Arran’s Obsession (Body Count, #1)

For a decade, I’d pictured the house I was looking at now, and I’d been oddly close to the mark. A sweet three-bed semi, a garden to the front and back, in a quiet suburban location. Trees and trampolines. Normal family life.

My little sister’s home.

Parked across the road, a good distance away so we wouldn’t be noticed, we watched the house, Gen finishing her ice coffee and me just fucking frozen. In the background, one of her soundtracks played. Something soft and sweet marking the comeuppance of my life.

“There, that’s Flora. It’s them,” she suddenly said.

A small group of people ambled up the road. A mother with three girls, the older two in school uniform, and the youngest toddling along. I stared at the tallest of the children. Addie. Even at twelve, she was the image of our mother, from the shade of her hair to the way she moved.

The toddler stumbled, and Addie stooped to pick her up, holding the smallest one’s hand while the second girl grasped her other and they swung her between them. Flora, the mother, smiled at her children.

Gen took a short inhale. “She’s happy.”

I held my breath, waiting for the pain, but none materialised. The family entered their Edinburgh house, shoes kicked off and school bags discarded.

All these years, and she’d only been one city away. Every time I went north to see my friends, I passed within minutes of her.

“I used to daydream about providing a family for that child,” I said into the minutes of silence that followed. “But she has one.”

“It doesn’t mean there’s no place for you in her life.”

Unmoving, I stared at the now-closed front door.

“The more I think about it, the more I believe that the reason Audrey kept her secret was so your father never found her,” Genevieve said.

I swung my gaze to her. “You think he’s Addie’s dad as well?”

She interlaced her fingers into mine. “I watched your mum’s video again yesterday. Think about it. She had a baby that she loved so much but couldn’t keep. She didn’t get pregnant again for a long time, which considering her profession, suggests she got wise with contraception. Where did the second baby come from? Had to be purposeful, right? I think she was trying to recreate the one she’d lost. But even if I’m wrong, Audrey had already suffered her worst nightmare in having a baby removed, so complete secrecy was her only safeguard.”

My chest panged. “Implying it was nothing to do with me.”

Something inside me unravelled. Something tight and cutting that had sliced into me for years.

“I’m sure you can get Shade to organise a secret DNA test if you need to be sure. Either way, are we doing this thing?” She touched her door handle.

“Wait.” I clenched my jaw, trying to catch up with my spiralling thoughts. “What if she doesn’t want anything to do with me?”

“What if she does? She has a right to know.”

Had Flora told her, or was I just as big a secret as Addie had been to me? Flora had those answers, and more I wanted to know about our mother. Yet I couldn’t make myself climb out of the car. “I thought I needed to make sure Audrey’s child didn’t suffer in the same way I had. I wanted to give her what I’d missed, but she’s happy, isn’t she? Addie doesn’t need me. Not like I need you.”

Gen reddened, her emotions close to the surface. “You missed out on love. Don’t tell me that today, the final day of our month together, you’re ready to understand that?”

I choked, making a noise halfway between laughter and shock. “I can’t love. I never learned how.”

“People learn either by example or by trying. You never heard the words until you met me. Yet all your friends love you and have been showing you that for years. In return, you provide them with care, respect, and safety. Every single person who works for you gets that. For those closest, you’d step in front of a blade for them. That’s all a form of love.”

Her eyes darkened. She pressed her hand to my chest, facing me.

“Then there’s this breathtaking, unstoppable need between us. You want to possess me, use me, but also be there for me and support me. That dark ownership, that die-for-you desire, your crazy proposal, that’s love, just broken down into its component parts. You’re not calling it what it is. So when you’re ready, say the words. They’re already true.”

“That’s being in love?”

“Ever felt it for anyone else?”

“Never.”

“But you feel it now?”

I tested the word in my head. Couldn’t make it reach my lips. “Say it to me.”

“I love you, Arran.”

“Again.” Since she’d started, I couldn’t hear it enough.

“I’m so in love with you I want to strangle you sometimes.”

I tried to laugh. It came out cracked. “I don’t know if what you’re saying about parts is true, but that list is just the start of what I feel about you. So whatever it is, you have my broken pieces. They’ll always be yours. I hope that’s enough.”

“Can I take this off yet?”

She tugged at the choker around her neck. I’d taken it off her in our apartment using the tool that opened the clasp but put it right back on when she slept. And hidden the tool again.

“Fuck no. The threat to us isn’t over.”

“Then try out the words, because I know they’re there.”

“I…might…want to fuck you.”

She glared daggers. “Try again.”

“I…might…have a lineup of shit I’m going to put inside you later.”

“Fucking hell. Again.”

I stared right back at her, my heart pounding. “I might just be in love with you.”

“Then one day, I’ll marry you.”

I kissed her. Fever rose in me.

Gen started and grabbed my wrist. “Duck down.”

I curled my lip. “Happy to, but probably better to drive away from these family homes first.”

She jabbed at the house. “No. Adelia is coming.”

Addie and the other older girl were leaving, the two in shorts and t-shirts. Both carried a tennis racket. They walked straight past us, not paying any attention to the car.

I watched them go and considered the point that Flora was now home alone. Fuck. I could do this. I waited for them to be out of sight then popped my door. At their house, I knocked on the door, Gen scampering to keep up.

It swung open, Flora in the frame with her youngest on her hip and her smile broad. “What did ye forget?”

Agog, she stopped with her lips moving, but no further words came out.

“I’m Arran,” I said. “This is my fiancée, Genevieve. I think you’ve met before. Can we come in? I swear I mean you no harm.”

I had no idea what her knowledge of me was, or what Audrey had told her, but it felt best to lay the groundwork. Clearly, somehow, she recognised me.

Flora held still for so long I expected a door slam, but then she opened it wider and stepped aside. “You’d better come in.”

In her comfortable living room with toys and kid artwork everywhere, she settled in a chair, her face pale and her toddler at her feet. We took the sofa.

“Why are ye here? I think I know but I want ye to confirm it,” she said.

“You knew my mother, Audrey.”

She gave a small but quick nod. “You’re right, I did.”

“And the girl that just left is my sister.”

Flora took a shuddering inhale. “Oh God. Aye, she is. Do ye know her name?”

“Adelia. Gen told me.”

“It’s good to see you again,” Gen said quietly.

Flora flicked her gaze to Gen. Her fingers trembled. I didn’t want her to be afraid. I’d known nothing but a broken home, and I wasn’t about to change hers.

I gentled my tone as best I could, though inside I fucking shook too. “I’ve only just found out Adelia’s name. For half my life, I’ve been searching for her. I can see she’s happy, but I want to know more and whatever you know about Audrey. Is that okay?”

Flora took a deep breath and rubbed the space between her eyes. “You’re due that. Your mother would’ve wanted it.”

She commenced a story of how she’d worked at the same brothel as Audrey and how they’d been friends. When Audrey had gotten pregnant the second time, they were sharing a flat.

“She took me under her wing when I had no one else, and after she’d given birth, she signed me up to have joint parental responsibility for your sister. It meant I could help out with taking her to the doctor and that kind of thing. Or that was my assumption. I didn’t question it, I loved being an aunt, and I was only young so it felt like an honour. Then one day, she called me and said she’d done something dangerous. She made a video.”

“About my father. She helped put him in jail.”

Flora held my gaze. “I knew then why she’d signed me up to co-parent. After your father did what he did, Addie had no one left. She became mine.”

“You adopted her?”

“I didn’t need to. The paperwork your mother arranged covered everything, and it wasn’t like your father was going to intervene this time around.”

This time. “He’s her father, too?”

“Aye. Ye really didn’t know anything.”

Holy shit. Another blank page filled. “Does Addie know? About any of it?”

“I told her that both her parents died. She doesn’t know she has a brother. I’m sorry for that. She’s a gentle soul, just like Audrey. She would’ve wanted to find ye, and I’d already done that on her behalf. I heard ye ran a brothel and it scared me. I left the game a long time ago. I’m married now. I don’t want my girls to go anywhere near that life.”

I sat back, my head spinning.

Memories swarmed me. Of the mother I’d never truly known, of the father who I’d done everything to avoid being like. Whose sins I’d tried to atone for. Would Audrey have judged me even though everything I’d done had been in her name?

Flora had, and I’d been found lacking.

Gen took my hand, her touch an anchor to my torment. “You’re mistaken. Arran provides a safe place for women to work. He set up the warehouse to help everyone his father abused. People just like Audrey. He isn’t what you think.”

Flora watched her. “I remember you as a little girl. You were the age Addie is now. You wouldn’t agree to marry someone like the man who killed your mother.”

There was a challenge in her voice. Gen flushed red.

“Arran’s wonderful. He’s all Audrey and nothing of his father. And the man you speak of is dead.”

Flora sucked in a breath. “Your father did it, then.” She slid a look at me. “Regardless, you’re still a brothel owner, aren’t ye?”

I bristled but tamped down my ire. It was time to set aside the control freak in me. I could be more than a single-minded person commanded by the forces of my past. I’d learned along the way to be a little more reasonable.

“I’ve never encouraged a woman to sell herself but I will always protect those who choose to do it. Most of them were forced at some point, and I have never judged them, only offered them the respect and safety they’re due. I am a child of that life, and I’m not ashamed of what I am, at least not my mother’s part. It’s up to you when Adelia finds out about her past, but I would like to meet her. One day. When you’re ready.”

Flora gazed at me for a long moment. “Then yes. Give me some time to work up to telling her.”

Gen thanked her for me, grabbing a pen and paper from the coffee table to write out our phone numbers.

Flora gave hers in return. “There’s more I can tell ye about your mother. Like your fiancée here, she loved ye. She’d come home from working at your da’s house full of stories about her son. She wanted ye to know who she was, and once tried to take ye aside to spill the secret, but your da…”

“Threatened her?” I kept my tone light for the sake of her child.

“No. He threatened you. That was the point she decided enough was enough and he had to be brought down. Then the video happened, and ye know the rest.”

Her life for mine. Audrey had given her life for mine. When I’d believed her messed up enough to overstep any line just to be close to me, it was an act to get me alone before her life ended. If only she’d taken the risk earlier. Then again, I understood why she couldn’t.

Flora checked a clock on the wall. “I’ll try to remember the things she told me. I think you’d like to know. But the girls’ tennis lesson is only thirty minutes at the park down the road.”

Gen took the hint. “We’ll go now so Addie doesn’t see us.”

I stood with her, needing the guidance. At the door, Flora apologised again for not telling Addie about me, this time, with more feeling. Maybe I’d convinced her I wasn’t like my father.

I drove us back to Deadwater with my numbness turning to something else.

“Are you okay?” Gen asked when we were outside the warehouse. “Your sister is going to love you when she meets you. And that stuff about Audrey, it was sad but also good, wasn’t it?”

“I think so. I’m just…” I made shotgun fingers at my head and pretended to shoot.

“Everything looks different now,” she guessed.

I kissed her. My fiancée—because she hadn’t protested it—melted onto me. Need streaked through my body, and I reached over to unclip her seat belt.

“Inside,” I muttered.

Upstairs, locked away, I undressed her, kissing her until we were both breathless. She tumbled onto the sheets on the big bed and I went with her, parting her knees then lowering myself into the gap.

I sucked and licked her until she moaned my name. Then I went back for more, committing myself to a lifetime of this. Her. I was in fucking love, and somehow happy about it.

The game that I’d devised, along with Shade, where couples came together in violence and found deep, unbreakable love had caught me too. I’d watched it play out over and over, and imagined being in it, though never with the intention of competing. Then Gen came along and I was so fucking glad she had. She’d changed me for the better. I was never letting her go.

After orgasm three, felt on my tongue and branded on my mind, I eased up her body and entered her. I was so hard I could hammer nails with my dick.

Gen took a short breath. “What, no random household items first?”

“Are you asking?”

She blushed an even deeper red. “I mean, maybe later?”

“Which did you like?” I took a guess, remembering how wet she’d been. “The wax.”

“That, and maybe the cucumber.”

“Hot and cold. Like your man.”

“No, you’re all warmth and softness. It was hidden under ice, but you melted for me. Now come inside me before I go insane.”

I laughed and ran my hand under her ass to lift her to meet my thrusts. Fucking heaven. Then my finger glanced over a tiny bump, and I remembered something else I needed to say.

“By the way, I shot a tracker into you, right here.”

Outrage filled her expression. “You did what? I thought I’d been bitten. You wait until I get you back for that.”

I cracked up then fucked her like a piston, turning her complaints into moans.

“I won’t apologise for protecting you.”

“Because you love me.”

“Because I love you, little maniac.”

She came again, throbbing around my dick and pulling me into a drugging kiss.

Gone for her, I might’ve been, but now she was mine, I was keeping her, no matter what it took.