Wrong (27 page)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

As it turned out, relaxing wasn’t horribly difficult in a small ski town, even during peak season. Surrounding us at every turn were snow-topped mountains and massive evergreens that made me feel so comfortably hidden, especially coming straight from the media madness in New York.

Our flight departed at 8AM but still, the boys squeezed in an early morning workout before we left – “like a bunch of sickos,” as Aria remarked. Within an hour, there were a few media members trying to get past Max and access the gym. Apparently, the papers had quoted Walsh accusing Liam of “lacking competitive spirit” for leaving the sport despite physical health. “He must have some other skeletons in his closet. Shouldn’t be hard at all to get in his head.” That was the exact quote, and because of it, there were media members milling outside the gym at 6AM, waiting for Liam to give them something of a rebuttal. But as usual, he said nothing, and by 7AM, we were aboard our flight to Colorado.

The morning had been spent snowboarding. Rather, Aria and I skied for a few hours before doing exactly what I’d predicted, waiting for our boys at the mountaintop lodge and throwing back Irish coffees and hot toddies. We laughed when Liam and A.J finally clomped in, carrying their helmets, wearing their goggles on their heads and trailing snow everywhere with their boots. Dressed head to toe in Burton gear, they looked much more like winter sport stars than fighters, and we pretended they were exactly that as we sat in front of the fireplace, occasionally talking to other couples as “Anton” and “Lola.” They were the random names A.J had assigned us “in case of reporters or spies,” which was silly, but even sillier was the fact that Liam and I were still playing that couple by nightfall.

“In my mind, she wears white fur vests and white Uggs year round,” I said as Liam tried to pull me from the edge of the Jacuzzi back to him. I pouted. “No, stay here. Look at the mountains with me,” I pleaded, gazing over the balcony we had to ourselves since A.J and Aria were long asleep.

“As long as she wears that and nothing else,” Liam grinned against the back of my neck. I giggled as I gazed out at the endless view with Liam’s strong arms wrapped around me from behind.

“That can be arranged. She’d probably even cook for you wearing just those furry Uggs. And maybe a matching apron.”

Liam groaned, pressing his swelling cock against me. “Christ. My imagination’s getting a little too vivid.”

I reached behind me and stroked his length. “Yeah? What else ya got?”

“You have me thinking of you in white. What do you think I got?”

I peered over my shoulder at him. I wanted to say “shut up” but I was too embarrassed to even imply that he was talking about a wedding dress – in case he wasn’t. He grinned wickedly at my reluctance to speak.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“That you’ll always love torturing me.”

“Hard not to when you give me those looks.” Pulling me back, Liam took a seat and turned me to face him, spreading my legs over his lap. There was mischief in his green eyes as he took his cock out and wrapped my hand around it. “Say what you were thinking.”

“You can’t make me.”

“Say it.”

I bit my lip as I stroked his cock under the water. I felt it twitch just as my lips parted to speak. “A wedding dress,” I finally murmured. The tip of my tongue ran over my teeth when I felt him swell rock solid in my grip. “Oh my God, Liam,” I laughed, shaking my head. He smirked.

“Hey, my dick doesn’t lie. At least you know I’m telling the truth when I say I want you wearing one for me.”

I tried to deflect. “You’re a dirty man,” I teased, still stroking him.

“I’m an honest man,” he countered.

“Right.”

“What are your doubts right now?”

“You telling me that you think about me… in a wedding dress,” I replied dubiously. But the words alone sent a thrill up my spine.

“I’m telling you that.”

“Mm-hm. In a classic happily ever after.”

“Yes. Tell me why you can’t seem to believe it.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I laughed. “Probably because I’ve put you through such endless hell that I can’t imagine you have time to think about anything besides your next breath. I gave you so many things to stress over and be angry about that you decided after two years you needed to fight again. Just to let it all out.”

“I don’t see how that’s a bad thing.”

I swallowed, realizing neither of us was joking around anymore. “It’s a bad thing because it’s like I cursed you. All the bullshit you went through in the past few months was caused by one person, and one person only. Me.”

“You’re not wrong about that.” Liam pulled me closer. “But your burdens didn’t just happen upon me. I chose to be with you, so I chose to bear them with you. I chose to fight with you and share in your pain. I said I was here to make sure you got the happiness you deserved, and I meant that with no expiration on those words. Yeah, you put me through Hell, but you can drag me there and back again, and I’ll still be here for you, Sash.”

His words stripped the air from my lungs but I shook my head. “I won’t, Liam,” I whispered, brushing my lips against his. “I won’t drag you back there again. I refuse. You deserve happiness, too, and a new start. You’re going to win this fight, and if you want to keep fighting after that, that’s great. But it won’t be because of me. From here on out, you only fight in the cage. I won’t be taking any more of your energy, or putting you through any more bullshit. I only ever want to make you happy.”

Liam gave me that crooked grin as he cupped my thighs and lifted me out of the water. “That works for me too.”

“Good.”

I kissed him as he carried me inside to our bedroom, his erection pressed between our bodies and pulsing hot against my belly. My arms stayed laced around his neck as he laid me down gently, his tongue still sweeping mine, never breaking contact as he untied the sides of my bikini bottom. Peeling it away, he ran the head of his cock against my clit, circling it around my swollen pearl at a languorous pace. He pulled his mouth away from my kiss only to watch me reach the very edge of my breaking point and beg to him.

“Put it in, Liam. Please. I need it now.”

He didn’t tease or torture me this time. Parting my legs, Liam positioned himself between them. His eyes on mine, he pushed himself all the way inside me. I moaned as he pulled nearly all the way out, pushing deeper in the second time. I watched his bicep flex as he gripped under my thigh, positioning my leg so he could access every inch of my pussy. My arms over my head, I shivered. I was used to Liam fucking me hard and fast, but at a slow pace, he was somehow more powerful and brutal than ever, his strokes impaling me.

“You are so fucking beautiful, Sasha.” Liam watched every expression on my face as he dominated me. He was kneeling now, my thighs draped over the tops of his and his hands fisting my waist to pull me all the way down to the root of his dick. I felt so small, so pleasurably powerless as I lay staring up at Liam, watching in amazement as he rocked smoothly, deftly inside me, filling me completely despite his easy movements. His head slightly tilted, his eyes smoothed over me – over every inch of my body from my pussy drowning in his cock to my breasts shaking from his thrust. His gaze traveled slowly, taking its time till it reached my lips parting to moan. His name was at the edge of my tongue but he was so ferociously deep inside me that I could barely make a sound. Eyes burning through me, Liam read my mind.

“Say it.”

When I didn’t immediately comply, he yanked my thighs till his cock hit the luscious sweet spot only he had discovered for me. When his name tore from my tight throat, Liam did it again, shaking the bed, growling deeply with my every cry. His fingers gripping my thighs, I felt my muscles tighten. When I came, Liam’s weight collapsed on top of me, and his slow pace turned to a wild, brutish thrusting that coaxed out every last convulsion in my core. It amplified my orgasm ruthlessly and slammed the headboard against the wall. I was still in ecstasy when he captured the nape of my neck and crushed his mouth over mine, his tongue tasting the desperate ache in my breath, absorbing me and savoring me.

“
Fuck
, baby.” Liam growled, barely having to move his hips to slip and slide inside my heightened wetness. He took my cue when I pushed against his chest and rolled me over, his swollen tip still lodged deep inside me as I switched to the top. I was still breathless as I straddled him, but I wanted too badly to ride his cock. I kept my heavy gaze pinned to him as I moved on him, merely arching and un-arching my back to slide my drenched pussy up and down his long shaft. “Yes,” Liam breathed as I reached behind me to untie and unclasp my bikini top. “Show them to me.” I let the soaked fabric fall onto his six-pack and he groaned at my naked breasts. When he reached for them, I took his hands. I molded him over me and held his squeezing grip on me as my hips picked up their speed to ride Liam harder. “Christ, I’m so fucking lucky,” he panted as he gazed up at me. “You are my fucking miracle, baby. I love you so fucking much.”

“I love you,” I returned without question.

“Tell me again.”

“I love you, Liam,” I whispered, blood rushing to my swelling lips as I felt him turn to steel between my walls. My hair fell into my eyes as I rocked into his deep thrusts, but I didn’t shake it away. Nothing could break our gaze as I brought us both to our very peaks, a second surge tearing through my body as I soaked in Liam’s awe for me, the green in his eyes brighter than ever as he stared into my soul.

“Keep doing it. You’re going to milk every drop out of me, Sasha,” he rasped, groaning as a spasm ripped through his body, contracting each and every line of muscle on his sculpted torso. I bit my lip, loving my view and grinding with wild abandon on him till I came again, pitching forward and gasping for air. Liam grabbed my hips, his teeth gnashed as he moved me back and forth over his cock, erupting in a vicious roar as he flooded me with his seed. My thighs pumped as I demanded it, begged for it, every precious drop of his heat spurting inside me.

When I collapsed onto him, the air I breathed was still thick with our yearning. Emotion churned through the air and prevented us from drifting into sleep despite our fatigue, but I didn’t care. I held onto Liam as he hugged me tight against his chest, and I relished in every second I got with him. I wasn’t the type to pray but in that moment, I did, silently pleading that this love would never be interrupted, and that someday very soon I could enjoy this man fully, without having to worry that somehow, another obstacle lie just around the corner.

Chapter Thirty

The place Aria chose for brunch the next day boasted a heated patio complete with a fire pit and peaceful view of Gore Creek. Still, Aria packed her bags with thick, printed blankets that we wound up throwing over our boys’ shoulders before snuggling into them.

“Stop looking up stuff,” Aria said as A.J checked his phone for the tenth time.

“I’m
sorry
. Everyone we know is sending me every link that comes out about Liam.”

Liam laughed, paying it little attention as he brought his coffee to his lips while peering over the edge of the balcony. He looked so damned cute in his knit hat, and I couldn’t bring myself to stop hugging up against his arm, even if it meant I’d barely touched my food. I knew it was a common vacation symptom, but I wished for a moment that this could just be our lives – cuddling up under beautiful mountains with our best friends and all the time in the world.

“Anything interesting?” Aria asked, though she made sure to sound annoyed to convey her displeasure with A.J’s phone addiction.

“Uh. Holy shit, yeah,” he said, shifting his eyes toward Liam. “You, uh, you wanna hear, buddy?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“No. Also, shouldn’t your phone be blowing up right now?”

“I haven’t had service since we got here,” Liam said, popping a bite of steak and egg in his mouth. He smirked at A.J. “You gonna give us the news or what?”

A.J’s eye actually twinkled as he broke into a boyish grin. “They got your venue, man. You’re fighting at Madison Square Garden.”

Aria dropped her fork as I threw the blanket off our shoulders. “
Oh my God!
Liam!” I wrapped him in the world’s tightest hug. “Oh my frickin’ God, that’s huge!”

A.J pointed at me. “Listen to your woman. They don’t let just anyone fight in our city, bro. This is a fuckin’ honor.”

Liam nodded, reluctant to let out his excitement but when A.J got up to drape a bear hug over his shoulders, he let that sexy grin break free from between his teeth. His emotion came out all at once as he pumped his fist and brought it down on the table. “Fuck,
yes!
”

We couldn’t stop celebrating. We didn’t even think to order any kind of celebratory drinks, but a bottle of champagne came to us anyway, apparently sent from a couple inside who could feel our “radiating joy.” We burst out laughing and waved when we looked through the window to see a white-haired couple grinning wide and waving back at us. Since they didn’t drink and had already settled up, Liam paid it forward by sending a bottle of Krug to a random couple – tourists from Japan, we later learned, who came over to do a giant toast with us. The cheer kept multiplying, and it was such an unbelievable feeling – the kind of pure elation I had either forgotten or simple never experienced in my life.

Maybe it was the elevation, but I felt tingly and high as we walked out of the restaurant, A.J’s arm around Aria, Liam’s arm around mine. A.J promised to shut his phone off for the rest of the day as we rented the same Jeep Liam used to drive and took a trip to the quaint town of Breckinridge, continuing our celebration in the fittingly picturesque town plucked straight from a storybook.

“Here’s to all the amazing new things in our lives,” Aria toasted in a charming log cabin of a restaurant perched at the tippy top of a hill. “To the four of us, and the two of you, and all the happy days that lay ahead of us.”

We took our time on that one round of champagne, and before it got too dark, we decided to make our way back to Vail. With A.J and Aria grabbing her things from the coat check, Liam and I waited outside, his coat wrapped around me and his lips buried in my hair. I closed my eyes, ignoring the view around us to just steep myself in his love. Neither of us said a word, but we didn’t have to. We didn’t want to jinx it because it truly felt like this was it – the first page of not just our next chapter, but a completely different book. As I thought about his fight at Madison Square Garden, I grinned quietly against Liam’s chest. I hadn’t wanted to go home before, but now I truly couldn’t wait.

* * *

It was dark by the time we arrived back, and we laughed because we’d made the mistake of leaving every light off, which meant we were about to walk into a massive, three-story house of pitch black.

“Scary,” Aria remarked, but the second we walked in the house, three lights beamed up at us, joined by a chorus of chirps.

Ding-ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!

“What the hell?” I muttered before realizing that our phones had just connected to the Wi-Fi again, and we were receiving all the texts we’d missed throughout the day.

My heart crashed against my ribs when I saw the names that lit my phone.

Ethan Kirk.

Jenna Pettit.

I looked up to see Aria’s wide eyes already on me. Our feet gravitated to each other as we both sifted through the hordes of messages to click one link – a Facebook post by an anonymous account. Once it loaded on my screen, I knew. I didn’t even have to read any of the words to know what Ethan had just done.

From there, I blacked out.

* * *

I was ruined – scorched and blistered. Set on fire and left to burn. There was no way to come back from this, and there was little I could have done, phone or not, New York or Vail.

Ethan had posted Owen’s letters to me on Facebook.

Worse, he didn’t publish every one of them. He only put up the passages that made it seem ambiguous – like I had been some screwed up consulting party. Missing were the diary entries in which Owen detailed how he knew he was wrong, and that he knew I was scared. Missing were the letters in which he told me he couldn’t sleep at night, and prayed to someday be free of his sins. All that was blasted on social media for the world to see was the delusion. The side of Owen’s sick brain that believed I wanted it.

“I don’t know how many women I’ll have to go through to forget every inch of your beautiful body.”

“I met your mother at the same age you were when you met me, and as rotten and perverse as that sounds, I can’t help but see it as fate.”

“You gave me the best pleasure of my life. I still hear the way your sweet lips moaned my name.”

I was physically nauseous. Owen was the most disgraceful, humiliating part of my past, and somehow, Ethan managed to edit the memories to make me feel even more shameful. Locked in the bathroom, I refused to let anyone in. I was broken. Unfixable. All the foul, nasty demons of my past were now up for public viewing, and it made me feel as if my clothes had been torn off, my body spit on and dragged through the mud. My stomach hurt from crying, which I continued to do despite the lack of tears. I’d used them up. They were all gone, replaced by a dry heaving that had me clutching the toilet every fifteen minutes, prompting Aria’s pleading to turn into screaming, frantic tears outside the door.

It wasn’t even as if Ethan stopped there.

Of course not.

He had to go after Liam, too, so joining the pictures of Owen’s letters was a video that couldn’t have come from anyone but Jenna. The quality was shockingly clear, coming from her phone as she made her way up the stairs to the upper mezzanine of the VIP area of Liam’s Halloween party. Apparently, I had been too shocked to notice that night that she’d captured the first few seconds of me straddling Liam, my body fully naked, his dick still inside me.

“
With Daddy Owen no longer in her life, Sasha has moved onto her stepbrother, Liam. If you think he looks familiar, you’re right!”
Providing jovial commentary was Ethan, as if he thought himself some kind of gossip reporter. “
That’s MMA fighter Liam Cage, set to rematch Damon Walsh on March Fifth. Maybe Walsh is onto something about the skeletons in Liam’s closet, because it takes one twisted individual to fuck a girl like Sasha Blakely. Then again, she might just be a serial step-offender!”

I didn’t have to look long to see that the media following Liam had pounced on this story.

“LIAM CAGE/STEPSISTER SEX TAPE LEAKS!”

“LIAM CAGE DATING ‘SERIAL STEP-OFFENDER’!”

I saw that and Jenna’s link to our video on a porn site and vomited, my throat raw and my eyes burning. In the random moments of clarity I experienced sitting up on the wall, I tried to bring myself to my feet, knowing well that only Aria pounded outside the door because A.J was busy containing Liam. I had heard glass breaking, things crashing downstairs. I had heard both Liam and A.J in a shouting match, but I paid little attention to it as it happened because I was still lost in a downward spiral, reading the vitriol off my phone.

“Move over.”

Finally, I heard Liam’s voice outside and Aria’s heels scraping the floor as she scrambled aside. Terror burst from my lips as I then heard an explosion – Liam kicking open the door. I expected to see him foaming at the mouth, halfway maniacal, but all I saw was a look of calm and strength I knew he was putting on just for me, because I noticed the wetness in his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I whimpered, refusing to look at him.

“Don’t apologize. You have nothing to apologize about,” he said soothingly, despite the faintest trembling in his voice. Despite the weight of my heart, I felt light as a feather as he scooped me up off the floor and brought me out into the bedroom. I somewhat heard Aria softly urging me to sleep and relax, promising me everything would be okay. She’d get her father on this, all his best lawyers – “
everything will be fine
.”

I absorbed none of her words as Liam laid me in bed. He lay with me too, and for hours upon hours, he kept his arms wrapped around me. Every time I burst into tears, he held me tighter, kissing the top of my head and whispering for me not to worry. “I’ll get it removed. I’ll make sure he can’t post anything again. And we’ll take it from there,” he said, so bizarrely calm.

But the few times I nearly dozed off from exhaustion, I heard Liam inhale deeply. Raggedly. I felt his muscles tense and his body shake in the absolute fury I knew he was forcing himself to hold in while I was awake. Because the moment I stirred, he flipped the impossible switch, swiftly returning to his role my impenetrable savior, murmuring comfort in my ear and breaking my heart as I realized that he sacrificed for me down to his every breath and movement.

I stared out into the pitch black.

“You don’t deserve this.”

I said it out of nowhere. It was past three in the morning and the only light that came through the window was a sliver of moon. But through the dark, I convinced myself I saw clearly.

“Liam.”

“I’m here.”

I wasn’t sure if I was numb or calm as I stared at the wall. “I don’t want to be your burden anymore.” He said nothing, so I went on. “You can’t see it because you love me,” I whispered. “You love me so much you’ll do anything for me, even though all the signs point to the fact that you shouldn’t. If it weren’t for me, Liam, you’d be Superman. You’d have no weaknesses in this whole world.” Still, there was silence from him. A teardrop swelled from the corner of my eye and spilled over the bridge of my nose as I pieced together the thoughts that had plagued me for the past hour. “I’m a far way from being okay, Liam. I feel disgust for myself like it’s a disease, and I don’t want you to catch it. You owe it to yourself to see what your new chapter is like without me.”

Liam held onto his absolute silence. Were it not for his embrace, I’d have questioned that he were still behind me.

“Go to sleep, Sasha,” he murmured when he finally spoke.

“Liam – ”

“We’ll talk in the morning. Let yourself rest for now.”

It took an hour, but I listened to him.

* * *

In the morning, Liam’s nightstand was clear. No cell phone. No wallet. When I called, it went straight to voicemail. When my bare feet padded downstairs, I found Aria wandering the kitchen area, craning her neck into various rooms. I took one look at her bewildered face and knew she was wondering exactly what I was. The front door ajar, we turned when A.J came back in wearing just his flannel sweats. He raked his hand through his messy hair, looking as confused as he did completely stressed.

“Yeah, he took the rental, too,” he confirmed.

And with that, we knew that Liam was gone.