His brow arched. “No?”
His grip weakened with his surprise, and I easily pushed out of his hold and stood up from the bed. I rewrapped the towel around me, gathering myself literally as well as figuratively, and then pivoted to face him. “I have to be the one who tells her.”
This wasn’t how things worked between us. He was the one who decided how things would be; I was the one who followed orders. I didn’t get to make demands.
This, however, was nonnegotiable.
I shifted my weight from one hip to the other, waiting for his response.
Reeve rolled to his side and eyed me carefully. “As long as you actually tell her,” he said sternly.
“I will,” I assured him. Then I frowned. “What do I tell her exactly?”
He cocked his head at me. “You know. You tell me.”
It was a challenge, a test, and for half a second I was afraid that I’d fail because I didn’t know what the correct answer was.
And then I did. “That I’m yours.”
His features barely changed and yet his entire face lit up. “You’re mine,” he confirmed, pride thick in his tone.
I bathed in that pride. Let his words lick at my skin like the rough washing of a cat’s tongue. I felt like I’d been remade. Claimed. Newly wedded. Though my declaration and his acknowledgment were far from marriage vows, it was the strongest vow I’d ever made.
Well. Besides the one I’d made to Amber.
But this moment wasn’t about her – it was about me and Reeve and this bond between us that she had no part of.
If there was any chance of letting her slip farther into my thoughts, it was gone a second later when Reeve yanked me to the bed and flipped me to my stomach.
“You’re mine,” he said again, this time with a growl as he jerked the towel away from my body. “And now I’m going to fuck you like I own you. On your knees. Ass up.”
I scrambled into position while he stripped out of his underwear. Then he was inside me – bruising me, breaking me. Tearing me into a hundred pieces that all belonged to him.
And while he fucked me and used me and made me beautiful, I stayed almost entirely focused on him. Almost. Because, unlike in the bathroom where the shower had masked our activity, here we were exposed with only that one wall between us and Amber’s room. I would tell her about Reeve and me, but this wasn’t how I wanted her to find out. So I swallowed my cries of pleasure and pain, and I buried my face in the mattress when I couldn’t keep it inside.
He noticed, of course. With his cock buried in my cunt, he pressed his chest against my back and whispered at my ear. “Remember I’m the one who’s letting you be quiet. If I wanted you to be screaming right now, you would be, no matter what you wanted anyone else to hear.”
Was it wrong that this was his way of making love?
Was it wrong that it was mine too?
Later, like new lovers who can’t get enough of each other’s touch, we fell asleep coiled, our legs and torsos intertwined, unwilling to be parted even while we dreamed.
CHAPTER 10
The last time I’d shared a man with Amber I’d been twenty-one.
The last time I’d shared one willingly, anyway. Bridge had been after that, but I didn’t count him for obvious reasons.
Bryan Crane had been nothing like Bridge. Amber had met him while we’d lived in Mexico. He’d been a guest at the resort we’d stayed at, but, though she’d been at his side the entire two weeks he’d been in the country, I’d been too wrapped up in my own affair to have a chance to meet him myself. When his vacation ended, Bryan had invited her to visit him anytime so, naturally, when we decided to head back to the States, he was the first person Amber thought of to take us in.
“He’s so nice,” she’d told me with a dreamy look in her eyes, “and really rich. But mostly just really a nice guy.” After rescuing me from an abusive lover who had very nearly killed me, Amber had likely thought a nice guy was just what I’d needed.
She hadn’t understood me back then. Eventually, she began to, but that came later, and, even then, she’d never understood all of me.
“I can’t wait to meet him,” I’d told her. And maybe I’d meant it. As horrible as my relationship with Aaron had been, he’d taught me some very important lessons about myself – that I had no limits. That I didn’t know how to say stop. That I was incapable of deciding what was best for me in sexual situations.
A nice guy probably was just what I’d needed.
“Anyway, I know you’re just going to love him,” Amber had said for the fiftieth time as we’d boarded the private plane he’d sent to collect us. She’d been determined to sell me on him, not because I’d been reluctant to go, but because she’d thought it would be good for my morale to have something to look forward to. “Plus he can lick pussy better than any guy I’ve ever met.”
“You’re just as beautiful in person as Amber said,” he’d told me when I met him in the foyer of his Atherton estate. I’d looked like I’d just been beat up by someone, because I had been, so I knew it was a lie, but he’d embraced me and kissed my cheek and made me believe for a fraction of a second that I actually was a beautiful person.
It had been immediately evident that Bryan was everything Amber had made him out to be – nice, rich, and incredibly good at oral sex. Every word that had come out of his mouth had been gracious and kind and, surprisingly, genuine. His house had been the biggest I’d ever seen, let alone lived in. And he could go down for hours.