At the door, he pressed himself into her back, plastering her against it, seeking all her triggers. But she was finally angry enough to resist and desperate enough to leave.
“Tell your damn pet door to open sesame, Richard.”
Taking a last suckle of her earlobe, sending fireworks all over her nervous system, he sighed. The sound poured right into her brain as he mercifully ended their body meld. But instead of murmuring the door open, he leaned on outstretched arms, bars of virility on both sides of her body, and pressed his hands against it.
So it also had palm-print sensors.
The moment the door opened, she spilled outside as if from a flooding tunnel.
Once she reached the elevator, he called out, “I’ve laid all my cards on the table. It’s your turn.”
Looking over her shoulder, she found him standing on his threshold, long legs planted apart, hands in pockets, the embodiment of magnificence and temptation. And knowing it.
She cursed under her breath. “Yeah, my turn. To tell you what I want. I want you to take your cards and go to a hell even you can’t imagine, where crazy monsters like you belong.”
He threw his head back and laughed.
She’d never heard him laugh before.
Rushing into the elevator to escape the enervating sound, she was still followed by his amusement-soaked question.
“Want me to pick you up from work, or will you finish your vital errand and come back on your own?”
She almost stomped her foot in frustration. The elevator buttons made as much sense as hieroglyphics in her condition.
She smacked every button. “I’ll willingly go to hell first.”
His dark chuckle drenched her again. “The hell for irresistible sirens is the same one for crazy monsters?”
She glowered at him in fuming silence as the elevator doors finally swished smoothly closed.
The moment she could no longer see him, she slumped against the brushed-steel wall...then shot up straight again.
The damn snake must have cameras in here. She’d dissolved all over him all night, and even just now, she wasn’t about to let him see he still messed her up, albeit remotely. She had to hold it together until she was out of his range.
By the time she was in her car, one realization had emerged from the chaos.
She’d never be out of his range. There was no place on earth he couldn’t follow her to if he felt like it. And he’d made it clear that he had nothing else on his mind right now.
There was only one way out of this. To change it for him somehow, before he took one step further into her life. And destroyed everything. Irrevocably this time.
How she would do that, she had absolutely no idea.
* * *
Richard closed the door, stood staring at it as if he could still see Isabella through it.
He could monitor her for real until she exited the building. But he preferred imagining her in his mind’s eye. As she stood there in the elevator, letting go of the act of defiance. As she walked to his private parking area where her car was, every step impeded by the soreness he’d caused her as he’d given her and taken from her unimaginable pleasure. As she drove home in an uproar, furious at him yet reliving their climactic night, her every inch throbbing, needing an encore.
Dropping his forehead against the door he’d sandwiched her against, he could almost feel her every thought and breath mingling with his, melding, tangling, wrestling. Just as her limbs had with his, as her core had yielded to him, and clasped him in a mindless inferno. His body buzzed with exquisite agony as his hardness turned to burning steel.
Pushing away from the door, he discarded his pants as he headed to the pool, his steps picking up speed until he launched himself into the air, arced down to slice into the cool water like a missile.
It was an hour before he’d expended sufficient incendiary energy and centered his thoughts enough to consider the exercise had served its purpose. Pulling himself out of the pool, he sat on its edge, staring through forty-foot-high windows at the sprawling green expanse of Central Park, seeing nothing but Isabella and everything that had happened between them.
So. For the first time in...ever, nothing had gone according to his plan. And he couldn’t be more thrilled about it.
Though he’d known she’d been his only kryptonite, he’d believed she wouldn’t retain any power over him. Even after he’d realized he still coveted her, he hadn’t thought there’d been the slightest danger she’d breach his impenetrable armor.