“Who am I then?” He leaned over me and set his hands against the massage table, on either side of my hips.
“A man who looks like he’s just done something crazy. A man whose job winds him up and shoots adrenaline through him when all I know of him is a man who can soothe a wild-eyed horse.”
“Well, you grew up down the street from my mom’s farm. So that’s the man you know me as.”
“Is there someone else I should know you as, though? Because you have blood on your shoe, Dante.”
I didn’t tell him about the man at work, didn’t tell him someone had accused him of murder. I wanted the easy excuse. I wanted him to give me an irrefutable explanation and for that to be the end of it.
My mind wanted to ignore it while my body was occupied with him right in front of me. The spiral around that dark, dark drain was starting to swirl, and I was going to cling to anything outside of it, even if it meant avoiding the real problems between us.
“I’m going to keep you safe, Lilah. You and your family and my family. That’s it. Everyone else and what they think of me doesn’t matter. Tonight, I protected my family, and the blood on my shoe is proof of that. Now, I’m here protecting you from another man’s hands.”
The knots in my stomach unraveled. I found the excuse and ignored that valedictorian brain of mine. “That’s what has you all wound up? The hotel staff seems to know you make the rules.”
“Well, they will very soon,” he growled as he glared at the door like they might appear.
“What? You intend to have them hear me moan your name?”
“Is that what you want, Lilah?” he asked. His gaze flew back to mine, and he moved his hand to hover over the sheet on my stomach. We both watched it, and I swear I felt the heat of it spreading through my body, up to my breasts that tingled and down to my core that clenched with need immediately. I licked my lips as his hand moved up and then down, parallel to my body but never touching it.
I may have been struggling internally with what our future held, but the present always led to my body overpowering my thoughts.
He curled his fingers into a tight fist, and my body tensed with it, my soul somehow connected to his movements, wanting only what he showed—tension, heat, or both, I wasn’t sure.
He growled before he said, “You’re fighting me and building up walls I want to tear down.”
“You’ve never used force to get to me before, Dante,” I murmured, mesmerized by how we connected, how my body felt his energy, how he must have felt mine too.
His fingers danced over my collarbone before settling on my neck. “Some force, torture, or punishment could be classified as something else.” He breathed in deep and glanced at the smoke curling up from the candle that was still lit on the table across from us. “Remember your safe word, Lilah.”
Why my cunt instantly got wet when he said those words, I wasn’t sure, but I nodded before he squeezed my windpipe, and then I gasped as his other hand went to the sheet to rip it from my breasts. It all happened at the same time his lips flew to mine and tore them apart with ferocious lust.
A moan escaped from deep down inside me as his hands worked my breasts, kneading and squeezing them to the rhythm of his tongue.
“That’s the sound I want everyone to hear,” he said, his voice a whisper on my lips as he rubbed his nose back and forth over mine. “I’ve perfected the job I do, Delilah. You know that right? Do you think I do it just because it’s the job I was given in the military, because it’s my family name?”
His hand left my breasts to skim down to my center folds, and he didn’t waste time testing if I was ready for him. I stuttered out a response, not even sure I could string together a sentence with his fingers so close to the bundle of nerves I knew he could work into oblivion. “I guess that’s what I thought. Of course. I mean, most people do that. I fell into nursing. It’s fine—”
“Don’t downplay that job. You love nursing.”
“Of course, but I heal people.”
He rolled his thumb over my clit, and I hissed. “And I do what, Lilah?”
Biting my lip, I didn’t answer. His question was meant to goad me, to push me to say what we hadn’t discussed properly.
He tsked when I didn’t answer, and suddenly his hands were gone from my neck and pussy. He turned around while I fumbled with my protest.
“What are you doing? Are we not …？ I mean, should I—”
Right when I started to sit up and saw him fiddling with his phone, he commanded, “Stay where you are.”