AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“That’s very distracting,” she says gently. “I want to talk.”
I anchor my hands on her waist and watch her. I want more than to talk. I want to disappear into her and never return. She tastes so fucking sweet. So lovely. It’s like being stabbed through the heart.
She’s named her price, however.
One last try. “There are other things we could do.”
Daphne puts both her hands on the sides of my face. “I know. Okay? I know. I want—” A shiver of frustration. “We are having this conversation first. Before anything else.”
The heat of her palms rushes through every one of my veins. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Well, I really don’t care.” Daphne studies my eyes, my lips, and then she leans in for another quick, vicious kiss. A biting kiss. “Don’t tell me about your dad, then. Tell me about you.”
“No.”
“You’re not the first person to do this, you know. Other people have kept secrets from me.”
“Who?”
She narrows her eyes. Ah—there it is. My little painter is discovering the rules of the game. Secrets for secrets. My past for hers, excruciating as it may be. That same sense of darkness from her paintings surges into the air. That danger. I’ve located it now. Separate tendrils. One of them is desire for something forbidden. For someone. For me. The other—
The other is hidden beneath layers of paint. Behind a hundred stacked canvases. The other has its roots in her life before I entered it.
My little painter presses her lips together. Her trust was hard to win in the first place. I took a blade to it when I brought her here.
I could win some of it back.
“I won’t repeat it,” I promise her. “And you haven’t told anyone else.”
Daphne wrinkles her nose. “You can’t possibly know that about me.”
“I can see it in—”
“My face.”
“What do you see in mine?”
“That—” She isn’t sure of herself, but she decides nonetheless. “That you won’t tell.”
“Who kept secrets from you?”
“One of my brothers.” It’s delightful, the way she hedges her bets. “What happened to you?” She points a finger at my chest. “You think you can go back on your word because you’re keeping me here, but I actually think you have to tell me. That’s what happens when you kidnap a person. You owe them. You owe me.”
She waits, impatience scrawled across her expression. It fades like a sunset. It fades into something deep and starry, like the night sky over the ocean.
It fades into understanding.
Daphne nods, almost to herself, and puts her head back down against my chest. I run my fingers through her hair, relieved as all fuck.
“Tell me,” she says.
It’s marginally easier to imagine it now that she’s not watching. I wouldn’t have asked her for this. She didn’t need to be asked.
“I’m sure Sin already told you.”
“No, he didn’t. He was trying to protect you.”
I scoff at her. “What is it you want to know, little painter? You’ll have to be more specific.”
