Sinful Ever After - Vivian Wood Page 0,52

need.

Aiden kisses my nipple again, then bites it. I shiver as a river of feeling flows over me, dragging me down and putting me at risk of washing away completely. Then he stops, looking at me with his intense, dark gaze.

“Please what?” he says, his voice gone to gravel.

I’m too shy to answer right away. I blush red, though I’m already so flushed right now that it hardly matters.

While he waits for an answer, he runs his lips up the column of my neck. I swear, I catch fire in that moment, going from a pool of gasoline to a full blaze. He is the match that, once struck, has now changed some essential part of me. There’s no returning to the girl I once was, untouched by Aiden Moreland.

So I burn. It’s not aimless, not without purpose, either. I burn for Aiden, the flames reaching higher and higher until they threaten to raze down the entire world around us.

It feels like I have waited my entire life for this moment. My heart pounds in my ears, its chant encouraging me.

Go on. Do it. This is. Your chance.

“Please,” I plead with him, working to find the words. “Take me. Break me. Do what you want with me. I’m yours.”

Aiden stiffens and straightens, peering down into my eyes. He scans my face, an unspoken question hanging in the air between us.

He huffs out a breath. “You want me to be your first?”

“I—”

A cry comes through the woods from the direction of the main house, a man’s voice. “Olivia! Aiden! Someone!”

We both freeze, our attention turning to the voice.

“Is that Carter?” I whisper.

“Help! I need help!” the voice shouts.

Aiden lets me slide down before he steps away. It’s like something shifts in him, the sex god that I was just with retreating, the Navy man stepping forward into his place.

I clutch at the edges of my ruined shirt, my eyes wide. Aiden glances back at me, hesitating for a moment. “Go,” I urge, moving toward my apartment. “I will follow you once I throw on a sweater.”

He turns and breaks into a jog, his mind on whatever is going wrong at the main house. I run into my apartment and shove the first sweater I find down over my head. Then I sprint to the main house, just in time to see Aiden and Carter lifting an obviously ailing Margaret into the back seat of Carter’s silver Mercedes.

Oh, God. At Margaret’s age, almost anything could be wrong. I get tears in my eyes as I realize that she might not be okay.

Aiden looks around as he circles the car to get in the passenger side. He spots me and mimes a phone, which I assume means he will call me, I guess.

And then they are gone, the Mercedes taking off down the gravel path in a whoosh of dust. I stare after them, only realizing when they are gone that I am shaking like a leaf.

Chapter Twenty

Aiden

When Carter and I drive Margaret to the hospital, we are only concerned that she has fallen and twisted an ankle. It’s only later that we discover that she’s had some sort of mini-stroke shortly before that.

Inevitably, this prompts Carter to call the entire Morgan family to come to St. Luke’s Medical Center. After waiting impatiently for hours, the doctors tell Carter and I that Margaret hasn’t broken her ankle. They will be keeping her for the next few days to monitor her and change her medications, though. She’ll need a lot of rest, I guess.

As the family begins to arrive, I fade into the background. When I walk out of the hospital and hail a taxi to the Morgan estate, I feel little relieved that something worse didn’t happen to Margaret. She is already practically a ghost, hobbling around the ground floor of the mansion all alone.

I can’t stop picturing the family, her nieces and nephews pressing their faces eagerly against the windows of the house. My aunts and uncles, if my mother’s tales were true.

I get a bad taste in my mouth after that thought.

What will happen to the estate without Margaret? It really doesn’t bode well for my search for my true father, I guess. I stare out the window of the taxi, my own thoughts making me feel morbid.

By the time I get back to the big house, Olivia comes running out to the taxi to meet me. As I hand the driver a wad of cash, she demands information from me.

“What