I kept silent, unsure how to answer him. He got to his feet and moved with a slow, silent tread to the end of the bed. He put the cigarette to his mouth, breathed in slowly, and rested a hand on the corner post. I could make out a sliver of skin between the buttons of his shirt.
“Do you know what happened with the Romano girl?” he said, his voice thick with something I didn’t recognize. It sounded almost like pain.
I did. Everyone did. But he wanted to tell me, to spill the words out to someone, so I kept quiet.
“Carlo Romano was so convinced I’d fucked his daughter…she was a lying whore and she’d gotten knocked up by one of his soldiers. He didn’t want to believe it was by just a common soldier and she lied and told him the baby was mine. That bastard kept me in a cell, naked, helpless. He tortured me, cut me, burned me. There was one night when he flayed bits of skin from my back.”
My stomach roiled. “I’m sorry, Lucien.”
He sighed like he’d heard it all before. “He wanted me to marry her and she was obsessed with me…I think she thought lying that I was the father was the best way to entrap me. I said I wouldn’t until I saw a paternity test and Romano was livid. He was cutting the skin off me, piece by piece, and he made his daughter watch. So she broke and admitted the baby wasn’t mine. And Carlo fucking Romano wanted things to just go back to the way they were, as if he hadn’t just spent three weeks torturing me, starving me, treating me worse than an animal.”
There was a note of despair in his voice. He raised his eyes to mine and they were like falling through cold water, sinking slowly into an abyss that threatened to suffocate me.
He pointed at me with the two fingers that held his cigarette. “And don’t think I don’t see the way Romano looks at you. Like he wants to bend you over and fuck you like you’re his paid whore.”
I gasped, heat surging through my body. “He wouldn’t dare.”
“He wouldn’t. But I will.”
The silence that followed his words was deafening. My body was on fire, my mind inundated with images of Lucien taking me from behind, his broad, slender body driving into me without mercy. My breasts were hot and sensitive, rubbing against the inside of my nightgown. There was a needy pulse between my legs and, as we sat there looking at one another through the dark, I felt something wet slip down my thigh.
“Swear to God, I can smell how wet you are,” he said. “But that’s probably just the whiskey talking.”
Never in the last seven months of knowing my fiancé had I imagined that he was capable of saying anything like this. It was a whole new side to him that held me totally enraptured, ready to do anything just to hear him speak to me like that again.
He put the cigarette back to his perfect mouth and held the smoke in his lungs. “I saw you,” he said, the smoke drifting out as he spoke.
“You—you saw me?” I dug my fingers into the pillow. Was he talking about the night Romano had touched me in the garden?
“Do you masturbate, Olivia?”
My mouth dropped open as I stared at him, too shocked to speak. There was nothing on his face to suggest he was uncomfortable with such a direct question. His eyes bored into me, waiting for an answer.
I floundered. “No,” I lied.
“Really?” The corner of his mouth jerked up.
“I don’t,” I whispered, mortified.
He tapped his fingers against the post, leaning back to look up at the ceiling as he expelled another lungful of smoke. Drunk Lucien was far more expressive, far less guarded. Although those eyes were still made of solid, icy rock.
“The night you got here, I came looking for you early,” he said, his voice thick with something. Perhaps it was desire. “And I didn’t find you in your room, so I stepped inside and there you were. On the bathroom floor, touching yourself. You had stockings on…I watched you come all over your fingers. Goddamn, I don’t think I’ve been that hard before. Ever.”
Absolute mortification rose in me and I dug my fingers into the sheets and drew myself back against the headboard. I remembered that night, how confused and aroused I’d been from sitting beside him in the car. How I had slid down onto the floor and stroked my clit as I imagined him pushing his lean fingers into my pussy. How his hard eyes had swam into my mind as pleasure spiked through my body.
“How dare you,” I whispered.
“It’s my home,” he said. “I can say and do exactly as I please.”
He loomed over me, dark, disheveled, and drunk. There was no doubt in my mind that he would do just that and there was nothing I could do to stop him. I swallowed, my throat dry as his eyes bored into me with a flat stare. Did they ever light up or flicker with any kind of expression at all? Or would I lie beneath him on our wedding night and let him drive into me as he looked at me from behind a wall of icy cold?
“I want to see you do it again,” he said huskily. “Lie back and spread your legs.”
I shook my head quickly, pressing my thighs together. “No, I don’t think I should.”
“I’m your husband and you answer to me.”
“No, you’re not.”