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She only stared back at him, clinging to the palm tree behind her as if it was the only thing tethering her to this earth. Joaquin did not choose to ask himself why he found that...a kind of grieving.
“I don’t want your confidences,” he told her, as harshly as he could. “I don’t need you to tell me what it is tobe alive. I thought I made myself clear, Amalia.”
His intention was to devastate her. He wanted to, with a kind of greed that matched the lust he felt for her and made him feel the same intense shame—because surely that would get her to leave him. Because something had to break this fixation, this addiction, and he did not seem able to do it himself.
Surely if he crushed her, she would go.
And he could sink back into the life he’d made for himself, where he was not required tofeela damn thing.
He could see her pulse beating wildly in her throat. He could see the way she trembled, there in the rain.
But if he’d expected her to crumble, he was to be disappointed.
Instead, she wrapped her arms around her middle and studied him. Solemn and careful.
“I understand that you have a lot of anger about how things ended—” she began in the same way.
Joaquin let out a bark of laughter. “I was angry five years ago, certainly. But this is not anger, Amalia. This is revenge.”
She blinked. “You’re...taking revenge on me? And my punishment is...endless sex? Hot and cold running orgasms? Is this how you get back at all your enemies?”
He couldn’t say he liked the way she put that.
Joaquin advanced upon her, well aware she did not cower. Instead, she stood taller. Still, he had to lean over her so he could run his hand along the side of her face, then grip her chin. He held her face there, and brought his down close, so they could be no mistake.
So that this moment could stand as an example of what was really happening here.
This moment that could have been a kiss, but wasn’t.
Because this was no romance. This was what happened five years after the romance died—at her hands.
“Ilovedyou,” he threw at her, taking no care at all to ensure he didn’t hurt her. He wanted his words to hurt. He wanted them to land the way they did, like bullets into her tender flesh. She jolted, and he liked that. “I would have given you anything at all. Anything and everything. I would have laid it all at your feet. But all you wanted to do was step on me.”
She lifted her hand to his and he thought she would try to peel his fingers away from her chin—but if that was her aim, she seemed to get lost in it.
It reminded him of the first day she’d returned here. When she’d looked at him as if he was a ghost, but one she’d come all this way to find.
She was sopping wet now, soaked straight through, and he thought he should have been able to see through her, too. Not just the gown she wore, currently plastered to her every sweet curve, buther. He’d spent all this time peeling back her layers, learning how to make her scream, making her beg and cry out for gods who never came.
But he still couldn’t read what he saw there in her endlessly blue gaze.
And he didn’t see why she should be a mystery like the sea, when he could barely keep himself to the plan he’d made.
Maybe, a voice inside him suggested,the mystery here is not her—as she meets your demands and shares herself in all possible ways, but you. Who do not.
Joaquin didn’t care for that thought at all.
“You like to make it sound as if it was my aim to hurt you all along,” she said after a long, fraught moment while the rain came down in sheets all around them. “I think you know that’s not so.”
“What difference can it make? It is what happened.”
“My hands were tied, Joaquin.” He started to shake his head, but her gaze only seemed to grow steadier. “You will say that does not matter, but it does. I’m sure you would like to think that nothing on earth could have stopped you from doing what you liked back then. Or now. The reality is, there was nothing on earth that had any authority over you. There still isn’t. I can’t say the same.”
“That is a weak argument, Amalia.”
“I’m not talking about what I owed the Queen. I’m talking about the fact that my Queen was my mother.”
She did pry his fingers from her face then. She held them away from her, though she didn’t let go of him. Joaquin should have jerked his hand away. He told himself he meant to do it at any moment, but one moment became another, and he didn’t.
