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It’s a lie. Another lie, stacked up on so many more, but this one feels worse, somehow. How many more will I have to tell to get through this? To Adrik, to Theo—maybe even to my brother, in time. To myself. I can feel them multiplying, becoming a convoluted tangle that will eventually wrap me up in it, maybe to my own doom.
“Prove it.” Adrik’s voice cuts through my rapidly escalating thoughts, and I look up at him, confused.
“What do you mean?” I whisper, afraid that I know all too well what he means.
His hand drops to my inner thigh, sliding upwards, beneath the edge of my silk shorts. I’m not wearing panties beneath it. His fingers graze over the gusset, where the silk is damp, and he bites back a groan.
“You are wet for me,” he murmurs, and I don’t correct him. I don’t tell him that the dampness of the silk is from Theo’s cum still inside of me, all three times he’s filled me up with it since I came back from the mansion, that if Adrik kissed me hard enough, he might still taste Theo in my mouth.
But it wouldn’t be entirely true, anyway, because Adrikisturning me on. His hands, his proximity, even the demands that I know he’s about to make, because I know him well enough at least to anticipate what he’s about to say. I can feel that tightness between my legs, the building ache, and I know if there were no consequences, I might not tell him no.
A part of me wants both of them. The gentle, sophisticated, generous Irishman I married, and the rough, arrogant bodyguard who saved my life. But I can’t. And the one I’m bound to in all the ways that matter in this world is the one I have to be loyal to, for now.
“Adrik, please go.” I push ineffectively at his chest. “Theo will be back.”
“I can gauge how long it will be before he’s back.” His fingers tip my chin up, so that I’m looking directly into those gorgeous blue eyes. “Sleep with me, Marika.”
“What? Here?” I glance back at the huge bed, my stomach in knots. “Adrik, no—”
“Prove to me you still care for me. That you still want me. That it’s not only his cock that makes you come.” His fingers slide under the silk, trailing over the soft outer folds of my pussy, and I flinch, as much from my own desire as from the urge to tell him to stop. I don’t even know if Iwanthim to stop or not—just that I know if we get caught, for any reason, this entire house of cards that Nikolai has built with me at the center will come crumbling down. “Prove to me that mine is the only cock you want to come on.”
“Adrik,please.” I flatten my hands against his chest, and his fingers on my chin tighten.
“Please, what?” he taunts lightly, his fingers still stroking just beneath my shorts. “Please fuck me, Adrik?Orplease make me come the way my husband does?” There’s an edge to his voice that frightens me. “How can you do this, Marika?”
I look up at him beseechingly, not wanting to ask what he means. Iknowwhat he means, that he wants to know how I can be with Theo. “If you don’t understand by now,” I whisper softly, “I don’t know how I can make you understand.”
His fingers dip between my folds, rubbing back and forth, and I suck in a breath as he grazes my clit. “How can you let another man come in you, Marika, and say you still care for me?”
“Because Idocare for you,” I whisper. “I care enough to try to keep you from getting yourself killed, Adrik! When this is over—”
“What I saw on the plane—” His mouth bends to my ear, his teeth grazing over the shell of it. “There is noover, Marika. He’ll drag you under with him, and then—”
“This ismyjob, Adrik!” I try to twist out of his grasp, my body throbbing with mingled desire and fear. “I have never tried to tell you how to do yours. How to protect me or my family. But myfamilycomes before anything else. If you loved me—” I take a deep breath, trying to ignore his touch, the confusion tangled up inside of me. “You’d understand. You’d realize that this is as much my duty as you think following me here is yours.”
Adrik’s lip curls, and for a moment, I think it’s me that he’s furious with. It might be—I can’t tell. “I didn’t follow you here because it was myduty, Marika,” he growls. “I followed you here because I can’t stand thinking of that man’s hands on you. Because I needed to know that you were still mine, not that you’d soldallof yourself to him, bodyandsoul—”
This time, I wrench away from him so hard that I do manage to slip out of his grasp, stumbling back. I straighten, trying to calm my racing heart, to speak as clearly as I can manage. A part of mewantsto tumble into that bed with him, to reclaim my decision to sleep with him in the first place—but the problem is that it no longer feels wholly like my choice. Just as my desire for Theo is complicated with my reasons for marrying him in the first place, my desire for Adrik is now complicated by his demands. I no longer feel like it’s entirely in my hands.
“Nothing else will happen between us until I’m finished here,” I tell Adrik as calmly as I can manage, ignoring the pulse beating through my veins, the throbbing in my clit where he touched me. “When I’m no longer married to Theo, we can figure this outthen. But not now, and definitely not here, not in—”
“The bed you share with him?” Adrik growls, and I take another step back.
“We can work this out, one way or another, when my marriage is finished. But until then—”
Adrik’s face contorts for a moment, the rage clearly showing for a brief second, and I feel my heart stutter in my chest. I don’t know if it’s Theo or me he’s so angry with, and I’m a little terrified to find out.
“I will kill him, when this is over,” Adrik snarls. “For ever touching you. For ever fucking you. For ever knowing the pleasure of having you come on his fingers or his tongue or his cock. I will cut it off myself, and then—”
“I will be a widow when this is over,” I tell Adrik, as coldly as I’ve ever spoken to him. And as soon as the words leave my mouth, I regret them—because I never planned to tell Adrik what my brother had designed. It’s far above him—and even if it wasn’t, and even if I thought he deserved to know, I no longer feel sure that he can be trusted with that information. “But that’s not for you to decide when that will be,” I add, doing my best to keep my voice from trembling. I’m suddenly very afraid that the decision I made to be with Adrik will have farther-reaching consequences than I could have ever imagined.
He looks at me for a long moment. “I’m not going anywhere, Marika. I will still be here, protecting you. Watching you. And when this is over—I will be here, too.”
Adrik turns then, and stalks out of the room.
It should have sounded romantic, like a promise. But the way he said it—I shiver. It sounded more like a threat. And I start to wonder if keeping my secret might not be more dangerous than telling Theo the truth.
I sink down onto the edge of the bed, wrapping my arms around myself.I can’t,I think miserably, rubbing my hands up and down my arms, the feeling of Adrik’s touch still clinging to me. It’s not unpleasant, remembering his hands there, and I feel so utterly, horribly confused.
