Dangerous Temptation (Dark Dream Duet #1)(5)

It was difficult to admit that I’d never met anyone like him before. He was older, powerful, so attractive even with the slashing scar across his cheek that I had to swallow the drool pooling in my mouth every time he showed up on our doorstep. I simply wasn’t worldly enough to deal with a presence like his. He turned me inside out with rage and upside down with deviant curiosity. It was a dangerous cocktail of temptation and revulsion.

I was in the kitchen late one night getting Lucky Charms cereal because I couldn’t sleep with the noises coming from Aida’s closed bedroom. I refused to succumb to my perverted desire to touch myself imagining someone eliciting those sounds from me.

Music thrummed through my earbuds, Billie Eilish’s smoky voice thumping through the speakers. I swayed my hips to the beat, fingers drumming on the countertop quietly in time with the tempo as I poured the cereal into a bowl with the other hand. Eyes closed, mouth open to wordlessly form the lyrics about bad boys, I was wholly unprepared for the firm grip that manacled my arm.

Startled, I tossed the cereal box into the air, tiny pieces of sugared goodness spilling out from the open top like confetti from a canon. Morsels caught in my hair and in the deep crevice of cleavage exposed by the old black sports bra I wore to sleep. I spun to face the man who grabbed me, panting and wide-eyed with fear.

And there he stood.

The monster that kept me from sleep.

Tiernan stared at me impassively, taking in my disheveled hair and worn sports bra and baggy sweats as if I were some criminally boring obstacle in his way.

“You scared the crap out of me,” I accused breathlessly, one hand pressed to my panting chest while the other ripped out my earbuds. “What are you doing lurking in the night, huh?”

A tiny smile flickered at the edge of his ruddy mouth. I frowned at him as he reached toward me, plucking a piece of candied cereal from where it was slightly tucked into the crease between my breasts. I gasped in surprise and outrage at his audacity, but my nipples furled into hard peaks at the brush of his rough knuckles against the swell of my chest. His eyes were so clear I thought I should have been able to see straight to the bottom of his thoughts, but they were utterly fathomless. Just a color as pale as frost.

I watched with my heart beating in my throat as he took the anchor-shaped piece of cereal to his mouth and placed it on his tongue. He crunched into it, then swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his tanned, strong neck.

Heat pooled in my belly and I wondered with a flare of irritation how he managed to make eating children’s cereal sexy.

“I had a hankering for a midnight snack,” he said finally, as he snatched another piece from me, a four-leaf clover marshmallow tangled in the hair over my right ear. “But you shouldn’t eat this poison. Sugar will kill you.”

“You could use some sweetening up,” I offered pleasantly as I reached up to shake my hands through my hair and dislodge the remains of the Lucky Charms. “Why don’t I make you a bowl?”

He made a quiet noise in his throat that could have been something like laughter or a derisive snort. I watched from the corner of my eye as he leaned against the counter while I cleaned up the mess on the floor and put it in the garbage. The long, v-shaped expanse of his torso was bare, black ink forming words and outlined images here and there across his torso, thick from hands to shoulders on each arm. A pair of black sweatpants in some luxe material sat low on his hips, revealing a light smattering of hair leading from his belly to his groin, a tattoo barely visible above the waistband in the low light pouring in from the streetlamps outside. I swallowed thickly as he crossed his corded arms over his chest, abs tensing into perfectly stacked boxes.

Suddenly, I wasn’t as hungry for cereal as I was for something darker.

“Isn’t it past your bedtime?” he asked me. “Little girls need their sleep.”

“I could say the same about old men,” I countered with a sniff as I topped up the bowl with more cereal and then went to the fridge to get the oat milk. “I’m seventeen, by the way, and I haven’t had a curfew since I was seven. The minute Brando was born, I was on feeding duty throughout the night more often than Aida.”

“Such a good girl,” he said in a voice that made it seem like a bad thing. “Wholesome and responsible. I wonder where you got that from…your father perhaps?”

I angled a glare at him, but he was just staring at me with that cold gaze. “My father was a good man.”

It was only because I was studying him that I caught the flash of tension contracting his harsh features. Only half a second, but it was enough to express his hatred for my father.

I frowned. It was a little early in his relationship with Aida to be jealous of her dead lover and baby daddy.

“Good is boring,” he offered, and suddenly he was too close, crowding me into the corner of the countertops.

He braced his arms against the laminate, caging me in. I froze at his nearness, as the masculine scent of him surrounded me. He dropped his gaze to my chest, but when he moved his hand, it wasn’t to touch me inappropriately. Instead, he plucked the heavy locket I wore around my neck into his fingers and lifted it to his gaze.

“What’s this?”

I swallowed thickly, wrapping my hand around the chain to try to tug it from his hold. It felt wrong for Aida’s lover to touch the most precious possession I owned.

“None of your business.”