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She laughed at that. It was a wild, provoking laugh and he thought she knew that, though she did nothing to stop it.
“How’s that working out for you, Joaquin? Because it seems to me that if anything, thishandshakeof ours is only getting more intense.”
He would have preferred it if she’d kept her unwelcome honesty to herself.
“It won’t last,” he bit out. “And even if it does last some little while, it’s immaterial. Because there is nowhere for this to go. I won’t be falling in love with you again. There will be no accidental pregnancies that link me to you forever. I rarely make mistakes, and when I do? I don’t repeat them.”
“Joaquin,” she began.
He pulled her even closer, making sure that he could get his face even closer to hers, so that this was some kind of mockery of every kiss they’d shared so far. It almost felt the same. That intense, that passionate.
This close to unhinged.
“I won’t pretend I don’t enjoy this chemistry between us,” he told her, almost touching her lips with his. “But the only thing I will ever want from you, Amalia, is your body. Do you understand me?”
“Perfectly,” she threw back at him.
And for a moment, they both stayed as they were, her chest rising and falling as rapidly as his. Their breath seemed to saw through the air, disrupting the patter of the rain as it fell.
But it was far too much like all the other things they did when they were touching like this.
He uncurled his hands from her shoulders and stepped away, entirely too cognizant of the fact it was more difficult to do than it should have been.
Much more difficult.
Just as it was to turn on his heel and walk away from her.
He stomped down the path to his little dungeon and in all the time he’d stayed here, it had never felt more like the prison it had been than tonight. Joaquin resented the work he’d put into the place, because he wanted to slam the doors behind him, damn it, and yet they all were too smooth and closed too quietly.
In the bedroom, he stripped off his clothes and made his way into the grand shower enclosure and stood there, propping himself up against the wall as the water poured down all around him.
And he told himself he’d meant every word.
He had.
And still, everything in him leaped when the door to the shower opened some while later, when the steam had begun to billow around him.
Amalia stepped in, naked now. Her dark hair swirled around her, already wet. It seemed to call attention to her small, perfect breasts, and the indentation of her waist. He had spent a lot of time in this very shower with his hands splayed out over those hips, holding her sex to his lips so he could hear her cries echo off the tiles while he treated her like a dessert. He liked to prop her up against the shower wall, because he liked the way her fists dug into his hair as he held her up on his shoulders.
It was the only time he knelt before her. And that was fair enough, he assured himself. It was all about sex. That was what he’d told her, because it was true.
It wasn’t that pleasuring her pleased him, deeply. It wasn’t that sometimes, he thought the point of all of it was afterward, when she was limp and curled around him, sometimes right here on the shower floor. It couldn’t be the way she buried her face in his neck, the two of them simply clinging to each other while another bout of their endless passion wore itself out.
It had nothing to do with how he liked to carry her out of here after tasting her so thoroughly, so he could set her on the marble counter and take his time drying her off. Toweling every part of her body, then slicking her everywhere with the soft cream she preferred, so she smelled of night blooming flowers with a hint of spice.
And it was best all round that Joaquin did not permit himself to think about all the times he woke to find the two of them tangled up together in his bed, sleeping so close it was as if neither one of them could make it through the night unless they were touching in as many places as possible.
When he sometimes slept on the hard floors of his various residences, purely to remind himself where he came from. And to make sure he never forgot what real life was like without all the softness he now enjoyed.
Softness led to pain. Those were his earliest memories. He had learned either to keep from wanting anything—or to make sure he could buy the lot of it, so he never needed to worry about losing it.
He had veered from that course precisely once.
She closed the shower door behind her and looked at him, her eyes far too large.
“I keep trying to run you off,” he growled at her. “But you won’t go.”
He shouldn’t have said that, but she laughed it off anyway.
