bruise on your ass that I didn’t put there. So never try to break my shit again.”
She understands then. I don’t care about the window. I see her as my property, and I’ll be damned to let her destroy it.
Through gritted teeth, she says, “I’ll do whatever the hell I want.”
Oh, the fuck no she won’t.
“You want a bruise on your ass? I’ll give you one.”
Catching her wrists with my free hand, I tug them from the one gripping her shirt. She weighs practically nothing as I yank her to her feet, catch her around the waist and force her a few feet back to the leather couch.
A squeak bursts from her lips as I drop both our bodies down, maneuvering her so that her stomach falls across my knees, the hem of her shirt bunching at her hips.
She’s still fighting, still angry as a spitting cat, so I lock one hand down over the back of her neck to keep her from rearing up and catching my nose with the back of her skull. The other, I use to lift her shirt just before my palm slaps the firm flesh of her pale ass.
Another small shriek at the sting, but she stops moving, the threat firmly in place now that I have her pinned and exposed.
Leaning over her, I speak softly, my voice cold and controlled while she’s hot with fury. “Stop fighting me. I’ve already won.”
“Like hell you have.”
Another slap and she flinches over my knees. “I won when you went on that walk in the cemetery with me. I won when you chose me over your vows. I won when you told me you were getting engaged as if begging me to stop you. And I won so many other times you don’t know about or remember.”
Adeline’s body becomes motionless, my palm rubbing away the sting on her skin, slow circles that warn I will slap her again.
She can lie and pretend that she hates me, but her body thinks differently. It always has.
This is pushing the line a bit far to even admit it, but I’m dying to see her reaction.
Whispering against her ear, I reveal one of her truths she thinks nobody knows.
“If somebody was strong enough, I think they could own me. It would take a lot. I’m stubborn, I know that. But I know there has to be a man out there who can break me, who can understand me, who can seduce me by matching me toe for toe while somehow seeing all my parts and accepting them for who I am. He’ll be stronger, obviously, faster. But he would conquer. How messed up is that? I’m not looking for the type of love that makes a person feel warm. I’m looking for someone who will fight a battle, not to hurt me, but to show me I’ve met my match. I don’t think he exists. He can’t exist. They never do.”
Her body goes rigid as I recite a journal entry I’d found in one of the beat up books she’d stuffed full and tossed aside. I’d ripped the page out back then, kept it, read it so many times that I’d memorized every word until the paper was thinning.
My voice softens even more, the deep vibration of it moving over my lips to the shell of her ear. “He exists, Adeline. And you’re pissing him off.”
No response. She doesn’t give up her thoughts by accusing me of stealing her private confessions, by yelling that I let her go, by demanding answers. Adeline is disturbingly silent, her body frozen in place, her eyes hidden by the fall of her dark hair.
It’s a prick move on my part, telling her what I know about her, admitting that I’ve spent years studying her and examining her life when she didn’t know I was there.
But I’m not done.
Stupid. It’s fucking stupid of me to want her to know the truth of it. To want to punish her for trapping me in a spell she didn’t know she’d cast.
Just like that first night she cried and forced me to turn around, her silence now is forcing my hand until I’ve lost my mind.
My fingers flex on the back of her neck, a small grunt of discomfort over her lips as I pull her up, lock her back against my chest and shove her legs open so she’s straddling my lap. Her plump ass sits over my hardening dick, her hair falls over my shoulder, and I