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He leaned down, meeting her lips softly, brushing against the swollen skin, his tongue slipping out to lazily taste the delicate heat of her. Bloody exquisite. Every inch of her.
He unthreaded her leg from around his hip and pulled away. Without a word, he turned and walked away from her.
His actions foreign—he took what he wanted and, hell help him, he wanted to devour her like she was the last morsel of food on earth. So he wasn’t exactly sure what propelled him to walk away.
He only knew that he needed her to want him just as brutally as he wanted her. He wasn’t just a conduit for release. He wasn’t just ammunition to throw in her father’s face.
She had to truly want him.
And that meant walking away.
{ Chapter 18 }
Victoria stared at the back of Rafe’s shoulders as he retreated into the woods, disappearing into the thin slit of the trail through the trees.
Her cheeks flush, her breath ragged and her body limp, she couldn’t stumble after him like her gut told her to do.
He’d left her. Abandoned her.
Again.
She wanted him and he’d walked away.
Because of her anger at her father?
Why?
Her head dropped back against the bark of the oak tree, her look on the bare branches above her. Three little leaves, the last ones on the tree, crinkled and brown, flapped in the cold wind, unable to let go.
Fascinated.
He was fascinated at the emotions she couldn’t control. She saw clearly how he would study her when she was bordering on mania.
One is only fascinated by something one doesn’t understand. Which meant he was fascinated by her emotions because he didn’t understand them—didn’tfeelthem.
Anyof them.
A fissure speared through her heart at the thought.
That a boy that once loved a dog enough to save it at his own peril, had turned into something so cold, so empty, he didn’t understand emotions playing out in other people.
He didn’t understand enough to know that what had just happened between them had nothing to do with her father.
True, her anger had started with her father, but the second Rafe’s mouth had met hers, it was no longer about her father. All that anger twisted away, morphing into a vicious hunger for Rafe’s body to be touching hers. There was no emotion beyond what was happening between her and him and the insanity of this pull between them that she couldn’t deny.
Not that she wanted to deny it. Not any longer.
Her anger at her father? That was just a quizzing glass, held up to allow her to focus on what she truly wanted.
She wanted Rafe.
And she wasn’t going to let him abandon her so easily.
She started after him, her boots crunching loud atop the frost-dusted fallen leaves scattered in the woods, whereas he was silent as he walked amongst the trees. How someone as large as him could move quietly in a forest, she couldn’t figure.
There.
The flash of a dark coat around the bend.
