bit fucking sorry.” Calvin scowled, but his hand didn’t move. Instead, he pulled the strap down farther, enough that the fabric threatened to topple over her nipple.
“What do you think I mean? We’re married, aren’t we?”
Nina jerked. His hand fell from her arm, but instead of giving her space while she pulled her nightdress back into place, he slipped it under her sheets to grab her thigh. Skin to sweaty skin.
Nina squirmed. “Calvin!”
“Don’t be such a fucking prude, Nina,” he snapped as his hand tightened. “The jig is up, isn’t it? Considering the state I got you in, I don’t think you’re really in a position to pretend you’re all that modest.”
“Calvin,” Nina tried again, stilling like a deer staring at headlights. Did that mean he was the semi? “Calvin, please stop.”
“I’m tired of this little game.”
“Tired of what game? We had—I thought we had an arrangement. We have separate bedrooms, and—”
“Did you really think I was going to marry you and not act like an actual married couple?” Calvin snorted as his hand moved up her thigh, gripping even harder. “That’s part of the perks, isn’t it? You might be ruined goods, but I’ve never been too good for the bargain shelf. Especially when I can’t get anything else I need.”
“What—what are you talking about?” Move screamed a voice in the back of Nina’s mind. But for some reason, her body was stone.
The hand on her thigh crept upward.
“This whole marriage was supposed to set me up for life. No one would give me the time of day without my child fucking bride. The one with the de Vries pedigree.” He practically spat the words. “But I’m on an allowance from dear old Grandma. I have to ask for fucking pocket money from my child bride. Well, if I can’t get what I want out there, I might as well take advantage of it in here.”
Nina gasped as Calvin’s hand shoved underneath her nightgown, a blunt intrusion against her thin silk underwear.
“Calvin! What are you doing?!”
Suddenly, Nina was all action, finally in her right mind. She sprang off the bed and to the other side, breathing only slightly easier when there was a king-sized mattress between them. She yanked her robe from a chair beside the bed and wrapped it tightly around her body, ignoring a desire to jump straight into a hot shower.
“Look,” she managed. “I don’t know what you thought this was. And I’m sorry if I misled you. But I wasn’t expecting us to…you know…”
“Fuck?” Calvin snarled. “Come on, princess. It’s not like you’ve never done it before.”
Nina gulped. “You said the plan was to remain strictly platonic!”
“Plans change.”
Calvin stalked around the bed, and, suddenly, Nina wished dearly she had run the other way, toward the door. As it was, she was trapped in the corner, with nowhere to go unless she scampered back over the mattress like a monkey.
And maybe she might have if she hadn’t been stymied by a sudden wave of nausea flinging her back again.
In a few surprisingly quick steps around the bed, Calvin cornered her against the chair. A ribbon of sweat broke out across Nina’s forehead as she tried to fight the rising tide in the back of her throat.
“You won’t put me off forever, you know,” Calvin said as he curled a hand around Nina’s wrist. “Those hoity-toity assholes in suits might, but you won’t. I won’t fucking have it.”
Nina looked down at his hand, then back up at her “husband.” She snuck a glance down the hallway.
“The butler isn’t here. None of them are.” One of Calvin’s light brown brows quirked upward as he leered down her robe, openly examining her cleavage. “I told them to leave for the day.”
Nina gasped. “You dismissed our entire staff for the day without telling me?”
Calvin shrugged. “You sure think you’re something of a mistress, don’t you? You’re a child, Nina. And that’s exactly how they all think of you.”
“If I’m a child,” Nina snapped, “then what does it say about you that you want to sleep with me?”
His other hand found her cheek with a sudden, ringing smack. Her skin burned, her neck throbbed with the sore reflex of being hurled to the side.
“You will never talk to me like that again!” Calvin roared. “I have to take all their fucking belittling outside this house. I won’t have my wife doing the same. You will respect me!”
He grabbed her other wrist and shoved her against the wall so her head thumped