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Deirdre looks everywhere but at me when she finally speaks.
“So, how does this work? The jewellery, the clothes. Is this all getting added on to my debt? Because I’d rather not have it at all.”
I pause, drinking in the sight of her in a dress I paid for, already imagining the tens of thousands of dollars of gemstones I’m about to wrap around her throat. A collar with Titone spelled out in the language of diamonds.
“I’m feeling generous. Consider it a birthday gift,” I say. Her gaze snaps to me, and I don’t miss the way it slides up and down my body in my black suit and black shirt. The only thing not black on me is my pocket square. A slight wrinkle appears between her eyebrows when her gaze snags there, and I wonder if she recognizes it.
I almost ask her, but Valentina is back, panting as she careens down the stairs.
“Here, quick, quick!” she says to Deirdre, holding out sparkly stuff. My cousin’s frenetic impatience is grinding my nerves raw. I hold out my hand for the jewellery and tell her, “Go ahead. Curse and Enzo will take you.”
Valentina dumps the shimmering gems and metal into my hand without a moment’s hesitation before running for the door, pulling it open and disappearing. Deirdre flutters, looks like she’ll call out something like “Wait!” But it’s too late. Valentina is gone and it’s just us again. Her eyes fall to my hand, where bright, clear diamonds and white gold shine in stark contrast to the black leather of my glove. Her mouth primly puckered, she reaches for my hand, but I pull it back.
“I’ll do it.”
“What do you mean, you’ll do it? If I have to wear it, I’ll put it on myself.”
She reaches forward again, but once again I move my hand, curling my fingers into a fist.
“We aren’t leaving until I put this stuff on you.”
She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand what showing up in public wearing my finery, my diamonds, means. It will tell the entire fucking city that she’s mine now. Not as a debtor, someone to torture or to kill over what she owes. Not as someone I couldn’t care less about losing.
But someone possessed.
Someone protected.
“Then we won’t leave at all,” she snaps.
I don’t say anything else. I step towards her. She steps back. We do this over and over until she collides with the wall. She’s trapped by my body, and I hold up my fist between us, loosening my grip slightly until a white gold chain slithers out and dangles in the air. It swings like a pendulum, and her blue eyes track the movement.
“You’ll find that things will be much easier for you if you don’t disobey me,” I mutter.
Her eyes flash. “Maybe I don’t want this to be easy.”
“What do you want this to be, then?”
Her reply is flat and grim. “Over.”
A concoction of emotions I don’t like and won’t name floods my body. I feel like I could crush the diamonds in my fist.
“Put your fucking hair behind your ears.”
She stares at me in mute defiance, and I grunt as I lift my left hand, ignoring Morelli’s instructions not to use that arm as much as possible. Deirdre gasps when I grasp all her hair at the nape of her neck and tug, forcing her head back, baring her throat. Her heart beats a rapid-fire rhythm there, poetry of the body and of blood. It’s a song in and of itself. I want to put my fucking tongue there.
Instead, I reach to the side with my right hand, depositing the jewellery on a small stand near the wall. From the pile, I grab one earring. It’s a dangly diamond thing with a simple hook to slide through her earlobe. No back or clasp.
Deirdre can’t move much with her hair bound so tightly by my fist. She breathes rapidly, staring at the earring like it’s a murder weapon. Her body vibrates with what I assume is fury. She doesn’t look afraid. She looks fucking pissed.
But something changes when the leather of my glove brushes the shell of her ear. She makes a sound, between a whimper and a gasp, that jolts straight to my dick. Her entire body goes taut, her breath catching as I skim a single knuckle over her earlobe. I stop looking at her ear for a second and see that her eyes are scrunched shut. Her back is arching away from the wall, and it’s not because I’ve started pulling her hair. And…
Her nipples are hard.
I couldn’t see them through the dress before, but I can see them now. The temperature hasn’t changed. It’s toasty fucking warm. Honestly a little too hot for my liking, now that my blood is boiling inside me.
“Sensitive, Songbird?” I mutter quietly, brushing my knuckle down her ear again experimentally. I watch her as I do it. Watch the flutter that goes through the muscles in her face, the tautness that spreads down her body. Watch the way her nipples swell and tighten further, begging me to mouth them through the slippery fabric of her dress. Her hands are plastered to the wall at her back.
“Can you just get this over with?” she breathes, her eyes still closed, as if she can’t stand to look at me. Can’t stand to acknowledge what she might be feeling in response to my touch.
