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“No, I’m not.” Bridget crossed her arms over her chest.
“You have two options.” I leaned in close enough to smell her perfume. “You can either walk out of here with me like an adult, or I can throw you over my shoulder and carry you out of here like a child. Which one will it be, princess?”
She wasn’t the only one pissed tonight.
I was pissed she’d spent the last half hour letting a weaselly fucker put his hands all over her. I was pissed we were fighting when we had two weeks left together. Most of all, I was pissed at how much I wanted her when I couldn’t have her.
If there was one thing her move back to Eldorra made clear, it was that our relationship was a temporary one. It always had been, but it hadn’t hit close to home until now.
At the end of the day, she was a princess, and I was the guy they’d hired until they didn’t need me anymore.
Crimson stained Bridget’s high cheekbones. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Try me.”
“You forget you’re not the boss here, Mr. Larsen.”
The temperature of my smile dropped another ten degrees. “You want to test that theory?”
Her lips thinned. For a second, I thought she might stay just to spite me. Then, without saying a word or so much as looking at me, she pushed past me and walked toward the exit, her shoulders stiff. I followed her, my scowl dark enough to make the other clubbers scatter like marbles before me.
We took the first cab we found back to Bridget’s townhouse, and it barely stopped before Bridget jumped out and sped walk to the front door. I paid the driver and caught up with her in four strides.
We entered the house, our footsteps echoing on the wood floors. When we reached the second floor, Bridget opened her bedroom door and tried to slam it in my face, but I wedged my arm in the gap before she could do so.
“We need to talk,” I said.
“I don’t want to talk. You’ve already ruined my night. Now leave me alone.”
“Not until you tell me what the hell’s going on.” My gaze burned into hers, searching for a hint as to what was going on in that beautiful head of hers. “You’ve been acting strange for weeks. Something’s wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong.” Bridget gave up trying to bar me from her room and released the door. I pushed it all the way open but remained in the doorway, watching. Waiting. “I’m twenty-three, Mr. Larsen. Twenty-three-year-olds go out and drink and sleep with guys.”
A muscle ticked in my jaw. “Not the way you’ve been doing since we got back to New York.”
Not the sleeping with guys part, thank God, but the going out and drinking.
“Maybe I’m tired of living life the way I should and want to live life the way I could.” Bridget removed her jewelry and placed it on her dresser. “My grandfather almost died. One minute he was standing, the next he collapsed. What’s to say the same thing won’t happen to me?”
Her words held a ring of truth, but not the full truth. I knew every inflection of her voice, every meaning behind every movement. There was something she wasn’t telling me.
“So, you decided you want to spend your potential last moment with Vincent fucking Hauz?” I scoffed.
“You don’t even know him.”
“I know enough.”
“Please.” Bridget spun toward me, fury and something infinitely sadder glittering in her eyes. “Every time I so much as smile at a man, you bulldoze your way between us like a territorial bear. Why is that, Mr. Larsen? Especially when you told me in no uncertain terms when we first met that you don’t get involved in your clients’ personal lives.”
I didn’t answer, but my jaw continued to tick in rhythm with my pulse. Tick. Tick. Tick. A bomb waiting to go off and blow up our lives as knew it.
“Maybe…” Bridget’s expression turned contemplative as she took a step toward me. Mistake number one. “You want to be in their place.” She smiled, but the haunted look remained in her eyes. “Do you want me, Mr. Larsen? The princess and the bodyguard. It would make a nice story for your buddies.”
Mistake number two.
“You want to stop talking now, Your Highness,” I said softly. “And be very, very careful what you do next.”
“Why?” Bridget took another step toward me, then another, until she was less than a foot away. “I’m not afraid of you. Everyone else is, but I’m not.” She placed her hand on my chest.
Mistake number three.
Her gasp hadn’t fully left her throat before I spun her around and bent her over the nearby dresser, one hand gripping her chin and forcing her head back while the other closed around her throat. My cock pressed into her ass, hard and angry.
I’d been on edge all night. Hell, I’d been on edge for two years. The moment Bridget von Ascheberg entered my life, I’d been on a countdown to destruction, and tonight might just be the night everything went to hell.
“You should be, princess. You wanna know why?” I growled. “Because you’re right. I do want you. But I don’t want to kiss or make love to you. I want to fuck you. I want to punish you for mouthing off and letting another man put his hands on you. I want to yank up that tiny fucking dress of yours and pound into you so hard you won’t be able to walk for days. I want all those things, even though I can’t have them. But if you don’t stop looking at me like that…” I tightened my grip on her chin and throat. She stared at me in the mirror, her lips parted and her eyes dark with heat. “I might take them anyway.”
They were harsh, bitter words, drenched with equal parts lust and anger. They were meant to scare her off, but Bridget looked anything but scared. She looked aroused.
“So, do it,” she said. I stilled, my hand flexing around her throat as my cock threatened to punch a hole through my pants. “Fuck me the way you just promised.”
