Chapter 7
“I thought after Vaso Alizoti was dead, some of this would go away,” Ethan began. “That it would make the nightmares stop. It didn’t.” He released a shaky breath. “You said something earlier about reading of Zander’s marriage to Kate in the newspapers?”
“Yes.”
“Did you also read the newspapers seven months ago, when they reported the disappearance and murder of Shelley Adams?”
The name sounded familiar… “Oh God…” she groaned as she recalled the beautiful blonde-haired, blue-eyed model had been kidnapped from a fashion show in Milan, Italy, her body turning up a week later in a disused warehouse in the same city. She’d been raped and then stabbed.
Ethan nodded. “Shelley’s parents hired Knight Security to help look for their daughter after she went missing.”
“You?”
“Gabriel pulled in half a dozen of us. But I was the one who found her, yes.”
“I don’t remember it ever being reported they had caught the person responsible.”
“But I did,” Ethan assured her grimly.
Talia could feel the tremors running through his body. “Vaso Alizoti was the one who killed her?”
“Just killing her would have been a mercy.”
Talia tried to remember what she had read in the newspapers after the discovery of Shelley’s body in that warehouse. Not much, as she recalled. Shelley had been stabbed multiple times after being raped. Bad enough, but there had to be more for it to have affected Ethan as badly as this. He had been a soldier, had seen death, graphic and violent death, numerous times. Not of a vibrant and beautiful young woman, admittedly, but he had seen more death than most people.
“Shelley had been missing for a week when I found her body. It was still warm,” Ethan spoke flatly. “During her week of captivity Alizoti had cut her numerous times, broken both her arms, mutilated her, burned her body with cigarettes, raped her in every way possible, stabbed her until she looked like a fucking pincushion, and then—mercifully—slit her throat.”
Talia felt the bile rise in the back of her throat at the same time as tears stung her eyes. Shelley Adams had not only been beautiful, she had also, according to her friends and family, been a warm and lovely woman.
What sort of monster could do something like that to another human being?
Ethan was right, Vaso Alizoti was a monster.
Talia repressed a shudder of revulsion. “He has to have been a psychopath to have done those things.”
“He’s now a dead psychopath.”
“Did he just pick Shelley at random or did he know her?”
“Vaso was a good-looking bastard, if you like very dark and very dangerous. Several of Shelley’s friends said she had gone out to dinner with Vaso a couple of times a few months earlier, but broke it off with him because he was ‘too weird.’ Apparently, Vaso didn’t take rejection well, and he turned up at the fashion show in Milan a couple of times that week.”
“Didn’t the Italian police suspect him?”
“He admitted to being in Milan when Shelley disappeared, but claimed he had flown to Atlanta immediately afterwards. Airline records showed that to be the case, and his father gave him an alibi for the week Shelley was missing.”
“Airline records can be changed.” Talia should know. She had done it herself for several of her “customers” once she had learned how to hack well enough. “I’m guessing his father lied.”
“Yes. And with their main suspect cleared, the police were getting nowhere, so I decided to give Vaso another look on my own. I broke into his apartment in Atlanta when he wasn’t there. He had this room off his bedroom. Probably meant to be a dressing room or something, but Vaso had a different use for it.” Ethan’s voice was flat. Some might take that for a lack of emotion. To Talia, it sounded like too much emotion, not too little. “There were dozens of photographs of Shelley pinned up on the walls of that room. Both before and…after.”
Talia’s stomach dropped. “He took photographs of what he’d done to her?”
“Yes. I let myself back out of his apartment and reported what I’d found to the local police.”
“And they did nothing?”
“Different country from where the crime was committed, and the Georgia police claimed they had no admissible evidence to back up getting a search warrant. The Italian police were more receptive, but by the time they talked to the police in Georgia and got through all the red-tape, the photographs had all disappeared from Vaso’s apartment.”
“Someone had tipped him off as to what was happening.”
“Yes,” Ethan confirmed bitterly. “The bastard was going to get away with it. If you could have seen Shelley’s parents when I brought their daughter home to them in a fucking casket…” he choked. “She was twenty years old, Talia. Beautiful. With her whole life ahead of her until that bastard got his sick hands on her. So I stayed in Atlanta, watched and waited for him to come home alone one day and followed him into his apartment. He fucking laughed in my face when I told him I knew what he had done, and that he was going to give himself up to the police, at gunpoint if necessary. He pulled a knife, taunting me by telling me it was the same one he’d used to cut Shelley. The same one he was going to use to kill me. But first he wanted to tell me in graphic detail exactly what he’d done to her.”
“Sick.” Talia shuddered.
“He called Shelley a stuck-up bitch, and several other names, for refusing to go out with him again.”
“He killed her for that?”
“I told you, he didn’t take rejection well.”
“Totally sick.”
Ethan nodded. “He thought who his father was made him invincible.” His arm tightened about her waist. “He was cocky and overconfident. Probably because he thought I wouldn’t be alive afterwards to tell anyone any of what he’d said. I waited until he was distracted by his own satisfied boasting, and then I went for the knife. We fought, and finally Alizoti was the one who ended up with the knife in his chest. It wasn’t planned, it wasn’t premeditated, was completely accidental. A question of his life or mine. If I had to, I would do it again,” he added firmly.
Talia could hear that conviction in his voice. “You didn’t report it?”
“No point when the local cops were obviously on Alizoti’s payroll. I had absolutely no doubt by that time that going to them would result in me being the one put in jail for killing Vaso, and possibly even an attempt made to make it look as if I had killed Shelley too.”
That didn’t sound unreasonable to Talia either. “But his father somehow discovered it was you who killed Vaso?”
Ethan shrugged. “It wasn’t too difficult. I was looking for Shelley for the week after her disappearance. I was seen accompanying her casket home. I was the one who reported Vaso to the local police. I was in Atlanta when Vaso died. I didn’t exactly try to hide my presence in any of those places.”
“Maybe you should have done.” Talia couldn’t stop the shiver that ran the length of her spine at the thought of Agon Alizoti ever getting his hands on Ethan. The things he would do to Ethan for killing his son…!
He raised his head to looked at her. “Are you okay?”
“Am I okay?” Her arms were wrapped so tightly about him they were shaking. “Are you okay?”
“I will be. One day.”
“You had no choice where killing Vaso Alizoti was concerned,” she told him firmly. “Even if it hadn’t turned out that way, and you could have somehow persuaded the police into arresting Vaso, his father is powerful enough, rich enough, to have either got him off completely or ensured his son went to a psych ward. Vaso would have been back on the street within months, possibly looking for his next victim,” she said with certainty.
“Does that make what I did right?”
“It was self-defense.”
“I fucking enjoyed seeing the life fade from that miserable bastard’s eyes!”
Talia could understand that. It was a pity Shelley’s parents would never know their daughter’s murderer was dead, but Vaso was dead, and maybe it was enough that Ethan and Talia knew that monster could never hurt another beautiful young woman.
“You knew Shelley’s parents, helped to look for her. When you found Shelley and saw what he had done to her…” Talia shook her head. “I don’t believe you have anything to feel in the least guilty about,” she added firmly. “It may not have been planned, but it was definitely an eye for an eye.”
“It doesn’t frighten or disgust you to know I’ve killed a man?”
Talia knew what Ethan was really asking: if she was frightened of or disgusted with him. “I believe I would be more shocked if I wasn’t Ivan Krechenko’s daughter,” she said self-derisively. “But as I am… No, I’m not frightened or disgusted by anything you’ve told me.”
She had seen things in the last three years, evidence of her father’s ruthlessness, that she knew made her different from a lot of other twenty-four-year-old women. It didn’t make that right either, but it was what it was. She was who she was. And she didn’t feel fear or disgust at what Ethan had done. Instead, it felt good to know there was someone in the world who might avenge her if anything happened to her.
Talia rolled over onto her side before wriggling down the bed so that she could cup either side of Ethan’s face as she looked deeply into his eyes. “You ensured that man could never hurt another woman ever again. I’m grateful to you, on behalf of all the other women in the world, for removing him.”
Ethan’s breath released in a shaky sigh. “And do you understand now why I couldn’t involve you in any of this, make you a target, by coming to find you after Zander found you and your father seven months ago?”
She did and she didn’t. Maybe if Ethan hadn’t been running hot and then cold the last twenty-four hours, she would feel differently. As it was, they had here and now, and anything else was questionable. She avoided answering him. “You’ve distanced yourself from your family too, haven’t you?”
“To protect them as much as I could, yes.”
“I’m betting they don’t like that,” she teased.
“You would win that bet,” he drawled.
Talia knew the Knight brothers were a close-knit lot, and she could only imagine how Gabriel, Asher, and Caleb Knight had reacted to Ethan virtually shutting them out of his life. “Do they know you killed Vaso?”
“I’ve never confirmed it, but yes, I believe they know.”
Talia felt a warm glow in her chest in the knowledge Ethan had trusted her, confided in her in a way he had no one else, not even his family. It was also time to distract him away from these dark thoughts and memories. “You were right about this being a buzz kill on you making love to me,” she teased.
“Story of my life.” He groaned. “I finally get the woman I want into bed, and now she’s not in the mood.”
They both knew they were attempting to lighten the heaviness of the past half an hour’s conversation. With time, Talia hoped having finally talked about it would help Ethan to deal with those memories. But for the moment, she could still feel him shaking in reaction to talking about Shelley, and what Vaso Alizoti had done to her.
“I didn’t say I wasn’t in the mood,” she murmured softly as her arms moved above his shoulders and she entwined her bare legs with his. “But I would like to make love to you rather than the other way round.”
“Didn’t you do that this morning?”
Talia nodded. “And now I would like to do it again.”
This whole scenario was completely different from anything Ethan had ever experienced before. Not just Talia holding him while he talked, but the way she kept giving unreservedly, of her understanding, her comfort, her lack of censure for what he had done. It was…humbling.
And arousing.
Ethan moved until he had Talia lying flat on her back with him on top of her. “I’ve thought of nothing but wanting to kiss, touch, and taste you again since last night.”
“Don’t let me stop you!” The smile she gave him was warm and inviting.
“I’ll try to be slow and gentle. I don’t want to hurt you. But I’m a little tense after our conversation. I’m not sure how long my control will last—”
“Did I ask you to be slow or gentle?” She entwined her fingers in the hair at his nape and raised her face for his kiss.
It felt like more than a kiss to Ethan as he claimed the softness of Talia’s lips with his own. It was a melding, more intimate than any sexual joining could ever have been, as they slowly sipped and tasted and explored each other. Lips parted, tongues stroking, hands caressing.
His hands trembled slightly at the feel of Talia’s silky skin beneath his slightly calloused palms. She was sleek and beautiful as he turned her onto her side to face him, allowing him the freedom to caress from her nape and down the length of her back, gently touching the indents at the base of her spine before exploring the smooth curves of her bottom.
Talia’s body was aflame with desire and need as Ethan’s hands briefly encircled her waist before he moved one of them to glide over the curve of her hip and then round to the cluster of curls covering her mound.
Her breath caught in her throat and pleasure coiled and then burst inside her as Ethan’s other hand pressed against the base of her spine, pushing her into the caress of his fingers as they slid along the wet folds of her labia and then back to where her clit ached to be touched.
She arched up at the first touch of those caressing fingers, tiny bursts of pleasure going off inside her body as Ethan lowered his head and laved the moist heat of his tongue over her nipples. First one and then the other, before he sucked them each in turn into his mouth. Tender and gentle suckling that left her skin sensitized and gleaming where his mouth had been.
“I want to feel you come for me.” His breath was hot against her cooling flesh as his fingers stroked and caressed between her thighs. Over and over again, before he gave her clit a light pinch.
It was enough to send Talia hurtling over the edge, lights bursting behind her closed lids as the pleasure coursed through her body in churning, cresting waves that seemed never-ending.
She came back to an awareness of her surroundings at the touch of Ethan’s lips against her inner thigh, first one side and then the other before moving higher and slipping the heat of his tongue between her folds to lap up her juices.
Her whole body convulsed at the first touch of his tongue against her clit. She groaned as that tongue swirled before she felt the sharp edge of his teeth, followed by another swirl of his tongue. “Ethan, I can’t…”
“I want you to,” he said huskily, his breath hot against her folds. “I love the taste of you, Talia. I fucking love it.” The heat of his mouth swallowed up her pussy, sucking and licking until Talia came a second time, and he drank that release of juices as greedily as the first.
Talia was still trembling in the aftershocks when he slid back up her body and his lips claimed hers. He tasted of her, heat, honey, salty musk. There was a rustle of foil, Ethan shifting slightly, before she felt the hard press of his cock against the softness of her folds as he lifted up.
She needed to tell him something first. Needed him to know—
She let out a tiny scream as that mushroomed top pushed against the natural resistance of her body for a second or two before breaking through that barrier and surging forward.
Ethan froze, managing to hold most of his weight off her as he looked down at Talia in shock. He couldn’t see her face properly in the moonlight, and he needed to. Badly. A flick of the switch on the bedside lamp revealed her eyes were closed, teeth clenched tightly together in the tenseness of her jaw. “Are you— Were you—”
“Turn the light off,” she pleaded, still without raising her lids. “Please.”
He immediately did as she asked. “Talia…?”
“I— Just give me a second or two to adjust. I’ll be okay in a minute.” She took in several deep breaths before finally opening her eyes to look up at him. “You’re bigger than you look, and you look…enormous.”
Ethan knew Talia was trying to make light of it, and at any other time he would have found her comment amusing. But not when he could see the glitter of tears on her lashes. When it was clear he had just taken her virginity. Jesus…! It had never occurred to him. Not even for a moment. And it should have.
Three years ago, Talia had been so closely watched by her muscular Knight Security bodyguards, there was no way any of the boys at the university were going to risk antagonizing any of them by going to bed with Talia. In the three years since, she had been constantly on the run with her father. Unless she was going to get involved with one of her father’s bodyguards, there would have been no opportunity for her to become involved with anyone then either.
Ethan inwardly cringed at some of the things he had said and accused her of the previous night. “Shall I—”
“Absolutely not,” she told him fiercely, hands clinging tightly to the tops of his arms. “I’m okay now. It was just a shock. It shouldn’t have been but… I’m babbling.” She winced as she looked up at him appealingly. “Stop me from babbling like an idiot, Ethan. Please.”
He kissed her. Slowly. Deeply. For long, timeless minutes, hours, until he felt the tension leave her body and she was once against writhing beneath him, urging him closer.
Ethan’s arms were shaking with the effort of holding himself back and at the same time trying not to crush her with his weight. His arousal should have shriveled up and died at the enormity of the moment, but his rebellious cock had other ideas. Ones that included continuing to sink deeper into that silken hot sheath.
He leaned up on his elbows as he entered her slowly, watching for any further signs of discomfort in her face or body, and ready to withdraw if there was. Instead, Talia wrapped her legs about him until the heels of her feet were resting on the tautness of his ass, completely in agreement with his cock as they pressed him forward.
Ethan resisted that urging, beads of sweat popping out on his forehead as he continued to enter her inch by slow inch, the walls of her sheath slick and hot but also grasping him so tightly, he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to move once he was completely inside her. Wasn’t sure he wanted to move. Entering Talia, having her take him inside her, was like being welcomed home after being away for a long time. A lifetime.
Because this was home.
Being a part of Talia. Being inside her.
Ethan had never much cared where he lived as long as there was a bed and it was somewhere close to where food would be delivered when he was hungry.
Before his cousin Ian got together with the love of his life, Ian had lived in a penthouse apartment that was like a citadel. No one was allowed in unless Ian invited them, and he never invited them.
Ethan had never been able to understand that. An apartment was an apartment. What the hell did it matter where it was or who knocked on the door? Even the finca on Majorca had only been a bolt-hole, initially somewhere for him to disappear to when he needed to get away from the family he loved but which could also be a little overwhelming to the only member of that family who wasn’t married and had kids. This last few months it had also been the place he retreated to when he sensed Alizoti was getting close.
But this, his cock buried to the hilt inside Talia, was the home he had never known he wanted or needed.
“Are you going to move?”
Ethan gave himself a mental slap upside the head as he realized he had been concentrating for so long and so hard on not moving, on not hurting her, that while he did, something inside Talia had relaxed to accommodate the girth and length of his cock, and she was now looking up at him expectantly.
Am I going to move?
That was like asking if the tide would be coming today. Of course he was going to fucking move! It was not moving that was killing him.
“Fuck, yeah,” he breathed softly before he claimed her lips with his and his hips began to slowly withdraw before plunging back in again.
Talia had never felt anything so sublime as having Ethan deep inside her. Oh it had hurt initially, and she wasn’t joking about Ethan’s size, but having him inside her felt wonderful. As if the part of her that had been missing had finally come home.
As he began to move, sliding that steel encased in velvet along the length of her sensitive sheath, she had felt it drag along that spot inside her he had stroked last night, with the same result. Bursts of pleasure instantly coursed through her.
Talia bit down on the soft flesh between his throat and shoulder—vaguely thinking he was probably going to have teeth marks there in the morning—as her sheath clenched around him and she felt a flood of fresh moisture slicking and easing his way before he began to thrust inside her in earnest. Deep and claiming, as each thrust pushed her farther up the bed, those sparks inside her becoming huge showers of light and color as she was thrown fiercely into another climax.
“Shit,” Ethan gasped as Talia’s pussy clamped around his cock, squeezing and stroking his length toward a climax he already knew was going to cause the top of his head to explode. “I can’t— I’m going to—”
“Come for me, Ethan.”
Hearing those words coming from Talia’s lips was enough to push him over the edge, his balls drawing up tight as the cum shot hotly along the length of his cock and flooded the condom until he thought the damn thing was in danger of bursting.