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He laid me down on my bed, and softness enveloped me. It felt blissful, to sink into downy blankets as hands stroked my face. I was shivering despite the heat, burning up with a fever that no medicine could fix. Heartsick and confused, as the man who professed to love me the most, for once, touched me with loving hands.
‘You remind me of her,’ he whispered, his thumb tracing my bottom lip. ‘Stephanie. She had a fire inside her, like you. You would have liked her.’
I stared at the ceiling, remembering Stephanie, who I’d met only in death. The memory was anything but pleasant.
‘You can’t say that,’ I choked. ‘You murdered her. You can’t say that.’
Dornan’s palm wiped the tears away from my cheeks, but more streaked down to take their place. ‘Shhhh,’ he said. ‘It’s okay. It’s okay.’
I shook my head. ‘It’s not okay.’
He kissed me. His mouth silenced me, drowned me out. He ground his hardness against my thigh and I remember wondering if I’d go to hell for fucking two men in the space of a few hours. A whore. That’s what I’d been labelled as. Might as well enjoy the benefits.
I felt guilt, thick and swirling in my belly, as I pictured John’s face. If he saw this, he would kill Dornan. But he was the other man, and he knew it. He had no say, and for that matter, neither did I.
Dornan hitched my nightgown up over my knees, bunching the material around my hips. The air on my stomach and thighs was cold, despite the night heat. I think it was being exposed like this, a gentle caress, a loving touch. Two hands, one on each of my knees, and then I was open, my hips protesting at how wide he’d parted them, his cock heavy as it rested against my pussy. My nipples were hard pearls beneath my thin nightgown, the material deliciously rough as it rubbed against them. I throbbed with desire – I still possessed desire for this man, somehow – and shame blanketed me like fog.
It was so much easier to detach when you were thrown onto a bed and fucked without any tenderness. When you weren’t given a chance to say yes or no. When it was mechanical, going through the motions.
Love made things . . . complicated.
What would he do if I said I didn’t want this?
‘Stop,’ I said, pushing his hands away. He gave me an odd look, his cock in his palm, the blunt tip glistening with pre-come. We regarded each other silently, my hips arching of their own accord as he slid his free hand up the inside of my thigh and slipped a finger inside me.
‘That doesn’t feel like stop to me,’ he murmured hoarsely, lowering himself, my eyes glued to the bruises blossoming on his neck. John’s hands had made fine work of Dornan’s flesh, before they’d made fine work of mine.
‘Fuck,’ Dornan groaned, pushing inside me so tenderly, it was as if he were another person. He’d never been gentle with me, not once in ten years, and I hadn’t asked him to be. But something had possessed him. He rocked his hips against mine, slow and soft, his cock stretching the bruised parts of me that John had been anything but gentle with when he fucked me against a bathroom sink in a diner not three hours earlier. I cried out when he touched the spaces inside me that John had already punished. It hurt. I liked that it hurt. Above me, moving faster, it was clear that Dornan liked my pain, too.
We’d been together ten years, Dornan and I, and I can safely say that this was the first – and last – time we’d ever made love.
It was tragic. He was trying to start anew, a fresh beginning, and I was opening, yielding my flesh to him one last time to say goodbye to the man who saved me all those years ago.
And neither of us was brave enough to admit what we were doing.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
DORNAN
The ring had been burning a hole in his pocket since he’d gone home to get it that afternoon. At the same time, one singular thought had burned in his head.
Had the woman he loved turned her loyalties against him?
It had gone something like this: His father had given his macabre version of a blessing to a Dornan-Mariana marriage, as well as a warning about where her allegiances might lie; Dornan had walked out of the meeting, and straight out onto Venice Boulevard. He didn’t pass go. He didn’t collect two hundred dollars. All he did was get on his motorcycle, speed home and find the ring his grandmother had left to him when she died.
He’d considered asking her properly if she’d marry him, but what if she said no?
She hated him for what he’d done. For everything. And he couldn’t even blame her, because she was right to hate him. To fear him.
None of that mattered, though. She was his. She would always be his. Since the moment he’d laid eyes on her in that motel room in San Diego, he’d known.
Ten years. She’d be fine. She’d be happy again.
Was she fucking somebody else?
‘Pack a bag,’ Dornan called into the bedroom.
Mariana appeared in the doorway, wearing nothing except panties and a confused look on her face. Her hair was wild, from where he’d ground her into the bed, and her nipples still glistened from where his mouth had just been.
