I bite down on my bottom lip, trying not to smile at such an awful statement. Part of me finds it kinda sexy, and I don’t understand why. “All right, so what do you do then?”
“Well, first, I have to kill the guy.”
My eyebrows rise. “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“That escalated quickly.”
He shrugs. “Has to be done. He knew she was married to me, so he should have known better. No sympathy for dumbasses.”
“All right, so first step, murder.”
He nods. “Then, once I’ve bludgeoned her lover to death, I figure she’s probably pretty mad at me.”
“Seems likely.”
“I don’t care, though. She made this bed, now we have to lie in it.”
“Sure.”
“If we’re going to move on, we’ll need a change of scenery. Life wherever we are clearly isn’t going the way it should, so I take her somewhere more remote.”
“With no new men for her to cheat with.”
He smirks. “Sure, but I’m not really worried about that. If she’s such a fucking nympho that I literally can’t let her go out in the world, I have concerns about my judgment.”
“Maybe you love a really beautiful idiot with no self-control. I’m sure she has other lovely qualities.”
“Maybe,” he allows. “In that case, I guess I have to build her a tower or something and keep her locked up away from the rest of the world.”
“Murder. Imprisonment. Your solutions to marital distress are illegal.”
“This is why I shouldn’t get married,” he tells me.
I crack a smile. “At least not to someone who’s going to cheat on you.”
“I’ll have this talk with her before the wedding so she knows it’s not something she should ever do.”
“Unless she wants her own princess tower, of course.”
“Then she should just tell me that, she doesn’t need to put us through all this bullshit to get it.”
“What an accommodating husband.”
“I try.”
“All right, so you built her a tower.”
“On an island,” he adds. “Make sure her little ass can’t go anywhere.”
“What if she’s a mermaid?”
His eyes sparkle with mischief. “Maybe she is. Are you my wife in this scenario?”
I know he’s only joking, but my heart sinks. “I… I would never cheat on you, so if I’m the wife, this has all been a big misunderstanding.”
“Yeah?” He rolls on his side to look at me, then pushes up to his knees and moves across the bed toward me. “You’d never cheat on me?”
My heart hammers. It feels like it’s lodged in my throat as he crawls closer, only stopping when he’s straddling me. I try to swallow past the lump, not breaking his gaze as I shake my head to confirm.
“Why?” he asks.
Arousal stirs between my thighs feeling his weight on top of me like this. My words feel thick as they spill out of my mouth. “Because… because that would hurt you, and I wouldn’t do that.”
He smiles, reaching his hand toward me and stroking my cheek. “You wouldn’t hurt me?”
My heart contracts. He’s making me feel profoundly vulnerable with his words and his actions. “Not on purpose.”
“Because you care about me?”
Needing out of this situation before he does something I don’t want him to, I try to drag us back to the playful scenario we were talking about before. “I mean, if I’m your wife, of course I care about you.”
He remains on top of me, but allows me to steer us back into safer waters. “Maybe you don’t,” he suggests, his lips curving up. “Maybe you married me for my money or my connections and it was never about love.”
I shake my head, not smiling. “That’s not something I would do.”
“No?” His hand leaves my face, but it doesn’t go far. He drags his fingertips across my collar bone just like he talked about last night on the phone. “Maybe I made you marry me.”
My heart stalls and I feel short of breath. “Why would you do something like that?”
He shrugs casually, but it feels misleading. “Maybe you wouldn’t stop saying no to me, made me obsessed with you.”
Somehow, my heart drops even lower, but arousal stirs between my thighs. “I don’t think that’s how that works.”
His fingers glide lower, tracing the curve of my neckline. “I don’t know. I find myself thinking about you an awful lot.”
I swallow as he hooks a finger in the thin material of my shirt, caressing my skin just underneath. “You do?”
He nods. “Ever since the night I saved you.”
I can’t think of anything to say. I’m too focused on how much I want him to keep touching me like this. And how much he shouldn’t.
“So, maybe enough got to be enough.”
Logically, I know what he’s saying is really bad, but it feels so good as his finger dips lower, tracing the curve of my breast. Tingles start between my thighs.
“Maybe I decided to claim you, whether you wanted me to or not.” His finger moves over and under the gentle curve. “Keep you forever. My pretty little plaything.” His fingertip grazes my nipple. I gasp, shifting my body in an attempt to move him since he’s taking it too far.