He lifted the single stem between them, twirling it between two fingers so that the lamplight caught the velvet petals and made them shine like blood.
“A perfect rose for a perfect woman.”
I covered my gag with a cough.
My mother didn’t buy it.
“Bianca, be a good girl and come take the rose from Tiernan. Put it in some water for me while I grab my coat,” she directed me as she moved away to gather her things.
I fought against the urge to roll my eyes and nearly lost the battle. Bitterness coated the back of my tongue as I trudged forward to take the rose.
From Tiernan.
Tiernan.
When I looked up the strange name later, I learned it meant lord.
Of course, it did.
He stared down his nose at me as imperiously as I extended my hand to take the flower. For a moment, I thought he wouldn’t give it to me.
“Don’t get any ideas, little girl,” he said quietly, his voice a rough rasp of sound that my mother couldn’t hear over her delighted humming farther down the hallway. “This is the only time you’ll ever receive a present from me. You’ll need to look elsewhere to satisfy your daddy issues.”
I gasped so sharply the air pierced my throat like a knife. “You arrogant, conceited ass.”
He dipped low, his scent wafting over me in a cloud of dark, almost smoky fragrance. It conjured images of burning forests and ash falling from the sky like silver rain.
“You think I am arrogant because you know I am better than you and it hurts your pride. I am wealthier, more attractive, more powerful than you could ever dream of being. You think I am conceited because I refuse to hide behind false modesty.” He swooped even lower, a predatory bird descending for the kill. When he spoke, his breath was hot against my ear. “Don’t worry, little thing, I only devolve the more you get to know me. It’s too bad you won’t have that opportunity.”
I gaped at him as he pulled away, then jerked as he took my limply offered hand in his grasp and forcibly curled my fingers around the stem of the rose. Pain burst across my flesh. A hiss streamed through my clenched teeth.
He hadn’t dethorned the rose.
I stared at our joined hands, his deeply tanned skin bisected with deep black lines of script written in Latin. My own hand, small, almost totally consumed by the breadth of his grasp. Slowly, scarlet blood seeped between our fingers and rolled down my wrist.
My gaze snapped up to his.
He was smiling.
A thin, mocking expression more like a knife wound than a grin.
“Why are you like this?” I asked softly before I could help myself.
I was too shocked, too deeply impacted by the absurd contrast between his scarred beauty and his blatant cruelty to maintain my composure.
His white teeth winked at me as his mean smile widened briefly, then collapsed. “Because, Bianca Laney Belcante, no one is going to stop me.”
Chapter Two
Bianca
It didn’t occur to me over the next three months that I didn’t know Tiernan’s last name. Honestly, I didn’t care. He was a dark spot in my life, a shadow I couldn’t dodge no matter how much time I tried to spend in the library, working at the diner, or taking Brando to the arcade.
He had infiltrated our lives.
Even though he lived in New York, he visited almost weekly for a handful of days, spending the night with Aida out on the town before returning to her room where they made enough noise to keep Brando and me from sleeping soundly.
I bought us both earplugs the night after his first sleepover.
I tried not to think about him because I didn’t want to give him that satisfaction. He seemed to delight in irritating me, in being as cruel as he could without drawing the attention of my mother or my brother, whom he mostly ignored.
It was just me he hated.
I didn’t know why, and I pretended I didn’t care.
No one in my life had ever hated me before.
At school, I kept to myself because I didn’t have time for parties or extracurricular activities, but I was friendly with the entire grade and never longed for company.
People at the diner liked me and I liked them, they were the closest thing to a community I had.
To everyone in town, Bianca Belcante was a quiet, studious girl with a penchant for daydreaming at the bus stop and chastising people for wasting water or not recycling.
To Tiernan, I seemed to be the freaking antichrist.
But he was right, Aida didn’t care that I hated her boyfriend. She just clucked her tongue and accused me of being overly loyal to my dead father.
“I’m a woman,” she’d say every time. “I have needs. You’ll understand one day when you’re older.”
As if I was a kid and not a seventeen-year-old woman.
I might have been a virgin, but I had needs.
I knew what it was to feel heat pool wetly between my thighs, to feel the tick of arousal beat in my low belly, to want something only rough hands on my body could gift me.
She didn’t know I lay awake at night trying not to let the low growl of Tiernan’s voice issuing demands in the room across the hall from my bedroom affect me. She didn’t know how often I failed and gave in to the impulse to play my fingers between my legs.
The shame of it burned holes through my soul, but I found myself inexplicably attracted to Tiernan’s meanness. There was some intangible chemistry in our barbed words, crackling between us as potent as the hatred we shared for each other. He was callous and cruel beneath the suave veneer he applied in front of Aida. I saw him for the monster he was, so how could I be attracted to him?
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?”