what he did to me?”

She answers without hesitation. “I think a person who would do that to a child has done much worse things that no one knows about.”

She’s right about that. The man who drove that stake through my body was one of the most evil people I’ve ever met, to this day.

Then she says suddenly, “So this ‘I am the mafia’ thing. Let’s talk about that.”

I rise, push her back against the mattress, and straddle her body, kneeling down to brace my elbows on either side of her head. “The less you know, baby, the better.”

We’re nose to nose, so I can see exactly how much me calling her ‘baby’ affects her. She adores it, but it also irritates her. That reaction is such classic Tru that I have to press my lips together to keep from chuckling.