Cousins In Love: An Alpha Bad Boy Romance (Book 3) (2 page)

Maybe if I just take one of my hands and slide a finger or two between my folds, very lightly, very slowly; I may be able to hold off long enough to make this work for the both of us. But watching me do this to myself, and not being able to participate, is probably taking things a bit too far. Roman takes an almost obsessive delight in controlling when I orgasm and how often; me masturbating in front of him is the ultimate challenge to that carnal need of his.
 

I know I'm right once he begins to growl at me at a decibel level that I can clearly hear. That the whole block could hear. I'm breaking him.
 

So this is what it feels like? I think I'm starting to see the appeal.

"Shh," I warn him. "Quiet."

"Duchess," he exhales my name like a prayer for mercy.

And then a second later he calls my name much louder.

"Duchess!"

The boom of his call frightening the bejeezus out of me. And just like that my eyes pop open and reality smacks me dead in the face. I'm still in my bedroom, but I'm not nude. I'm wearing a matching racerback tank and panty set. The one I bought from Target just the other day. I'm not standing up, but lying across my bed, and Roman is definitely here but his muscular body is hovering above me and he's grinning, as if he just won the lottery or something.

I blink my eyes several times to help get the room in focus. Not just because I don't have my contacts in, and I can't see much, but because I'm a little confused as to what's happening around me.
 

"I hate to wake you up, but you were dreaming about me, and it's making my dick hard as fuck."

Of course ... it was all a dream.

"I don't think–"

Roman quickly slides one of his thick fingers inside my panties and in between my folds. When he slides it back out, he pops it inside his mouth and sucks.

"Mmm, I think you were, baby. You taste like you were dreaming about me. You taste like heaven."

He's right, there's no use in pretending or being embarrassed by it. What's wrong with a little dirty dream? Plus I'm horny as hell, and he's just the man who can help me out with that. The only man.

"I was on my knees," I say with a teasing grin.

I wasn't quite on my knees yet in the dream, but he doesn't need to know that.

"Fuck, Duchess," he says gruffly. Almost in the same identical erotic way he did in my dream.
 

"Is that what you want right now? My dick in your mouth?"

He's so dirty. I love it, and I love him.

"Yes, Masterson," I say as I slide my body down the bed and under the sheets, "that's exactly what I want."

The first, strong pull I take of his engorged cock is smoky and spicy, and renders him utterly speechless.
 

Very much like he was in my dream.

CHAPTER TWO

ROMAN

Sex is a very powerful weapon. Historically it's been known to bring down even the most ruthless of men to their knees. Now I understand why. I'm sitting on one end of my father's dining room table while he sits at the other end, staring at each other silently because of sex. I'm not sure why he agreed to this sit down, but I admittedly did after being given a blowjob that changed my life.
 

Yeah, sex makes you stupid.

I feel like I'm in the middle of a Spaghetti Western stand off. The old man is blowing slowly on his spoonful of hot potato soup waiting for me to say something, and I'm doing the same as I bullshit around with my turkey on rye that Juliette fixed for me. Right before she ran out of Dodge.
 

Fuck it. I'm not hungry. I'll go first. But as soon as I prepare to open my mouth to say the first few words I've said to Joseph in months, the old coot beats me to it.

"So I hear that you have an issue with me."

That would probably be understating things, but okay, I'll bite.

"Which issue would that be?" I ask sarcastically.

"You think I have something to do with you not being able to secure any new clients."

He's right. I absolutely do think that. When Joseph and I parted ways last year, I wanted to make a clean break, meaning I'd start over from scratch. Yet he insisted that I take The Lotus and Mendez with me. I had to be mindful and consider my friends the Kings and not just myself when I made my decision, so I agreed. Lawyers sealed the deal. There were no hidden clauses, no backdoor deals I had to agree to, and no exchange of monies.
 

"It was a parting gift,"
he said at the time. Now I'm starting to think that there was a price for such a generous gift. He's cockblocking me big time.
 

Neither Cam, Cutter nor I have been able to sign a new client to save our fucking lives. No one is calling us to fix shit, and the feelers that we've been putting out there are resulting in basically nothing. Shit clients. Degenerates who want us to burn down their corner stores for the insurance money. It's fucking insulting.

"I certainly don't think it's a coincidence."

Joseph takes another slow slurp of his soup. The noise sickens me. Reminds me of days from my childhood when all I had to slurp on for days was ramen noodles, thanks to my addict mother and absentee father. After he dabs his mouth with a napkin, the old man sits back in his chair, hands folded in his lap; looking like the smug bastard he's always been. The same man I've resented but also revered for most of my life.
 

"If you think I had to convince people not to hire you and those
friends
of yours, you're sadly mistaken. There aren't too many people who are simply going to trust you
just
because you're my son. That is of course unless I tell them to." He smirks after making that last comment. Pissing me off even further.

"We've been working
together
as a team for years. Why would I have to convince anyone of anything, unless you're telling them shit to make them reconsider hiring me?"

"Let's get one thing straight. You and the Kings worked for me. We didn't work
together
. Having said that, let's not forget that I was grooming your ungrateful ass to takeover the business and be your own boss until you started sleeping around with family."

He's bringing up Elizabeth to get a rise out of me. That seems to be his go to strategy now to crush me in an argument. To rattle me. Throw me off my game. Wait for me to react like the hothead I can be. So he can say, "see." I'm not going to give him the satisfaction. I'm the new and improved Roman 2.0, and that's not what I came here for.
 

I'm here because just before I was about to blow a load in my beautiful girlfriend's mouth, she asked me to meet with Joseph, and if I said anything but, "yes baby," she made it quite clear that our very vigorous session of sucking and fucking would end prematurely.
 

Little brat.
 

Sure, I could have taken it out on her in other ways that night. It's what I do. But we've come to a few understandings over the last few months since we've been together. One of them being that I would stop being an orgasm bully (one of her ridiculous names for me) and engage in more reciprocal sexual endeavors with her. Or at least try. Although I don't see what the problem is. She's fooling herself if she doesn't see that we both get tremendous mutual satisfaction out of my control, my punishments, and of course my rewards.

"You can't seriously have a problem with me being with Elizabeth. You were never in her life growing up, and you don't really have any sort of emotional connection to her now. I mean you barely talked to her when she lived in this house. So what is your real attachment to this? To make sure that I'm a miserable fuck?"

"What you fail to realize,
son,
is that I do know Elizabeth. I've known Elizabeth since she was a kid, because her mother sent or emailed pictures of her over the years to us. She sent pictures of her first sleepover, her first spelling bee, she lost in the third round by the way; her first set of braces, the senior prom, nice looking kid took her if I recall right; and she also sent her graduation photos from both high school and college.
 

"I didn't need to spend a ton of time with her to know who Elizabeth was. I learned all about her through pictures, through anecdotes, and through overhearing brief but sweet phone conversations between Juliette and Elizabeth's mother."

I reach in my jeans and play around with a few M&Ms in my pocket. I pretty much always mindlessly munch on my favorite candy daily, but Joseph's words are making me feel a little guilty. Maybe if he had said all of this shit a long time ago, we wouldn't be here. Maybe if he had shared some of those slices of Elizabeth's life growing up with me as well, maybe I would have looked at her more like a family member, rather than a hot piece of ass seducing an entire club full of men the night I first saw her. Maybe I would have been the older cousin, or the big brother, who visited her on Penn's campus and scared motherfuckers like Ethan away before they could pollute her with their disease ridden penises.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

But that's not what the fuck happened.

What happened was that Joseph and Juliette kept all that pertinent information to themselves. Probably because it was too painful for Juliette to talk about. The beloved niece she would hear about but could never see, because her brother wouldn't have anything to do with her.
 

What happened was I met this beloved cousin of mine only once when I was a kid, and she was annoying as fuck; so I buried her in the backyard to get rid of her. What happened was I didn't recognize her when I saw her again as an adult. And there was no stopping me once I saw Elizabeth in the club that night, and then again at the restaurant.

I'm not a big believer in fate. A real man makes his own destiny, but I'm no idiot either. I know that either God or some other higher power was smacking me in the back of the head back then, trying to point Elizabeth out to me. Trying to tell me that she was my girl, that I needed to claim her, and that I needed to make her see it too.
 

Elizabeth is supposed to be mine and she is. I love her, and nothing is ever going to change that. Why can't these motherfuckers we're related to get on board? I know I'm fucked up, but the one good thing about me, the one thing that I've gotten completely right is loving Elizabeth.

"So what, we're a little dysfunctional and don't spend the holidays together like other families. That doesn't change a single thing," Joseph continues on, "I don't care if I never met Elizabeth. By marriage or by blood, she is still my family, which means that she is your family too. She is your cousin, and while I don't necessarily care about who people choose to love, what I do care about is the fact that her parents will never accept the two of you. They will never be okay with it. Which means that they'll never be okay with Juliette. Which means that they definitely will
never
be okay with me. That's my attachment to
this
of which you speak."

I can't munch on my candy right now, since I'm positive that Joseph will get the wrong idea. He'll think that he's bothered me with that speech. Which he hasn't, but he has given me an earful to consider. So to help me process, I decide to take a bite of my turkey sandwich, instead of a handful of candy. Damn, it's pretty good too. Juliette spread some sort of secret sauce on the bread instead of mayo or mustard, which gives it just the right amount of tang.
 

Joseph carefully watches me as I chew and swallow my sandwich, then take a sip from my bottle of water. He still seems to be anticipating, or waiting for an outburst from me, as if his disapproval of my relationship means shit to me. It doesn't. I just want Elizabeth to be okay.
 

"What if I get her family on board? Bring brother and sister back together again. Will you stop sabotaging my business?"

Joseph leans forward.

"Sabotage?" he lets out a single incredulous laugh. "Do you even understand why I gave you The Lotus and Mendez in the first place?"

"So you could go travel the world with your wife?"
 

He and Juliette haven't spent much time in Philly over the last few months. They've been to several countries since he decided to essentially retire from the business, and from what Elizabeth tells me they're loving every minute of it. They have plans to continue traveling on and off for the rest of the year. Something about traveling to every continent before Juliette's next birthday.

"I didn't have to give you a single thing in order for me to take my wife around the world."

"So then why did you?" Since he seems to be dying to tell me.

"I gave you the easiest club to manage, the one with the highest profit margin, and I gave you the best client to manage, the celebrity with the deepest pockets and minimal drama as gifts from a father to his son. You don't have to work another day in your life if you so choose, Roman, and that's because I set it up that way. You may have earned a living over the years with some work on your part, but only because I permitted it to happen.
 

"I know I wasn't your ideal father, but I'm going to be perfectly honest with you since you're a grown man now. I'm sure you're very much aware that your birth wasn't planned. People that come from where we come from don't plan shit. Life just happens to us. When your mother told me she was pregnant, I didn't want you. I certainly wasn't in love with your mother, and I was too busy trying to make a name for myself and get out of the neighborhood to be concerned with raising a baby. Because of my mentality, I didn't accept you for a long time. That's my fault. It's one of my biggest regrets. I realize now that I was reacting to a situation that I didn't plan for like a frightened child and not a man. It just took me a minute to realize it.