Tempt Me - Caitlin Crews Page 0,56

very distinctly. “I want so much more than that. I want to marry you, and I don’t even believe in marriage.”

He must have made a face, because she laughed. And then she reached over and took his hand, reminding him suddenly of the way she’d kissed him in that pool, changing everything.

This time, Rory smiled when she pulled his hand to her mouth and kissed his palm, the same one he’d used to spank her until she came apart. “I’m in love with you, Conrad. And don’t tell me I’m not, or that I don’t know my own mind or heart. I do.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

RORY HAD IMAGINED this scene a thousand times over the last, long month, but every time she had, she hadn’t imagined that she would feel like this.

So alive.

Hopeful and a kind of outsize version of happy—or almost happy—at the sight of him. Something like supercharged—plugged in again—because he was here, and everything seemed to crackle with electricity around the edges near him.

She had looked up from what she considered her primary form of self-care these days to see him coming toward her, and if she’d been entertaining any doubts about what had been happening in her heart for the past month, they disappeared.

Just like that.

Because even outside that Gothic church, out of context, and in the last place she had ever expected to find him in all his brooding maleness, Conrad was magnificent.

He made her glow with happiness, simply with his presence. He made her squirm in her seat, so instantly was she soft and wet and ready for him. She felt as if she’d been ready for him since she’d last had him.

He made her all kinds of things. Even mad, when he looked at her so calmly and talked about experimenting with others—but not the kind of mad that made her want to storm away, burn bridges, or figure out ways to forget him. This was a kind of mad she’d never felt before. The kind of mad that made Rory want to sit here in this café with cats and coffee, and keep talking to him until they understood each other.

And all of that, she had to believe, was love.

Rory had always thought that love was the sort of thing that would build up over time, like dripping sand through her fingers until it became a castle.

But instead, one night had ripped her wide-open, showed her who she was and what she wanted, and that was it. She was done.

And as Conrad stared at her now, looking as close to dumbfounded as she supposed a man so stern and austere ever could, she only felt more certain.

It wasn’t going to go away. It wasn’t going to change. She had known that beyond the shadow of a doubt when she’d been certain she might never lay eyes on him again. She knew it now, while he was here.

All she had to do was touch him, and it was like that collar he’d put around her neck. It affected her breathing. It was impossible to ignore. Something held them both in a tight, unbreakable grip.

“I collared and claimed a woman once,” he told her, and for once, his dark eyes looked like a storm. “That means—”

“I know what it means, Conrad.”

Rory didn’t tell him that she’d spent an inordinate amount of time this last month studying the BDSM lifestyle. Not just looking at sexy pictures, though she’d done that, too. She’d read books, a thousand articles, and had even gone to a few lectures.

But that was something she could tell him later.

Because she had to believe, now he’d tracked her down in what he didn’t need to tell her was a very unlike-him move, there would be a later. Hopefully a lot of laters.

“I would have told you that we simply changed,” Conrad told her, sounding something like bleak. “People do. But it’s been pointed out to me that I misjudged her from the start. And I can’t be sure that I won’t make a similar mistake again.”

Rory understood that was supposed to set her back, but she only shrugged. “Everybody has problematic exes. That’s why they’re exes. My college boyfriend could only get it up if I wore white cotton panties, lay on my back in corpse position without moving, and let him drip candle wax on my nipples. Totally not a serial killer, I’m sure.” She grinned at him. “We all make mistakes.”

Not for the first time, his eyes did that thing where she