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He leaned in further, pushing his erection into me.
“Oh, I’m sure.”
I love-hated the feel of his breath as it brushed against my neck, and the trail of arousal his hushed, urgent voice blazed around my body.
“I’m also sure that no matter how hard you try, no amount of lying to me, yourself, or anyone else is going to explain away this thing between us.”
“You’re deluded. There’s no ‘thing’ and there’s definitely no ‘us’. It’s all in your mind.”
“On the contrary. You’re the one living in a fantasy land. Back in the real world, you couldn’t turn off your physical reaction to me, even if you wanted to, nor could you hide it.” He lowered his mouth farther, and took my earlobe into his mouth, sucking hard.
“Jesus!” The word slipped out involuntarily—an uncontrollable reflex, just like the way my body jerked into his in shock.
“Nope, just me, but come to the suite with me right now, and I’ll show you Jesus and the twelve disciples.”
I shook my head.
“Not a negotiation, Angel. Don’t overthink it. It’s just sex, nothing to do with what’s going on in the rest of our lives. I can separate my need to own your body from the fact that as soon as the sun’s up, I’ll be back to doing my best to ruin your life.”
He was right about one thing: sex was just sex, and would never be anything else for me. I didn’t associate it with my emotions, and definitely not with love. I’d never been in love and I had no intention of ever letting myself be.
Chapter 24
Drew
I saw the switch flick in her head that took her from fuck you, to fuck yeah, and I wondered what the trigger had been. Not that I cared much, beyond the fact that I wanted to be able to replicate it so that I could make it happen at will.
Who was I kidding? The stunt she pulled at the table while I fucked her with my foot, and she questioned which of us was really in control, had reminded me again of the end of Little Marionette—the story my nanny used to read me.
What the puppet master hadn’t realized was that the puppet had a mind of her own, and could act independently of him. In all the years of being controlled by the puppeteer, the marionette had grown strong, and wise, and had studied the puppeteer’s ways. She’d worked tirelessly every night while he slept, toiling away in his workshop without his knowledge. And then one morning, he’d woken to find that she’d built a giant set of strings for him, and she was now in control.
Kik nodded, almost imperceptibly, silently answering my unasked questions, and I knew I had her. Yes! I was still the puppet master. I made a mental note of everything I’d done and said in the minutes leading up to that point for future reference. As much I enjoyed the dance between us in a perverse kind of way, in another it was just a pain in my ass, and one that I would happily skip if I still got what I wanted from Kik.
“Come on.”
I didn’t want to waste any time, before she changed her mind, or decided to make a scene—neither of which would surprise me, given how volatile she was. I took her hand and tugged her toward the elevators, and she didn’t resist.
It was no coincidence that I’d chosen to eat at The Palisade, which just happened to be situated under The Place Hotel. I’d figured that the “negotiation” to get her to the restaurant in the first place had been bad enough, let alone having to convince her to travel to get her into my bed. There was too much margin for a change of mind, so I’d eliminated one before we even began.
In the elevator I turned to her, staring at her long and hard before speaking. “So tell me Angelita, what’s the love of snow angels about?”
“None of your damned business.”
“Au contraire, like I said before, everything to do with you is my business if I make it that way.
“Good Spanish, by the way—I heard you talking to my dad earlier. Where’d you learn?”
Mostly from various nannies over the years. I used to spend a lot of time watching novellas with them when my mom just couldn’t cope with parenting—or life—and my dad was… well, he was my dad. Then they also taught us at school, I suspect purely so we could all communicate with our staff.”
“How the other half live.” She looked at me as though she’d rather I was more than half dead. “You know my dad came here with his parents from Puerto Rico when he was still in diapers? He speaks perfectly good English. In fact, he speaks better English than Spanish—English is his mother tongue. He was probably just playing up the pobrecito immigrant routine to humor your rich ass.”
Chapter 25
Kik
We burst through the door of the suite like we were being chased by a pack of wild dogs, then got naked in record time—tearing at our clothes like they were suddenly on fire. Everything about what was going on between us felt deliciously forbidden, and when our lips fused, urgency morphed into inevitability. We hurtled headlong down a rabbit hole of our own making that I knew it was going to be impossible to haul myself out of unscathed. But that was a problem for another day.
Today I was all about the here and now, and for once, I wanted to be in control. I pulled my lips away from Drew’s and shoved at his ripped chest. I knew it would make no physical difference, it was like trying to move a mountain, but it at least got his attention,
