Page 44 of Black Sheep

“No, baby, we’re just getting started. Take off your clothes.”

Her immediate loss of color tells me everything I need to know. “There’s no need.”

“There’s every need. If I’m going to take what you’re offering…if I’m going to fuck you tonight, then you’ll need to be naked. Or were you hoping I’d settle for watching you finger your pussy again?”

She shakes her head. “I…we don’t…I can take care of you.”

Several dozen images of just how she can take care of me whizz through my mind, even as I shake my head. “For you to achieve that to my satisfaction, you need to take off what you’re wearing.”

She wants to refuse. A flare of her nostrils ends with a twitch of a grimace a second before her right hand grips the panties, yanks them down her legs, and steps to one side.

For the third time in less than a week, Cleo McCarthy’s pussy is bared to me. Except, this time, the ferocity of my arousal is tempered by what she’s hiding beneath her teddy. What I can already see beneath the black lace edging up her left side.

Three purple bruises, edged in sickly yellow along one side of her ribcage. Bile and self-loathing rise along with blinding fury. “Motherfucker!”

Her teeth clench, whether from pain or in reaction to my rage, I don’t wait to find out.

Striding forward, I knock her hand out of the way, grab hold of the material between her breasts in both hands, and rip it in half.

Beauty. Indescribable beauty.

And ugliness.

I shudder at the sight of her. I shudder at the thought of what I did to her a few minutes ago on the floor, while she was wearing this suffering on her skin. “Jesus Christ, Cleo.”

“It looks worse than it is,” she blurts.

She stays for the shits and giggles.

The idea that she’s defending him makes every cell scream with homicidal fury. “Is that why you can’t lift your fucking arm or a take a full breath? I’m an ex-soldier, trained in combat and other types of shit you probably don’t want to know about. I sure as fuck know what a fist or a foot to the ribs looks like.”

Her lips compress, and her gaze slides away, and once again I’m left with trying to understand the incomprehensible. “Why? What the fuck is so special about a middle-aged thug that you can’t walk away from?”

Because that is what he is.

Finnan Rutherford was a common thug long before he bought a plane ticket and left the rough streets of Belfast behind him. Bespoke suits and a thousand fancy dinners haven’t changed his DNA. “Does he have something on you?”

“Haven’t we had this conversation before?” Her stillness and the boredom she tries to inject into her voice is telling.

“He does, doesn’t he?”

“Axel—”

“What is it?”

She pales. Her gaze flicks away then defiantly returns to mine. “It’s none of your business.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. All it’ll take is a phone call to him to make it my business.”

Fear skitters through her eyes, but her headshake is definitive. “He won’t tell you. What he wants from you has nothing to do with him and me.”

All it’ll take is a phone call to call her bluff, but I don’t trust myself to interact with Finnan right now. My repository for fucked-up bullshit is overflowing, and the sight of her battered body is too much to handle. I drag the tattered lingerie from her body with one hand while the other reaches for my phone.

B answers on the first ring. “Send up a first aid kit. Now, please.” I hang up.

“There’s no need—”

“I require your silence right now, Cleo. Look at me and nod your agreement to shutting the fuck up.”

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