Chapter Eight

CHAPTER EIGHT

It was that moment between action and reaction. The longest second in the world. Where there are a thousand different outcomes, and the universe was peeling its way through all of them. His lips against mine were open, like he was breathing me in, but he didn’t kiss me.

He was just breathing. In and out. Against me.

I’d been a virgin on my wedding night. Something that seemed important to the senator. He’d touched the blood between my legs when the brief sex of our wedding night was over. He’d touched the blood and rubbed it between his fingers and said, in a satisfied way. “You’re mine.”

I’d been speechless with pain and disappointment, and so I said nothing, which was what he liked best, though I didn’t know it at the time.

Before the senator there’d been a guy I worked with in the library in college. A boy in high school. But nothing prepared me for the senator, and nothing about the senator prepared me for Ronan.

For this feeling right now.

This ache. This need. I wanted him to kiss me.

“Poppy,” he said, his voice a groan of regret. He was about to push me away. To end this.

So, I pulled him closer. Licked at his lips, waiting for him to snap or break. Push me away or kiss me back. Anything. Anything but this pitiful saying of my name.

His hands let go of the door and touched me. Feather-light like he was feeling his way across my back. I expected boldness from him. Wanted confident and sure and rough. I wanted him to be in control, and these careful touches weren’t enough. Weren’t nearly enough.

But I didn’t know how to get more from him. How to incite him to more. How to ask for it.

He lifted his hands from my body, and I could feel him pulling away. “Ronan,” I groaned, clinging to him. Trying to stop the inevitable.

And then suddenly he wasn’t kissing me. He turned me away from him and pushed me up against the door. His body hot and hard against my back. Against my . . . ass. I could feel him there. Hard through his tuxedo pants. Proof he did want me. A shuddery relief went through me.

“What do you want, Princess?”

I pressed my forehead against the door and my ass against his cock and we both made a sound like we were being tortured. He cupped my breast in his wide rough palm.

“Say it,” he groaned in my ear.

“I don’t . . . I don’t know.”

His chuckle against my neck sent shockwaves through my body, and my knees buckled. He leaned harder against me, holding me between the door with is body. “I think you do,” he said, his hands still. His hips still. “I think you know what you want. You’re just too scared to say it.”

I arched as best I could against him. I didn’t know what to do. How to seduce a man. How to make him want me. I was clueless and stupid.

And still I wanted him to touch me.

“Don’t you want me?” I whispered, hating the words. Hating myself for saying them.

“Why would I want you?” His words were a slap.

I went still, pulling myself deep inside my body. Where I couldn’t be hurt.

“You’re a pawn. A mouse,” he whispered, and I pushed away from the door trying to get away from him and his hands, both of them came up to the bodice of my dress. Reaching between my skin and the silk to cup my naked skin in his hands. I gasped. Torn down the middle by his words and his actions. The silk of my dress tore as he shoved it down, baring my breasts to the cool air.

It was violent.

“What are you doing?” I whispered.

“Giving you what you want.”

“Not . . . not like this.”

I braced my hands against the door and shoved, but he put his mouth at my neck at the tender skin behind my ear and he bit me. I couldn’t control the tortured moan in my throat. His mouth traveled down my shoulder, planting wet, open-mouthed kisses as he went. Sucking and biting, and I collapsed back against the door. I was angry? Why was I angry?

“You’re scared of your shadow,” he murmured, pulling the skirt of my dress up with one hand as his other cupped my breast, pulled my nipple taut until I cried out in pleasure and pain. This was too much. He was too much. I’d jumped into some kind of deep end with a man who disdained me, and I couldn’t find the will to stop him.

Where was my pride?

“Do I want you?” he breathed as he slid his hand down over the soaked satin of my barely-there thong. I shuddered and tried to escape, but he literally held me in the palm of his hand. I couldn’t tell if he was being mean or sarcastic. I couldn’t tell if he was playing a game or being honest. I didn’t have the experience or the confidence to make sense of this.

I just knew that I wanted him. Mean, sarcastic, whatever I could get from him.

He pulled the wet satin out of his way, and then he was touching me where no one had touched me for years. Years. I’d even stopped touching myself. Sex was a chore. And no part of my body wanted it.

But now . . . oh my god now, my body wanted everything. Anything. Whatever dark depraved thing he wanted to do to me, I wanted it times ten. I couldn’t breathe for the desire filling me. His fingers slipping over every inch of me, and I was on my tip toes, my head thrown back. I didn’t care what he said. Or what he thought if he would just make me come.

So long, it had been so very, very long.

“Look at you.” His voice was cold, and I whimpered. “So needy. So desperate.” He said it like it was wrong. Gross.

“I’m sorry,” I choked.

The hand that had been torturing my breasts came up to my throat, and he held me with my head arched back.

“For what?” he asked. “What are you sorry for?”

Wanting him so much. Being so needy.

Everything.

“I’ll leave,” I breathed. “Just let me go.”

I whimpered as one long finger slid down over my clit. Pressing hard enough to fill my body with sparks.

“No,” he groaned, and my knees gave out. He held me by my throat and the fingers inside of me. “It’s too late for that.”

“Then what do you want?” I twisted against his body. He was a silent steady pressure against my back.

“That girl at the party who was about to run off into the night. I want her. But she doesn’t exist anymore, does she?”

I whimpered in pain. My soul. My body. Everything was hurt by his words.

His fingers against my clit were rough and hard, and no one had ever touched me that way so I had no idea how much I liked it. How his hand around my neck made me feel caught. I couldn’t resist. I couldn’t refuse.

All I could do was stand there and take the pleasure he was forcing on me.

“Oh, look at you,” he said, his voice dark with disdain and desire. “Look at how you love it. What could I do to you?” he asked and licked my earlobe before sucking it into his mouth. “I could fuck you. Right here, couldn’t I? Put you on your knees and feed you my cock until you couldn’t breathe.” All of it. He could do all of it. But I didn’t have to say it. He felt it in my body. My total surrender. My breath was coming out in pants and moans, and I needed his fingers inside me. Inside. I was going to die if he didn’t put something, anything inside me.

Two fingers pushed hard inside me, and I was shuddering. Sobbing. The orgasm I needed a breath away. Two.

“I could stop,” he said, and he did. His fingers still inside me. His hand around my throat applied no pressure. I couldn’t move. Push him away even.

But I didn’t. I closed my eyes and tears rolled down my cheeks. I waited, but so did he.

“Jesus, Princess. If you want it, ask for it.”

Like he knew how hard I’d been conditioned not to. How my self-denial was so deeply ingrained. “I promise you,” he said. “I promise that girl in the ball gown cracking jokes, that if you just ask, if you just say it. I will give it to you.”

“Please.” It burst out of me with perfect manners. “Please, don’t stop. Make me come. Please.”

“There you go,” he said, like he was proud of me, and his fingers were a madness inside my body. In my throat there was a keening sound I couldn’t swallow and would embarrass me when I remembered it tomorrow. And I wanted him to pull up the back of my skirt and undo his pants. I wanted him inside my body in a way I’d never wanted anything ever before.

He wasn’t doing it, so I tried to help it along. Pulling up my skirt, reaching behind me for his pants. The hard steel length of his cock in his pants.

“No.” His hands left my body to slap my own hands against the wall. “Like this.”

And I could have fought, but he’d already said it. I was a mouse. And I let him touch me the way he wanted. Hold me the way he wanted. Against this wall, my hair falling down my face like we were strangers. Animals.

I let him make me come in a wild ecstatic explosion of pleasure and pain. I cried. I might have screamed. I was light, and I was dust. And I was so far out of my body it was relief.

But I imagined all those things he said to me. I imagined him fucking me against this door, or the desk. I imagined the taste of him on my tongue.

I imagined . . . oh god . . . I imagined that savage mouth against mine.

The sweet violence of his kiss.

And I wanted him all over again. More, even, than before. It hurt how much I wanted his kiss.

It took me a moment to realize where he’d been a living breathing blanket damp with sweat against my back, there was only cool fresh air.

He wasn’t holding my neck. His fingers were not between my legs.

Ronan wasn’t touching me at all. I couldn’t feel him even an inch away. On shaky legs I turned, my skirt falling back down to the floor, hiding the thong pulled to the side, my slick thighs. The mess he’d made of me.

He stood by the desk, his hands sweeping his dark hair away from his face. His fingers, I could see were wet from being inside my body. Wet from my come.

“Fix your dress, Poppy,” he said.

“My . . . dress?” the words didn’t make sense. Was it English? My brain had short-circuited.

He pointed at my chest, and I realized the bodice was gaping, revealing my breasts. The silk torn. “Cover yourself.”

Another unwanted memory. The senator on our wedding night standing over the bed where I lay naked.

You’re not much to look at, are you?

Shaking my head didn’t change the memory. Or what had just happened here. I tugged the bodice up as best I could, holding my hands over my skin. Wishing I could cover myself.

This dress cost ten thousand dollars, and it was ruined. I felt ruined.

“You leave first. Go straight to your car. You look like you’ve been fucked against a wall.”

I understood what was happening. The rejection. It had been inevitable, in a way. This was what I got for wanting something.

Anything.

But I was not a child on my wedding night. I was a woman who’d endured enough of a man’s disdain.

“Fuck you,” I said through gritted teeth and reached for the doorknob. He moved so fast I didn’t get it open before he was right in front of me again. His fingers cupping my face.

“Keep your blood up. You’re going to need it. Be smart. Now, go.”

I jerked my head out of his grip and was out that door like an Irish devil was on my heels. But of course, when I turned at the end of the hallway, he wasn’t there.

I had no idea where my purse was, so I left it and my phone, and I stepped out onto the windy 27th street and, like magic, there was my car. My driver. My life operating as it always had.

When I felt somehow . . . changed.

“Ma’am?” my driver said. The wind whipped his coat away from his body, lifted his pale hair off his head.

“Yes?” We stood by the open door. A storm was blowing in from someplace.

“Are you all right?” he asked. He had a nice face my driver. And he was younger than I thought.

So much sudden concern from the men in my life.

“I think so. Yes,” I said and climbed into the back seat. He slammed the door behind me and then we were pulling away from the curb. The party.

The car ride home I spent squashing the lingering fires in my body. Distancing myself from the memory of his fingers around my throat. The open-mouthed kisses on my neck. I pushed them away and framed them up like they weren’t my memories. It was exactly what I did to survive being married to Jim. They were a book I read. Or a movie I saw.

The shame of having to do it again was unwanted, so I turned it into anger.

And I seethed with that anger all the way up to Bishop’s Landing.

The house was dark. And I was alone. The alarm beeped as I entered the front door, and I punched in the code to make it stop.

Theo, the driver, lived in the cottage at the end of the property. Jim’s bodyguard was no longer around. It was just me and seven empty bedrooms. An office wing. A formal dining room. Eight and a half baths.

There was so much room, and I rattled around inside it like a lost toy.

In the dark I went to the drink cart in the sitting room, and I poured myself a glass of something that burned as I shot it back. I poured myself another one and took off my light-as-air, pencil-thin Jimmy Choo stilettos and walked barefoot with my drink through the kitchen and the sliding glass door to the pool deck. Another drink and with nowhere to put the glass I heaved it at the far end of the patio stones where it smashed spectacularly.

Tonight . . . tonight had to be the end of something. Or the beginning. The way Caroline changed the speech. The way I came apart in Ronan’s hands only to be tossed aside the second he’d taken me apart. I was being used by everyone. Enough.

I lit a fire in the small fire pit I’d made out of bricks and stone, and I took off the dress and the thong and naked in the moonlight I burned them.

Shivering, I watched my old life burn.

My blood was up. And I was ready for a fight.