AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Ajax had neatly severed his past from the man he’d become. All of the years she’d known him, she’d never seen his darkness.
She’d seen drive. Intelligence. Hunger. She just hadn’t realized what had spurred the drive. That he’d been running, not just toward something, but from something.
From the darkness.
And she saw it now. Saw it in his eyes. And she was worried that he was getting too tired to keep running. She wanted to throw her armor onto him. To strip herself bare so she could protect him from it.
But she honestly had no idea how to hold the darkness at bay.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE HONEYMOON WENT by too quickly. She and Ajax were together every night. Every night, he bound her wrists, and every night he showed her a world of pleasure she hadn’t imagined possible.
But they weren’t closer during the day. Not any closer at all. In fact, she felt more distant from him than she ever had before.
During the day.
She closed her eyes as the plane touched down on the tarmac in New York. And she saw flashes of their time together in St. Lucia.
Her hands bound to the bedpost, her back to him. Candles the only light in the room. He’d skimmed his hand over her back, gripped her hips before thrusting in deep. And his voice...so desperate, so rough, in her ear, telling her how good it felt, words in broken Greek, some of which she’d never heard before.
She opened her eyes and looked out the window. It was cold and gray out there. Gray runway, gray skyline, gray sky.
“Good to be back,” she said, waiting for the plane to stop before she stood up and stretched.
“You sound so enthused,” he said.
“I am.” She wasn’t.
This was weird. She felt like she was talking to a stranger. A cold, detached stranger, not the man she’d had hot, erotic sex with all night, every night, for the past week. He was her lover, her only lover. There was no mistaking him. There could have been no other man with her those nights. And yet...and yet the Ajax sitting in front of her, all cool and calm and...bored, wasn’t that man.
He wasn’t the man brought to the edge by her body. By their conversation.
She wanted to touch him. But she wasn’t allowed to.
Her fingers curled into fists at her side. It wasn’t so much his command that she was obeying, but her self-control she was testing.
She didn’t want to be enslaved to her need for him. She knew this wasn’t going to be a great love match. More and more, she questioned whether or not he could actually love.
Because she was seeing parts of him, glimpses into his soul, that frightened her now.
Always, Ajax had been a constant presence in her life. Serious, studious, kind. Now he was her husband, and as her husband he was distant, angry. As her lover he was dominant, generous, sexy. And as a man...she wondered if she knew who he was at all. If the person she’d always known was nothing more than an illusion, than a careful facade he’d put on as a scared, runaway boy from the kind of past she couldn’t have ever imagined.
As a girl, she hadn’t seen it. She’d been blinded by his physical beauty, by his careful kindness to her. As a teenager, it had been those small smiles. The accepting of her gifts, that had held her in thrall. He hadn’t said anything about his past, and she hadn’t asked. She’d filled in the blanks, seen what she’d wanted to see. Thought what she’d wanted to think about him.
But nowhere in there had she imagined he would look at her with flat, black eyes. So closed off. So emotionless.
Never had she imagined him binding her hands and having sex with her. It was really the best way to describe it. They didn’t make love. Ajax was demanding, and in terms of the physical, he gave her everything. But his eyes were hollow. He held himself back from her.
There was something about being tied up that she liked. His dominance was arousing, his skill was wonderful. And if it had been a game, nothing more than a power play between lovers, she wouldn’t have had a complaint.
But Ajax was using it for something else. Using it to keep control. To hold himself at a distance.
She wasn’t an equal in it. Wasn’t able to give back.
Like the conversations they’d had when she’d been a teenager. Only this was their bodies. He was doing all the talking, all the work. But her hands were tied. Literally.
He wasn’t letting her give. Wasn’t letting her add herself to the mix. It was all him. All what he wanted, even though what he seemed to want was to give her endless, blinding orgasms, which seemed sort of petty and stupid to have an issue with, but it was the principle.
