He flinched.
My brows raised and I tried to fake a smile. “Oh ho. She did? Is that what happened?”
He cut his hand through the air in a way that had me taking a step back, though I was already several feet away from him. “I don’t give a fuck who she sleeps with.”
“You sound defensive,” I accused, trying not to let my tone sound as wounded as I felt at the idea of him getting jealous over her.
His angry eyes studied me. “Not at all. I said the exact fucking thing I meant. I don’t give a damn what or who she does.”
I didn’t miss the implication in every word he said. “So did she or didn’t she fuck Nate? Now I’m confused.”
His hands were in fists now, his shoulders heaving. “Now you sound like the jealous one. You’re the one that brought up fucking Nate! Would it bother you if she slept with him?”
I couldn’t help it. Meeting his rage filled eyes steadily, before I could stop myself, I gave him the truth he didn’t deserve. “I don’t give a damn what or who he does.”
Oh no. Now I’d done it.
He was up, approaching me for that, something spilling out of his eyes that I couldn’t stand. “That thing with him, was it only to hurt me?”
“Stop it.”
He was on me, hands in my hair, our faces pulled close, though I refused to look at his. “Tell me. Please. For so long, I didn’t think I could forgive you for that. I was sure I couldn’t, but, fucked up as it is, if you tell me you did it to hurt me, tell me you did it to break me, tell me anything as long as you tell me you didn’t feel something for him, before or after, then I can forgive it.”
I was trembling, head to toe. In rage. In fear. “Stop it. Fuck you. I don’t owe you anything. We were done when it happened. You betrayed me before I ever betrayed you.”
“Promise? Do you swear it?”
“I don’t owe you anything,” I repeated.
“Please. Tell me you did it to hurt me. Tell me it only happened after I hurt you. Please.” The arms holding my head angled to his were trembling as badly as I was.
Our combined shaking felt powerful enough to move the ground beneath us, to bring down the house that held us.
“I don’t owe you anything.” I had to force out every gutted syllable.
“I’m begging you. Have you ever seen me beg? Begging you. Tell me, lie to me if you have to, but tell me you did it hurt me. Tell me he didn’t mean anything to you.”
My hands were gripping his now for support. I thought I might collapse otherwise. This was why he always won. He used every weapon at his disposal, created new ones for his cause, until I felt too defenseless to fight him.
“I did it to hurt you,” I admitted, the words wrenched from my soul.
He tried to kiss me, but I fought him, heaving away.
“What about you and her? Was that only to hurt me?”
He looked so crushed at the question that I lost my breath.
He couldn’t even meet my eyes.
“Answer me. I answered you, so you answer me, you son of a bitch. Was that only to hurt me?”
“I’m sorry.” His voice was unsteady. “It’s complicated.”
I should’ve known better than to ask. The wound had been festering but at least it hadn’t been fresh. Now it felt opened anew, and it hurt much more.
Of course, that wasn’t what I’d wanted to hear. I wanted an answer as uncomplicated as mine had been.
The Bastard.
But I’d known the answer before I asked it. The timeline didn’t add up. He’d betrayed me with her before he ever had a reason to want to hurt me like that.
“I hate you,” I told him, quietly and vehemently.
“I hate that I still love you.” Just as quiet, just as vehement. Far more destructive.
God, with just a few words he’d almost defeated me. I was a sore loser, though, so I did my best to recover and limp away.
I was nearly clear of the room, one foot already in the bathroom, when he finished me.
“I hate that I’ll never stop,” his voice was soft but no less impactful.
I went into the bathroom and locked him out.
I was in the shower before I realized what he’d done. I’d gone to bed with one chain around my neck and woken up with two.
I held up the newest one. It was a key.
The bastard had put it on me while I slept.
He’d keep me chained to him in spite of everything. This I knew. I hadn’t needed proof.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
PAST
We were at our old swimming hole. We hadn’t meant to come here, we’d just been walking and talking and stumbled upon it, and once we saw it we remembered.
The spot was nothing new to us, and it shouldn’t have been so strange, except that it’d been a long time since we’d been here, years at least now that I thought about it, and I didn’t have a swimsuit.
Still, when we were kids I’d gone swimming in my T-shirt all the time. Dante never said anything about it, in fact, even though I was sure he had more swim trunks than he could count back home, he’d usually just join me in his shorts, and even though I knew he only did that to make me feel better, which should have made me feel worse, I appreciated the gesture.
My shirt now was too short for me. It barely reached the top of my high-waisted, too tight jean shorts, but I didn’t care. I figured my underwear covered at least as much as most bikini bottoms, and I had a nice flat tummy that seemed to draw Dante’s eye whenever the least bit of skin was exposed.
We couldn’t be near each other these days without him fixating on me. And if I showed a bit of skin, well, that was even more gratifying.
I absolutely ate it up. I couldn’t get enough of his attention.
“We doing this?” he asked me with a smile.
In answer, I unsnapped my bra through my shirt, wiggled out of it, then shimmied my shorts off. Wearing nothing but a thin white, almost half shirt and lavender panties, I made a dash for the water, leaving Dante behind.
I didn’t look back at him until I was fully submerged to find him still staring at me.
I smiled. He was slack-jawed and hadn’t so much as shrugged off his shirt. “You coming in or what, slow-poke?”
That seemed to shake him out of it, and I had my own moment of slack-jawed staring to do as he peeled off his shirt and then took off his jeans.
He joined me in nothing but his boxers. He was about three steps into the water when I rose out of it, watching his eyes on my body, the way he swallowed, how his breathing changed to ragged.
And my eyes moved down his body to stare in fascination at what his boxers couldn’t hide.
What I saw made me realize two things at once—how badly he wanted me, and how quickly this was going to get out of hand, both of which galvanized me into action.
With a cocky grin, I strode by him to the shore, past it to the wall of rock and started climbing. It was a short climb and easier than it looked. The wall of rock was dotted with almost perfectly placed handholds and inside each one a nice thick patch of spongy moss had grown big and strong enough to grab and hold. I scaled the wall and made it up onto the rock in less than a minute, just like old times, as though it hadn’t been years since we’d done this.
I waved to him from above. He hadn’t moved, and I’d caught him again very obviously staring at me.
I glanced down at myself. With my thin, white shirt wet, I may as well have been topless. Actually, somehow it felt even more indecent than that. Almost without thinking, I tried to cover myself with both hands but as I did, I realized that grabbing handfuls of myself was even worse.
I looked at him again. He was still frozen in place, staring intently. He looked like he wanted to devour me whole.
With a trembling breath, I let go of my breasts, letting them bounce free, straining against the thin, wet material of my shirt. With a smile I took a running jump off the rock.
He was on me
the second I surfaced, hands on my hips. He yanked me to him and started kissing me, his hands slipping around to my ass, pushing my sex flush to his.
I clung to him, kissing him back. I felt drugged, past all good judgement, in a state, and the look in his eyes had put me there.
He dragged me to the shore, out of the water, and onto the ground. He got on top of me, shoving his hips between my thighs.
He was a wild man, shoving my shirt up, grabbing handfuls of me, rough noises escaping from his throat.
My hand went for him, delving into his boxers to cup him.
One of his hands snaked down and started dragging off my panties.
We knew each other’s bodies well by now, but it never seemed to be enough.
He wrenched his mouth away from me and moved down my body. When he came back up, I was naked from my shoulders down and his boxers were gone.
“Let me put it in inside you,” he groaned into my mouth when he was on top of me again. “Just for a second. I won’t come. I just want to feel you.”
I couldn’t say no. In spite of my better sense, if I even had such a thing, I couldn’t say no to the desperate plea in his voice.
“Okay,” I said tremulously.
“Are you sure? You can say no. You should say no if you’re not ready.”
“Just for a second, right?”
“Yes. I don’t . . . have condoms or anything. I won’t come inside you, I swear.”
I nodded, craning my neck to look down and watch what he was doing.
He used his hand to guide himself to my entrance, angling his tip to snag in just right.
I was wet, and he’d already taken care of my hymen, but it was still uncomfortable. He was too big and I was too tight.
It took him a long time to stuff his thick length in. If it was uncomfortable for me, it seemed to be excruciating for him going by the noises he was making.
He shoved in until his hips were flush against me, buried to the root. He held still there for a time, panting on top of me.
My body started to adjust. It was still uncomfortable, but that discomfort was starting to be overshadowed by the ache inside of me. The ache was growing fiercely, and my body had come to expect relief from it. I started shifting under him, getting a feel for the overwhelming fullness of it, trying to find the angles that made my stubborn tightness loosen enough to bring me pleasure.
As soon as I moved, he lost his mind.
He cursed, jerked out halfway, shoved all the way back in hard enough to jar a cry out of me, pulled back, pumped in again, once, twice, before he yanked completely free.
He was apologizing over and over as he rolled off me and onto his back.
I followed him, hand going to his hard, twitching length, stroking him, rubbing out every last drop of his release.
We’d had a lot of practice by now. This had pretty much become the thing that consumed all of our free time in the last few months, and I knew just how to touch him, just what he liked.
He pulled my hand away slowly, eyes closed, still panting, but within thirty seconds he had me on my back, his hand between my thighs.
He set his mouth on my skin and started kissing his way down my body.
I couldn’t stop panting as he got lower, and lower. Fitting his shoulders between my thighs, he put his mouth on me for the first time.
He was unskilled, but he’d always been a patient learner. With some instruction, a shift here, a tongue there, he kept at it until he made me come against his lips in the most powerful orgasm of my life thus far.
“That’s my favorite thing so far,” I told him when I had the breath to speak again.
Grinning the most self-satisfied smile I’d ever seen him wear, he climbed up my body and started kissing me.
My hand went to his member. He was hard again, and I started stroking him.
This time, though, he didn’t let me jack him off.
He rolled onto his back.
I sat up, leaning over him, hand still on him, still squeezing and stroking.
His palm came up and cupped the back of my head, nudging me with a light touch down his body.
Knowing what he wanted, I’d wanted to do it for a while, I was just always afraid to give him too much, I moved down.
When I was hovering over his arousal, I licked my lips and shot a look at his face.
He was watching me with heavy-lidded fascination.
I licked my lips again, and the hand on my head gripped my hair and pushed me down.
I wasn’t good at it. What I lacked in skill I tried to make up for with enthusiasm, but as I bobbed my lips up and down on his length, I kept gagging myself.
Still, it was his first feel of my mouth so it didn’t take much. I’d barely gotten the hang of it, my hand helping my mouth, catching the rhythm of stroking and sucking, before he was shouting a warning, and then shooting down my throat. I didn’t know what else to do, so I swallowed.
He was still coming in slow pumps when he pinned me on my back and started kissing me.
“I love you,” he told me, over and over.
I’d never get enough of hearing those words come out of his mouth. It still seemed so impossible, so unlikely, that a perfect boy like him could love a trashcan girl like me, but I believed him.
“I love you too,” I told him. There was nothing in the world I was more certain of. Not one thing. Not the sky or the moon, not the earth or the sun.
He was my constant. He held the vast majority of my faith in the palm of his hand.
With stuttering slowness I told him so.
His answer was to kiss me top to bottom and then go down on me again.
After he’d finished me that time, he climbed on top of me, laying naked and heavy there.
With a groan, I pushed him onto his back and he let me.
“I think I’m ready,” I told him, pressing my breasts to his chest, rubbing my nipples into his skin how he loved. “I want you inside me. I want you to finish inside of me.”
He groaned like I was torturing him. “Jesus. Now you tell me this, when we’re in the middle of nowhere?”
“I didn’t mean right this second. I just meant, in general, I think I’m ready.” I tried to sound more sure than I felt.
The way he looked at me then made my chest go tight with emotion. He cupped my cheek as he said tenderly, “Don’t rush for me. I can wait as long as you need.”
Sometimes it was like he could read my mind. Lots of times, in fact.
No one would ever know me like he did. Understand and indulge the darkness and the lightness in me. The good and the bad. The strong and the weak. Take all of the parts of me that were toxic and soothe them with the perfect antidote.
We had all of the ingredients of forever love.
And on the immediate heels of that was a debilitating and destructive insecurity. Did he feel the same? Was it even possible for him? Was I enough to make anyone feel the way he made me feel?
“Do you love me?” I asked him.
“What do you think?”
“I think that’s not an answer.”
“Because you know the answer. I’ve told you many times just today. Of course I do. I’m not sure how I’d get through even one day in this world without you in it. Why I’d even want to.”
I studied his face while he uttered every word and found that I believed him.
All I had to do now was make sure he never stopped feeling this way.
But we were never meant to last. If only my heart had had known that.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
“Love never dies a natural death.”
~Anaïs Nin
PRESENT
I was in the kitchen, rummaging around for coffee like an irritated bear looking for honey when a now dressed Bastian joined me.
He still looked pretty freaking edible. Leo was a crappy as hell father, but he sure made good-looking sons. The Durant men were all of a size, uncommonly tall with straight, broad s
houlders. Bastian was dark where Dante was golden, but they still shared a certain look, something sinister around the eyes, with pretty mouths and straight, sharp teeth. Starkly handsome but villainous.
It was my own personal kryptonite.
“Hey,” I greeted him, tone bordering on friendly, because he was maybe the only person in this entire house that I didn’t despise.
“Hey there,” he returned, tone and smile beyond friendly into outright warm.
My body was facing the coffeemaker, hips leaning against the counter as I waited for the coffee pot to fill.
I was serious about my coffee, especially the first cup of the day. I’d basically been watching the pot filling drop by drop, mug ready to pounce the second it finished.
Bastian was clearly a coffee enthusiast himself, joining me right there, actually exactly right there. He didn’t even find his own space, instead he invaded mine, pressing himself against my back as he reached above me for a coffee cup.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he murmured into my ear, “but it felt ruder not to mention it—you’ve got a world class rack. It’s going to be hard for me to forget about it.”
“Well, Bastian, while we’re not being rude I guess I’ll mention that you looked pretty outstanding without your clothes on.”
“You didn’t even get to see the best part.”
“Regrettable,” I remarked, because flirting with hot guys was in my DNA, even if they were blood related to the hate of my life.
“Well, it doesn’t have to be.”
I bit my lip to keep from smiling. “You trying to get Dante to kill you?”
“He can try. Besides, you guys aren’t actually back together, are you?”
“Hell no, but you’re thinking of it reasonably. Try to think of it from the mind of a Dante.”
“I see your point. Something’s always confused me though. With the way he so obviously feels about you, the way you feel about each other, why did you break up in the first place?”