Love Triangle Six Books of Torn Desire - Willow Winters Page 0,305

her sad eyes, the defeat inside them.

“Why do you do this?” she asks.

“It doesn’t have to be hard.” I barely whisper it. I know we’re not unobserved. “You make it hard.”

A perfect teardrop falls from her eye. I capture it under my thumb, smear it across her cheek.

When she’s like this, soft and a little beaten, I feel like I can get lost inside the endless night sky of her eyes, and I don’t want to look away.

She’s a Willow Girl. I’m a Scafoni son. Firstborn, almost. We’re both condemned. But if I’m not careful, it can be worse, so much worse for the both of us.

I pull back and kiss her once more on the mouth. Our eyes are open. It’s not an erotic kiss. I don’t pry her lips open to slide my tongue inside. It’s just a kiss, and at the same it’s the most intimate kiss.

When I release her, she staggers to the stool a few feet away and sits on it like she can’t stand anymore. I wonder what she thinks when she looks at me. What she feels.

She must hate me. She must curse me.

I pick up my belt to weave it through the belt loops and open the door. Joseph is at his desk. He watches me buckle the belt.

He heard everything, I know, and he’s not my friend, I know that too. There are no friendships when this much money is in play.

He smiles and gets up from his desk to make his way into the room again. I know the camera in the ceiling recorded everything. I know he’ll watch right after we’re gone. I know he’ll get hard at Helena’s cries. Jerk off to her whipping. Our fucking.

The room smells of sex. Of us.

Joseph glances at Helena, and her cheeks burn. She, too, knows he heard every damn thing.

“Are we ready, then, Miss Willow?”

I put my hand around the back of her neck. “I think she’s ready now, aren’t you, Helena?”

She won’t look at us, but I can see from her profile that she’s biting her lip to stop from speaking or maybe crying.

“All right. If you’ll kneel on the stool, please,” Joseph says.

She turns to me. “Kneel?”

I hold out a hand to help her. “Kneel,” I say.

She swallows but rises and doesn’t take my hand as she kneels on the wooden stool and turns to the camera. Just as he snaps the photograph, she gives him the finger.

I can’t help the smile that creeps along my lips.

Joseph, however, is not amused. His ears go red, and it may be the first time I’ve seen him ruffled.

“We’ll need to take another.”

But it’s an old-fashioned camera. Not a digital one.

“No need, Joseph,” I say, looking at my pretty, defiant Willow Girl. “That’ll do just fine.”

Chapter Ten

HELENA

We both signed the book in the space where my photo will be forever preserved as this generation’s Willow Girl. We’re now sitting at a table for two waiting for our lunch to arrive.

Our eyes are locked, but the difference in our expressions is night and day. I’m glaring, and he looks like he’s smiling, calm as can be, like this is normal.

“What’s your problem?” I ask finally, shifting in my seat, his cum sticky in my underwear.

“No problem. Just enjoying my day with my Willow Girl.”

“You know he heard everything.”

He nods. “He’s probably jerking off to the video as we speak.”

“Video?”

Sebastian shrugs a shoulder.

A waiter comes with a bottle of wine, pours for both of us, and sets the bottle in a bucket of ice before leaving.

“Don’t worry. You shouldn’t have to see him again for three more years.” He picks up his glass. “Cheers.”

I fold my arms across my chest. I don’t pick up my glass.

“How did it start? Taking a Willow Girl?”

“You don’t know your history?”

“No, I don’t. Why don’t you educate me, like you so graciously did on the meaning of inbred.” Prick, I add internally.

“Happy to oblige.” He takes another sip of his wine. “The Willows were a prominent family—at least in the Midwest—way back when. The Scafoni were immigrants to America, but wealthy ones. We needed status, and you needed money, and so a marriage was arranged.

“There was a difference then, and that was that the Willows only had sons and the Scafonis only daughters, and so a Willow boy, Marius Willow, married a Scafoni girl, Anabelle Scafoni, for her fortune. There was no love between them. It was a business transaction, one arranged by Anabelle’s father and Marius Willow.