Beautifully Cruel (Beautifully Cruel #1)(66)

He’s upset. I’ve touched a raw nerve, but he’s touched so many of mine that I’m not backing down from this.

“What’s more important than happiness?”

He answers without hesitation, his voice ringing with conviction. “Honor. Without his honor, a man might as well be dead.”

It hangs there in the air, glinting and dangerous like an unsheathed sword, its sharpened edge gathering the light and my curiosity along with it.

Why would a mafia boss speak so vehemently of honor? He sounds more like a soldier, willing to give his life for god and country. A knight sworn in service to his king.

A man whose values don’t match his life.

I recall Declan’s odd comment about honesty in the parking garage and wonder if his talk of honesty and Liam’s talk of honor are related.

For men who deal in power, violence, and human misery, what use is there in such things?

With a strange intuition buzzing along my nerve endings, I turn my face toward him in the dark. “Liam?”

“Aye?”

“I’m adding honor to my list.”

His chest is pressed tightly against my shoulder blades, so there’s no way he could deny how hard his heart starts to thump.

And that, more than any words he could say, makes me certain that I was right when I accused him of having more secrets than one.

I’m beginning to think Liam Black is a labyrinth of secrets.

A layer cake of lies.

I’m going to peel back the layers until I find true center of him, even if it kills me.



After that night, we fall into a pattern.

When I wake in the mornings, Liam is already up. We have breakfast together, then I head to the library to study, and he heads off for the day to do god only knows what. I don’t ask. He doesn’t offer. After dinner, evenings are spent together in front of the fireplace, reading, talking, or in complete silence.

It’s strange to me that we can sit in each other’s presence for hours at a time without feeling the need to speak. Strange and wonderful, and comforting in a way I think we both need.

I catch him watching me often. I’ll look up from a book and his gaze will be on me, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes dark. Behind his eyes lurks a wild forest at nighttime, filled with dangerous creatures and hidden trap doors.

No matter how dark his gaze, it always burns with longing.

But he doesn’t touch me after that first night.

He keeps his promise not to pressure me like a sacred vow. We sleep in the same bed, often touching, always with his erection making itself known sooner or later, but he acts as if he’s unaware of it, keeping his hands and his dick to himself.

After a week of it, I’m dying.

It’s an undisputed truth that the flames of desire are fanned by being thwarted. That what we want, but can’t have, drives us mad. He warned, “I won’t ask again,” and by god, he makes good on that, until I’m climbing the walls with pent-up lust.

I don’t know if that was his plan or if he’s simply honoring his word, but lying next to his heat in the dark becomes a nightly torture.

On day eight, I break.

We’re in the kitchen. I’m sitting on a stool at the big black granite island, watching him slice bananas into my cereal. It’s a simple task, very domestic, but he’s shirtless and gorgeous and his hair is mussed from bed, and the urge to grab onto that hair while he has his face buried between my legs is an arrow through my heart.

Toying with my spoon, I say casually, “We’ll need condoms.”

Banana in one hand, knife in the other, he freezes. His gaze flashes up to mine.

“There aren’t any in the nightstands or the bathroom cabinets,” I continue lightly, as if I haven’t just been burned to cinders by his look. “I checked.”

He licks his lips. It makes my nipples harden.

Then he simply nods and turns his attention back to the banana.

I, meanwhile, have to grip the edge of the countertop so I don’t slide onto the floor in a puddle.

We eat our breakfast in silence so blistering hot I start to sweat. After he showers and dresses, he leaves the same way he has every day, with a kiss to my forehead at the door.

Right before he walks out, however, he lowers his head and says into my ear in a throaty voice, “You’re going to have to say please.”

He strolls away without a backward glance, leaving me equal parts steaming mad and just plain steaming.

I can’t study. So instead I pace like a lunatic, up and down the length of the library, back and forth through the living room, round and round the kitchen island, wringing my hands.

By the time he returns late in the afternoon, I’m a wreck.

He finds me on the living room sofa, my legs curled up underneath me, drinking a glass of red wine. It’s my second. The pleasant buzz it gives me also somehow makes him appear even sexier than usual, all hard jaw and hotness, his eyes burning coals.

He’s carrying a small brown bag.

He doesn’t greet me. I don’t greet him. Instead, we stare at each other like we’ve got a bet on who’ll blink first.

He sets the bag down on the coffee table, pushes it toward me, and straightens. He loosens his tie, watching me, waiting for me to say something.

Jesus. He’s not going to make this easy.

I set my wine glass on the coffee table and stand. “Are you hungry?”