Wounded Beast (Gypsy Heroes Book 2) (17 page)

Fisting the base of his shaft, I take the meaty pillar deeper into my mouth, curling my tongue around it. I bob up and down, my eyes shut. The rest of the world melts into nothing. There is only his mouth on my pussy and his cock in my mouth.

My orgasm comes suddenly, without warning. I push my palms into the mattress and climax hard with his cock buried deep in my throat, my nipples throbbing and tingling, and my whole body singing.

In all the rush and uproar, it occurs to me that I am hopelessly addicted to him. That I’ve been addicted from that first fix, when he threw me against a wall and shoved his cock into me without asking my permission.

A drop of slippery liquid touches the roof of my mouth. Ah! I start to suck really hard, as if I
’
m milking him. He comes in a thick, frothy spray, which I swallow willingly. Strange, how I adore my own sense of complete and utter submission to this man. I wriggle my hips.

‘Don’t you dare move,’ he warns.

I don’t. Very gently, I keep sucking the semi-hard flesh in my mouth. I work on it until it starts to stretch and grow and become rock hard. I take his cock out of my mouth, and, crawling down his body, poise my pussy over his erection.

‘I want to hear the animal noises you make,’ he says.

I hold onto the base of his shaft while he groans with pleasure as his erect cock slowly fills me up. Once all of him is inside me, I ride him with rhythmic, languid thrusts, and animal sounds fill the bedroom until we come, gripping each other so hard he leaves marks on my skin.

‘I don’t want to sleep the whole night,’ he whispers fiercely.

‘Why?’ I whisper back.

‘Just this one night I don’t want to close my eyes. All I want to do is make— Fuck all night.’

‘OK,’ I say, but we do fall asleep. Curled up against each other like two puppies in a basket. And we sleep soundly until the wee hours of the morning when a large hand crashes into my ribs and shocks me awake.

I sit up and see Dom thrashing his legs and moving his hands restlessly.

I switch on my bedside lamp and start shaking him and urgently calling his name. His eyes fly open. They are wild with horror. They fasten on me and widen with shock.

He rises off the pillows and grabs my upper arms, but I have the impression that I
’
ve become part of the nightmare that he
’
s still locked into. ‘I thought you were dead,’ he says in a strange voice.

‘I’m not,’ I say.

At the sound of my voice he suddenly lets go of my arms. He falls back on the pillows and covers his eyes with his forearm.

‘Oh! God!’ he howls. The sound comes from somewhere so deep and pained that I become frozen with fear.

A few seconds pass before I shuffle closer. ‘Tell me, please, Dom. Just tell me what
’
s wrong?’ I beg.

He puts his arm down and looks at me. ‘You’re a good person, Ella. But I just can’t do this anymore. It’s a lie. All of it is a lie.’

He vaults off the bed and begins to dress.

‘You’re going to leave now?’ I ask in disbelief.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, and, without looking at me, walks out of my door.

I sit there stunned. I have no idea what the hell has just happened. Has he just fucking broken up with me?

Bang, bang, my baby shot me down!

I
stand at the window in a daze and listen to his car come to life with such an explosive sound that it makes me jump. I don’t go back to bed after he speeds off. Maybe because I cannot believe that he will not come back.

We were going so good. It seems incredible that he would raze the city and salt the earth just like that. Over nothing. Nothing earth-shattering has happened. I stepped onto the road without looking, but it wasn
’
t like I was in any real danger. It would be a stretch of the imagination to even think so.

It doesn’t make sense. Nothing makes sense.

Unless it is in some way connected to that terrible grief that lives deep inside him. The one I accidentally glimpsed when I went back into the restaurant for Rob’s umbrella that first day. When I found him so curled up with pain that he reminded me of a wounded beast. The kind of suffering that is so blind and raw that approach is dangerous and any attempt to help would be suicidal.

I pace the flat incessantly, stopping only to throw a double vodka down my throat. I find myself back at the window looking down at the deserted street, as if in disbelief. We’ve never spent a night apart ever since the first night I spent at his house. After two hours of waiting, I finally admit to myself that he’s not coming back. Not tonight, anyway.

I go and sit dry-eyed in front of the television. I recognize that I’m watching a movie, but beyond that I don’t register anything. All I can see before my eyes is the moment he ripped my chest open with a knife by saying, ‘I just can’t do this anymore.’

Do what? I haven’t pushed or tried to get from him anything that he didn’t want to give. I switch off the TV and put on my CD player. Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ comes on. It grates on my nerves. I switch it off with a grunt. The flat becomes horribly silent.

I rush to fill it with sound. I pick Vangelis. It’s Dom’s favorite. Beautiful, dramatic music fills the air, but for some reason the only thing I want to listen to is ‘Stairway to Heaven’. The wistful longing and mysterious lyrics suit my mood. I listen to Heart’s rendition of the song.

In my condition it seems to me that the arrangement of music is in timeless layers that open up like a flower to reveal a yearning, fragile soul calling for something almost forgotten.

When Heart’s version ends, I move on to Dolly Parton’s. As soon as I’ve listened to her, I put on Led Zepplin’s original version. Then I go back to Heart’s version. Obsessively, I open my laptop and look at street performers singing the song. Again and again I return to Heart’s version. I listen and I listen. As if the solution to my problem is hidden in the song.

But there is no solution.

I am the woman who thought that everything that glitters is gold. The one who was building a stairway to heaven, but, as Dom once told me, my stairway is whispering in the wind.

When dawn breaks in the sky I am still listening to music.

Dom doesn’t call even in the morning.

I go to work, a wreck. I open the door to my office and look at my desk with dread. I hate this temporary job I took last week where I have to field on-line complaints all day about packages that have not arrived, are delayed, lost, or damaged. My job is to calmly absorb their frustration and send them on the relevant department.

The dreary drudgery of it has to be seen to be believed. At least when I was at HMRC I felt I was doing something good. There was always that feeling that I counted for something.

Here, I’m a cog in the wheel.

I truly count for nothing. Perhaps I should have listened to Dom. Perhaps I should have taken his offer of money and waited until I found a better job. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that. I was too proud. And now I think, Thank God I didn’t take his money.

No matter how bad this job is, at least it pays my bills.

I sit at my desk and jump every time my phone rings. Sometimes I stare at it as if I can metaphysically make him call me. I wait and wait. Until lunchtime, until I can bear it no more. I pick up my phone and call Jake.

‘Hey, Ella,’ he says. His tone is surprised and cautious.

‘Hello, Jake. I … uh … Can I talk to you … um … alone?’

‘Of course,’ he says immediately, and his tone tells me what I suspected. He knows exactly what’s wrong with Dom.

‘Thank you, Jake.’

‘No problem. We’re in the country tonight. Want to come over for dinner? I can send a car.’

‘No, no. No need for that, I’ll borrow a friend’s car. And I won’t disturb you at dinnertime. I’ll come just before that.’

‘All right, see you about six thirty.’

‘That’ll be great. Thank you.’

‘You know how to get to mine, right?’

‘Yes. I’ll see you then.’

‘See you later.’

‘Jake?’

‘Yeah?’

‘I really appreciate this.’

I hear him draw in a sharp breath. ‘That’s OK, Ella. I’m always happy to help.’

I park Anna’s company car next to Lily’s Mercedes-Benz and walk up to the front door. Smoothing down my hair, I ring on the doorbell. Lily opens the door with a smile.

‘Hello,’ she greets.

‘Hey,’ I say awkwardly.

She opens the door wider. ‘Come on in,’ she invites.

I step into her home. Lily is one of those women who have it all. Happiness, beauty, love, wealth.

She’s wearing a long, halter-neck dress that comes to her ankles. It’s one of those dresses that you know cost an arm and a leg. Once, a dress like that would have sent me to my computer to see if her husband’s tax records matched that level of expenditure, but those days are gone. It feels as if the notion that I was a tax officer at Her Majesty’s Revenue Customs was another life, or just a dream of mine.

I smile at her. ‘Congratulations. I heard you’re pregnant.’

She rubs her belly and smiles contentedly. ‘Yes, thank you, Ella. And how have you been keeping?’

‘Good,’ I say.

‘Jake’s expecting you. He’s in his den. Do you want to come through and have a drink before you see him?’

‘No. No, thank you,’ I refuse politely.

Liliana runs in from one of the reception rooms, screaming, ‘Aunty Ella, Aunty Ella.’

She is wearing a pink skirt and a T-shirt that states in bold letters ‘My Mother Thinks She’s The Boss’. I go down on my haunches. ‘My, my, look how much you’ve grown since I last saw you.’

‘That was yesterday,’ she says scornfully.

‘Dear me. Yes, that was yesterday.’

‘My poo was blue today,’ she declares suddenly.

‘Oh,’ I exclaim.

‘Lil,’ her mother reprimands, ‘what did I tell you about telling the whole world about the color of your poo?’

‘Aunty Ella is not the whole world,’ Liliana argues with impeccable logic. She turns her adorable face toward me. ‘My poo was made of icing.’

I straighten and look at Lily.

‘She went to a birthday party yesterday and ate too much blue icing from a Thomas the Tank Engine cake,’ Lily explains

Even though I was distraught, it made me giggle. How utterly sweet.

‘Where’s Uncle Dom?’ Liliana demands.

The laughter dies in my throat. ‘I … I have no idea.’ Voicing the thought saddens me greatly. Far more than I would have expected.

‘Lil, Aunty Ella has come to see Daddy. Say bye-bye now.’ She looks at me with an encouraging smile. ‘Go on, Ella. It’s just at the end of the corridor.’

‘See you later, Liliana,’ I call as I start walking down it.

‘Can I go and sit with Daddy and Aunty Ella?’ I hear Liliana ask her mother plaintively.

‘No, you can’t.’

‘Why not?’ the minx demands.

I don’t hear Lily’s answer because I’m already too far away, or they’ve moved into one of the other rooms. It hits me then: I’m not part of this family, and it looks like I never will be. I stand for a moment outside the door at the end of the corridor. Taking a deep breath, I knock. 

It is opened almost immediately.

‘Come in,’ Jake invites cordially.

He is wearing a black T-shirt and gray jeans, and I must admit, just being in his presence makes me nervous. He is as big and intimidating as Dom, but there are absolutely no buttons to push. No weakness. No secret sadness to exploit. He is one of those smoothly impenetrable and guarded people. It was always clear to me that he is the boss of his family. He guards them as ferociously as a mother lion guards her newborn babies.

Woe betide
anyone
who tries to hurt them.

‘Thanks,’ I say quietly, and step into a large, wood-paneled room. It has soft rugs, a heavy wooden desk at one end of the room, and a nest of expensive leather couches at the other end. There is an air of old world opulence about it all. Here, one can feel safe and cultured. The outside world never intrudes. Here, Jake is King. From here, he controls his empire.

He gestures toward the sofas.

I move over to them. My legs feel like jelly and my skin is tingling with nervous energy. Stop it, I tell myself.
You have nothing to fear.
I am on the same side as Jake. I don’t want to hurt Dom. I love him. It is perfectly obvious that he is in terrible pain, and I just want to help him.

‘I was just about to have a drink. Would you like to join me?’ he says.

I start to shake my head and then decide that I actually do need something strong to calm me. ‘I’ll have whatever you’re having.’

‘I’m having a whiskey,’ he says, and I nod.

He moves toward a drinks trolley. With his back to me he pours two fingers of whiskey into two glasses and comes toward me. As he crosses the room, he passes the last rays of evening light coming from the window. They hit the side of his face and I am struck by how handsome all the Eden brothers are.

I take the glass and bring it to my lips. The whiskey is strong and hits my empty stomach like liquid fire.

Jake doesn’t say anything, simply watches me with a deliberately bland expression. I know that his first and most natural instinct is to protect his brother. These gypsies stick together. For them, blood will always be thicker than water. He will help me, but only if it means it will also benefit his brother.

Fuck it. I decide to take the bull by the horns.