ear. “If I were to pull your cock out of your pants, right now, and start sucking you the way you like it, right now, the way you want me to, right now, you wouldn’t react?”
“Non.”
I bite his earlobe, hard, and he doesn’t even grimace.
I pull away frowning. “You’re never going to let me win, are you?”
“Non.” He turns to me, dipping his eyes briefly as if I’m a stranger on a park bench before turning back to the board. I drop my jaw, insulted, but don’t make a sound. I don’t miss the slight upturn of his lips just before I slide my hand down his chest and palm his crotch.
Bingo.
He’s rock hard. Immune, my ass.
“Well played, Tobias, but unfortunately, you’ve got a very big tell.”
“That is unfortunate,” he grumbles “and an unfair advantage.”
In a flash, I’m pinned beneath him, a yelp escaping me as he leans in running his nose along mine before I look up at him through my lashes.
“But in the spirit of full disclosure, you should know that every time I look at you, Cecelia, I want your attention, your lips, your tongue, your body. You have infected me with your sickness, and now I’m an addict too.”
“I knew it!”
He tugs my sweater down suckiling my nipple, eliciting a moan from me. “And while I do appreciate your beautiful face and your pretty peach nipples, it’s this,” he presses his palm to my chest, “and the fact that you use it as your mouthpiece. That is what is most alluring to me. I’ve never met a woman so willing to brave her own destruction for just a little truth.”
Fully drawn into him, he gazes down at me as I stroke his jaw. “But I will never let you win. Not ever, not once, not out of mercy or due to a cease-fire. Not ever. And I don’t ever want you to let me win either.”
“Why?”
“Because if and when you stop fighting me, that’s when I’ll know I’ve lost.”
He kisses me and pulls away, his expression going grave. “And you will hate me again one day, maybe soon or maybe later in the future, but you will.”
I frown. “You’re so sure?”
“Yes, and only you will be able to tell me why.”
“Tobias—”
“Come with me,” he murmurs.
Staring at the chessboard from the foyer, I can clearly see the two of us and the way the rest of the night played out. A night I’ve replayed over and over in my head. Just after his confession, he’d stood and taken my hand and I silently followed him up the stairs and into my bedroom. That night, he’d taken me so fiercely, with so much intensity, I practically convulsed in ecstasy, my jaw shaking as I called out his name. It was the best sex of my life.
But it was both an apology and a preemptive strike. At least that’s the way I see it now. And the fact that I see one of the most beautiful nights of my life as one of manipulation only fuels my contempt for him. But it was one of the many apology attempts he made before the bomb dropped, and he destroyed three relationships.
When I left, or was forced to leave—after the initial shock wore off—I began to experience the blinding pain of losing him and all I thought we had. Even so, I told myself I was leaving him, and I was. He deserved it. What he did was unforgivable. But somewhere deep down, I had hoped he would come for me. My twenty-year-old heart probably would have forgiven him. And the kicker is…if he had come back to me, I would have fought him, more furiously than I ever had.
It’s funny in retrospect just how you figure things out. Especially when you fell for a criminally deceptive man.
And where would that twenty-year-old heart be now if he had come back, if it had forgiven him?
But it’s my twenty-six-year-old heart who never got an explanation, nor an apology and will never forgive him.
But like all things that happened, it didn’t play out the way I wanted it to or expected. He never came after me because he had again banished me.
My eyes drift to the dining room where I shared uncomfortable dinners with Roman. Tobias wasn’t the only man to break my heart in this house.
Why did you come back, Cecelia?
The more memories that surface, the more I’m beginning to realize just how asinine it was to forsake a life that was,