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“You can’t just—”
“I can do whatever I want, stormbird. That’s rather the whole point of owning someone else.” He rises, then crouches beside my chair and turns it until I’m facing him. His hand slides beneath my jaw again, tipping my face up as he leans close enough that his next words warm my mouth.
“And I’ve had plenty of time to decide what I’m going to do with you once I get you inside my home. Do you want to hear it? Or do you want to keep pretending you don’t?”
I don’t answer. I can’t. But my heart is going so hard he must feel it under his thumb.
“I’m going to take this shirt off you.” His mouth grazes the corner of mine, not a kiss, worse than a kiss. “One button at a time. And every time I open one, I’m going to watch your face do exactly what it’s doing right now.” His thumb strokes my jaw. “This look. Like you hate me. Like you’d die before you’d ask. I’m going to undo you until that look breaks and you ask me anyway.”
“I won’t.” It comes out wrecked, breathless, nothing behind it.
“You will,” he purrs. “You’ll beg me so pretty, stormbird. I’ve thought about the sound. I think about it a lot.” He pulls back just far enough to look at me, a cruel smile spreading across his face. “Your pulse just jumped.” His thumb presses over it. “Right there. Every time I get close.”
“You don’t know that.” It’s the last lie I have.
“No?” His free hand drops between us, closing around my cock through the fabric, exactly where I’ve been begging all night he wouldn’t look.
My whole body jerks, my grip on the table going white-knuckled. I clamp my thighs shut on pure instinct, which does nothing except trap his hand exactly where it is, and his grin only spreads.
“Look at you,” he murmurs, and drags his tongue slow across his lower lip, watching me.
“Let go of me,” I get out.
“In a minute.” His hand curls, holding me while I strain against his palm. “First I’ll tell you how tonight ends. With you finding out exactly how much you want this, and me watching you stop being able to hide it.”
I press my lips together and shake my head, heat roaring up my throat.
His thumb drags along the seam of my trousers and my whole body jolts. “Tell me, prey. Has anyone ever played with you before?”
The question drops me somewhere old and unlit. A back room off the clinic corridor, the smell of antiseptic and someone else’s cigarettes, a set of hands that never once asked, that only ever took what the bill came to. Faces I made myself forget by morning. None of them ever wanted me. They wanted the hour, and I let them have it, because Onyx needed the medicine more than I needed to keep that part of myself. I have never told a living soul, and somehow he’s reached straight into the dark and put his thumb on it without even knowing it’s there.
I look away, jaw tight, my cock pulsing hard enough to hurt against his palm. “Shut up.”
He drags his knuckles up my cock. “I’ll take that as a no. A boss and his best worker, and such an understanding between us already. Look at that. You, so good at telling me no. Me, so good at not believing you.” His thumb moves once, just once, and my hips betray me, and his eyes go molten. “Say it again. Tell me no again. I could listen to it all night.”
“You’re insane.” The word snags on the way out.
“You keep saying that. And yet you’re the colour of a sunrise, and you haven’t left.”
“Because you’re holding my brother hostage in a blanket.”
“And because you don’t want to leave.” He says it like a fact he’s read off a page. “Both can be true. They usually are, with you. That’s what I like.”
I make myself sit back. “So how long does this last? This... whatever tonight is. You keep me until you’re bored?”
He shrugs. “Until I’m tired of you. Which, frankly, I don’t see happening anytime soon.”
“And then what?” I hold his eyes. “Keep me on the side? Because you’re still engaged, aren’t you? You told me in the cave. There’s an announcement coming. Is that still happening? Your wedding?”
Something shifts behind his eyes, and for one stupid second I wonder if I’ve had him wrong.
“The wedding’s still happening. I’m just no longer sure who I’m marrying.”
“You’re an asshole,” I manage, wrecked, furious, because I’m still hard enough to ache.
He rises, then holds out a hand to me. “That’s my prey. Now, shall we?”
I don’t take his hand. I stand on my own, and I keep my jacket held in front of me, because he’s left me in a state I can’t walk out of a room in, and the knowing is all over his face.
