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He was uncapping paints as he turned to me. “May I?”
“Sure.” I crossed my arms, ready for the strange experience of being caught in someone’s painting. No one had ever looked at me so closely as it felt he looked at me now.
He reached out his fingers, dotted in red paint, and drew stripes across my cheek. A flutter rose in my stomach being touched like that, and I took a step back. “What are you doing?”
“Painting you.”
“I thought you meant on a canvas!”
“Do you want to do it to me first?” He held out the colors.
There was a clear challenge in his gaze, and I could never resist a challenge.
“Fine.” I began to paint his face the way he had mine. This close to him, I couldn’t help studying the intense eyes, the sharp angles of his face, the little scar at the edge of one dark eyebrow. We were intimately close, and he studied me with a slight smile on his lips until I smeared red paint across them.
His lips parted under my thumb, and he leaned forward. I paused, then gripped his broad shoulders with my paint smeared hands, leaving my prints on his skin. His slow, tentative movement toward me was a question, and I answered by swaying toward him.
His lips met mine, marking me with paint—and marking me as his, for the moment. His hands gripped my hips, and his hard cock pressed against my lower abs as he dipped to deepen the kiss.
I finally pulled away, breathless. “You got me back,” I said, touching my lips, which were smeared with paint. Both of our mouths were a mess now.
“Not everything is a game of revenge, Selena,” he said. “Have you considered that perhaps I just find you irresistible?”
“Of course I am,” I said.
“Glib,” he chided, dipping his fingers in the paint and using it to mark my other cheek. “You are quite the warrior, aren’t you? But you can’t just use sex and seduction as a weapon with Aiden.”
I was still throbbing with need, my lips swollen after those kisses. I didn’t particularly want to discuss Aiden at the moment, but he was my current mission; I needed to win him over to my role to position myself for my next move. “And if it isn’t a weapon, it’s…?”
“The emotional connection both of you desperately need?” he asked. “Aiden loves to dominate—it’s his nature. He loves to give pleasure and require obedience. But he needs something more.”
I rolled my eyes. “I can give myself pleasure and I suppose I can fake obedience.”
His brows quirked. “Did faking obedience work particularly well for you last night?”
“Don’t remind me.”
“The keys are gone,” he reminded me. “Aiden has his own lessons to learn, apparently.”
“I’m sure he could get new keys.”
“I promise you, he will not.” A sudden steely look had come into Xander’s eyes. “You’ll be safe here, with us.”
A sudden chill swept through my body. It was a strange thought, imagining being safe with someone outside of our house. The fact that I’d slept so well far from my usual comforts--in a cage no less--with Xander close to me, felt unsettling. Maybe I’d just been dead tired.
“Now, let me finish painting you.” It was half command, half question.
I nodded and he reached out, drawing my dress over my head. I raised my arms and saw the way his eyes sharpened on my body, the flare of lust in his eyes. I’d seen lust in so many men’s eyes before, but it was the first time I felt an answering heat.
He touched his fingers just below my ear, then slowly traced a line down to my collarbone. His touch lit fire in its path, and I bit my lower lip, unaccustomed to being touched this way. I’d had sex before, but it was always for the mission—or it had been in preparation for the mission, becoming comfortable with my sexuality—and so it had always felt more abrupt and transactional than the slow, worshipful way he was touching my body, the way he looked at me.
And with every slow touch, he set new fire blazing through my body.
When he painted my stomach, I found myself swaying toward him, wanting for him to keep going lower. But he straightened and said, “Look at yourself in the mirror.”
Resting my hands on his hips, the two of us faced the mirror in the bathroom. I looked strange all covered in paint, and yet it felt like I was seeing myself in a new way—as if the bold swipes of color portrayed something inside me that I’d never seen before.
“You are so beautiful,” he told me quietly.
