her knees.” Submissive and fearful and unfinished. “Then you left me when you promised you wouldn’t.” He’d promised he would always come home to me. No matter what. He’d promised when he’d enlisted that he would never leave me.
The chiseled planes of his cheekbones suddenly more austere, his voice went so quiet it shook me to my core. “I made you like this.”
It wasn’t a question.
Answering would only feed the chasm between us as I sank myself deeper into this abyss that began and ended with the man in front of me, but I couldn’t stop myself. The part of me that was still that needy, desperate, hungry girl who wanted to cower, but wanted to feed the axis of her universe in the only way she knew how, she answered. “Yes.”
Because Ronan Conlon was my soul.
Everything I was revolved around the impression he’d left on my heart. “You made me submissive.” All those years ago, he’d turned me into who I was, then he didn’t so much as return a single text or phone call to let me know if he was still alive.
The tightly controlled expression he fed the world locked down, and his eyes left me. “Get up.”
My heart, my stomach, they sank as my breath crashed against fear.
I didn’t move.
I couldn’t.
Every touch he’d given me when I’d been too young to understand caressed my soul in a cruel replay of understanding. His hand on my shoulder. A softly worded command in my ear.
Sit, stand, eat, sleep.
A brush of rough fingers across my cheek. His firm grip on my nape. Fingers skimming across my stomach. All of it possessive, all meant to show dominance, and every touch leaving me breathless for more because that was his purpose.
But he’d never given me more.
Only promises.
So here I knelt, my bruised shins on hotel carpet, my feet bare, my soul splayed. With my head down and my hands on my thighs, I waited.
And waited.
The air didn’t shift. It became alive.
As sure as the hushed anticipation of a full audience when the lights went out before I sang the first note, this room, my nerves, they crackled with that same heavy, eager, weighted expectation because he was doing something he didn’t do before.
He was staying.
Not walking out, not dismissing me, he didn’t turn his back. The black leather of his heavy boots buffed to a perfect shine, he stood there.
And that’s when it hit me.
This, more than any smile that had ever graced his beautiful face, was his seduction.
Ronan Conlon was more dominant silent than any man I knew who barked orders, and that spoke to places deep within me that I had yet to understand.
My heart rate erratic, a need I had no lyrics for burning low in my belly, I continued to wait. Just like I waited for him to make me his all those years ago, I waited now. But this time, I was patient.
Quiet, like the softest of raindrops on a hot summer evening, he finally graced me with his voice.
“Your clothes in your suitcase, Sanaa, who put them there?”
Hearing my proper name pass his lips made fear twist in my stomach. Before I could answer, he asked another question.
“Who chose the dress you’re wearing right now?”
Defensiveness slid in. “My wardrobe is taken care of by my management team.”
Ignoring my response, he asked another question. “Who arranged the flight here?”
I opened my mouth, but he kept going.
“Who got you to the airport? Who arranged this hotel? Who picked out the shampoo in your bathroom? The cut of your hair? The scent on your skin?”
Rash and sudden, the ego that comes from fame gripped me, and anger propelled me to my feet. “How dare you.”
The heat of his palm flattened on my chest as his thumb swept across the bruise on my collarbone. “Who told you that you needed to learn how to fight? Did he promise it would reduce stress? Give you control? Make you feel better?”
Humiliation coated my existence. Vance had said exactly all of those things and more. “You have no right to insult me when I made a name for myself.”
“I’m not insulting your success. I admire every one of your accomplishments. I’m asking who chose this color on your lips.” As if to prove his point that I let every one of the things he was suggesting happen because I relinquished control over myself, his thumb dragged across my lower lip.
His words making me feel small, I shoved his hand away and spit