“You’re right,” I reply. “They do.”
His eyes skip from one of mine back to the other, like he’s trying his best to understand but can’t.
“But you took that opportunity away from them,” I say, straightening my back.
“They have each other now …” he says, planting his hand on the table in front of me before he looks me dead in the eye, “in death.”
His thick muscles tense with every breath I take, a constant reminder of how little my resistance would matter. He could kill me, use me, play with me, do with me whatever he’d like … and there’d be no one to stop him. Not even me.
A cold shiver runs up and down my spine as tears form in my eyes. “You’re cruel.”
“So are you,” he replies, tilting his head.
How could he say that?
I gasp. “I didn’t try to kill anyone.”
His brow rises so wildly that I’m forced to swallow my own words.
Fuck.
“You deserve it,” I add, trying desperately to look elsewhere than into his eyes, but it’s so impossibly hard when he’s right in front of me.
“And they don’t?” he retorts.
“You … you …” Goddamn him, I can’t even get my own thoughts straight. Especially not when he’s looking at me like that. Like he’d rather eat me than the food he cooked himself.
“I what, Jas?” he says, inching closer and closer until I can feel his breath on my skin. “I’m a bastard? You’re mad at me?”
I nod, but he doesn’t back off. When my hand slides back across the table to try to find the knife, he grabs my wrist and pins it down.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” he adds, never breaking eye contact.
“No amount of food or water or time—”
“Will ever be enough,” he interjects, grasping my other hand when I search for the fork instead. Now I’m really fucking trapped. “I know that thirst for revenge. It eats you alive until nothing is left.”
I want to speak, shout out at the top of my lungs that he’s wrong, that I’m not like that at all, and that I have no need to be because Jill and Luca are alive.
But if I did, he’d go after them in a heartbeat. I can’t let that happen.
So I swallow it back down as he leans in closer and whispers into my ear, “So … You want to kill me?”
My lips part, but when his tongue slides across my skin, I can’t form a single syllable.
He traces a line from my ear all the way down my neck, where he plants a soft, delectable kiss that makes me shudder in place.
And I can’t even say a word as he presses another kiss to my skin, and another, and another, until my neck isn’t the only thing that’s all wet and warm.
His gravelly voice puts me on edge. “Or do you want me to fuck your brains out like I should’ve done all those years ago?”
Oh my … God.
No one has ever talked to me like that before, let alone suggested doing that to me.
But the idea of him pushing up against me, forcing me on the table, wrapping my legs around him as he thrusts inside, still makes my clit throb.
What the hell is wrong with me?