Page 42 of Ruthless Savior
I’m still sitting there at two in the morning, staring at financial reports I'm not actually reading, trying to forget the way Leila’s mouth felt when I kissed her. The soft sound she made when I pulled her closer. The way her hand trembled against my chest.
Fuck.
I drain the whiskey in my glass and pour another. This is exactly what I can't let happen. Leila isn't some woman I picked up in a bar, or someone who understands the rules of a casual encounter with a man like me. She's under my protection, dependent on me for her mother's care, trapped in my house with nowhere to go. The power dynamic alone makes any involvement between us unconscionable.
There’s no way that she wouldn’t feel as if she needed to do whatever I asked in order to keep the money flowing for her mother’s care. No way that, if I slept with her, she’d feel like she could say no at any point without endangering that. I want her badly, but the thought that she might fuck me just to keep that money from damming up makes me go soft instantly.
I rejected her offer of a deal: her virginity for my help. I offered it freely instead. I can’t have her thinking that’s changedat all. And the situation makes it so that, no matter how clearly I might tell her that she’s free to say no, I can’t trust that she’d believe me.
And there’s the fact that, only two weeks ago, I buried my wife.
I pinch the bridge of my nose, dropping the file in my hands onto my desk. I didn’t love Siobhan. I didn’t desire her. But all the same, two weeks ago I was married, and now I’m kissing a woman fifteen years younger than me and under my protection in my library.
That’s not the kind of man I want to be.
I should be focusing on Rocco. On getting vengeance for Siobhan and making sure that what happened to Leila doesn’t happen to anyone else. That should be my focus, not how hard Leila makes my cock every time she walks into a room.
But I can’t stop thinking about the way she whispered that she liked what I did to Neil. About the way she said she wanted me to corrupt her.
My cock strains against my zipper, and I groan, closing my eyes at the insistent throb that becomes painful at the memory of Leila’s sweet voice whispering those words.
Five minutes later, I’ve come for a second time, and I still can’t get my erection to entirely go away. I pour myself another drink and stare at the paperwork on my desk, willing it to cool my apparently boundless libido.
I take another sip of whiskey and force myself to focus on the numbers in front of me. Revenue from the docks, protection payments from local businesses, the take from our various enterprises. It’s all filtered through Annie's intricate web of shell companies and offshore accounts, cleaned and legitimized before it ever touches our books. She’s a genius with it, and I don’t know how she manages it all so thoroughly. I wouldn’t know how to handle it all. Math was never my strong suit.
My phone buzzes, and I see a text from Finn.Package delivered. No complications.
The "package" is my warning to Rocco De Luca. Neil’s severed head on dry ice, on his doorstep. A warning that I know he’ll take as an escalation rather than a reason to stand down. But I don’t care. I’m going to kill him, and I want him afraid when I do. I want him to wonder what, exactly, I have planned for him.
Regardless of how I felt about Siobhan, he killed her. That can’t go unpunished. And he killed our child with her, a loss that Idomourn. That I try desperately not to think about, because it makes me feel insane. It makes me want to burn the entire De Luca empire to the ground, not just leave it for someone else to take over after Rocco is dead.
He killed my child. My heir. A child that I wanted, regardless of how things stood between Siobhan and me. That child was the entire reason I ever touched her at all.
Guilt floods me again, cooling my arousal at last. I shouldn’t be sitting here wanting someone else while my wife and unborn child are barely cold in the ground. And if I let myself complicate things with Leila, I’ll be once again at fault if something happens to her that I could have prevented by controlling how I feel. By paying attention to what matters instead of what I want.
At six in the morning, I’m still awake, now sipping coffee instead of whiskey, although I’m considering adding some. There’s a knock at my office door, and after a moment, Annie steps in.
"You look like shit," she says by way of greeting, settling into the chair across from my desk.
“Thanks,” I say dryly, and I see her eyes flick to the whiskey bottle that I forgot to put back on the sideboard.
“Have you been at it all night?” She peers at me. “Ronan, what did you do?”
I say nothing, and she frowns at me. “Is it Leila?”
When I still say nothing, she shakes her head. “Did you touch her? Kiss her?”
“How did you know?” I ask sarcastically, and she rolls her eyes.
"Because I know that look. It's the same look you had when you were sixteen and convinced you were going to hell for touching Mary O'Brien's breast at the church social.”
I groan. "That's different."
“Sure it is.” Annie’s accent thickens, the way it does when she’s annoyed. “Just like it was different when you were broody and angry all the time because Papa made you marry Siobhan. You’ve got a way of torturing yourself over women, Ronan. And I can see it happening again. Except she’s not one of us.”
I narrow my eyes at her. “You’re usually nicer than this.”
“Sure. I’m a real pushover. Your late wife showed me that. But I’m also your sister. And I don’t want to see you getting hurt. I don’t want you blaming yourself if she gets hurt, either. I get why you brought her home, but she’s a lost puppy. You can’t get close to her. It’s not smart, Ronan.”
