Chapter Eleven

I can feel how wet she is through the skin-tight leggings she put on. Hell, I can even smell her arousal in the room.

My cock is painful at this point, pressing eagerly against my underwear and slacks, desperate to sink itself inside her welcoming heat, but I know that I need to move carefully this time.

The gulf of years apart stretches between us and the fear and hurt that I caused will make her cautious of me. She won't thank me for fucking her senseless without offering anything in return.

If I want to get her out of here, I'm going to have to make sure that I actually do the job right this time. I allow myself to indulge in a moment of sadness that I didn't try to win her over properly when we were younger before shaking away that thought.

Now is not the time for regrets.

I move away from her, going to sit on the chair in the corner of the room. I look at her across the room, pondering what she wants from me.

Does she really think that she can live life like a normal person and raise my son away from me? Surely she can't be that na?ve.

"We need to get you out of here," I say to her. I'm careful what I say because I know that someone is standing in the hall listening to our conversation.

She is silent for a beat or two, looking at me. I see her chest rising and falling rapidly.

She's scared, but she's also turned on, and the thought makes a jolt of pleasure spike through me. I like her when she's wild and desperate because that is when she's the most direct with me.

"I'm not arguing that point," she agrees. She pushes away from the wall and moves a little closer to me. "However, it's not really up to me what happens now. You and those Baldini pricks are going to trade me like a cow at the market in exchange for the right amount of money."

I shake my head. "You don't know that," I say.

She scoffs but doesn't say anything else to me.

"Is he mine?" I ask abruptly. The question spills from my lips almost against my will. I hadn't wanted to ask her that. I had wanted to wait to ask her until she trusted me again.

She sneers at me. "Does it matter if he is?" she inquires.

I raise my brows. "Of course it matters," I say in reply. "I'm not going to work to save Marco Rodriguez's brat from the Baldinis. I will, however, consider this deal in a different light if the boy is actually my heir."

Her mouth is a firm line, and I can see her deciding what she is going to do. Finally, she says in a small voice, "He's yours."

I'm surprised at the rush of pleasure that her words cause.

I hadn't ever really thought about having children to inherit the family business. I had been too busy trying to stay alive, earn money, and find Kate again.

I hadn't given myself the time to consider whether or not I wanted a family. My reaction is the first indication that I have wanted a family all along and just never allowed myself to consider it a possibility.

"Where is he?" I ask, glancing around at the room significantly.

She blows out a breath. "He's at Enzo's house with his kids. They have a private tutor who teaches them."

I nod. I should have thought of that.

"I won't let you meet him anyway. Not until you have proven to me that I can trust you."

I lift a brow and regard her across the room in silence.

I hate being told what to do. I always have.

Even orders from the woman that I have been obsessed with for so many years make me irritated. However, I remember that I promised to do the right thing this time and win her over, so I grind my teeth together and force myself to nod in reply. "Fair enough," I say to her.

A silence stretches out between us. I have been hoping that my cock will settle down, but I'm still hard as steel. I'm starting to be so distracted by my discomfort that I can't think straight.

I shift in the chair and I see a tiny smile tuck itself into the corner of her mouth. She knows that I'm uncomfortable and she is enjoying it.

"You still want me," she says, naming the elephant in the room.

I gesture toward my crotch. "Against all common sense, yes."

She tilts her head to the side. "Surely you have been able to find many other women who are willing to warm your bed since I left," she tells me.

I look down for a moment, unwilling to take the chance that she might see my true feelings. I don't need her to know that I am still hopelessly besotted with her.

She has enough power over me in the situation already without adding knowledge of my weakness to the mix.

"You slept with Marco," I counter. "But that doesn't mean that all of us in this room are unfaithful."

She sets her jaw a little at my words. "I did what I had to do," she says.

That's neither an admission nor a denial, and I feel a sharp tug of anger in my chest. I hate the thought of Marco fucking her. I've never liked him, and I resent the idea that she could have found comfort in his arms after being with me.

"You've grown careful with your words," I say to her. "I miss your honesty."

She snorts at this. "No, you don't. If you had valued honesty, you would have regarded me as a real person, not a pawn in your never-ending scheming. You don't want to know what I think or what I have done to survive since the day I ran away. You only care about getting your way and your trade deals."

"We were betrothed," I say stubbornly, hating how churlish I sounded.

"Look around you, Elio!" she spits out. "It's not the 1800s. Betrothals aren't even a real thing in civilized society anymore. Besides, it's not like the ‘betrothal' that you keep nattering on about mattered when it came down to treating me with respect."

"You didn't even have the courtesy to be faithful to me!" I shout, giving in to my rage for a brief moment.

I feel my hands shaking, and I press them into the arms of the chair to stop them from vibrating with the force of my rage. I see her shrink back for a moment at my sudden outburst, only to surge forward again, meeting my anger with her own.

"You don't even know what you did wrong, you arrogant bastard!" she cries, coming closer to me. "You never once thought of me as anything but a toy. I was convenient for fucking and taking out in public to show the world the size of your dick. You don't give a shit about me or our son!"

I surge to my feet and wrap a hand around her throat. My fingers are shaking so badly that I can't apply much pressure.

She leans into my grip, as weak as it is, and I slam my mouth onto hers with so much force that I taste blood in my mouth.

The kiss feels like rage given physical form, both of us clawing and struggling with one another as we try to dominate the other person through intimacy. I had always fucked her roughly in the past.

She had loved being treated harshly and had melted under my stinging slaps and aggression for years.

However, this is not just rough sex play. This grappling of limbs and teeth and lips feels like the meeting of two elemental forces caught up in the desire to destroy the other.

I press her backward until our legs run into the bed and we collapse in a heap on top of the neat comforter.

"I missed you," I admit to her breathlessly, pressing nipping kisses to the column of her throat.

She twists under me, her pelvis grinding against my straining dick. I growl and press against her, driving her into the mattress and pinning her beneath me.

"Lies," she says harshly to me, delivering a stinging bite to my lower lip as she struggles to get free of my weight. "You've never been willing to tell me the truth. It's always been lies and more lies."

"There are no lies in this," I tell her, pressing my hips into hers. "There is no one else I have trusted with this kind of intimacy. Why doesn't that mean anything to you?"

"Men always confuse sex with intimacy," she says to me, but then she moans as I yank her t-shirt down and suck her nipple into my mouth.

Something about her words breaks through the haze of desire raging through me.

I press away from her, looking down at her. Her hair is a dark messy halo around her head and the nipple that I had been playing with is dusky from being sucked and bitten.

She has never looked more fuckable in her life, but I suddenly don't want to take her just because I know I can.

"Intimacy," I repeat. "Okay, I can do intimate."

I lift my weight off of her and sit back on my heels. I work the leggings down her legs and pull them off. I grin when I see that she isn't wearing underwear.

"You always rip them when you tear them off," she says to me. "I don't have any clothing to spare here, so I thought it would be smart to skip putting them on."

I smile at her. "Clever," I say to her, before dipping my head and running my tongue through her slick folds. She cries out and arches into my mouth, and I oblige her by pressing my tongue into her depths.

"Oh, God," she murmurs to herself as I lick and suck, tugging her toward the brink of orgasm, only to retreat over and over again. I realize that I have never done this for her.

I had made her suck my dick countless times when we were together, but I had never gone down on her. She tastes and smells like heaven, and I find that I am enjoying making her writhe with pleasure even without being inside of her.

"Please," she says to me. She's panting, twisting and contorting her body as she looks for release. "Please make me come."

I lift away from her, wiping my hand over my mouth. She looks up at me, her expression languid, her lips bruised from our violent kiss.

"Show me how you like it."

She frowns a little at that.

"Show me how you take care of yourself when you're alone," I clarify.

She smiles at me ever so slightly, a cat-in-the-cream expression on her face. "I don't think of you when I fuck myself," she tells me.

I ignore the taunt. "I didn't ask you that. I told you to show me how you make yourself come."

She doesn't move for a moment, but then she lays back on the mattress, bringing her hand up to her needy pussy.

She circles her clit a few times, moaning as she does so, then delves two fingers inside herself. I watch her curve them upward as she rocks her hips toward their pressure.

There's something incredibly intense about watching her so lost in her own pleasure.

"Look at me," I order her, sensing that she is about to come.

She doesn't respond, and I say more firmly, "Kate, look at me."