And the best part? When my breathing settled and reality oozed back in, and I realized just how kinky we’d gotten and I felt like some sort of freak...he took me into his arms and whispered in my ear that I was his best ever. And suddenly, I didn’t feel like a freak at all.
Afterwards, we lay looking up at the ceiling. “Sean?” I said.
“Mmm?”
“We can’t burn this place down.” I sat up and rolled over to face him, propping myself up on my forearms. “When we move out, we can’t burn it down.”
I expected him to argue, but he looked around and slowly nodded. “Yeah. I know.” Then, when he saw my shocked expression. “What?” His eyes burned right into me. “You think I can’t appreciate beautiful things?”
He slid an arm under my body and pulled me close. I snuggled into his chest.
“I like it,” he said. “Reminds me of the places my mum and dad used to take me. Used to love those places.” He ran his eyes over me, following the curve of my breast and the swell of my hip. Then he smiled a tiny, secret smile. “‘Specially the statues.”
I blinked, wondering what the hell that was all about. “So we’ll find some other way?” I said.
He let out a long sigh and ran his hand through his hair. “Yeah. Christ knows how. But yeah.” And then he clutched me around the waist with those big hands of his and hoisted me up in the air, making me yelp, before bringing me down to straddle him, facing his feet. Then he shuffled us down the bed until we were sitting on the end of it. He sat up, his chest pressed against my back, and kissed my neck...and then he nodded towards the mirror.
I looked up into its silvered surface and gasped. We were framed by the dark wood posts of the four poster. The green dress was up around my hips and pushed down below my breasts. My hair was falling down over my naked shoulders. I really did look like a ravished princess.
And behind me, the man who’d done it: massive and tanned, black-haired and with those cobalt-blue eyes gleaming in the dim light. He wrapped his hands around my waist and lifted…
...and lowered me slowly. I drew in my breath as I felt the head of his cock nudge at the lips of my sex. “Ready for more?” he murmured, kissing my shoulder.
I nodded. And we spent the next panting, moaning, shuddering hour watching a princess and an Irish rogue in the mirror.
Eventually, way past noon, when we were both limp and exhausted, he left me in the bed and borrowed my car to go for food. He returned with pepperoni pizza and we devoured it sitting on the bed. I insisted on taking off the dress, not wanting to get grease on it. But as soon as he saw me naked...well, we very nearly didn’t get to the pizza at all.
Afterward, we lay there, sated in every possible way. It was only mid-afternoon, but with the cardboard over the windows and the lights off, the room quickly darkened as the sun moved to the other side of the house. “How’d they die?” Sean asked.
I was a little thrown. It wasn’t that I minded him asking, it was the shock of him asking anything at all. He’d avoided asking about my past and I’d always assumed it was because he thought it was unfair to ask when he was so closed off himself.So does this mean…?“Car crash,” I said. “Both at the same time.”
He didn’t say anything, didn’t use words likesorrythat would have felt inadequate. He just tightened his arms around me, his chest warm against my back, and that was enough. “Sometimes, I think it was better that way,” I said. “I mean, I didn’t have to watch one of them missing the other. But worse, too. One morning they were there and then...they never came home.”
He was silent for a long time, just holding me. I sensed that he was working up to something. Then, “I was born in Ireland. The north.” Each word came slowly and with great difficulty, as if it was being dug up from deep underground. “Irish dad but American mum. I’ve got lots of brothers. We were happy, mostly. Moved around between Ireland and America. And then...something happened.”
He stopped, but I could feel his chest straining with the pain. I pressed my body back against him, wondering if that was going to be it. I wanted to tell him how glad I was he’d finally told me something, that it was fine to leave it there for now if he wanted to. I opened my mouth to speak—
“My dad killed my mum,” he said.
49
LOUISE
I laythere trying to process. I had no words. Even losing my own parents hadn’t in any way prepared me for something likethis.I wanted to turn around and hug him, but I was worried he might not be able to get the words out, if he had to look me in the face. So I reached back with one hand and stroked his side instead, hoping I could transmit how sorry I was through my touch.
“It’s complicated,” he said.
I nodded. There was so much pain in his voice, I was tearing up myself.
“My dad isn’t the bad guy,” he told me.
I nodded again
“My dad used to go off on these jobs, sometimes for months, and he’d leave us at home with mum. Usually in Ireland but one summer, it was in America.” He swallowed. “At the end of the summer, he comes back….”
I closed my eyes, knowing what would come next. The lover. The discovery. The enraged husband, a crime of passion.My dad isn’t the bad guy.But I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Sean swallowed. “He came back to find...she’d got mixed up with a cult.”
