Her rivals touch, p.11
Her Rival's Touch, page 11
Hard to argue that. Especially considering the lengths he’d gone through to find her again. She finally lifted her head. “You know, if I was anyone else, I might decide that you’re a creepy stalker who I need a restraining order against.”
His lips curved. “Are there restraining orders on the island?”
“No. There’s just Death.” She made a face. “Or I guess Famine is the one who would kick your ass to the curb. My sister prefers to keep her interactions with the general population to a bare minimum.”
“I see.” He kept one arm around her waist and smoothed back her hair with his free hand. “I like you, Kenzie.”
Her heartbeat kicked up roughly a thousand notches. “I…like you, too.”
Liam nodded as if he hadn’t expected any different. He pressed a quick kiss to her lips and released her. “Let’s go over the plan.”
Right. The plan.
Dazed, she sank onto the couch and watched Liam lay out the food. “My brother dug up a contact who finds the girls Milo uses, both for the big parties and the private ones. I need you to broker the deal, either as the guy selling me or as my boyfriend looking to make a quick buck.”
His hand froze in the middle of opening the second bag. “You want me to sell you to that man.”
It wasn’t quite a question. Kenzie cleared her throat. “I can do it if you’re not comfortable with that. It’s not as common, but I can play naive co-ed easily enough.” She’d done it before, though she wasn’t about to tell Liam that. Not with the flat way he looked at her as if considering tying her up and tossing her in a closet until he found a way to do this without endangering her.
It felt…weirdly nice that he cared about whether this would hurt her or not. Because that’s what it was. He didn’t protest this because he thought she couldn’t handle it. He didn’t want her to have to face this particular demon from her past. “Liam, it’s okay.”
“It’s not okay, but I’m dealing with it.” He finished setting out the food—Chinese—and waited for her to choose what she wanted before he grabbed one of the other cartons. “How do we get him out of the apartment?”
She breathed a silent sigh of relief. “He parties hard, so I’m going to dose him with a sedative that will leave him looking like he’s drank his weight in alcohol. Still able to sort of walk with our help, but not coherent enough to remember anything or even speak.”
Liam took a bite and chewed slowly. “Walk me through it.”
“Ryu’s contact will take me and probably another girl or two up to the apartment. I’ll have to play it by ear because Milo never has fewer than three guys with him at all times. They’re paid muscle and even if I’m better than they are, four against one isn’t the greatest of odds.”
He nodded. “Agreed.”
“I’ll try to dose his drink, but it’ll depend on how things play out.” If she had to, she’d shove the drugs right down that fucker’s throat. “The goal is to sedate him, let you into the hotel room, and the two of us will take care of the muscle. The girls we’ll pay off and kick out. Then we walk Milo right out the back door. Luca will meet us at the airport, we pop him on the plane, and then we’re on our way back to the Island of Ys.”
“There are half a dozen things that can go wrong with every single step of that plan.”
Kenzie shrugged a single shoulder. “There are usually a lot of things that can go wrong with any plan.” He had a point, though. They should have had another week to get the details finessed on this, but Declan showing up early put everything on a rush. She didn’t like that, didn’t like what it might mean. “We’re working with what we have.”
He finally nodded. “I need a key for that apartment.”
“They’re coded for fingerprints, rather than actual keys.”
“Can your brother hack it?”
“Hold that thought.” She went and grabbed her phone and came back. Kenzie dialed Ryu’s number and put it on speaker.
“Yeah?”
“Can you hack the door in Milo’s apartment?”
Anyone else would have asked questions, required verification. Not Ryu. “It’s a closed-circuit lock that requires fingerprints.”
Liam leaned forward. “What about the manager? Someone must be able to get in for maintenance.”
“Give me a few.” Furious clicking was the only sound as Ryu followed the information. It made her dizzy to watch when he did it with her in the room. How someone could keep track of three screens while typing so fast was beyond Kenzie. She could work a computer just fine, but her brother was magic when it came to tech stuff.
Finally, the clicking stopped. “There’s an override code in case of emergency. It’ll take me a little time to get access to it, but I’ll forward the information when I do.”
“Thanks.”
“Be safe.”
“You, too.” She hung up and sat back. “Okay, fine. That was a good idea.”
Liam gave her a tight smile. “I’m not without my merits.”
No one in their right mind would say that Liam was without merits. She couldn’t have tailor-made someone better suited to move through her world if she’d tried. But then, she and Liam’s worlds overlapped more than a little. She’d be a fool to forget that, to overlook where he’d come from and who he worked for.
Kenzie worked really hard not to be a fool.
She wasn’t about to start now.
Chapter 11
“Do you ever regret the things you’ve done?”
The question caught Liam off-guard. He sat back and really looked at Kenzie, taking in the tired drop in her shoulders, the way she kept her expression carefully blank. The question seemed innocent enough, but it was loaded in a thousand different ways. “No.”
She blinked. “Just that. No?”
“I can’t afford regret. If I regret, that means I might hesitate to do what’s necessary the next time conflict rolls around. There are things I would go back and do differently, I suppose, but at the end of the day I’m simply following orders.”
“That’s very…soldier of you. Following orders so the guilt falls on the one giving them.”
He hadn’t exactly thought about it that way. “It’s not so simple as that.” When Kenzie seemed unconvinced, he tried to elaborate. “There are rules in my world. Not everyone plays by them, but the O’Malleys do. We don’t fuck around with people who aren’t moving on the same spectrum that we do, which means I’m never sent after someone who isn’t guilty of all sorts of shit. It makes it easier to sleep at night.”
“You’ve never hurt someone who isn’t playing by the same rules as you?”
He thought back, though Liam already knew the answer. “Not that I’m aware of.”
“Wow.” She blew out a breath. “That’s weirdly honorable of you, considering you’re attached to the freaking Irish mob.”
“Throwing stones, Kenzie?”
She laughed. “No, of course not. Sometimes it just surprises me how alike we are.”
Alike.
Such a fragile word for the soul-deep connection Liam felt with her. It should have freaked him the fuck out. His world was a carefully balanced one with a specific order. When he sought out Kenzie, he hadn’t realized she was Kenzie. He thought he could somehow have both—the woman he couldn’t forget and the only life he’d always known. With each day, each hour, he spent with her, he couldn’t shake the knowledge that at some point he’d have to choose.
Kenzie or the O’Malleys.
Fuck, but he hadn’t prepared for that.
Liam pushed it away. He had to set it aside. In the next forty-eight hours, he would be playing backup to Kenzie and extracting a monster. Nothing needed to be decided now, and he couldn’t afford to be distracted in the meantime. If he missed a step because he was too worried about what the future might hold, he ran the risk of her being hurt.
He ran the risk of losing her in the most permanent of ways.
Fear flared, cold and cloying, digging into his lungs and heart and stomach. A world without Kenzie was unacceptable. He shoved to his feet and rounded the table to her. “I need you.”
She frowned, but let him pull her to her feet. “Are you okay?”
“No.” He pulled her sweater off and urged her to shimmy out of her jeans. As tempting as it was to set her on the table and fuck her right here, he needed something beyond the bliss of orgasm. He needed to lose himself completely in her. To ground himself. Liam picked her up and strode through the doorway into the bedroom. The bed was just as luxurious as the rest of the suite, something he might appreciate if he could put on the brakes for half a second.
A lost cause, that.
Liam laid Kenzie down on the bed and then crawled up to join her. She pulled him down to her, wrapping her long legs around his waist. “Tell me what you need.”
“You. I need you, Kenzie. Just you.”
She hesitated for the breadth of a second and then everything about her went soft. She cupped his face between her hands and ran her thumbs along his cheekbones. “I don’t know what to do with you,” she whispered. “Every time I think I know what you want, you change the game.”
“This isn’t a game.” He turned his head and kissed one of her palms and then the other. “No power plays. No commands and obedience. No masks. Just Kenzie. Just Liam. Just…us.”
“I don’t know if I can be just Kenzie.” She gave a sad smile. “I’m a shark, Liam. I have to keep swimming or I’m going to drown.”
“I’ll keep you afloat.” He brushed his lips against hers, silently requesting access. She parted for him on a sigh, and Liam slipped his tongue into her mouth. Searching for something that had no name. Kenzie met him halfway. She always met him halfway. Something he loved about her. The woman had never met a line she wasn’t willing to step to—and over.
Her hands slid from his face down his chest and around to his back, holding him close even as she kept matching his slow, drugging kisses. He rocked against her without meaning to, his cock sliding against her, spreading her wetness.
Always ready, his Kenzie.
Liam lost himself in the pleasure of her body moving against him. The slide of her soft skin again his. Her nails lightly digging into his back as he rocked his hips again, sliding the length of his cock against her clit. Again and again, spinning a spell of pleasure around them that he never wanted to end. Better to stay in this moment where nothing could hurt them, where the desire and emotion sparking along his nerve endings made time stretch in strange ways.
I want this forever.
I want you forever.
Words he couldn’t say, not without ruining things between them. Instead, Liam was determined to show her. He rolled his hips again, loving the way her thighs tightened around him as she moaned against his lips. “God, Liam, not-fucking shouldn’t feel so damn good.”
“It should when it’s us.” He dragged his mouth down her neck and flicked his tongue against the hollow of her throat. “You make me crazy.”
“The feeling is entirely mutual.”
He slid his hands between her and the bed, holding them tighter together. “Tell me yes, Kenzie.”
“What?” She let loose a breathless laugh. “Baby, I’m practically begging for your cock right now—for you. It’s not a yes, it’s a hell yes.” She dug her ankles into the small of his back, urging him closer yet. “Fuck me, Liam. Hard and rough and until the only thing I’m capable of doing is screaming your name.”
“I love it when you do that.” He nipped her bottom lip and moved back just enough for his cock to drop down to her entrance. “You have such a filthy mouth. It gets me so fucking hot to see those pretty red lips telling me all the things you want me to do to you.”
She moaned as he slid fully into her, and Liam pressed his forehead to hers, fighting for control. As much as he wanted to follow through on the promise of fucking her, he needed this too.
They both did.
Slowly, oh so achingly slowly, he withdrew and eased back into her. Torturing. Teasing. It was nowhere near the rough fucking she wanted, but that didn’t stop Kenzie from kissing his neck and jaw, working her way back to his mouth. “You’re evil.”
“You love it.”
She grinned against his lips. “Maybe.”
And then there was no more space for talking. Words simply couldn’t compare to the way her breath caught. To the growl in the back of his throat he couldn’t quite smother. To the way their bodies moved in perfect unison. She was perfect. Everything about this was perfect.
He wedged his arm beneath the small of her back, lifting her hips to get the angle they both needed. The one that would drive her over the edge and have her coming around his cock. Kenzie let her arms fall over her head, mimicking the position she’d had not so long ago in his bed on the island. This time there was no headboard to hold onto. Her breasts shook with each long thrust and she moaned, her hands clenching the sheets. “There. Right there.”
Liam forced himself to hold the position, the rhythm, to give her everything she needed even as she went wild around him. Kenzie came with a cry, and hell if he wouldn’t sell his soul to hear his name on her lips in exactly that tone for the rest of his life.
Too bad that bargain had already been made.
Eight years ago in a hotel room not too different from this one.
Kenzie had taken a piece of him that night, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that she took the rest tonight as he drove into her and came with a curse. Liam had no regrets. She saw him in a way that few people did.
If she wanted his bruised soul, he would hand it over gladly.
For the first time in her adult life, Kenzie didn’t know what came next. Ever since they’d bought the Island of Ys and put it together from the ground up, she’d had a direction to point herself. She still had a direction when it came to vengeance. But in all that, she’d never really thought about what the future would look like for her personally.
She wasn’t sure she could afford to think about it now.
She coasted her hand over Liam’s chest. “I don’t know how to do this thing you want to do.”
“What thing I want to do?”
“You know. The relationship thing. You didn’t go through all this just to fuck me, though I think we can both agree that I’m worth it.”
Liam’s chuckle rumbled through his chest. “Yes, Kenzie. You’re worth it.” He cuddled her closer and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “To be honest, I don’t know how to do ‘the relationship thing’ either.”
At that, she lifted her head, sure he was screwing with her. Liam must have been in relationships before now. He was so…Liam. Before he’d come to the island, he was the very picture of strong and steady, and there was absolutely no way women didn’t flock to that, even with the mob ties. Maybe even because of the mob ties. “Funny.”
“I’m serious.” No mirth in his dark eyes. “Why do you think it took me so long to come looking for you?”
“Because you had to exhaust your resources before you realized that I couldn’t be found.”
His lips quirked at that. “Valid point, but ultimately a side effect to the larger reason. I was… I am…One of the O’Malley family’s men. There was never any question of that when I was a kid, and by the time Aiden and I became friends, that was my path.” He gently urged her head back to his chest and pulled the sheets over them. “And, yes, there were women when I was in my twenties, but I kept the dating casual because I was working up the ranks and my focus had to be there. By the time Aiden was poised to take over for his father, I’d already been ruined.”
“Ruined.” She frowned.
“Yeah. I met this gorgeous blond who blew my mind and took my wallet, and after that, no other woman could really compare.”
At that, she sat up. “You have not spent eight years celibate.”
“Fuck, no.”
Kenzie exhaled a sigh of relief. He already put so much pressure on this thing, for the sole reason that Liam had gone through so much effort to find her again. She toyed with a strand of her hair, hating how vulnerable this conversation made her feel. Vulnerability Liam didn’t seem to blink at. It didn’t make him weak to admit he’d wanted her, had chased her across the years and half the world.
Maybe it was time to do some admitting of her own.
She couldn’t quite make herself meet his gaze. “I kept track of you…for a little while.”
“You did?” Next to her, Liam didn’t seem to draw breath.
“For a year or two. It was kind of a similar situation. We’d just opened the Island of Ys and the big focus was drawing in the right kind of people. It took all four of us working overtime to make it happen, and the opportunity to make another stop in Boston never came up. But, yeah, you made an impression on me. I looked you up every few months at first, but the more time that passed, the harder it was to look back. Eventually, I stopped looking altogether.”
He touched her chin, guiding her back to face him. “You said you didn’t remember until I forced the issue. You looked at me with absolutely no recognition during the Wild Hunt.”
“You don’t live through what I’ve lived through without developing some troubling coping mechanisms. All my siblings deal in their own ways, but I learned to forget. I can’t afford to forget everything. It would paint a target on my forehead and make me worse than useless. But I forget the memories that threaten to cripple me. I have to.”
He looked at her for a long time. “The memory of me threatened to cripple you.”
No question there, but she had to answer it nonetheless. “It was too good,” Kenzie whispered. “One night shouldn’t be good enough to make me reconsider things I knew for truth. Like you, I couldn’t afford to be distracted. Too much hung in the balance—still hangs in the balance.” She couldn’t ride off into the sunset with this man. There was no happily ever after in Kenzie’s future, especially not now when they were so close to figuring out who actually ran Camp Bueller. Her siblings needed her head in the game, and here she was, naked and tangled up in Liam.
