Page 85 of The Kingpin’s Bride

I closed my eyes for half a second and rested my forehead against hers.

“Not tonight,” I said, and it cost me. “Tonight you eat. You let someone look at that cut. You sleep in a bed that isn’t a car or an alley. Tomorrow we talk. Tomorrow we figure out what the fuck we are now that she’s safe.”

I kissed her one more time, slower, deeper, my hand gripping her ass because I couldn’t make myself let go. Then I forced my hands off her body and stepped back.

She stayed against the wall, breathing hard, staring at me like she couldn’t decide whether to hit me or pull me back in.

I nodded toward the kitchen. “Come on. Food. Then sleep. I’m not touching you again until you can stand without shaking.”

She pushed off the wall.

“You’re an asshole,” she said, voice rough. “I wanted you.”

I turned and walked toward the kitchen before I could change my mind and take her against the wall. Behind me I heard her follow. I turned on the lights. The sudden brightness made the cut on her cheek look worse. My jacket hung off her shoulders. I opened the fridge and started pulling things out just so I had something to do with my hands that wasn’t putting them on her.

I set a cutting board down harder than necessary. “Sit.”

She stayed standing. I turned. Slowly.

“No more good girl?” I smirked.

“Fuck you.”

I rolled my eyes. “Such a brat.”

“You put me through too much,” she said.

“I kept you soft and aching and focused on my cock so you wouldn’t do exactly what you just did, run straight into a bullet for a kid I was already hunting,” I reminded her.

“How noble.” Her laugh was sharp enough to cut. “The great Matteo Ventura, protecting his breeding stock by keeping her too full of cock to notice her sister was kidnapped.”

The words landed exactly where she wanted them to. I crossed the kitchen in three strides and crowded her back against the island. She didn’t retreat. She tilted her chin up and glared at me like she was daring me to prove her right.

“Say that again,” I said quietly.

“You used me,” she muttered, sounding less sure.

“I used your body because every time I was inside you, you stopped looking like you were already halfway gone,” I hissed. “Because when you came on my cock you forgot, for thirty fucking seconds, that the world had spent eighteen years trying to break you.”

Her eyes flashed. “Don’t you dare make this romantic.”

“It’s not romantic. It’s obsessive and ugly and the only way I know how to keep the people I refuse to lose. That’s why you were a prisoner.”

I braced both hands on the marble on either side of her hips, caging her in. “You want the truth without the pretty version? Fine. I bought you. I collared you. I fucked you on a schedule designed to put a baby in you as fast as possible. And I would do every single one of those things again if it meant you and that little girl ended up exactly where you are right now, alive, in my home.”

Her breath caught. I leaned closer until my mouth almost touched hers.

“You left me a breadcrumb in an alley like a challenge. You crawled through a window with a gun at your back. So stop rewriting the story into one where you’re only here because you had no choice. You had every choice. You chose the version that brought you back to me,” I said.

“I chose Camilla.”

“And then you chose this.” I rolled my hips once against her so she could feel how hard I already was. “This is what you wanted when you were sitting on the ground in that alley missing the weight of my hand on your neck. Admit it.”

Her hands fisted in the front of my shirt. I brushed my mouth over the corner of her lips, not quite a kiss. “I hate that I get hard every time you look at me like you want to kill me. I hate that the only time my chest stops hurting is when you’re under me, taking every inch, calling my name while you come. So we’re even.”

She shoved at my chest. I didn’t move. “You’re still hard.”

“Yes.”