AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“First you must ask,” he told her, his gaze a dark fire and his voice like gravel. “Out loud, so there can be no mistake.”
“Ask?” She hardly understood what he’d said, much less what she’d repeated. As if she’d never heard the word in her life. And all she could see was that beautiful, harsh mouth of his, bold and hard and so deliciously close to hers—
“I’d prefer it if you begged,” he said, low and rough and needy, but absolute. Implacable. “But if you ask nicely, I’ll let it slide. Just this once.”
And then there was a very long moment where Mattie couldn’t think of a single reason why she didn’t do exactly that. Not one single reason.
She opened her mouth—but then reality asserted itself inside her, blinding and brilliant, bringing with it a kind of desperate reason, and she didn’t care if he saw all of it in her eyes. Intimacy with this man meant losing herself first, and then losing him. She’d known that for years. She knew it the way she knew he’d wanted her, always. Deep in her bones. Immutable and irreversible. A simple, searing truth.
“I’m not going to ask you nicely,” she promised him, though her voice shook. “And I’m certainly not going to beg. That might be your conception of marriage, but it certainly isn’t mine.”
“I thought this wasn’t a real marriage,” he murmured, all silk and fire. “No need to fight for equality in a sham like this, is there? Just surrender, Mattie. I promise you, you’ll like it.”
She believed him. That was why she scowled at him again. Harder.
“No begging,” she snapped. “Unless you plan to get down on your knees and try it yourself?”
His hard mouth crooked. “I hope you’re prepared to suffer.” He was so big, hard and gorgeous and almost entirely naked as he pressed her to the bed yet kept the bulk of his weight on his arms on either side of her, as if he was the only thing protecting her from what they both wanted. “Because that’s the only way I’ll touch you again.”
“You’re touching me now, I can’t help but notice.”
“Splitting hairs won’t take the ache away, Mattie,” he all but crooned at her, as if he knew how badly she already did. As if he could see all the ways she longed for him. “It will only draw this out.”
He laughed, and it was that same dark victor’s laugh, but this time it rolled through her differently. Because his mouth was so close to hers, maybe. It swept inside her like an inexorable wave, and she didn’t know if she wanted to weep or scream or betray herself entirely and beg the way he wanted her to do.
Anything to get him to touch her again without her having to ask—without her having to thereby prove that he was right about her.
She hated herself for that twisted little thought.
“Let me go,” she whispered then, furious at both of them, but he only laughed again, in exactly the same way.
“I don’t know why, when you obviously want me as badly as I want you, you go to these lengths to deny it. But none of that matters.”
“Because you’ve seen the error of your ways and are setting me free from this absurd pseudo-marriage?” she asked with all the bravado she wished she felt.
He leaned in and nipped at the soft place beneath her chin, punishment and seduction at once, and Mattie could do nothing but jolt and then shudder. Showing him too much, she understood. Proving herself the liar he already thought she was.
The liar she’d proved herself to be again and again and again. Every time he touched her, she lied.
“Pick a new strategy, Mattie,” he told her, and then moved up and off her in a breathtakingly smooth shift of athletic grace, giving her an unwanted object lesson in all of that divine, stunning strength of his. “The problem with this one is that I’m bored with it.”
“Heaven forbid I bore you,” she snapped out. “You’ve blackmailed me, threatened me and manhandled me into this sham of a marriage—but all of that pales in comparison to boring you. A fate worse than death!”
“You dance too close to the edge again and again,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken. “You treat me to your sharp tongue whenever you feel like it, you run and hide when I return the favor, then you repeat the pattern ad nauseam. All without any consequences, until now.”
Nicodemus was standing then, by the side of the bed with the morning sun casting his face in shadow, but she had no trouble seeing that gleam of honey in his gaze. That dark knowing thing behind it. She felt it everywhere.
Worse than his mouth on her. Deeper. Infinitely more destructive.
