Ravished (The Teplo Trilogy #1) (32 page)

"Yes," he hissed, storing that sound in his memory with every other scream of pleasure and little sob she'd ever given him. "Yes," he hissed again as his own orgasm flew closer, brought rearing to the surface by the way her body contracted around his cock like a vise.

"Oh God, oh God, oh God," she cried out. "Tristan, I-"

He came with a roar, holding her hips still beneath him as orgasm ripped through him more intensely than he'd ever felt it before. Everything faded, just went complete black as wave upon wave of ecstasy tore through him. Sightless, soundless, thoughtless.

Just… an utter goddamned otherworldly experience.

"Hey," Lillian whispered.

Tristan roused from his collapse beside her. He'd somehow managed to find the strength to get rid of the condom and deal with the pillows first, but she honestly wasn't sure how. Her entire body still tingled. Her lips, her fingers, and her toes. She was completely blissed out. Happy. Sore in all the right ways.

His gaze swept over her face, sleepy and sexy and serious all at once. "You okay, beautiful?"

"Perfect." She reached out to brush his sweaty hair back from his forehead.

"I didn't hurt you, did I?" He snagged her hand, kissing her fingertips.

"Not at all," she said, smiling at him. "I feel…." Every descriptor she could think of fell short of explaining how amazing she felt.

"That good, hmm?" He rolled onto his side and grinned at her.

"Yeah." She smiled again. Couldn't have stopped herself from smiling if she'd tried.

"Your leg's okay? No pain?"

"It's fine, Tristan. Everything feels fine. Great. Perfect."

He searched her face once more and then nodded, seemingly satisfied with her answer. "You're too far away," he mumbled, snaking an arm around her waist to pull her closer. Her heart fluttered as he dragged her across the foot of bed between them until no space remained.

She hummed and nestled into his arms, his legs tangled with hers.

They lay in silence for a while, his fingertips dancing up and down her arm. The gentle cadence of his breath whispered like a song in her ear. She traced the shape of his tattoo, following the lines of the bird's wing.

"Tristan?"

"Yeah, beautiful?"

"Thank you," she whispered.

His hand stilled on her arm for a moment before he resumed the soothing motion. "Believe me, beautiful, that was my pleasure."

She couldn't help the little laugh that bubbled up at his rebuking tone. "I meant for earlier, Tristan. Helping me dance."

"Oh."

She laughed again at that one sheepish word and then sobered. "It was nice."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

"And the rest of it?" he asked.

"Better than I expected," she said and then paused. "How do you do this every day?"

"I got used to it a long time ago."

"Can I ask you something?"

"Mmhmm."

"Did you decide to become an agent because of what happened to your parents?"

He hesitated for a long, silent minute and then sighed. "Yeah."

"How- how did it happen?"

He shifted around to face her, his expression pained. "Please don't take this the wrong way, but I really don't want to fucking think about it tonight, okay?"

"Okay," she whispered, pressing her hand against his tattoo, over his heart. "We don't have to talk about it now."

"But?"

But the clues were beginning to pile up, and they didn't lead anywhere good. She wanted to understand him, but she wouldn't push him. She hesitated, trying to think of how to best put it. "But I hope that you'll trust me enough someday to tell me how it happened."

"Trusting you isn't the issue."

"Then what is?"

"The issue is that it's not relevant, not anymore. It was a lifetime ago."

"Okay," she said, withdrawing her hand when he practically snapped at her.

"Christ," he groaned and flopped onto his back. "I'm sorry. I'll never forget what happened to them. Talking about it, remembering how it felt to lose everything I loved, is torture."

"I was terrified to walk in there tonight," she admitted quietly, scooting closer to rest her head against his chest again. She could have said, "
It's okay."
or "
It's fine."
or "
I understand."
but sometimes, that just wasn't enough. Sometimes, that's not what people needed to hear. Sometimes, it did matter, it wasn't fine, and the only thing you could do when things got too real for someone was to give them real back.

"You didn't show it," he answered after a moment, his tone rife with gratitude. He wrapped his arms around her. "You did really fucking well, sweetheart."

"I imagined it as a performance. I was just playing my role. Pretty stupid, right?"

Tristan grumbled before shifting and flipping her onto her back. He followed her over, glaring down at her, fire in his eyes. "Why do you do that?"

"Do what?"

"Put yourself down like that. It's not stupid, and neither are you. You had every reason to be terrified walking in there tonight. Hell, most people with your history
wouldn't
have done it, but you did. It doesn't matter how you managed it. You
managed
it. Don't make that less than it is, Lillian. It's a big damned deal and you're better than that."

Lillian blinked up at him, speechless.

He sighed, a scowl on his face. "Fucking Marc Rivera really messed with your head."

"It wasn't just Marc," she said when she found her voice.

"What's that mean?" he demanded, his voice dropping low.

"I grew up in a ballet studio," she explained. "I was good at what I did and people noticed. But the thing about people noticing is that your peers aren't always happy to give you the spotlight. When you get attention they want, insults and cutting people down is just a fact of life. When you're smart, you learn to cut that off at the pass whichever way works. And beating them to the punch worked really, really well most of the time." She swallowed past the small lump in her throat, refusing to cry over something that no longer mattered.

"Christ," he swore. "That's shitty."

"Yeah," she said, clearing her throat. "It sucks, but when dancing is your life, you deal with it. I wanted to dance, Tristan. I wanted it more than I wanted anything else, so I dealt with it the best I could. And when you do it for so long, it's hard to stop. There isn't a switch you can just flip after so many years. It's not that simple."

Especially not when some part of her believed the little insults and barbs that'd been thrown her way for so long. Rationally, she knew that little voice was ridiculous, but she didn't know how to reconcile the facts or understand why things had happened the way they did.

She didn't understand why Marc had hated her so intensely for turning him down or why he'd attacked her. And sometimes… well, sometimes she couldn't help but wonder if he was the Universe's way of taking away the things everyone believed she hadn't deserved. She'd turned him down, so he'd punished her, and everyone had just sat back and let him do it.

"I guess I can understand that, but they were wrong, Lillian. You deserved to dance and what he did wasn't your fault."

"Was it his then?" she asked, looking up at Tristan.

"Fuck yes, it was his fault," he said, his voice full of violence. "He may have been an addict, but the burden of responsibility still rests with him, beautiful.
He
chose to pick up that fucking syringe and jam it into his vein. And he did it knowing that once he walked on that stage, your safety was his responsibility. He assaulted you, and that's his fucking fault, regardless of what pumped through his veins when he did it. And there's nothing you could have done that was so horrible as to deserve that."

She nodded. "I know."

"Do you?" he asked, tilting his head to rest his forehead against hers. "Do you really?"

She thought back over everything she'd seen and heard in the last few weeks, every statistic and reality that Tristan had given her, and the conversation they'd had days ago in the kitchen. He'd asked her why she'd agreed to help, and she'd told him that the people at
Teplo
didn't deserve to die, no matter what choices they'd made. If that was true, then she had to accept that she hadn't really deserved what Marc had done to her, didn't she?

"Would you believe me if I told you that I'm working on it?" she asked.

"Yeah." He smiled at her, his expression softening. "Yeah, I'd believe that, beautiful."

She nodded and he eased back down beside her.

"I guess you know how it happened?" she asked a few minutes later.

"I read the case file."

"Oh."

"Does that bother you?" He pulled her back into his arms, nestling her against his chest.

She shook her head. It didn't bother her. Knowing she didn't have to relate the whole, sad story to him relieved her. She knew she needed to tell it to someone, someday, but it was still too fresh for her. Too close.

"Did you two date?"

Lillian shook her head and sighed. "He asked a few times, but I always said no. I thought he understood, but I guess he didn't. They tried to blame me, you know? Said I led him on. That it was my fault he turned to drugs."

The ballet world and gossip rags had called her a tease and a thousand other things. As if anything she could have done would have made her deserve to be violently attacked like that. She'd done nothing to him, but that hadn't mattered to anyone. Not even the judge had really believed her, instead sentencing Marc to rehab. No matter how many times she thought about that, it still hurt. It always would. She'd been punished for exercising her right to say no, and he'd been treated like the victim by most of society.

Tristan's arms tightened around her. "You didn't deserve it."

"I know," she whispered, pressing a grateful kiss into his skin.

"Do you want to talk about what happened tonight?" he asked a few moments later.

She bit her lip and then sighed. "There's not really much to say. I thought if anyone recognized me, it would be one of Anton Vetrov's people. I wasn't expecting it to be one of the people in the club. It was a shock, and it hurt. But it hurt a lot less than it did two months ago or two months before that. And you helped."

He squeezed her.

"Is it weird that the girl bothered me most?"

"What do you mean?"

"Last year, she was going to see the ballet with her boyfriend, and now she's… she's on drugs, going to places like
Teplo
. Tristan, she couldn't have been much older than seventeen or eighteen."

"That's how it works, beautiful," he murmured, brushing her hair away from her face. "Addiction doesn't care what you did last year or how old you are or where you're getting your drugs."

"I just don't get it. She's so young. Why would she do that to herself? It's senseless!"

"Yeah, it is."

Lillian fell silent again, trying to imagine how Emma had gone from attending a ballet to shooting up at
Teplo
. It didn't make sense. And it was sad as hell. At twenty-two, Lillian felt so much older than Emma. The girl was just a kid. She could do anything, be anything. What made someone just throw all of that potential away?

Lillian didn't understand. She wasn't sure she
wanted
to understand.

"So I helped, hmm?" Tristan teased, adjusting his position so they lay facing one another again.

"You did." She didn't want to dwell on things she couldn't change, or think about people she couldn't save. The best she could do for Emma and those like her was to help Tristan find a way into that drug lab.

"I think you like it when I help."

Lillian blushed, unable to deny that.

He examined her face for a minute, smirking. "I love it when you blush, beautiful."