Chapter Seventy

Safiya

I bled out all of my fears, and I told him the truth.

He wrapped his arms around me, and his voice washed over my soul like the balm it had always been. "Shh, shh. I got you."

I did not want him to only have me. I wanted to have him in return, except I was afraid. "I am hurt," I admitted as emotion welled, and my voice gave me away. "But I do not want an out. I do not want you to leave me forever."

"I hear you, beautiful. I'm not going anywhere."

For a single breath, every shattered, rattling, broken piece of me that had been vibrating uncontrollably since he had walked me into that room full of women shuddered to a stop. Then they picked right back up. "Do not make me false promises." I would not survive it.

"I never have, and I never will." He brushed my hair over my shoulder with a feather of a caress before his lips touched the shower-and-humidity-warmed skin of my shoulder. "You're trembling. Take a breath." He inhaled slow and deep.

I closed my eyes and mimicked him.

Five breaths later, his lips touched my shoulder again. "Better?"

My nerves skittered, my heart thrummed, my body felt as if I had had too much tea when I had not had any, and it did not escape me that he had not responded to any of the things I had said. But he was here. He was holding me, and I could not deny that this felt different. I felt different.

"Yes, thank you," I replied.

"You don't need to thank me. I asked you a question earlier." With his hard chest at my back and the sculpted muscles of his arms forming an impossible cage around me, he held me tight as his lips coasted across my neck. "Do you remember?"

I shivered despite the heat of the day and his body surrounding me. "I remember."

Deliberate and slow, he caressed the bare skin of my stomach as his hands skimmed down to my legs before he drew his fingertips up my thighs with a firm pressure that pushed me back into him even more. Then he grasped the ties of my bikini bottom on either hip and stilled. "I need an answer, Safiya."

Suddenly, I became hyperaware of the rough coarseness of his jeans and the impossibly thick, frighteningly long ridge pressed almost entirely against my backside that I had only ever felt once before. Except that time the contact had been brief and unintentional as he had shifted slightly in his sleep. But this calculated press of contact that was all at once too much and not enough, it was deliberate and provocative and breath stealing as every last rational thought unfaithfully abandoned me.

My lower stomach tightened, and a painful emptiness pulsed between my legs. I wanted to weep with need. "I have already given you my answer." Please, please relieve this tension.

He slipped his fingers beneath the strings and grasped my hips hard. Then his dominantly pernicious command destroyed every last reason that had driven me to flee from him. "Give me the words, Safiya."

I gave him more than words. I gave him my heart and soul. "I trust you with my body."

He pulled the strings, my bikini bottom fell to the stone tiles under our feet, and his teeth grazed my shoulder. With barely more than a rough whisper, his dominant voice turned into lethal seduction. "Do you know who gets to touch you now?" The back of his hand dragged across my sex with taunting, exquisite, painful pressure as every one of his knuckles slowly took their torturously measured turn kneading against my most sensitive spot as if it were their ministerial duty.

Desire ripped through my body, my lips parted with a heated gasp, and my core pulsed so hard, it made the previous emptiness a derisory imitation.

With blinding need, I reached back for him.

Before my hands could grasp at his thighs, his fingers were cuffed around my wrists. "No."

His sharp reprimand shook me to my very soul, but I was no longer hurt and betrayal. I was need. "You touch me, you undress me, but you leave your pants on and capture my wrists. Why?"

The warm water of the shower falling all over us, his lips on my shoulder, he swirled his tongue. "Because this is our dynamic, and if I take my jeans off now, you're going to lose your virginity." He bit the flesh at the base of my neck.

My entire body arced in a violent arch of shock, pain, and desperate desire.

His tongue lathed, and mine betrayed me. "What if I am no longer a virgin?"

For one frenetic beat of my heart, he stilled.

His veined muscles bulging, his hands back on my hips, his fingers spread low over my stomach, his mouth on my flesh, he did not move.

Then his voice came deeper, rougher and drenched in a warning anger. "Are you still a virgin, Safiya?"

Chill bumps raced across my flesh, and my breath seized. I had never been so simultaneously aroused, ashamed at my inexperience, and aggrieved by his dominance. I had also never wanted to lie to him before.

But I did.

I desperately, desperately did.

I wanted to say no.

I wanted to feel the word on my lips and his reaction on my body. I wanted him to bathe in anger. I disgracefully wanted him to experience hurt—the same hurt that was still lurking in my soul.

Then I wanted to get on my knees and supplicate.

If I could lie and breathe in his anger, then beg for forgiveness with the truth, I would. I would have done so that very second because he had all the sovereignty and I had none.

"Safiya."

Stated, not said.

My name plus one single breath of his.

It was all my body and heart needed to betray me.

"Yes," I whispered, relinquishing the very last chance of ever having any hope of agency with this man.

His inhale was deep, and for a single life-affirming moment, we stood as one.

Then he grasped my chin, tipped my head up, and his voice dropped to a deep murmur as his darkened gaze landed on mine. "You were always going to be mine, hayatim ."

Hayatim.

My life.

He had called me my life in Turkish. Choking on emotions I had no name for, I could barely whisper the single most important word I knew. " Grayson ."

Leaning down, he brushed his lips against mine.

My breath caught, the world faded to nothing, and heat erupted.

Before I could process the soft touch of his lips, the rough grazing of his unshaven jaw, and the most beautiful thing anyone had ever said to me, he pulled back. "Still trust me?"

My body on fire, my mind cascading, I finally understood the true meaning of the word faint . There was nothing pale about it.

"Safiya?"

"Yes?" Did he kiss the others?

His cool blue-gray gaze holding mine, his expression suddenly more unreadable than I had ever seen it, he deftly undid the tie around my neck and back. Tossing my bikini top aside before skimming his palms over the taut peaks of my aching breasts, he ignored my breathless moan as he firmly grasped my throat.

Then he stroked the side of my neck with an achingly gentle caress. "I want to take you somewhere."