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“How many times do I have to say it,” I murmur, ever so gently massaging the front of her throat. “You’re safer in here than out there.”
“And who’s going to keep me safe from you?”
She tips her head back slightly, some subconscious part of her wanting to give me more access to her throat. I dig my thumb into the place her heart beats and she swallows a sound.
“I’m not the one sticking your head underwater for more than a minute,” I remind her.
“Yeah, well, you haven’t even been here for the last five days so how would you even know, anyway?”
This time, I don’t hold myself back from thrusting my hard dick against her belly. She’s so fucking naked, bare against the wall, and it would be so easy to hike her upwards, settle her thighs around my waist, unzip my pants, and nudge inside.
“Did you miss me?”
“What? No! What are you talking about?” she stammers. Every word, every breath, makes the muscles of her throat contract under my hand and now all I can think about is what that throat would do with my cock hitting the back of it.
I lower my mouth to the pretty shell of her ear and tell her, “Well, I missed you.” I give her throat one last, tender squeeze before I finally let her go. Her arm whips to the side, grabbing a towel from a nearby rack and wrapping it around herself so viciously I wonder if she means to tear it in half.
“Yeah, right. Like you don’t have women at your beck and call twenty-four seven,” she says as she walks past me into her bedroom. It’s quiet, under her breath. But since I am attuned to every goddamn atom in her body, because I own that breath, I hear it. I follow her into her room.
“Does that bother you?”
I haven’t been with another woman since bringing Deirdre here, and does my body ever feel it. But a quick, mindless fuck, which is how it usually goes for me, holds absolutely no appeal right now.
The only things that appeal are angry blue eyes and freckled skin and the face of the girl who hates me.
I almost want to hate her right back for it. For closing my usual methods of release off. For making every other woman but her unpalatable. For making me want her like this when this was supposed to be simpler, supposed to be about the music and money and nothing else.
“Oh, please,” she snaps, heading for the closet. “It’s a relief. Go spend your time with that blonde woman from the gala. In fact, teach her violin. Then maybe you’ll leave me alone.
“Deirdre.”
“Hell, I’ll teach her for you. Subtract my teaching fees from my debt. And then-”
“Deirdre.”
In the midst of her rant, she doesn’t realize I’ve followed her into the closet. She whirls and gasps at my proximity. It’s a large closet, but still much more confined than the bedroom we’ve just come from. The lights are off in here, and only a soft glow spills in from the adjacent room. I keep moving forward until her back hits a wall of shelves laden with clothing. It reminds me of New Year’s Eve. When I had her spine to the shelves in the pantry of her father’s kitchen. Something bittersweet, maybe even nostalgic, pokes in my chest when I remember that night. My shoulder thuds in time with my heart as Deirdre clutches her towel and glares at me.
“I haven’t been with anyone else since before your birthday.”
It’s actually been longer than that, but I don’t elaborate.
Something changes in the set of her mouth. I don’t get much time to analyze it before she spins around, yanking down some clothing from the shelf. She flinches and drops it when I move in close against her back.
“I truly don’t care,” she mutters. “I have no idea why you’re telling me this.”
“Don’t you?” I slide the long, wet clump of her hair to the side, baring the back of her neck. I hold back a groan when I see goosebumps rise on her skin. “I think you’re jealous but you don’t want to admit it.”
The thought of Deirdre jealous, sitting at home and wondering where I am, makes something burn low in my belly. I’ve always found jealousy in women tedious before. An irritation I have absolutely no patience for. But in my Songbird? I fucking love it. It’s not the way I should feel about a debtor, someone I’ve made my prisoner. I should hold all the power, here.
But clearly, I don’t. Because imagining Deirdre annoyed and jealous and waiting for me, like a girlfriend, like a wife, makes me so hard I can’t fucking think. It almost, I think, makes me happy. But I’m not sure, because it’s been about twenty years since I felt truly happy, and it’s not an emotion I recognize these days.
“I am not jealous. You are delusional,” she breathes. Her voice has changed. Some of the anger has ebbed away, replaced with a trembling huskiness.
“Don’t lie to me.”
I pull the towel and let it fall in a damp heap around Deirdre’s ankles. I clamp my hands around her waist before she can try to wriggle away from me. But my leather gloves are soaked, and even though it’s driving me nuts, I don’t want to create any space between us to go grab another pair.
Without letting myself think too hard about it – because if I do I’ll stop and that’s the last thing I want right now – I hold her in place with my right hand, biting off my left glove and spitting it down to the floor before repeating the action on the other side.
