Page 374 of Power Play

“Traitor.”

“Sit with my woman.”

I shrugged him off and followed Bliss.

She took one end of the couch, and I sat in the armchair across from her, keeping enough distance between us that she could say whatever she needed without trying to hug me afterward. The others remained in the kitchen pretending to clean, but no one believed them.

Bliss folded her hands inside the sleeves of her sweatshirt. “I’m not going to ask you to take her back.”

“Good.”

“I’m not going to tell you what happened was okay.”

“Even better.”

“And I’m not going to explain her parents like you don’t understand them.”

“Great talk. Are we done?”

She’d already removed the three arguments I expected to fight, but her face told me I wasn’t leaving anytime soon.

“What do you want, B?”

“I want you to stop hurting her on purpose.”

My jaw tightened. “She hurt me more times than I can count in English and Spanish.”

“She didn’t do it on purpose.”

“What the fuck ever. Intent doesn’t change the result.”

“It changes what you do next.”

I looked away, but Bliss waited until I returned my attention to her.

“What you did last night was cruel.”

“I know.”

The admission surprised her. I continued before she mistook it for surrender.

“I knew which part of her neck to touch because she loved it. I knew kissing her would make her believe I’d changed my mind, and I knew pulling away would destroy her.”

Bliss’s face crumpled slightly. “You still did it.”

“I did it anyway, with intent.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted her to hurt.”

The honesty made the room colder. Cade entered from the kitchen and sat on the arm of the couch beside Bliss. His hand settled against the back of her neck, but he didn’t interrupt.

“I wanted her to feel what she did to me,” I said. “I wanted her to have something she could almost touch and know she would never get to keep.”

“That isn’t you,” Bliss whispered.

“Chica, you know nothing about who I am at the core. That is very much me.”