in some way when they both knew all he’d done was give her pleasure. Mind-blowing pleasure at that.
He wasn’t being conceited—it was the truth.
He wrenched open the door to her room without knocking and she shrieked tugging her dress up against her breasts, attempting to cover herself.
“What the hell was the meaning of that?” he asked, aware that he was showing his loss of control and temper, not sure that he cared.
“I might ask you the same question,” she fired back, her eyes stormy. “You just…you did that to me in a public place. A public place! We could have been seen. We could have been—”
And his control snapped. “I did that to you?” he repeated, his voice low. “I did it. To you.”
“Yes,” she said, lifting her chin.
“Aren’t you a pretty little liar. Making up stories that suit your reality. I did nothing to you. You grabbed me. You kissed me. You were the one who wrapped your hand around me and put the condom on, so don’t you dare act the part of wounded maiden.” He advanced on her and she shrank back. Good. Finally she saw what he was. Finally she was afraid. Just like everyone else. And he would not hold himself back, not for her, not now. Not when it was her fault that his armor was cracked, that all of this was leaking out. “If there is a part for you to play in this little opera you’re conducting in your head it would be the whore, and make no mistake.”
“And if I’m the whore,” she spat, “what does that make you?”
“No less and no more. But I know my part, and I don’t pretend to be something I’m not. I don’t pretend to be above the lusts of the flesh even while I’m burning up for it.”
“Have you no sense of responsibility? Of right? You act like self-control is some sort of sin, but people aren’t animals and we don’t just have to go around doing everything we like!”
“So proper, Jada, have you ever stepped out of line other than tonight?”
“I’ve never wanted to.”
“You never wanted to? Or other people in your life didn’t want you to?”
“What’s the difference? We live for other people. At least, normal people do.”
“There is a big difference, Jada. Clearly you needed to let loose. Or tonight wouldn’t have happened.”
“Tonight,” she bit out, “never should have happened at all. I must have been crazy to let you touch me.”
“Is that right?” he asked. A new kind of heat was flowing through him now, reckless and dark. So often in his life, he felt like an observer, standing above things, watching them, manipulating, but not engaging.
He was engaged now. And the closer he got to Jada, the more tightly he embraced the anger that was pouring through him, the looser his grip on his control became.
He took a step toward her and she didn’t back down, didn’t shrink. Whatever moment of sanity she’d had before was gone now. Now she was ready to challenge him.
“Yes,” she said, her voice thinner now, less confident, betraying the fact that, no matter how straight she stood, she wasn’t as fearless as she appeared.
“Is that so, princess? You despise my touch so much?” She looked at him, stared him down, golden eyes burning. “I am so abhorrent to you?” He reached out and skimmed her cheekbone with his thumb, drawing it down to her lower lip, tracing the outer edge of her tender flesh. And he saw her react. Saw her eyes darken, her pulse flutter at the base of her throat. “Yes, clearly you could not stand to have me touch you again,” he said, his tone mocking.
She jerked back from him. “I shouldn’t be able to stand it,” she said. “I don’t know you. I don’t like you, I sure as hell don’t love you.”
“What does love have to do with sex?” he asked.
Her mouth dropped open. “What does love have to…Sex is incredibly intimate—that I just shared it with a virtual stranger makes my skin crawl.”
“There is nothing intimate about sex.”
Jada thought she’d reached her limit on things Alik could say that she would find shocking. She’d been wrong. “Nothing intimate about…How can you think that?”
“Sex is just chasing release, using someone else’s body to find it.”
That assessment of it, of what they’d just done, was worse than anything she could have imagined. She felt used, but worse than that, she felt like a user. Like she’d pushed her pent-up