“I don’t want you doing anything for him. He doesn’t deserve your time or energy.”
“Maybe, but there’s a lot to be said about a false sense of security.” I comb his hair back, tilting his face from my breasts to mine. “What do we have to lose?”
Stroking my hands down to his shoulders, I straddle his lap. When I reach his hands on my thighs, I hitch them up to my arse and sit into them.
“I know what you’re doing.” He squeezes my flesh hard enough that I gasp with the bite of his hold.
“We all have our angles, I’m working mine.” I grind down into his hands, my groin rubbing into his lightly.
With a groan he falls back onto the bed. Lying on his chest, I lick up the underside of his jaw until he tilts his chin up, just out of reach. “Know that if he so much as says the wrong thing, the only sauce on his pasta will be his fucking brain. Understand?”
“You need to work on your threat rotation,” I tell him, dragging myself over him so that I’m straddling his torso. Bearing down on my hands, I let the tips of my hair tickle his face. “The brain thing isn’t doing it for me anymore. Maybe try something with guts. Something less blood spatter and more bloodbath…gorier…”
“You’re a wrong one, you know that?” Holding me to him, he flips us so that he’s pinning me under him.
“Isn’t that why you love me?”
“No,” he says, licking my face like I licked him a second ago.
The feel of his h
ot, wet tongue followed by his stubble is fucking incredible. It makes my skin prickle with an electric hum that has the need for him screaming inside me as violently as the need to end all this chaos around us.
“No?” I rasp.
“No. I love you because you’re beautiful.” His words spill over my pulsing flesh while he meanders down the column of my neck with the tip of his nose. He pauses at my chest, inhaling before he nips at the tender flesh of my breasts. “I love trouble, and you’re it. In every. Possible. Way.”
“Fuck, that hurts,” I choke when he bites down.
“Good. Bear that in mind when you’re playing house with Daddy. Because if he harms you in any way, I’m going to hold you responsible. It’s you that will have to answer for it after he’s gone.”
Jesus, the dark, feral look in his eyes as he looks up at me from beneath his thick lashes…I could disintegrate if I don’t look away. When I try, Casper pinches my chin still so I have to hold his stare.
“You better know what you’re doing. The game you’ve planned in your head.”
“I do.” At least I think I do. I’m not exactly proficient at hostage manipulating or prisoner coaxing.
“Right-o.” Pushing off me, he jumps to his feet, hauling me to the edge of the bed by my legs as he says, “Let’s get to it, shall we?”
Chapter 40
CASPER
I imagine the last supper had a fuck less tension in the air than this fucking dinner. Fleur’s got a better poker face than I gave her credit for. You’d actually think she wants to save Charles with the way she keeps asking him to give me the answers I want.
“You’re the only person I have left. If they kill you…I’ll have no one.” Her lashes lower, leaving the faintest black tracks across the bottom of her eyes. “You don’t want to die, do you?”
Charles fists his hands on the tabletop. The kitchen bench is long enough that I can’t reach across and smack the twisted grin off his face. Because even though I’m certain that she’s talking out of her arse, there’s that niggle at the back of my mind that questions it with the glisten of her tears.
“You expect me to believe any of that?” he laughs. “You’re as good a liar as she was.”
“So are you,” she says, turning back to the counter where she’s got plates lined up.
Going about her business, she hums the tune to one of the lullabies she sings to Grace. Meanwhile, I stare Charles out, trying to measure how much of a cunt the man is. There has to be more that we don’t know about him and his dealings.
“Where’s the money?”
Charles looks between me and Fleur. His face is fucked. Lips cut to the point that they’re almost entirely scabbed over. One of his eyes is weeping so badly that he can’t keep it open.