Because you want her, and you know you can’t have her.
The snake coiled its tail under my sleeve as I locked the door and strode toward her. Holding it by the head, I dangled the squirming body in front of her face. “I see you’ve been thinking about me.”
She slowly closed the laptop, without a single twitch at the snake wriggling inches from her nose. “Did you know snakes have two penises?” She reached beside the chair, raised a tall wastebasket, and held it beneath the snake. “And some have spiny hooks on their dicks. You know, so they can anchor themselves inside to extend the duration of the fucking.”
Her tone was calm. Too calm. I wanted her to scream at me.
I dropped the snake in the basket, a creature I would never look at the same way again. “Two penises?”
“It allows the snake to go from one mate to another without a period of latency in between. Which makes me wonder.” She set the snake aside and leaned back, staring up at me. “How many people are you screwing to get want you want?”
I gripped the back of my neck, my stomach hardening with frustration and guilt. Tell her. Tell her everything.
Then what? At what lengths would she go to escape the threat Trent used against her and Collin? After what I did to her, she’d sell me out in a heartbeat, and who could fucking blame her?
I lifted the strap of the messenger bag over my head, dropped it on the floor, and looked her in the eyes. “You’re asking the wrong questions. You don’t even know what I want.”
Pulling her bare feet onto the cushion and bending her knees against the armrest, she turned her head and gazed through the wall of windows beside us.
The broad shoulders of Chicago’s skyline stretched over the horizon, its architecture and height spread out with room to breathe in the fiery sunrise. It was a hypnotic picture of elegance and strength, like the profile of the woman watching it.
Without moving her eyes, she said, “You want the same thing they all do. Money. Sex. Control. Life in the fast lane.”
That last one was incredibly accurate, jabbing at my childhood dream of racing professionally and legally. But she hadn’t meant it in the literal sense.
I crouched beside her chair, our faces a foot apart, and waited for her to give me her eyes. When she did, I filled mine with honesty. “You’re wrong about me.” Which contradicted the motivation I’d given Trent, but I didn’t want her categorizing me with the assholes who controlled her. “I’m not them.”
For a long moment, she studied my face. Roaming over my jaw and lips, flitting to my eyes, lingering on my right eyebrow, she blinked away, only to return to my brow again.
I stifled a smile, holding as still as possible. I seriously loved her quirky fascination with that part of me, loved that she noticed the natural arch so quickly. Other than my mother, she was the only person who’d ever looked close enough to detect it.
Something shifted in her gaze, latching on to whatever she saw in mine. “I believe you. Just like when you gave me your word in the hotel room.” Her lips formed a flat line. “Why are you here?”
Christ, her expression was a heart-wrenching mix of anger and hurt. If she was innocent, she deserved to know that I planned to kill her family. But if she shared that knowledge, it could get me killed. Her, too.
I shifted back in my crouched position, needing to clear my head of her intoxicating proximity and think through this.
She slouched against the chair back, interpreting my caution as refusal. “I got your resume from HR. Is that shit legit? MIT with honors? Physics, Engineering, and Business Management?”
“Yeah.”
She stared at me intensely. Despite the glow of dawn gilding her eyes in gold, her pupils dilated, a silent indicator of the complexity of her thoughts.
I needed to redirect the focus back on her. It made me nervous, her analyzing my motivations and searching for the truth. I leaned forward. “What did your husband say?”
She blinked, her eyebrows gathering.
I knelt in front of the chair and placed my forearms on the armrests, trapping her in. “Does he know about us?”
Her spine straightened, her arms wrapping around her bent knees and pulling them to her chest. “Of course he knows.”
Something was missing. Something she wasn’t telling me. “And?”
“And nothing. He knows I was set up.”
Why hadn’t the bastard hunted me down and smashed my face in? I gritted my teeth. “Does he know how much you loved it? Did you tell him how many orgasms I gave you?”
Her face hardened, and her eyes narrowed.
I was a bastard, but dammit, I needed to understand the nature of their relationship. “Did you tell him how I licked your insatiable pussy for hours?”