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I nod in understanding and pull her nude frame against my clothed one.
“I feel like I’ve been living under a rock my whole life. Like my mother placed me in this protective bubble and now it’s burst and everything feels so much… bigger,” she says softly with her forehead pressed into my chest. Her hands tighten against the sides of my shirt as she clings to me.
“I’m here, baby, for as long as you’ll have me,” I promise again, rubbing my hands up and down her back softly.
She nudges me back into the spacious walk-in shower, and I don't think twice about objecting. Not when her lips find mine, not when the water clings to my skin. She quickly removes myshirt, and I take off my shoesas she leads the way beneath the veil of water. Her hands find my pants and belt and push them down till the water runs clear of all the soot and ash.
It’s cathartic in a way I’ve never experienced before.
I pull her into my arms,and she pushes my wet hair away from my forehead. I spin around and pin her against the wall as her legs encircle my waist. I can’t stop kissing her. I don't think I can ever get enough of her.
“If we do this, Cristiano, I want to do this together,” Maeve says against my lips.
“I promise,” I agree, as my cock finds her entrance. I slide inside of her as if I’m returning home. She moans softly against my lips and her fingers rake down my scalp.
“I mean it,” she gasps and struggles to keep her voice steady enough to speak as I fuck her slowly, deeply. “I want to be included. This revenge is just as much mine as it is yours.”
I nod again, my teeth closing over her full bottom lip.
“Promise me… Cristiano.”
My name is a prayer on her lips.
“I promise,” I groan. “Together.”
Maeve’s forehead falls to mine and her eyes drift shut. “Harder,” she requests. “Please, I want you to fuck me until I forget. Please. I can’t stop hearing the screaming…”
She doesn’t have to tell me twice.
I fuck her until she’s begging me to stop. I take her against the wall of the shower, the small seat, and on the damned floor. I fuck her until her legs no longer support her weight and she sits curled in my arms on the floor of the shower as I wash her hair.Then, when I carry her, towel-dried, into our bed. I roll her on her stomach and fuck her to sleep.
Letting her be involved in revenge goes against everything that I’d sworn to myself. I can’t put her directly in harm’s way. She has no training, she’s never been in the field. Maeve’s never even fired a gun before. How can I put her up against trained mobsters? Is her getting revenge worth possibly losing her? Can I really make that choice?
As I lay there staring at the ceiling of our room, I don’t know if I can keep my promise, after all.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
MAEVE
Days pass uneventfully.
It feels like a terrible letdown. How sad is it that suddenly,notbeing blown up or attempted to be kidnapped somehow feels anticlimactic? I know that Cristiano’s working on it. I know that he’s trying to get as much accurate information as he can before moving forward.
He’s been out of the house more often than he’s been home.
In the morning, I wake up and he’s gone. He’s rarely back before I go to bed in the evening. Ada keeps saying she’s never seen him work this hard and I don’t know how to take it. I want to assume that it means good things. I want to assume that he’s getting his men closer and closer to a lead, but maybe he’s finding nothing at all.
I need him to talk to me.
I figured he was going to start taking me with him. Or, at the very least, updateme on the developments. Instead, he's left me holed up in this place, waiting for anything to happen, day in and day out. I keep toiling away. I can’t draw. I can’t sew. I have no idea what to do with myself since all I can think about ishim.
Callum Sullivan is my father.
We found my birth certificate. He’s found more information on my mom’s childhood and even some pictures of the pair of them together from the short period they were married. Not that they ever got divorced.
Cristiano won’t tell me if he knows where Callum is or what he is up to with Doyle. I know that he’s Hugh’s right-hand man now, so clearly it’s been a very important secret for them all to keep. Still, the only details I’m being fed all seem rather superficial; nothing that will help me know where he is or what he’s going to be doing.
I understand he’s trying to keep me safe. But there are limits. Cristiano’s getting dangerously close to breaking his promise to me. I have to show him that I can handle it. I have to prove to him that I’m not that vulnerable. I can do this. He just has to trust me.
