I try, “Tristian,” but the words get locked in my throat when he yanks my dress up, the muscle in the back of his jaw ticking.
“You make me feel helpless. I spend the better part of every day worrying about you, and I’m not like the others. They would have let you go before. But me?” There’s a spark of dread in his eyes that I’m alarmed to see. “I would have followed you. I would have been your next Ted, only I would have been worse. Do you know why?” He answers his own question as he slides my skirt over my hips, bunching it around my waist. “Because I know you want me back. I would have tracked you every fucking hour. It’s insanity. I don’t like it.”
When he fumbles for his belt, I do nothing but stand there, a deer caught in headlights, a bug trapped beneath a microscope. Because he makes me feel the same way.
This is insanity.
And I want it.
I want it even though I’m terrified of it. Of the way he’s watching me with those shuttered eyes. Of how much he looks like that man who forced me to my knees in the laundry room, years ago, and of how much he doesn’t look like him. I’m terrified of his dad being right about this being all I’m good for, and I’m terrified for him.
“You make me feel all of that,” he says, reaching into his pants. “But mostly?” He grabs my hips and pushes me onto the counter, unstoppable as he forces himself between my thighs. “Mostly you make me feel like I don’t care. About any of it. Being irritated and worried and so fucking crazy about the thought of you leaving…” He reaches between us, grabbing the crotch of my panties, and I flinch, eyes flying toward the door.
It’s wide open.
“People will see.” The words are rushed and panicked, and it doesn’t matter, because Killian’s words are still ringing in my ears.
“If you want something, then you fucking take it.”
I spread my thighs for him.
“Let them see,” is what he says, lining himself up and shoving his cock inside me.
My jaw drops on a gasp, fingers clawing at his shoulders, but I don’t speak. The words I need are locked tight in my chest, pinned under the weight of his heavy, intent stare as he fills me.
“If you think I can’t be yours,” the slow drag of his cock pulls a whine from the back of my throat, “then sweetheart, you haven’t been paying attention.” He braces one hand on the mirror behind us, and winds the other into the back of my hair as he fucks into me.
The punches of his hips are short, calculated, his eyes never leaving mine. It’s almost too much to hold his stare, because I see inside of it exactly what I’d realized before. What Tristian wants, above all else. It’s the thing that makes him mean. It’s what drives him. It’s the very thing Gen could never give him. It’s the reason the sight of her still bristles at his insides, and it’s probably not even because he loved her. It’s because he feels foolish for having believed her.
Tristian Mercer just wants someone who wants him.
Not for his money or his status, or his good looks or charming smile, or for his future or his past. He wants someone who’s seen him stripped bare of it all and still finds what’s left worthwhile.
I touch his jaw, my fingertips caressing the tense muscle there, and it’s true that I remember his softness and warmth and sweet touches. But likewise, I remember his hardness, coldness, and cruelty. Like Killian and Dimitri, he’s not just one thing. Nothing that felt so good could ever be that simple.
I stroke his cheek as he fucks me, forehead braced against my own, and the words tumble free in a flutter of sharp, shared breaths. “I think I might love you.”
He freezes there, just like that—pressed so close that I can feel the flex and surge of his muscles as he struggles to still them. So close that I can see his lips part and his eyes close. Close enough that it only takes the tiniest tilt of my head to fuse our lips together.
It’s all different then.
I wind my legs around his waist just as he invades my mouth, tongue plundering deep and forceful. He reaches down to grab my hips, hitching me closer to the edge of the counter, and then he digs his way inside. It’s so deep—I’m so full of him—that I don’t want to let him go. My calves burn with the strain of squeezing him closer, and even when he grunts into my mouth, slamming into me, over and over, I wonder if it could even be called ‘fucking’。
Maybe there are people walking down that hallway, but neither of us would hear them over the sound of our hard breaths. It’s frantic and uncoordinated, and it’s how I know that, whatever it is I’m feeling—love, devotion, want—Tristian feels it, too.