‘You don’t mean it,’ he answers, stumbling backwards against the bedroom door, his fingers like manacles clamping around my wrists. I fall after him, landing on his chest, half in and half out of my bedroom, my body pressed to his. ‘You wish you meant it.’ His gaze is full of something I don’t recognise. ‘But you don’t. You can’t.’
‘Don’t you tell me what I mean! You’re a lying, cheating bastard.’ I try to punctuate my words with my fists against his chest, but he holds my wrists too tightly. I don’t think I’ve ever hit anyone since I was in third grade. I guess I never felt like I needed to before now. I might not have my fists, but I do have my knee. As I raise it, he twists, and I find myself suddenly pinned under him—pinned like a butterfly on a piece of felt. He holds my wrists on either side of my head, pressing his right thigh at the very apex of my legs.
‘Ma Rose. You fight dirty.’ His expression is provocative and sardonic and infuriating, and I hate every atom of him, yet as he brings his thigh higher, my traitorous clit reacts with a solid pulse. ‘I prefer you didn’t.’
I tell myself it’s my body answering his, that the reaction not at all brain-based. Nothing at all to do with jealousy or the sick sense that I still want him.
I lift my head from the floor to get in his face using the pause to untangle my suddenly thick tongue. ‘And I’d prefer not to have been the silent partner in a love triangle.’
His laughter sounds unkind, but what do I expect from a man who would string two women along? ‘There is no love triangle. There is just you and me. I have not been unfaithful, Rose.’
‘Please don’t insult me by saying you have an understanding fiancée.’
‘We’re engaged only on paper.’
‘So Ben said.’ And though I’m not sure I one hundred percent believe either of them, it hurts a little less to think so.
‘Ben?’ Shock hits his expression. First, fury then flashing across his face. ‘What were you doing with him?’ I’m tempted to make him suffer. Not just because he’s the off the chart’s kind of sexy when he’s angry, his accent thickening, his green eyes glittering, and not because of the way he presses my wrists to the floor, the solid weight of him pressed against me, his body over mine casting me into shadow.
‘That’s really none of your business. But before you start throwing your big dick around, he did what you should’ve done already. He explained.’
‘I find that hard to believe. If he touched you—’
‘We might be even,’ I retort.
‘Don’t,’ he growls. ‘Don’t even joke about that.’
‘You don’t get to tell me what to do.’
‘No?’ His thigh presses harder, my body working against him of its own accord, and I bite back a whimper. ‘Maybe you should tell me what you’d like me to do.’
‘I’d like you to get off.’
‘Get you off?’ His smile is beautiful and cruel, and though it makes no sense, I want to lick the salt from the hollow of his neck, press my teeth into the cording standing taut at the sides, and bite until he bucks into me with a cry. ‘Relationships come in many forms, Rose, but that one was purely business. I swear to you on my mother’s life, we have never been emotionally involved. I haven’t been intimate with anyone but you since March.’
My mouth snaps shut as I process the implication before my brain processes another wave of hurt. ‘But you have fucked her.’ The woman who looked like a supermodel. How can I compete with her?
‘Yes, but it was a long time ago.’
‘I don’t know why I asked because it doesn’t matter.’ It shouldn’t matter.
‘You ask because you care. You ask because you’re hurting—’
‘Because you hurt me. You took me for a fool. You lied to me, and I hate you for it.’ My chest heaves as I pant, my nipples still pebbled by the brush of him.
‘If I could take it all back, make it better, I would. But what you saw was smoke and mirrors, not the truth. You have to give me a chance to explain.’
‘I don’t have to do jack shit,’ I grate out, angry with him, angry with myself, and angry with my faithless body. I know it would take nothing to raise my face to his, to kiss him, to have him kiss me. To slide my legs around him as we tousle and tangle, thrashing out the confusion and hurt. But what would that make me?
Weak. Wrong. Faithless. Heartless. No better than him.
‘Get off me.’ I try to wriggle away, to twist from under him because my arousal has been burned away by my anger.