I let a beat pass. Two. My lashes lower just slightly as I plant the toe of my sneaker on the bench between his spread knees without touching him and use it to perch back against the sink’s edge. I look down at him.
“Would that break Gage’s heart?” I sink my teeth into my bottom lip for just a second before releasing it. “Do you think he’d fight for me, Bishop?”
He trails his gaze along my bare leg before his eyes lift to mine. His mouth curves—just barely, just enough.
“You got daddy issues, Bellamy?”
A slow grin pulls at my mouth and I tilt my knee left, then right. “Are you auditioning, Bishop?”
Something in his expression shifts. The curve dies. His eyes slink over me like a silken feather. “Not even if you paid me.”
I lift a shoulder and let it fall. “Daddy is a state of mind, Bishop. And Rafe gives me?—”
“No one’s giving you shit once my brothers find out you’re fucking random assholes at The Pit.” Anticipation lights up in his face when he says it.
Something slots into place.
I let my expression go soft. Let my teeth catch my bottom lip. Let my eyes do the rest. “What do you want, Bishop?”
His hands close into fists against his thighs. “Leave Hollow Beach.” His voice is flat. “Don’t come back.”
I let my leg sway again and something close to a laugh moves through me. “C’mon, that’s not what you really want. Besides, that defeats the whole purpose.”
“Alright. Option one: leave town. Option two: on your knees.” He nods a few times, his gaze intense as he flashes his teeth with a grin.
The words hang between us.
It’s a taunt and a bullshit test. He expects me to snap back, to storm off so he’s justified in whatever conclusion he’s already come to about me and his brothers.
I can see it in the way his shoulders have already rolled back slightly, weight redistributed, chin lifted—the posture of a man who has already decided how this ends.
But I live to surprise this man.
I hold his eyes as I lower my foot to the ground and so very slowly sink to my knees. Just enough to change the angle between us, to shift the balance, to make him remember who the fuck I am. Because this is a position of power, and he just handed it to me.
Something moves across his face before he can stop it—a sharp pull at the corner of his jaw, a single blink that comes just a half-second too late. His hand closes into a fist against his thigh.
“Come on, sweetheart.” His voice has dropped, the grin gone now, replaced with something quieter and more dangerous. “Now crawl to me.”
NINETEEN
BELLAMY
My palms find the floor.I close the distance between us—not all of it, just enough. “Like this?”
The inhale he pulls is audible.
For half a second, neither of us moves. Then I look up at him.
His jaw has gone tight. The muscle in his throat moves once. His eyes have dropped to somewhere they shouldn’t be, and when they drag back up to mine, there’s something in them that wasn’t there a moment ago—something raw and immediate that he hasn’t had time to file down yet, something that looks almost like want stripped of its armor before he can get it back under glass.
There it is.
I let the moment breathe. Then I push back to my feet—smooth enough that it feels like a choice rather than a withdrawal—and turn on the ball of my foot. I brace my hands against the edge of the sink and lean forward, letting the cool porcelain press into my palms. The overhead light catches in the mirror, throwing our reflections back—his seated behind me, mine angled forward, the line of my body curved in a way that leaves very little open to interpretation.
I meet his eyes through the glass. “I thought this was how you like it?”
I hold his gaze for a beat, then let my head tilt and arch into it, slow and deliberate, until the space between us narrows to almost nothing. “Or is this just how you like me?”
