Chapter 33

Nix and I got home to our apartment in Chelsea before dinner. When buying our home, he’d picked somewhere that had an underground garage with a hidden entry that made our lives far more private.

Never had we expected us to need it for my publicity.

The drive back was excruciating. The video—the video—I had to tell Nix about it.

He spent our drive showing me the positive articles from the trial—positive for me, at least. The main headline was the scandal that SamanthaGarvsadmitted to leaking the picture. My eyes narrowed in surprise, and my head inched back.

How could he be so positive when he had just missed the race that meant he couldn’t win the championship? As the last leg of races were all in America, we wouldn’t be able to get to Texas in good time for Nix to practice and qualify. He’d missed too many points and Frank was storming ahead.

He’d given up the championship for me.

This man who I’d thought was too arrogant and selfish to care about anything else.

And now I felt sick with guilt too.

For the journey, my mind kept racing through what might be in the video. The picture was bad enough. I’d never seen the original; half of my body was blurred.

But it wouldn’t be good.

“There’s a video,” I blurted the second he put his keys on the entry table.

He turned, half an arm out of his suit jacket. “A video of what?”

“That night,” I said and kicked off my heels before nudging them to stand side by side with my feet. “Vinnyrecorded it. Samantha took a still of it.”

The shoes weren’t symmetrical, so I nudged them further, needing the pointed toes to face straight, an inch from the skirting board.

He didn’t speak, though I could feel the anger radiating off of him.

I kept on shuffling the shoes forward with my toe.

“Want me to call Trina?” Nix asked, brushing my hair off my shoulder, avoiding my skin. He never touched my skin when we discussedVinny.

And I hated it. I hated that he felt I didn’t want him, as if I might think he was similar.

Why wouldn’t they go straight? I toppled one shoe over and groaned at my failure.

Nix bent to stand it up again and placed it perfectly. He looked up at me, crouched down at my side and then turned it so it was a centimetre off.

Only when I shoved it to the correct position and was no longer glaring down did he stand again.

“I don’t want you to call Trina,” I said, acclimatising to how much shorter I was than him out of my heels. “I don’t want to be in my head. I want you to touch me. I want you to distract me. ”

He stepped back. “Livie—”

“I need you to distract me,” I begged, following him and pulling at his top. “Distract me.”

We hadn’t had sex since that quickie in my hotel room weeks ago.

He’d cuddled me, let me lie on top of him at night, but we hadn’t touched each other like that.

I didn’t have the energy.

“I want you to know that I love you,” I told him, looking up at his concerned expression. He clearly wanted to help my pain. “I want you to know that you can touch me. If we’re talking about what happened. If I’m crying. You’re not him.”

He swallowed and took my hand from his shirt to hold. “On one condition. We’re introducing yellow flag. If we’re doing anything you think is too much — you want a breather, you want me to check in but don’t want to completely stop, you are going to yellow flag it. If you want to stop, it’s the same as usual — red flag.”

I nodded, pressing my chest into his.

“The signal.”

I raised our safe sign.

And I threw myself at him, quite literally. He caught me and held my legs around his waist as he kissed me back, slower than usual, startled.

But I put more energy into the kiss, more desperation. I needed his hands in my hair, I needed the air out of my lungs, I needed to choke on his cock.

I just needed to be away, off the ground, in his arms.

He kissed down my neck but it wasn’t enough. I jumped down from his legs and dragged him to the living room. I didn’t have the patience to get to our bedroom. I pushed him down onto the sofa and stripped before him. But it wasn’t sensual; it was me throwing my clothes off, not caring where they ended up, and then I was on his trousers, unbelting him, lifting his thin-knit jumper off him.

It hadn’t been a minute since I’d given the safe signal.

Poor guy must have had whiplash.

The living room was dark — I hadn’t given him the time to turn the lights on — but I could still make out the grooves of his stomach, the muscle of his arms as I pulled him on top of me.

He was no longer cautious, rubbing his cock up and down my slit. When he caught my clit with the smooth touch of him, I gasped.

His tongue flicked against my nipple and I closed my eyes, trying to enjoy the sensation.

“I’m going to need a bit of pain with my pleasure,” I told him, breathless.

He twisted my nipple as he sucked on the other.

It wasn’t enough.

I wanted so much pain that if I had been drugged, I would have woken up.

I needed to feel it.

“Harder.”

I felt the scrape of his beard down my stomach to my pussy.

Vinnyhad a beard at the time.

How had his beard felt against me? Had I been conscious of it happening?

I screwed my eyes up further, forcing myself to feel it all.

To feel the sharp bite Nix put into my inner thigh.

I yelped and there was a dark chuckle in the room.

Nix’s laugh. It was Nix’s .

Vinnyhadn’t left any marks. Not physically, anyway.

Then his fingers were pumping away in me and I was squirming as he tried to coax me into getting wet.

I was always so wet for Nix.

But I wasn’t now.

My breathing picked up again, a pant as his fingers felt so big in how tight I was.

Everything was grainy when I opened my eyes again.

The body lay behind me, running a rough hand down my sides, cradling my ass, fingers pumping, pumping.

The camera angle would have shown my whole body from start to finish. It was impossible to know how many people had seen me in that vulnerable state.

How many times had he watched it?

Did he touch me like this?

This was the same skin he had touched. The same body.

A violated body.

“Livie,” Nix cried, sitting up behind me.

His voice brought me back to the moment. The present. Where I was sobbing.

“Red—red flag,” I wept, pushing back the tears into my hair. “Red flag.”

My body was rocking with sobs, and Nix sat there on his knees, mouth open. He shuffled forward as I locked my knees to my chest. “What can I do?” he asked, voice broken. “Drink? Space? Some—”

But I pulled him to me and collapsed onto his chest, rambling about the video. He stroked my back, kissing my hair and giving comforting phrases of reassurance.

He could offer to do anything, but it wouldn’t solve this.

He couldn’t solve this.