His scent all over me, his lips raining kisses on my mouth, my throat, my neck, he rocked deep inside me, spreading his seed. “That”—his voice washed over me like a drug—“was making love.”
I didn’t have words. I had nothing. I untangled my arms from his neck.
He pulled out.
An emptiness, so profound it hurt, settled in my chest. I turned my head.
His arms slipped around me, and he whispered, “I’m not letting you go.” He pulled my back to his chest and snaked an arm under my head. “Sleep.”
Sleep? Sleep wouldn’t fix this. I’d lost. Everything.
“Stop,” he quietly commanded.
“I’m not doing anything.” It hurt to speak.
“You’re fighting against this.”
It hurt to breathe. “I have no fight left.” I had nothing. Except yearning.
Thick fingers stroked through his seed as it leaked out of me. “You don’t need it with me.”
It hurt to feel his gentle caress. “Don’t.”
He drew his fingers through the mess on my thighs then pressed his release back inside me. “Don’t what?”
He was crushing my heart. “Give me false hope.”
“Don’t doubt me.” He sunk two fingers inside me and stroked. “Are you sore?”
“A little.” Incredibly, amazingly sore, but I didn’t care. I wanted every orgasm he was willing to give me. He didn’t torture my body to coax out my pleasure. He stroked and caressed and hit every spot as if he simply wanted to make me feel good.
“Do you want to come again?”
My pussy contracted around his fingers. Viktor had never wanted to give me pleasure. I knew that now. He wanted control.
Dane nipped the flesh on my neck just under my ear. “It’s a simple question, love.”
My body tensed at the term of endearment.
His fingers in my pussy and his thumb on my clit stilled. “Is it the word or the idea?”
I didn’t pretend to not know what he was talking about. I was quickly learning he had a sixth sense. “You don’t know me.” It was the simplest way I knew how to answer without giving myself away. Viktor had never said that word to me. Not once. I didn’t believe in love. I couldn’t. Love was a luxury for little girls and fairy tales, not ruthless killers and abusive gun traffickers.
His lips touched my temple. “How many men have you been with?”
I weighed the embarrassment and vulnerability against the risk of not telling the truth. In the end, I was a fool for wanting more with this man. “Three… including you,” I whispered.
His fingers began to stroke in a slow pace. “Do you know why I want to make you come?” Every gentle thrust hit my G-spot as his thumb rubbed sweet circles around my clit.
My hips moved with his strokes. “No,” I breathed.
“Because every orgasm is a step further away from him and closer to me.” He pressed down hard with his thumb.
I cried out in desperate need.
“And you’re beautiful when you let go.” He stroked against my G-spot. “Come.”
I fell apart.
A thousand points of pressure erupted from my core and spread across my body like an electrical current. Tingling, shaking, pleasure-pain, I didn’t have words for the feeling of simultaneously soaring and plummeting.
One arm across my chest, the other slowly stroking through my aftershocks, he wrecked me further. “That’s what it feels like, beautiful.” He kissed my neck, my cheek. “That’s how a man should make you feel.”
I turned my head away as a tear slid down my face, but nothing escaped him.
Tender kisses fell on my head. “I’ll take those too, love.” He gently pulled his fingers out of me then cupped me with a soft caress. “Now sleep.”
I didn’t want to sleep. I didn’t want to waste a minute of the time I had with him. Despite what he said, tomorrow was coming and Viktor wasn’t going to let either of us walk away.
He brushed my hair from my face. “You’re safe. Close your eyes.”
He was everything Viktor wasn’t. “We should talk about tomorrow.”
“I’ll deal with it.”
“He’s going to do something.” And it would be bad. “You don’t know him. He won’t show up without backup.”
“I’m aware,” he replied calmly.
“You can’t go alone.” It would be suicide.
“I’m not.”
“Who’s going with you?” I didn’t expect him to tell me, but I asked anyway.
He changed the subject. “Tell me about his house.”
I stiffened. If that was his plan, he was screwed. “It’s a fortress. You won’t get close to him there.”
He stroked my arm. “What kind of security does he have?”
“Every kind you can think of.”
His fingers sifted through my hair. “Yet you walked away.”
Even the minimalist of touch from him felt incredible. “He was distracted by the storm. He and Peter were discussing a shipment and how they couldn’t afford the storm to delay it, and I called a cab.”
“How did the cab get in through the front gate?”
My cheeks heated. “I promised the front guard a favor.” I never intended to keep it, but he didn’t know that. “I said I needed to get supplies before the power went out.”
“There aren’t backup generators?”
“Of course there are.”
He was silent a beat. “It seems unlikely that you were able to bribe one guard and walk out.”
I exhaled. “It was a… rough morning.” They’d all seen what he did to me at breakfast. They’d all heard what happened after. Viktor had made sure of it. He’d told me to scream. After that, none of the guards would make eye contact. “No one wanted to deal with me.”
He rolled me to my back and looked down at me. His expression was tightly controlled, but his jaw ticked. “What did he do?”
I wanted to feel the soft skin of his full lips under my fingers and trace the hard edge of his jaw, but I didn’t touch him. “Nothing he hadn’t done before.”
His nostrils flared. “Tell me.”
I never told anyone what Viktor did to me. I didn’t have friends anymore. I barely even spoke with my mother, not that she would’ve believed me or wanted to hear it if I did tell her. She thought the sun set and rose with Viktor and she hung on his every word. So I’d been putting in my time with Viktor until my five years was up, then I’d planned on starting a new life. But that time had come and gone last week.
I pushed what had happened this morning down deep. “It’s not important. I’m fine.”
“You’re underweight, you have fading bruises on the inside of your thighs, one of your knees is skinned and the dark circles under your eyes say you sleep less than me.”
I touched his ribs by his knife wound then traced the outer edge of the burn mark on his shoulder that he’d said was a bullet graze. There were three other scars on his chest and two on his shoulder that looked like they were from bullet wounds. Two thin lines of scars on the other side of his ribs looked similar to the smattering of thin scars on his thigh. “You are not unscathed.”
“No one beat me.”
“Viktor didn’t beat me.” Not exactly.
“Tell me what he did,” he demanded.
I couldn’t explain it, but his dominance made me feel secure. I relented. “He dragged me out of bed.” By my hair. Naked. “And made me sit at his feet while he ate breakfast.” In front of his guards.
Dane inhaled sharply. “Clothed?”
Silence my only defense against my shame, I stared at him without answering. I didn’t have to.
Rage cracked his carefully controlled mask. “What did the guards do?” he bit out.
Leered at me and made crude gestures while Viktor wasn’t looking. “Nothing.”
Every muscle in his body tensed. “That’s when you called the cab and bribed the front gate guard?”
“No, that’s when I pulled my suitcase out of the hiding spot I’d found in one of the tunnels and took it to the west exit beyond the front gate and stashed it in the bushes. Then I went back, showered, dressed and called a cab. By the time I walked to the guardhouse, the cab was waiting and I told the gate guard I was going shopping. He said I wasn’t scheduled to go out. I told him he wasn’t scheduled to meet me after dinner in the pool house. He opened the gate and I got in the taxi.”
His chest rose and fell twice. “Tunnels?” he ground out.
Tension I didn’t know I was holding on to released when he didn’t question me about the pool house promise I’d made the gate guard. “They’re all over the property. Viktor told me he had them built to escape if the house ever caught fire, but I know they’re for an escape route if we get raided by the police. He even has one that leads out to the docks. He took me through them when I moved in but forbade me from ever entering them alone. He said they weren’t safe, but they’re reinforced concrete.” They were safer than anything in the house.
“Where does the one you used let out?”
“West of the front gate, there’s what looks like a sprinkler pump housing. Underneath it is a grate. The grate leads to the tunnel.”
“It’s not locked?”
“There’s a combination lock, but Viktor stupidly used his birthday for the combination.” It’d taken me all of two tries to get it open five years ago, after the first time he’d taught me a lesson. I stupidly didn’t leave. I sat on top of the fake sprinkler housing and smoked a pack of cigarettes then went back. When he’d smelled my hair the next day, the first lesson had seemed like child’s play.
Dane cupped my face. “This will be over tomorrow.”
“You can’t promise me that.” He had no idea who he was dealing with. “Even if you could, then what? I don’t have a life to walk into.”
“Is that what you want?”
I evaded any real answer. “Isn’t that what everyone wants?”
“You’re not everyone.” He pulled me back into his arms as if that settled it, as if everything about what was happening was normal.
“Neither are you,” I stupidly countered.
The breath of his tired exhale feathered across my shoulder. “No, I’m not.”
A thousand questions about him, about what he was going to do, about what would happen tomorrow tumbled through my mind. The worst of them being what would happen to me if Viktor got to Dane first. Guilt would destroy me, if Viktor didn’t. I knew this, but something had been in the back of my mind since I’d seen him standing naked in the kitchen.
“Ask your question.” The deep and quiet timbre of his voice interrupted my thoughts.
I could listen to his voice for the rest of my life and never get tired of it. “How did you know I wasn’t asleep?”
“Besides your breathing, I’m not sure you’re ready to hear the answer to that. Ask.”
I briefly wondered what I wouldn’t want to hear, but I had a more pressing question. “What is the tattoo on your back?”