AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I bowed my head down, and when my knees touched the marble, a groan of pain and self-hatred escaped my mouth.
I hate you.
I like you.
I wish I could quit you.
If I didn’t show Wolfe the truth, he’d make my life hell or worse—throw me back to my parents, cancel our engagement, and make me the talk of the entire city of Chicago.
He would use whatever he had against my father, and we would be poor, powerless, and defenseless without my father to protect my mama and me from poverty, the Irish, or The Outfit’s cutthroat society.
I would lose everything.
The choice not to kneel was never truly mine. I couldn’t afford for this wedding not to happen. And I couldn’t afford for my future husband not to believe me as I knew it would make both of us miserable and hateful toward one another.
The foyer was so silent, I could hear the echo of my heartbeat ricocheting off the ceilings. I slanted my chin up and cracked my eyes open, meeting his punishing gray ones.
We stared at each other for a few seconds, my fingers laced together at the small of my back.
He was right.
Kneeling for someone did make you feel like a peasant.
The minute you willingly lowered yourself for someone else, they would never, ever look at you the same way. In or out of bed.
“I will not take you by force.” His voice was a sharp-edged knife, traveling across my nerves, nipping though not cutting all the way in.
“I offer myself willingly,” I said, my head bowed down.
“Up.”
I stood up.
“Come to me and kiss me the way you did Angelo tonight.”
I swallowed the sour bile rising in my throat. Hatred, humiliation, excitement, dread, and hope swirled in my chest.
With my knees bumping into each other, I made my way back to him, pressing my lips to his as I wrapped my arms around his neck.
My body hummed with dark energy. I wanted to devour him with rage and show him that I was innocent. That I was still untarnished, and that I was his.
But I was met with such passive disinterest, I couldn’t muster up the courage to do to him all the things I wanted to.
He lowered his lips to meet mine—finally—and I thought he would reciprocate, but he just grinned into my mouth. “If that’s how you kiss the man you want so desperately, I can see why Angelo didn’t put up a better fight to win you.”
That was when I lost it.
I bit down on his lower lip, hard, raking my fingernails through his hair and tugging at the same time he tore the front of my dress by the cleavage, ruining the designer number completely.
My skin burned, and my back arched. I kicked out of the dress, crushed silk mounting under my heels, pulling him to me, wrapping myself around him like a deadly octopus.
I was a black widow swallowing him whole.
We wrestled each other furiously, stumbling toward the staircase and bumping into a hanging picture, a console table, and a statue.
He hoisted me up and carried me upstairs, drowning my moans with kisses, suffocating his own groans of pleasure by biting my chin and lips and earlobes.
Bruising me with punishing lust.
