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She moans around me and the vibration nearly buckles my knees. Her hand wraps the base and I watch her knowing no one has ever looked at me like that. Like I'm something she needs.

She pulls off long enough to drag her tongue up the underside, root to tip, and smiles at me with wet lips.

"You're doing the jaw thing again," she says, breathless.

"Smart mouth."

"You love my smart mouth."

"Right now I love it for other reasons. Put it back."

She laughs and then takes me deep enough that the laugh dies in her throat. My fist tightens in her hair. The pleasure climbs my spine in long pulls, building, and I let my head drop back and just feel her mouth, her hands, her low hungry sounds, all of it stacking into something I have no defense against.

I look down at her and I understand, with terrible clarity, that I've already made my choice about when to tell her.

After. God forgive me, after.

She moans again, and I stop thinking at all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Amanda

Valentino carries me to the bedroom.

He drops me onto the mattress and follows me down, his mouth already on mine, and whatever joke that was building dissolves on my tongue.

His hands work the buttons of the shirt and he kisses every inch of skin he uncovers. Collarbone. The slope of my breast. My stomach.

He peels the shirt off my shoulders and tosses it to the floor, leaving me naked under his gaze, and he's looking at me the way men look at things they plan to ruin.

"Turn around," he says.

My brain stutters. "What?"

"Turn around. On your knees." His voice has dropped into that low register that bypasses my higher reasoning entirely. "Ass to me, bella."

I turn around and rise onto my knees, facing the headboard, my back to him, and I hear fabric hitting the floor, the soft heavy sounds of a large man undressing without hurry. He's making me wait. He knows exactly what the waiting does to me, the bastard, because the air against my bare skin feels like a torturous tease.

The mattress dips. One knee comes up onto the bed beside mine while his other foot stays planted on the floor. I can feel the brush of hair against my thigh.

His hand slides around my throat and up, palm cupping the underside of my chin, and he pulls.

My neck arches back against his shoulder. My spine bows. I'm bent forward and pulled back at the same time, and his mouth lands at my ear.

"You remember what I told you," he says. "About what happens when everyone in the building can hear."

He pushes into me in one long, brutal stroke and the sound that comes out of me isn't a moan, it's a scream, loud enough to embarrass the dead. He doesn't pause.

"There she is," he growls. "That's the sound I wanted. Louder."

"Oh my G—" The rest of it shatters because he drives in hard.

His hand stays under my chin, keeping my head tipped back, my throat long and exposed, and there's nothing I can do with my body except take it. I can't curl forward. I can't muffle myself in a pillow. He's arranged me specifically so that every scream goes straight up into the ceiling, and I understand that this was the point. He wants the evidence. He wants Rome to file a complaint.

"You feel that?" His voice scrapes against my ear, rough and wrecked. "That's mine. This pussy is mine. Say it."

"Yours—" The word splinters into a scream as he angles deeper.