grip a hand over her knee before slowly dragging my fingertips up.
Red lines form in her skin from the hard path my fingers take, up higher until I’m tugging the bottom of her shirt up her body and yanking it from her arms.
Her tits bounce over her chest as her arms drop back to her sides, my arm locking around her waist like a steel vice to hold her back tight to my body, to scoot her ass even more over the rigid line of my cock.
Still, she gives me no response, a fucking pathetic rag doll who will take what I do to her without question or complaint.
It’s a defense mechanism, the same thing she did when Grant stripped her of personality, and I won’t accept it. I don’t want it. I want the aggravating girl she’d once been, the monster who pissed me off at every turn.
So, I remind her of that girl. Even if it means I’m admitting things that will push us too close to the truth of why I know her.
Adeline is mine.
She’s here.
And I finally get to play with her for as long as I want.
White cotton panties still cover her hips and cunt, but I want those on for now, want that tiny bit of modesty, that thin shred of fabric that lets her think I don’t have her completely naked and bared to me.
Except, she’s wrong in that.
Any man can strip a woman of her clothes and make her stand naked before him. But even then she’s not truly naked. It’s child’s play. Brute force. But he still can’t see all of her. And that’s where he loses. Not if her thoughts are still locked away in a mind he can’t have. Not unless she gives it to him.
I have Adeline’s mind. Her private thoughts. Her memories. All her successes and shames, triumphs and losses. Every single one. I was there watching them. Reading about them in her journals. Looking through her room at all the photos of her life before me, her life after.
I have it all. Body and mind.
And she still doesn’t know the first thing about me.
If that’s not winning, I don’t know what is.
Adeline can keep the panties for now.
Because I already see the parts of her that no other man has seen before.
All the parts she can no longer keep hidden away, no matter how hard she shuts down.
Adeline
I’ve felt fear before in my life. Tons of it. Enough to break even the strongest person. Enough to sink anybody beneath the surface of water and drown them in the consequences of life.
I felt it when my mother got sick and was dying. When I heard the gunshot on the night my father died. When I knew I was alone in a house filled with ghosts, and when I lost control of myself in the years that followed.
Fear and I are well acquainted. It’s been delivered by men who’ve hit me. By assholes who thought they could control me. By the days and nights I felt everything I loved being stripped away while I watched helpless from the sidelines.
I know fear. I’ve lived it. Slept with it. Cuddled up to it when a man beat me senseless because I’d broken my vows.
But this fear. What Ari is doing to me now. It sinks deeper, cuts sharper, the jagged lines of it fissuring through my mind and body while he holds me in place and admits all the secrets he knows.
His chest is a blanket of heat against my back, the soft cotton of his shirt rubbing against my skin, his scent, that musky, masculine spice of him, is seducing me into compliance.
The familiarity is startling, memories rushing back. Flashes of shadow I’d dismissed, the way my hair would stand on end when it felt like someone was watching.
We all feel it, that presence, those eyes on us, exploring and touching, examining and judging.
Deep down we know someone is watching, but we brush it off.
I shouldn’t have dismissed it as many times as I did.
Fingertips softly brushing up the top of my thigh, he tightens his arm around my waist and holds me still. I can feel every breath he takes, every steady beat of his heart, even though my pulse is chaotic and fractured, a trapped bird frantic to escape the confines of my ribs.
My body trembles as his lips brush my ear, as his fingertips climb higher on my leg. A sweep of his thumb over my