Wait…when he said ride, did he actually mean a PONY ride?
Does he think she’s six years old?
We park in a dirt lot. Quinn exits the car and helps Lili from the passenger seat. Then he leads her away by the hand. He doesn’t look back.
When the guards pull up, I’ve already jumped out and slammed the door behind me.
Luigi, the driver, rolls down his window. He makes a questioning gesture with his hand.
“Who fucking knows?” I say, aggravated. “Maybe the idiot wants a cotton candy.”
I hurry to follow the receding figures of Lili and Quinn as they head toward the ticket booth. I catch up with them just as they’re going through the main gate.
“Ma’am! Ma’am, you need a ticket!”
Ignoring the pimply young man calling out to me from the booth, I follow behind Quinn and Lili as he leads her through the small crowd. She glances over her shoulder in a panic, looking for me. When she sees me marching behind her with my executioner’s face on, she looks relieved.
I almost break an ankle trying to keep up with them. He’s got long legs and is making good use of them, striding through the crowd with purpose as he drags Lili along. I’m starting to think he’s going to march us around in circles until one of us drops from exhaustion when he suddenly veers left, toward the carousel.
What on earth…？
There are about twenty people standing in line. Quinn pushes past all of them, shoves a ticket to the gawking girl at the gate, and walks straight over to the slowly spinning carousel.
He picks Lili up by the waist and hoists her onto the platform.
She spins away from him, looking utterly confused.
I gasp and lunge forward, pushing past people until I reach the gate. The ticket girl is about to ask me for my ticket, but takes one look at my face and shrinks back.
Quinn turns just as I reach him.
I shout, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
He grabs me around the waist with one arm and yanks me roughly against his body.
His big, hard, unyieldingly masculine body.
For a long, breathless beat, he stares down at my face. His brows are knit. His eyes are dark. His full lips are pressed into a narrow, angry line. When his gaze drops to my mouth, a muscle in his jaw clenches.
Then he meets my eyes again and growls, “Whatever the fuck I want, viper.”
He leaps onto the moving platform, taking me with him.
A scream catches in my throat.
He grabs a bar on the edge of the platform, swings me around, and sets me on my feet, then releases me abruptly. Off balance in my heels on the uneven, moving metal platform, I stagger, flailing for the nearest stupid colorful carousel horse moving lazily up and down on its pole.
I throw my arms around its neck and hang on.
Quinn glares at me.
I glare right back.
Then he stalks off through the field of undulating carousel ponies while I shout curses in Italian that the brassy calliope music does nothing to drown out.
I kick off my heels and follow him.
It’s a Herculean task. He appears to have zero problem navigating a crowd of people riding moving fiberglass animals on a spinning disc, while I’m slipping and sliding all over the place, bumping into everyone and starting to feel sick.
When I finally catch up to him, he’s lifting Lili onto a purple-and-gold pony, holding her carefully, but managing her weight easily, as if she’s a doll.
She sits astride the pony, grasps the gold pole coming out if its neck, and looks at Quinn with wide eyes.
I’m about to drive a fist into his kidney when she smiles.
Thank God. She’s not afraid.
I stand one pony away, watching them in relief, until he turns his gaze to me and it sharpens.
When he steps toward me, I know exactly what he has in mind.
“Don’t you dare,” I warn as he approaches. “I mean it, Quinn! I am not getting up on this thing!”
But of course I am.
Because he wants me to.
He picks me up by the waist and lifts me onto the horse so I’m sitting on it sidesaddle, clinging to his broad shoulders, my bare legs and feet dangling helplessly as I stare down at him.
He gazes up at me, his hands still gripped tightly around my waist.
The horse drifts down on its pole. Quinn’s hands drift up from my waist to my rib cage.
Another inch and those huge hands will be cupped around my breasts.
I suck in a breath. My nipples tighten. My entire body erupts into flames. Our eyes lock, and suddenly, the carousel, the music, and everything around us disappears. It’s as if nobody else in the world exists but the two of us.
The two of us and my aching vagina, which just now arose from the dead to start howling with need.
For him.
This awful, arrogant Irishman.
Who’s betrothed to my beloved niece.
Who’s madly in love with the pool boy.
I understand with chilling clarity in that moment that none of this is going to end well.
9
Spider
The viper stares at me with her red lips parted and her mermaid eyes wide, her dark hair falling around her face and her lush tits straining for release from the deep V neckline of her dress as she clings to my shoulders.
The hem of her dress has ridden up, exposing her bare thighs.
Thighs I want to kiss, bite, and bury my face between.
Right here on this fucking carousel. Right now, I want to make this fiery, dangerous woman come with my mouth. I want to hear her moan my name and feel her pull my hair as I finger fuck her and lick her clit until she’s screaming.
Then I want to fuck her, deep and hard.
Heat rushes to my dick. It throbs, stiffening. I almost groan with need.
I knew I shouldn’t have come back to New York.
I should’ve stayed in Boston until the wedding, then moved Lili into my home and avoided her lethal, luscious aunt for the rest of my bloody life.
But it’s like my dick has become one of those divining rods, always pointing right at her hidden treasure. It’s obsessed with her.
After our first meeting, I left with a hard-on that kept returning despite repeated attempts to jerk it to satisfaction. I woke up in the middle of the night every night that next week with a dick so rock-hard and aching, I couldn’t go back to sleep unless I made myself come.
Thinking of the viper, of course. Imagining in carnal detail every single filthy thing I’d like to do to her.
The list is endless.
Those full, red lips I’d force my swollen cock past.
That long, dark hair I’d wrap around my wrist twice and use to pull back her head.
Those plush, soft tits I’d lick and fondle, sucking her nipples until they were deep pink and rigid in my mouth.
And that sweet, hot pussy I’d fuck in every goddamn position, over and over again.
I want it.
I want it all.
Except I convinced myself I didn’t. I convinced myself the burning lust I felt was all in my imagination. Especially after Declan’s warning. How could it have possibly been that obvious?
It couldn’t.
So, determined to prove to myself that I was totally in control, I threw myself into the shark tank once again.
I strolled into her kitchen, took one look at her standing at the stove glaring at me, and got so hard so fast, I was embarrassed for myself.
I came back today more determined than ever to keep it together, but she wrecked me with a single glance. She stood in the entryway burning me to ashes with her eyes, and I had to restrain myself from grabbing her and throwing her over the nearest chair so I could fuck her from behind in front of everyone.