PUSH: Ultra Alpha MMA Badboy Mafia Romance (Southside Brotherhood Book 2) (11 page)

She’d tied her hair back in a long, loose tail, her lips shined with pink. The green of her eyes had been shocked to discover him staring at her through the the French doors of the music room.

Look at me. I’m right here.

Flynn dared to let some of her light into him that day.

Having battled the urge longer than he could stand, fueled with the knowledge that his father was tucked away in some other woman’s bed, Flynn gave into his overwhelming need to be close to her.

As he stood staring at her from the doorway, not entirely sure if he wanted to be seen or not, she’d stopped playing.

“Why don’t you just come in?” Lilly asked, lifting her hands from the ivory keys.

“Because I might not want to leave.” He smiled even as something else raged behind his friendly facade.

“That’s a chance I’ll take.”

The room filled with the soft notes and seductive lilt of her voice as she resumed her melody. Flynn sat in the chair next to the piano, watching as her fingers moved, wondering what it would be like to entwine his fingers into hers.

Fuck. She’s like a damn torture chamber. Watching her, smelling her, knowing why she’s here.

“You’ve been following me. I think we shouldn’t be friends.” Her voice tinted with playful banter.

“Why’s that?” Flynn’s eyes traced around her face, falling to see where her pulse softly moved in her neck, thinking of his mouth there, marking her.

She looked out the window, down the lawn toward the lake before her eyes dared to make a lazy trail up to meet his.

“Because.” Her face lit in a smile. “You’re going to be my stepson. You won’t respect me if we’re friends. What if I have to turn you over my knee one of these days?”

“I’d like to see that. I’m pretty sure, if anything like that ever happens, you’ll be the one with the upturned ass. If I would be so lucky.”

Their dance turned the corner away from playful as Flynn watched her eyes darken with his words. Before that day, neither of them spoke of anything more. They were merely wayward, both caught in a play of irony and backward traditions that found some familiar solace with one another.

“Really? Is that how you think of me?”

“I think of you in a lot of ways.” Flynn pushed his toe over the line and watched her face. “Don’t fucking tell me that’s a surprise.”

The months of discovery, the hours he’d listened to her tell him things about her life he wished he could forget, or at least let her forget, put them in a strange place. They were intimate strangers. Neither of them knew what it was like to trust another human, to bond or allow someone else into their dark little worlds.

“It’s not. But, why? I mean, what are we doing?” Lilly asked, her voice tinted with resignation.

“You told me you don’t feel anything for people. Is that still true? That you don’t feel anything?”

“Don’t—” She shook her head. “There is no use having this conversation, so why make things harder? We should have never tried to be friends. It’s only going to end badly, and it will end. So, let’s just call it what it was, a momentary weakness. A little glimpse into what it would be like to live in a normal world where people meet, hang out, go for coffee, quarrel about which movie to see or which club to go to. Where people tell each other things and then years from now, they remember and laugh about all the memories. That will never be us.”

“I used to think that. Now I’m not so fucking sure. I think some people get thrown together and it’s up to them to decide if they’re brave enough to figure out why. Why some people are different. You’re different. To me.”

Lilly blinked and looked up at the ceiling then down at her fingers, which hovered over the piano keys.

“How was your fight?” she asked.

She raised her fingers and fiddled with the V-neck of her buttercup yellow sweater. Flynn couldn’t tear his eyes away from the way her body pressed her curves into a crease that started just above where her fingers pulled the soft fabric upward.

“Is that your real question?” Flynn quickly discovered her habit of a drastic subject change when they were getting close to something with too much feeling.

“Yes. It is. That is what you do, right? Fight for a living? I want to know, how was your day? It must be a strange feeling to hit someone else for money.”

“Not any more strange than a lot of the other things people do for money. Around here, fighting is pretty tame.”

“I’m beginning to understand. Such a strange world. So much money and no one is happy. I look around at all the people I’ve met since I got here, and I can’t say I’ve really met anyone who seems happy. It’s like all this money only gives them a clearer sense of what they lack. It should bring them such liberty. Instead, it only magnifies everything they don’t have. It’s so strange.”

“At least what I do, we’re both evenly matched, and it’s a fair fight.”

“So, did you win?” Lilly spun on the bench, crossing and uncrossing her ankles as Flynn fought the ever growing tension under the zipper in his jeans.

He rubbed his fingers over his lips, trying to wipe away the smile she seemed to light on his face whenever she was close.

“Yep. I won. That’s kind of my thing. Winning.”

Lilly let out a laugh that sounded like music. “Arrogant, much?”

The blush pink of her lips came together in a side twist of a smile that hit Flynn in the gut. He’d never encountered someone with a devilish cuteness and such unconscious sex appeal.

At every turn, she became more irresistible. More his.

The tension in the air seemed to vibrate. Flynn’s fingers twitched, the demands that were being communicated from his suddenly very alive dick making conversing more and more difficult.

How can someone spin my fucking world apart in a matter of months when I’ve barely touched her?

“I just thought it would be so different. But it’s not and, in a way, it’s a relief. More familiar. What’s a girl like me going to do with some fairy tale anyway? What did I think? I would come here and be Cinderella? I’m smarter than that. Set myself up for disappointment. Stupid.”

Flynn’s legs couldn’t keep him seated for another second. Her scent clutched around his throat and the sparkle in her eyes looked like glitter in some snow globe of an Irish folk tale.

But, is was more. It was her fragile, broken soul. It called to him, begging him for something she would never be able to ask for.

“Did you ever think you’re setting yourself up for something other than what you thought you would get? I’ve never given half a fuck about anyone. My mom left me when I was three days old in a laundry basket outside the fucking gates at the street.” Flynn jerked his head toward the window, his hair flinging back and forth with the movement. “You know how I know that? Because they never let me fucking forget it. I’m the piece of trash they took in. No one taught me anything but survival and how to fuck over anyone weaker than you and take what they have. But,
fuck—
come on, I see you, and that slate is clean. Like all the things I’ve done, all the shit I’ve seen was someone else. When I look at you, I’m like a book I’ve never read before. Words I’ve never used to explain what I’m feeling keeping coming up over and over. Come on, you have to think there’s something here. Not what you thought you came for but something more.”

“Maybe that makes you more stupid than me.” Lilly slid off toward the other side of the piano bench and started toward the door.

“Hey, what the fuck. Stop.” Flynn lurched three steps to catch her arm.

Lilly flipped her head around, and her eyes narrowed. She could turn so quickly from the girl who believed in something more to the girl who knew there were no happy endings. Not in this life; not for them.

Flynn didn’t want more words. He watched as her lips opened, and a breath left and he wanted to breathe her in, to consume her and trample out the dark corners and fill them with something neither of them knew of before.

Her tongue wet her lower lip as the flash of her green eyes caught his.

Flynn reacted, the same as when a fighter sees his opening, and you have to decide in a fraction of a second what your next move will be. The move that either leaves you lying in a puddle of your own piss or gets your hand raised in victory.

Lilly jerked her arm as Flynn’s fingers felt the warmth of her chin. He danced her back until the wall stopped his forward motion.

He sprung into her with his mouth. His thigh pressed instinctively between her legs as his lips clasped onto hers. He tasted the softness, the claim of his ownership that knocked in his head for the last three months. Something unlike any connection he’d felt before exploded as he pushed against her lips with his.

Lilly struggled, pulling her arm as Flynn pressed it above her head and into the wall.

God damn, I’m hard as damn nails. I’d crawl through broken glass to feel her, taste her. How’d this become me? How’d I become a bitch? A girl I barely know has my number, and all I can think of is how to save her. Claim her as mine. Get her out of this fucked up life.

The kiss came like a storm. Lilly’s eyes narrowed as Flynn drew down on her like a lightning bolt. Her lips hardened for a moment as she whimpered. He could taste her already, blood boiling and rushing downward.

He could feel the softness of her chest against him, his leg pushing up into her heat as she dug her fingernails into his shoulder with her free hand. Every thought in his head screwed up into this moment in a mantra of desperation.

Come, Lilly, I’m right fucking here. Don’t fight me. Don’t fight us. It’s new, it’s scary, but I’m right here, just come to me. I’ve never felt shit like this before either. Never. We’ll figure it out together.

Warmth came up from his feet, jetted down from his head, all meeting in a riot of spinning and gut wrenching painful need.

She was a vortex, pulling him in and nothing and no one understood what it felt like to want to lord over someone so completely. To take her mind, body and soul until the world faded away and no one could cause her pain ever again.

Lilly whimpered into his mouth as she raked her nails down from his shoulder.

Flynn took the pain, pressed harder and his tongue traced around her closed lips until the instant he felt her body switch. She dissolved against the wall and into him. His leg between hers held her up as his tongue opened her mouth and found home.

He couldn’t be sure because his brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen, but he heard a moan, and Flynn was pretty sure it was his.

I’ve never made that fucking noise before. From a fucking kiss? It’s just a kiss, right? Then why does it feel like the god damn Fourth of July inside my head? Both my heads.

She tasted like sunshine and whiskey. Hot and sweet with a burn that started to generate inside him like the damn geyser at Yellowstone. Flynn could feel it building, something churning so far below and knowing whatever she lit inside of him could never be put out. Not now. Not ever.

Lilly’s hand clutched at the solid muscle of his forearm that steadied him against the wall. Flynn had no control when he felt the shift of her body, the undeniable movement of her hips opening then hitching and pressing down on the rock of his thigh. He returned the favor and guided his leg higher, harder, until he felt the change in temperature.

She radiated heat, and the world outside this moment no longer existed.

Never had anything affected him so much. Not once in his shitty life had he felt the need to make love to a woman for the sake of showing her how much he needed her. How much he felt for her. How much he wanted to bring her pleasure before his own.

Fuck, please, don’t take her away. Don’t fuck this up. I have to figure out a way. I have to.

He teased her tongue with his, controlling the depth and heat of the kiss as he drew in the warmth of her breath and the way her body flexed and shifted against him. All the days Flynn stared at her without her knowing, wondering how she would taste, all came together in a moment that drove him to the edge of madness.

She made soft, halting gasps with her breath; every sound sang out like a siren. Every noise only made him more crazed, his brain imagining taking every part of her into him. Tasting and fucking and giving her everything she deserved in one simultaneous moment.

Flynn drew back, his overwhelming need to look into her eyes and see what was there. He gave her an inch, both of them breathing like they were running from something dark and frightening, eyes locked to see if the other had the answer to getting away from what chased them.

He dropped his hands from where they held hers against the wall to take her face. To touch her and be sure she was real. He wanted to sink into her right there, a primal need more than any he’d felt before. His dick not just wanting the fuck, but wanting to show her pleasure, to put her before himself. An emotion that was completely unfamiliar.

“What?” Flynn lowered his face to look her into the eye as she turned her head away.

“You know what.” Lilly said.

“I only know one fucking thing right now. You belong to me. I can’t fucking explain it, but don’t fuck with me. Look at me. Tell me you’re here with me. Right fucking now, don’t think about what came before or what comes after. In this fucking second, are you here?”