Page 42 of Chains of Recompense
Then my mind is bringing forth fresh torture as it offers up a vision of Aisling—a sultry young redhead moving to the music of my family’s club as she tempts me from the dance floor.
She’s not just beautiful—she’s kinetic, alive, electric.
She laughs like she owns the night.
Drinks whiskey neat as she sways to the beat.
Looks at me like she sees right through my cocky façade, through all the games I like to play to keep people at an arm’s length.
“Do you always think so much?” she asked, leaning into me as I stepped close behind her, wrapping an arm around her trim waist. Her dress skimming bare thighs nearly killed me with distraction.
“Occupational hazard,” I said.
“What occupation?” she teased. “Brooding?”
I remember smiling, actually smiling—not the sharp, predatory smirk I’ve learned to use as a shield, but something real.
And when I kissed her in the penthouse suite—pressing her naked body against the glass windows, fingers tangled in herhair, whiskey on her lips, city lights flickering below—something inside me swore she would matter to me.
I didn’t know how. I just knew.
I force the memory back because it cuts too close.
Cuts into the man I was before the world turned septic.
Before I learned the truth about Aisling.
The water keeps pounding over me as if it could drown out my memories. It can’t.
Because right on its heels comes another one.
This one of Genevieve as she stood at the railing of a hotel balcony in Barcelona on our honeymoon, her curls blowing wildly in the sea air.
Blue dress rippling, barefoot, laughing.
“You’re not as scary as you want people to think,” she said, resting her head on my shoulder. “You just have a dangerously sharp tongue.”
“I don’t recall your having a problem with how I use it on you,” I growled playfully, savoring the way she blushed.
We’d been married six months when she died. Six months. Just a glimpse of a life that was cut out from under us before it even had time to take shape.
Sometimes, I still wake up thinking she’s beside me.
Other times, I startle awake to the memory of her choking on her own blood.
I tip my head back under the spray, wishing the water could wash away the ghosts. But it can’t because the present is just as brutal.
This morning, my first waking thought was not of my grief.
It was of my want, my desire, my body hardening to the feel of Aisling’s curves molding against me perfectly, my hand unconsciously tightening on her supple breast.
For one heart-stopping second, I thought she might wake up to find the possessive way I held her, the blatant, unconscious craving I have for her body, despite everything that’s happened.
And it was excruciating to extricate myself without rousing her.
I had to sit there afterward, heart pounding, dick throbbing, furious—mourning and aroused at the same time—like some depraved animal.
I stayed in bed only long enough to get my traitorous cock under control.
