The Punishment of Ivy Leavold (Markham Hall, #3)

by Sierra Simone

Ivy wasn’t tame. She was here dressed in the same clothes, wearing the same manners as everybody else, but they no more hid her nature than the bars of a cage hid that of a tiger’s in the zoo. And the same way people were drawn to those tigers stalking agitated circles in their pens, they were drawn to Ivy.

I wanted to make her better. I wanted to heal her. I also wanted to fuck her ass until she begged for forgiveness. But. Restraint.

“I suggest you examine your definition of ‘best,’ Ivy. Are you holding your relationship to a true moral rubric or to the moral rubric you think you should have?”

Jules woke you up—all of you—and now you’re trying to go back to sleep. Do you really think that’s the wisest?”

I appraised her dispassionately, how her breathing had grown rapid and how she seemed unable to take her eyes off me. She responded to me in the same way Ivy had responded to me the first night I’d met her. Esther’s one of us, I thought. She just doesn’t know it yet.

Let them think that informality and nicknames let them claim some sort of familiarity with me. They were wrong. But there was something so intimate about hearing my given name from Ivy’s lips. Like she knew me. The real me. The real Julian.

Do you measure your worth by how you love? Do you measure your humanity by the power you hold over people in love or the power that people hold over you in love? Who is anyone to say this is right or this is natural? Doesn’t the very fact that you want it make it natural to you?”

I took her chin in my hand and tilted her face to mine. “I think you do. Fear is part of this world, Ivy. So is uncertainty. But those things are only bad if they stifle us and keep us from living our lives the way we need.”

She was shaking her head vehemently, as if disagreeing. “But I’m asking you to take them.” “Are you? Or do you want me to take them so that you don’t have to choose?”

Maybe Molly wasn’t a friend, maybe I would always be jealous of her past with Julian, but she was in my sphere and I didn’t wish her anything but success. And there was something satisfying about seeing another woman wrestle her way into the world of men with nothing but sheer force of will.

“You find a man who matches your needs. A man who will cherish you tenderly, who will respect you in all ways, but will insist that somewhere, somehow, in some part of your life, you totally and wholly capitulate to him. And you’ve found him.

False holiness will get you nowhere in life. But living it with those you love, following your heart—that is how you become the self you want to be.

“If you hadn’t left, you would’ve always wondered what would’ve happened if you had. You would have always had one hand on the door, and this way, we both know. We both know that you came back, on your own.”

God, I loved her so much. I loved her so much that the word love seemed ridiculously inadequate for the magnitude of what I felt. I wanted to cut myself open and make her crawl inside of me. I wanted to live and breathe and drink every moment with her, for her, and then die for her a thousand and one times.

I pressed my lips against her stomach, and she laced her hands through my hair, holding me there, and I suddenly felt like a penitent knight kneeling before a saint.

But as I held her, feeling the swelling of promise in her abdomen, I realized that I did have her. Because I’d allowed her to have all of me. And we would continue on like this every day, each delight better than the last, each high higher than the one that came before it. I had my wildcat and she had me.

I was angry. Yes, I could feel it, such a twin passion to lust, both so fiery, so energetic, both restless, agitating, primal feelings.