authorbelladonna
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- Parts 17
𝗦 𝗪 𝗘 𝗟 𝗧 𝗘 𝗥
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"You smell like lilies and clean linen, little girl," Creed whispered, his hand clamping around my bare wrist until the bone ached. "Makes a man want to ruin you."
🪷
Ninety percent humidity, the suffocating stench of bruised magnolias, and Creed Claiborne standing on my veranda like an unholy plague.
He was my older brother's best friend- the Lowcountry's ruthless blue-blood heir, an untouchable atheist whose dynastic family owns the judges, the marshlands, and every corrupt cop in the county.
For ten summers, I watched him from behind the lace parlor screens, praying to God to wash away my sinful thoughts. He ignored me, blew clove smoke into the hydrangeas, and told me to go back inside before the heat made me crazy.
So I did what a preacher's daughter was raised to do.
I buried my feelings. I found a safe, God-fearing lawyer. I put on twenty yards of pristine white satin and prepared to walk down the aisle.
I never made it to the altar.
Minutes before the organ played, my groom was found dead in the vestry with his neck broken. An "act of God," they whispered, a random robbery gone wrong.
When I collapsed on the church steps, choking on my own screams, it wasn't the priest who caught me.
It was Creed.
Creed, lifting me into his arms, wrapping his bespoke coat around my trembling frame, his slow southern drawl murmuring sweet, filthy promises into my hair while rain drowned the cemetery.
Now, he refuses to leave my side. He sleeps in my house. He feeds me from his own hands. He claims he's keeping me safe.
The town calls him my protector. My brother calls him a brother.
None of them smell the metallic tang of dried blood beneath his expensive rye whiskey and clove tobacco.
None of them know what he did to my groom.