AOIFE
PRESENT – CHRISTMAS DAY
“Do you know how much I love you?”
A smile danced on my lips. “I mean, I could guess. But are we talking metric or imperial here? You know I’m a baker, Finn. Be specific.”
Before I could tease him much more, he rocked his hips, thrusting harder into me until my eyes fluttered to a close.
No longer was I thinking about inches or centimeters, just that my husband filled me so full that I wasn’t sure where he ended and I started.
A groan escaped me as he thrust back inside me, doing this thing with his hips that had my G-spot screeching to life in a wonderfully rude awakening.
My hands dug into his shoulders and I moaned out a promise, “No more teasing, no more teasing.”
“Definitely no teasing the father-to-be,” he growled in my ear, sucking on my earlobe in a way that tickled rather than sent shivers down my spine.
My moan morphed into a laugh. “What about the mother-to-be? She deserves an orgasm,” I retorted, my words broken as he lived up to the task and moved a little harder, a lot faster.
“You deserve something that’s for sure,” he rumbled, dropping his mouth now so that it was hovering over my lips.
I fought fire with fire because with a kiss, that was the only place Finn let me attempt to conquer him. As I explored him, savored him, reveled in him, I felt the second something switched on.
Gone were the teasing strokes, and in its place, I felt his tension start to brew as he tugged on my bottom lip.
“Mine,” he ground out.
My pussy clenched around his dick at the declaration, a declaration that always had me squirming and celebrating.
This hard man, this mobster, this brilliant mind, this beautifully scarred soul—he called me his.
I’d never imagined that belonging to someone could feel like this. Had never imagined I’d want to.
Who wanted to be owned by another person?
But if Finn owned me, I owned him.
It was a mutual possession, and that was what made it so perfect—
“Say it,” he rumbled, breaking into my thoughts.
“Yours,” I breathed.
“Who do you belong to, baby?”
“Y-You.” I ran my hands over the length of his spine, rubbing the taut muscles with my fingers before I dug my nails into the firm curves of his ass cheeks.
A hiss escaped him. “You will always be mine, Aoife. You know that, don’t you?”
I blinked bleary eyes at him. “I k-know that,” I whimpered as my toes curled into his calves, digging into them as much as he was digging into me.
“Good.” He crooned, “You take me so well, baby. So fucking well. So perfect for me. Mine,” he ended, sealing it with a kiss he pressed to my lips, before he speared his tongue into my mouth, telling me silently that the time for words had long since gone.
As he rocked into me, his tongue slid against mine, fucking me there as fast as he fucked my pussy. He reared up slightly, grabbing my legs and repositioning me so they were spread wider apart, absorbing my gargled scream with his kiss as he pounded my G-spot.
Again, and again, and again.
He angled my legs so the front of my thighs were against my chest, and he seemed to sink deeper into me as he joined our mouths once more.
I sobbed into his kiss, broke down into it, then was reborn in it as I came.
I came so damn hard and for so damn long that I was literally crying as the pleasure pummeled me.
Pleasure so fierce, so riotous that it was painful.
It hurt so good.
So good.
Heart racing, lungs burning, I dragged my mouth from his before I passed out from the lack of oxygen, and screamed with the ferocity of my unending orgasm.
It went on for what felt like an eternity.
Ceaseless.
Endless.
The darkness was there… beckoning me, enticing me with its comforting embrace, then he nipped my bottom lip and he brought me back to him.
“No passing out,” he chided gruffly, but I heard the relief in his voice.
A relief that was undoubtedly founded in the fact that I hadn’t passed out—he didn’t like it when I did that.
We all had our quirks. Mine was that I didn’t like waking up to find my pussy empty. I loved the feeling of him deep inside me, because I felt that connection to my soul. It bound us together, made us a force to be reckoned with, and in the months and weeks ahead, I’d need that.
Carrying Jacob hadn’t been easy.
Finn knew that too.
I also knew he’d never wanted me to get pregnant in the first place, but he’d let me try because I told him I didn’t want Jake to be like him or me—only children.
The next eight months were going to be rocky, but we’d get through them.
Together.
“Love you, baby,” he rasped, his mouth caressing mine, not letting me answer him just yet.
The holiday season had been particularly stressful this year, and I could hear the release in his tone, and knew that he’d found some peace in our joining.
Dazed and punch drunk, still full of him, I broke our kiss, reached up and nuzzled my nose against his jawline, then mumbled, “Love you too.”
He tilted his head down so that he could press a softer kiss to my lips. “Need you, Aoife. Need your love so fucking much.”
His words had me blinking back the fog from an orgasm that was like an atomic bomb.
I squeezed him in a hug but he was pulling back. At first, I frowned, because Finn didn’t do that, he didn’t pull away, then as he slipped out of me, I watched him watch us together.
He sighed at the sight of cum slipping out of my pussy, and I, in return, sighed at the sight of him kneeling between my legs.
Four years we’d been together, and I never grew tired of looking at him.
I’d gotten to this weird phase in my mind where I was starting to forget the moments when I hadn’t been with him. He seemed to drown everything else out, and I knew that was a coping mechanism as well as that old adage of time healing all wounds.
We’d met when I was still grieving my mom, and now, my recent memories were tied up in him. Not all of them were joyous—this Christmas included—but he was like a black hole.
He absorbed everything.
Snatched it away, stealing it from me so that I was entrenched in him.
Some might consider that unhealthy, but I was happy with my life so what was the harm?
Groaning when he rubbed his fingers along my slit, the digits gathering our wetness, he muttered, “I never get tired of looking at this.”
“Good,” was my stout reply.
His smile made the tiniest of appearances. “Good? Nothing else?”
“What do you want me to say?” I tacked on drowsily, slurring the words again as he sparked remnants of pleasure and turned them into glowing embers. “You fucked me mindless.”
Finn chuckled softly. “I want to look at this pussy forever.”
“You can,” I said sleepily. “It’s not going anywhere.”
He made me jerk when his fingers slid into me, and my legs snapped together in reaction.
I hissed when, his eyes on mine, he repeated, “I love you.” His voice was insistent this time.
Like he was demanding I knew that he loved me.
My head fell back against the pillows as he slid his cum-slick fingers along my sensitive flesh.
“I love you too,” I breathed, uncertain of why he was tormenting me with pleasure, uncertain of why his insecurities were rearing their head now. “But baby, I can’t take anymore.”
His lips quirked into a cocky smile. “Is that a challenge?”
“No, I just know you don’t like it if I pass out.”
Had he forgotten already?
If his repeated vows of love weren’t clue enough, here I had proof that my husband’s head space was not where it needed to be.
He groused under his breath as he stopped petting me, but then I whimpered as he pressed a kiss to my mound.
Before he could climb away, I snagged his hand in mine and whispered, “Finn? What’s going on?”
My charming, debonair husband was a mobster, sure, but to look at, you’d never know it.
He wore expensive suits and costly watches, his shirts were hand stitched and his shoes were made by some monks in Tuscany or some such BS.
Beneath that surface veneer of a businessman who pioneered a corporation that was on track to break a billion in turnover this year, however, there was Finn.
The boy I’d known when I was a toddler.
A teen whose abusive father had seen him running away to the streets.
A man who’d been reared in violence and had adapted to it, joining the Irish Mob and becoming a Five Pointer…
He was multi-faceted, just like anyone, but Finn was different.
It was only after we’d married that I realized something had broken him along the way.
I tugged on his hand, knowing full well he’d come if I pressed, and he did. He slipped onto me, then twisted us both over, tangling our legs in the wet spot, and making us one big knot on the sheets.
With my breath brushing his lips and his mine, our eyes on each other, the faint light from the bathroom the only illumination in our bedroom at the O’Donnelly compound in upstate New York, I whispered, “Talk to me.”
Telling me he loved me twice in a handful of minutes?
A nightmare last night?
His being forgetful when my man’s memory was razor sharp?
Something was going on, and I wanted to know. How could I help fix things if I was kept in the dark?
He was silent for so long that I didn’t think he’d speak, then he broke my heart by admitting, “You know my stepfather abused me?”
My heart stuttered, rage and compassion warring inside me as I retorted, “I’d poison his bread if I could.”
I knew something was wrong but I hadn’t thought it was to do with his stepfather.
Finn blinked at that, but he smiled. “Only you could make me smile at a moment like this.”
“You know if you crush up apple seeds, you can make cyanide?” I mean, you needed a hell of a lot of apple seeds, but that was how they’d done it in the old days. “I go through thousands of apples in the bakery. I know where to get a source of untraceable cyanide.”
“Let me guess, Jen told you that one,” he drawled with a chuckle. “She’s more into the vengeance shit than you.”
“I watch documentaries too,” I said in a scurry. “Plus, I learned all kinds of crap at culinary school.”
“‘How To Poison People 101?’ Isn’t the objective not to poison people when you’re learning to be a chef?”
I shoved his shoulder slightly. “Don’t be dense.”
“I’m pretty sure this life is poisonous in and of itself. A few years ago, you wouldn’t have told someone you’d lace their danish with cyanide.”
Tipping my head to the side, I murmured, “That’s where you’re wrong. I wasn’t an angel, Finn.”
“No?” He smiled. “Actually, you’re right. Not past tense. Present. You are my angel.”
“Even angels can have dirty faces when they shove it in a bowl of cookie dough.”
That had him snorting out a laugh. “Like Jake did last week?”
I nodded. “You’re surrounded by angels with dirty faces.”
I didn’t tell him that I thought he belonged in the same category.
Maybe ‘the life’ had changed me. Maybe I was more risk cautious, danger aware than before, and maybe I knew there were some things that had to be done to keep the world spinning—
I sighed.
He wasn’t wrong.
Men had died on the O’Donnelly compound over the holidays.
My husband had returned to me from only God knew where the night before Christmas Eve stinking of smoke, and wouldn’t you know it? There’d been a terror attack against the cathedral in New York…
It wasn’t hard to put one and one together.
Wasn’t hard to think that maybe he’d been a part of that whole thing that had New York on a red alert the likes of which we hadn’t seen since that horrendous September back in ’01.
I reached over and cupped his chin. “Do you judge me for letting my morals slip?”
“Are you kidding me? I thank Christ every fucking day for that. There’d be no me and you if you couldn’t deal with…” His words waned, but I heard them anyway.
If you couldn’t deal with the things I have to do to put bread on the table.
“Then what’s the problem?”
His hand moved over to press against my stomach. “Another soul is coming into the world. My child is coming into the life. I can’t control that or stop it or change it.”
Ah.
Shit.
I should have thought about that.
I was still in the happy phase. Still wondering if it would be a boy or a girl, and hoping I’d get through the pregnancy without too many health issues. Unlike last time.
Finn, though I’d only told him I was pregnant this morning, was thinking about when Jake and this baby—if it were a boy—were approaching fourteen.
Fourteen… When the Irish Mob had their version of a Bar Mitzvah and introduced their teenagers to the lifestyle.
My heart shriveled at the thought of arming Jake with a gun in thirteen years’ time… Would that happen? Would Aidan Sr. still be alive so Finn couldn’t break the cycle?
“My stepdad raped me, Eef.”
“I know he did, baby.”
My thumb traced over the line of his cheekbone. Little spiderwebs of wrinkles had appeared at the corners of his eyes this past year, and I was pretty sure that had everything to do with stress and not being almost forty-two.
“It isn’t my secret to tell, and I’ve kept this locked up inside for decades… I’d never have said a word either. Never, but—” He released a breath. “Let me start at the beginning. Conor was raped by a priest, Eef.”
For a second, I thought he was joking, but then my brain just whirred to a halt because this wasn’t funny in the least.
This wasn’t a joking matter.
And somehow, even though it was the opposite of a punchline, I knew my husband had more to tell me than that.
So, like anyone facing a hurricane armed with nothing more than a dollar-store umbrella, I braced myself.
Knowing that even that wouldn’t be enough.
Because for the Irish Mob, nothing ever was.
