Page 7 of Give In to Me
Her head tipped back. Her fingers dragged through his hair and she pulled, and the sensation shot down his spine and settled low and hot. He opened his mouth against her neck and her whole body arched into his, a response so involuntary it almost broke him. His teeth claimed the curve where her neck met her shoulder, and she whimpered, a sound so small and shattered that his hands tightened on her waist, pulling her hips flush against his. She must have felt what that did to him, because she went still for one second, her green eyes flying wide, and then her fingers tightened in his hair and pulled him back to her mouth.
He kissed her again. Deeper this time. Her mouth opened under his, soft and uncertain and learning him, and the shy, tentative way she answered sent a bolt through his entire body. His hand slid from her waist up her side, over her ribs, and she softened under his palm and leaned into him, and her body was warm and small and fitted against his like it had been designed to wreck him, and she breathed his name against his mouth,Julian, half air, half ache, and he felt it in his teeth.
He was gone. He knew he was gone. He could feel the last of his restraint burning to ash and he didn’t care; he wanted to burn, he wanted her hands in his hair and her pulse under his mouth and the sound she made when he kissed her throat, he wanted all of it, he wantedher, and wanting was the thing that destroyed people, wanting was the thing his father had made disposable, wanting was the knife you handed someone and hoped they wouldn’t use.
He tore himself away.
The violence of the separation was physical. His body screamed at him. Every nerve ending he possessed was reaching for her,and he stood two feet away with his hands clenched at his sides and his pulse roaring and took in the girl against the wall. Her red hair tangled, her lips swollen, her green eyes huge and stunned and still reaching for him, her fingers curled in the air where his shirt had been.
“Julian?” Her voice was barely there, scraped thin.
He couldn’t face her. If he faced her, he was going to put his mouth back on her throat and not stop. He fixed his attention on the stone wall past her shoulder and waited for his pulse to come down.
“That was a mistake,” he bit out. “I let it happen because I wasn’t paying attention. It won’t happen again.”
Silence. The jacaranda blossoms drifting between them.
“You weren’t paying attention,” she repeated softly. “You kissed me like that because youweren’t paying attention?”
He forced himself to meet her eyes. Forced his face to do the thing it did in boardrooms and negotiations and every other arena where the objective was to win and the cost was someone else’s feelings.
“You’re a nineteen-year-old server at my club.” Every word, a knife designed to make her bleed. “Don’t read into things.”
The color drained from her face. Her swollen mouth went tight. Her green eyes went bright and wet and then she blinked the brightness back through sheer, savage will.
She didn’t crumble. She didn’t cry. She stood against that wall with jacaranda blossoms in her tangled hair, and she regarded him with the quiet, unbearable dignity of a girl who had learned,from a father who never called, that love was something people took back, and she said:
“I don’t believe you.”
Then she straightened her polo. Smoothed her hair. Picked up a petal that had fallen onto her shoulder and let it drop to the ground. And walked past him, back toward the terrace, without another word.
He stood in the garden with the taste of her still in his mouth and the ghost of her pulse still beating against his lips and a hatred for himself so total it left no room for air.
DIONNE CALLED THATevening.
He was standing at the window of his penthouse with a glass of whiskey he couldn’t taste and the phantom sensation of Katy’s hair between his fingers.
“I need to talk to you about something.” Dionne was obviously choosing her words with care. “It’s about Katy.”
He said nothing.
“She’s been talking to people at the club. The staff, some of the junior members. About you.” A pause. Perfectly timed. “She’s telling people you two have a connection. That you’ve been paying her special attention. One of the servers told me she said you’re ‘wrapped around her finger.’”
His grip on the glass tightened until the crystal bit into his palm.
“Julian, I know how that sounds. I know you’ve been kind to her. But Katy...” Another pause. The reluctance of a woman forcedinto an unpleasant truth. “She grew up differently. She doesn’t always understand boundaries, or how things look. Her mother was the same way with our father. She saw what she wanted and she went for it, regardless of what it cost anyone else. And I worry that Katy’s inherited that instinct, and she’s building a story around you that isn’t real, and it’s going to be embarrassing for her and uncomfortable for you.”
Wrapped around her finger.
He thought about the garden. His mouth on her throat. Her fingers in his hair, pulling. The sound she’d made when his teeth claimed the curve of her neck, that small ruined whimper that had almost ended him. How she’d felt against him, warm and alive, fitting against his body like she’d been designed to destroy him.
He thought about El Diablo. A man who’d had the power to find his stolen son and had chosen not to.
What if wanting her this much is just handing her the knife?
“Thanks for telling me,” he said curtly.
“Anytime.” Warm. Relieved. The good sister. “I just want to protect you both.”
