“How did you get here so fast?”
Curse is facing away from me right now, staring out the open bathroom door. He’s bigger than when I last saw him, thirty now instead of eighteen. His six-foot-something frame, the breadth of his leather-clad shoulders, take up most of the doorway.
He shouldn’t have been here. As far as I know, he spends almost all his time in Canada. And unless I blacked out and lost hours of awareness after Marco was knocked unconscious, I don’t think I’m wrong about the fact that Curse was in the house, in the very room with me, less than five minutes after I called him. I was too stunned to question that.
Until now.
“Curse.” I turn off the tap, then say his name again, louder this time. There’s no way he doesn’t hear me. “Curse. What were you doing here?”
“I was in the neighbourhood,” he replies, finally turning back to me. He tears a towel from its hook with his free hand and tosses it onto my lap. I quickly scrub my toes, heels, and ankles. I’m glad he told me to wash up. I don’t want Marco’s blood on me anymore.
“In the neighbourhood,” I repeat incredulously, grabbing my phone and sliding down off the counter now that I’m dry. I make sure not to land on any of the bloody smears I’ve left on the tile.
His black gaze flicks down my body. There’s that same tightening around his eyes again. A moment later, he’s removed his jacket and tossed it over my shoulders. The scent of leather and him – my God, precisely the same as it was on that hoodie in Montreal – envelops me.
“You were in the neighbourhood for what?” I press.
“A wedding,” he replies.
He places the knife against the leather at my back.
And then, we disappear.
Chapter 5
Curse
The first thing I do when we get to my vehicle, hidden in the shadows of a nearby side-street, is retrieve the bag of clothes I’ve brought her. There’s a non-descript pair of black sweatpants and a matching sweater in there for her. I’ve got a winter coat for her too. It’s colder where we’re going than it is in New York. Thank fuck I thought to bring this shit. I can’t keep looking at her in her wedding lingerie. She’s even wearing the sparkly silver shoes from the ceremony, the only ones she had downstairs in Messina’s house.
“Change into these in the backseat,” I say, handing her the bag.
“Can’t change. I’ll just have to put these clothes on overtop,” she replies, snaking one foot out of its shoe and plunging it into a pant leg. “I can’t undo the fasteners at the back of all this to take it off.”
By “all this” she means the goddamn wet dream of an outfit she’s got on beneath my leather jacket. My cock is still throbbing like a bruise from when I was up against her in the bathroom.
How the hell did I not see this coming?
How the hell did I not see her coming?
She’s not the scrawny six-year-old anymore. She’s not the wide-eyed sixteen-year-old, either. She’s fucking luscious, with soft tits, slender hips, and creamy long legs that I cannot fucking stop imagining wrapped tightly around my thrusting hips.
I’ve always thought that Aurora Bianchi is beautiful. But beautiful in the way that a sunrise is, or the soaring architecture of a cathedral. She practically entered the realm of the celestial in my mind. Something sacred. Never sexual.
I’ve dreamed of her so many times. But it’s always her face, her voice – never her body. When I wake, I sometimes feel a slight ache in my chest.
But now the ache is between my legs.
I can count on one hand the number of women I’ve fucked. Actually, I can count it on two tattooed fingers, because that’s how many times it’s happened. Once when I was nineteen, once when I was twenty-one. Both times cold, detached, transactional. The quick scratch of an itch I almost never experience, let alone bother to give into.
When I vowed to take Aurora from Messina after her engagement was announced two years ago, it wasn’t because I wanted to have her for myself. At least, not physically. The idea of fucking her would have been as unnatural to me then as the thought of letting someone like Marco Messina fuck her instead. I guess I thought I would be some kind of neutered guard dog for her. The loyal, dickless monster she brought to heel with nothing but the blink of her blue eyes and a wave of her shimmering hand.
“No hood.” She hands me my jacket. She’s got the sweater on now. Her pale fingers brush the neckline. “Last time, there was a hood.”
Last time. In Montreal.
I wonder what she ever did with that hoodie.
Probably chucked it right in the trash after she locked the door against me.
