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It had been an orgasm-filled vacation. I couldn’t recall the last time I took a vacation. Every single day, I had worked in some form or another. Dancing. Editing. Filming. I hadn’t let myself stop because I’d feared if I stopped, it would all go away. That I’d fall into poverty like tripping on a crack in the sidewalk or something.
The time to sleep, to have sex, to bake, to cook, to have coffee with Marilyn, to walk Sirius, have more sex, reorganize my closet, deep clean the house, have more sex ... it had been exactly what I’d needed.
All it had taken was my ex to beat me half to death.
But the honeymoon—so to speak—was over now. I needed to work. Needed to get back to my routine. Back to myself.
Hades picked up an apple, tossing it in his large palms as if he was considering it. Except he looked at me while he did so, as if he was considering me.
“You did not tell me,” he finally replied. Not an accusation exactly.
For the first time since his lips landed on mine, I got a cold, uncomfortable feeling in my stomach.
“Here it is,” I snapped.
“Here what is?” Hades asked, leaning against the kitchen counter, taking a bite out of the apple.
How in the fuck did he make eating an apple look sexy?
I could not let that distract me.
“Here is the part where, now that we’re together, you feel like you own me, body and soul—”
“I do own you,” he interrupted, having swallowed the bite of his apple.
I narrowed my eyes, forcing myself not to give in to my body’s reaction to his words, the tenor in which they were spoken and the expression on Hades’s face as he was speaking them.
“We’re going to circle back to that later,” I informed him, my voice sounding husky and vaguely turned on instead of the sharp, pissed off tone I’d needed. “The ‘here it is’ was about the moment we start to become a thing where suddenly you have a problem with what I do for a living,” I explained, watching him take another bite, getting inappropriately turned on by Hades eating a fucking apple.
Then I remembered that I was meant to be on a roll, and this was kind of an important point to bring home.
“Me being a stripper was fine at the start, when I was just the woman saving your life. Fine when I was the woman that you needed to protect or whatever that was, fine when I was the woman you were fucking in fitting rooms, but now that I’m ... something else, something that you feel the need to own...” I blew out a frustrated breath, raising my brow pointedly before I carried on.
There was no longer any kind of sexual amusement or intensity in Hades’s eyes. Nor was he eating the apple anymore. He’d abandoned it because apparently you can’t eat an apple and stare at a woman with brooding intensity at the same time.
Something was pissing him off. Probably what I was saying, but I was on a roll.
“Now that you think I’m yours…” Cue an even more intense brooding stare, clenching of the jaw and an overall menacing vibe. Cue my body responding totally inappropriately to those things. “Now that you think I’m yours, you think it’s time to change things,” I continued
Hades’s brows narrowed.
I soldiered on. “Because a woman you’re dating certainly cannot be taking her clothes off for money. Not now. Not when I’ve got you to take care of me, right? And let me tell you something. That’s not happening.” I held my finger up to make my point, but I feared it looked like something a suburban mother did to her ten-year-old.
Hades continued to stare at me for a handful of seconds once I was done speaking. Then he leaned forward, grasped my wrist and moved my still extended finger to his mouth which he opened, using it to slowly suck on and kiss the aforementioned finger.
My knees turned to jelly.
Once he was done sucking on my finger, Hades tightened his grip on my wrist and used it to tug me forward so our bodies pressed together. He lifted his other hand to grasp the back of my neck, tilting my head upward so our eyes locked.
“Lot to unpack there, babe,” he said, his voice raspy and thick. I could’ve poured it into a cup and drank it in one sip.
“First, I’m going to tell you that from that first moment, when I was bleeding on the ground and your face hovered over me, you were not the woman saving my life. You were my woman. Nothing else. Never have been anything else.”
My insides melted.
Melted.
His hands moved from my neck to caress my jaw so his thumb could run over my bottom lip.
