Page 166 of Sweet Ruin

Immediately, her eyes start to fill with hurt tears.

Fuck, this isn’t going how I wanted. She’s not understanding.

“Stop.” I catch her jaw. “You did nothing wrong. Not one thing. Look at me.” Her eyes come up, wet and shining. “You think I stopped because I don’t want you. I stopped because I do.”

“That makes no sense.”

I press my forehead against hers and hold it there.

“When I have you, Lilah, you will know it has nothing to do with what you owe me.”

She opens her mouth to answer.

I step back before she can, and take the envelope out of the inside pocket of my coat.

“Now, come with me,” I tell her. “I got you another gift.”

30

DELILAH

I follow Kane out of the dark passage looking like I have been thoroughly mugged by a mouth.

Which, obviously, I have.

And I liked it.

My lips are swollen. My hair is disastrous. The back of my dress is bunched up into my underwear, and it takes several firm tugs before the fabric hangs down where it’s supposed to.

Kane, meanwhile, walks ahead of me looking crisp, composed, and criminally pleased with himself.

How annoyingly on-brand.

He opens a door off the front hall and waits for me to enter. I follow uncertainly, not sure whether to expect a room full of alligators, or a candle-lit torture chamber.

Okay, that’s excessive. It’s probably just gonna be something boring. A study, perhaps. Maybe a library.

Rich men love rooms lined with books they have never once cracked open. It tends to photograph well when they’re starring in Forbes magazine spreads about how wealthy and powerful they are.

This, however, is an office.

A pretty simple one at that. That’s not to say that it isn’t nice. Everything in it—the computer monitors on the desk, the nineteenth-century map of Brooklyn framed on the wall, the alarming row of locked filing cabinets—has the subtle gleam of stuff that was probably very expensive.

But it’s not garish. Nobody had Forbes in mind when they were decorating in here.

The problem is that I cannot appreciate the tasteful restraint of Kane’s office while my body is still vibrating like I’m a gong that someone just hit with a battering ram.

My mouth tingles. Every step sends a warm little aftershock through me. My thighs keep clenching together, which is making matters worse, not better.

I clasp my hands behind my back, mostly so I won’t fan myself like a maiden in a BBC period drama. Not that maidens usually get groped against kitchen walls during Orthodox Christmas.

Maybe there’s a deleted scene somewhere. PBS does have standards, after all.

Kane glances over his shoulder.

I immediately look at the map so he can’t read my eyes. He stopped touching me out of respect, or so he claimed, which is somehow hotter than if he had kept going.

Horrible. Deeply unfair. A woman should not be expected to survive ethical restraint in a man with a butt like that.