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She turned, putting her back to the glass. Then she tipped her face toward him, still swaddled in that sheet, but he sawherthere. Amalia, as deep in this as he was.
As hehad been, he corrected himself.
“I had convinced myself that nothing could be as intense as that summer was,” she told him, as if she was offering him a confession. And God knew he would take it, especially when her voice was so low, so raw. “I was wrong.”
Joaquin looked down at her, though he knew it was dangerous. Her hair was tangled now, messy from his fingers. Just the way he liked it. Her lips were slightly swollen from his, and if he wasn’t mistaken, the faint hint of his jaw was all over the tender skin of her neck.
This was how he liked her. Thoroughly debauched, and all his.
But none of this mattered. None of it was real.
“The intensity is the only reason I allowed you to return here,” he told her, and even that felt like too much of an admission.
And he was staring down at her face. He could see her reaction.
She blinked, once. That was all.
And then the Amalia he remembered, the Amalia he craved, disappeared as he looked at her. Her face smoothed out, and became serene.
Eerily serene, to his mind.
Something in him turned over at that, because surely that was a loss. Surely that was something less than honesty—though he doubted if she even knew how much she’d changed from that open girl back then, so filled with sunshine and wonder.
But he knew.
“Joaquin,” she said, in a quiet voice that matched the sudden steadiness of her gaze. “I hope you know there was never a day—”
He moved then, sliding his palm over her mouth and holding it there as her eyes widened.
As blue as the sea behind her. And as treacherous.
He needed to remember that above all things.
Because he could not allow this. She had been the exception that proved the rule, and she’d proved herself unworthy of it. He had let her in. He had allowed her to see parts of him he hadn’t known were there. He had never given anyone else that privilege.
And she had squandered it. It didn’t matter why.
Joaquin could not go back there. He could not tolerate her inevitable betrayal once again.
He had grown up hard, but it had been his life. He had never cried about it. He had been far too busy digging himself out of the hole he’d found himself in by virtue of his birth. And it turned out that no matter what all the soft, well-fed wellness gurus liked to say, empires really could be built on spite.
Joaquin had built his that way, and happily. There had been nothing soft in him, ever, until he’d encountered a princess on his island.
She had made himfeel.Then she had left him. He could not forgive it.
He would not.
Joaquin refused to entertain even the barest hint that they were headed in that direction again. If he could have dug out his heart with his own hands and gotten rid of it, he would have. He did not intend to risk it again.
This was about revenge and nothing more.
He could have moved his palm from her lips, but he didn’t.
“There are only two things, maybe three, that I wish you to do with your mouth,” he told her with a certain grimness that still didn’t manage to cut that same desire for her that burned in him, always. “None of them involve talking.”
He felt her smile there beneath his hand, and that did not help. She pulled her head back, so he could see that smile whether he wished to or not. And it did not exactly keep him focused on making this moment work to his advantage.
Because she might have changed in the years since he’d seen her. But she still looked at him as if he was a wondrous, magical creature when he knew otherwise.
