Shadows and Lies by Eden Butler

Author:Eden Butler [Butler, Eden]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: romance, suspens, myster, sex
Publisher: Eden Butler
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

New Orleans is a city for the lost. Bastards and bitches and outcasts, down trodden losers. Kids who cannot navigate their adolescence with parents that have forgotten that they, too, had been that rebellious, that broken, back in the day. I’ve walked those streets a thousand times. I could do it in my sleep. I knew where to hide when the cops where getting too restless, what shops and vendors in the Market never really cared about waste or surplus. Which ones fed the homeless when their profit was good. Some would even share their meals just to have someone else around to keep them company.

This city rooted itself into my bones at twelve. It was just like my cheekbones, the damn stiffness in my board straight hair—part of me, a cluster of thought and memory that someone else put inside me, but that I had accepted as my own.

Like Timber.

Ryan hadn’t seen my scars, not until tonight. Not until I let my body, my stupid pussy, loosen hold of good sense. He was never supposed to see that. No one had. Except Timber, of course, but then that was the point. It’s why he’d marked me in the first place.

“This body is mine, Alex.”

It wasn’t something he’d said to get me wet. It wasn’t some great confession of control and dominance that I’d secretly wanted to hear. It was a dictum he imparted to me to let me know he was owed and he planned on being paid fully, in a currency of his own choosing. What I wanted meant nothing. He wanted to dominate me, control me, fucking use me, and just one time, I let him. I fucking said yes.

It had lasted six hours. He fucked me and teased me and made me come and when I thought it would end, he’d tied me up and hurt me with matches and hot wax and then the sharpest point of his knife. I’d expected his initials in my skin the next morning. I expected him to laugh at me, torment me again, do all the things some men do to women who give themselves up so completely.

Timber had been worse. He fell for me. Harder than ever before.

He’d sworn he would never stop wanting me and then, looking over the welts and burns and humiliating bruises he’d given like a gift, Timber Ironside told me I was beautiful. And to him, I was. The most beautiful thing he had ever had in his hands.

But a deal was a deal and in our world, you paid it and it was done. No take backs, no short changes. It was the only reason he’d let me walk away.

And then I had to live for weeks with the memories of my blood staining his fingers, smearing his mouth, his sweat against my raw skin, knowing that my body had been claimed and marked, branded. He would always be there and no one, not even beautiful, sometimes self-righteous Boy Scouts could ever dismiss where Timber had been or how much he’d always want to be there again.

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