Page 59
He fills his lungs to take the edge off. “She is delusional, Veda. I’m sorry she said all of that to you.”
“She also mentioned that you lead with olive oil. That I should find out what truly covers the cost of this house before I sleep in a bed it purchased. She analyzed my marriage over espresso, stripped it apart, and the worst of it, Lupo, is that I couldn’t even prove her wrong, because I don’t know what goes on here.”
“She’s wrong.”
“About which part? Tell me. Tell me anything. She knows you better than I do. She always will.”
He smooths my hair behind my ear, and I let him. “My beautiful doctor, she is a viper. A deluded, self-absorbed viper who thinks I’m wrapped around her finger, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.”
I’m in his space now. I need it. The closeness of him. “Did you propose to her twice?”
“Yes.”
“At her father’s deathbed?”
“Yes.” No flinch. Not even a hint of denial or thinking whether to lie. “She said no both times, which was the biggest favor she ever did for me. It’s the only thing I’ve ever thanked her for.”
“And I’m a phase?”
That’s what makes him flinch. “No. That might be the last word I would use to describe you. You’re the reason I burned a building to the ground this morning,” he says, low.
My mouth is dust. “What?”
“A man died last night, Veda. One of mine. He was twenty-six.”
“I’m so sorry—”
“And this morning,” he says as he starts to pace, “I was handed a clean way to end all of it, and I turned it down flat.”
“Why?”
He steps in. “You’re believing a viper’s words over the evidence in front of you, and I don’t have the patience left today to be gentle about this.”
It’s fragments of a conversation I can’t follow, because half of it happens in his head. “Lupo, I don’t understand—”
The kiss hits me before I see it coming. His mouth shapes an argument he intends to win. His arms bar around me, keeping me close.
I’m still lost in his words when he hikes my skirt up. What did he mean about burning a building down? Or the dead—oh.
His hand is rough and furious on me. The viper’s perfume still ghosts in my memory, but we burn it off with teeth and hands, and I’m shaking in his arms. He walks me backward against the bookshelves, hard, one hand fisted in my hair. I claw his shirt open and bite the shoulder with the bad scar.
He growls against my throat, “Veda. You are mine. Say it.”
“I’m yours.”
He pins my wrists to the shelf above my head with one hand and gets my skirt all the way up my thighs with the other, no patience left in him. There’s none in me either.
“This isn’t a phase,” he says against my mouth, working me until my knees quit. “You are the realest thing I have ever had, and she knows it. That’s why she tried to scare you away. You’re her worst nightmare.”
I huff a laugh, and then his fingers plunge deep, making me wish they were his cock. My laugh becomes a ragged moan.
“Say it again.”
“Yours,” I gasp. “I’m yours.”
He hoists me up, my back against the shelves. I belt my legs around him. He drives into me hard enough to rattle the built-in shelf, and I bury my cry in his neck so the house won’t hear its lady of the manor come apart in the office.
His cock drives against me deep, and I see stars. So thick. The way he stretches me is intoxicating. And as he keeps coming at me, words snarl from his throat. “You’re mine. Mine.”
