Chapter Twenty-One

TEN MINUTES INTO the walk, my nerves got the better of me.

Squeezing Penn’s fingers, I asked, “Where are you taking me?”

“My place.”

“Why?”

He chuckled, his face shrouded in darkness. “Why do you think?”

My tummy clenched as his voice lost its decorum and slipped into sin.

“To fuck you, of course.” His teeth flashed as he added, “I’ve waited for as long as I can. You haven’t told your father I was lying about our engagement, and you haven’t run back to your bodyguard. Therefore, I know you’re up for whatever I have planned, and you will not argue.” His jaw lowered. “Will you, Bell Button?”

My mouth watered with how wrong but how right that sounded. Fantasies of what could happen tonight unraveled with lightning desire—

Wait.

He called me Bell Button.

Anger took precedent. “That isn’t your nickname to use.”

“No?” He raised an eyebrow. “Yet you let—what was her name? Chloe—call you Ding Dong Bell. Do you prefer that?”

My teeth locked together. “I prefer neither. Elle is perfectly acceptable. So use it.”

He laughed in a soft sigh. “So defensive.”

“Not defensive. Protective.”

His head shot up, his eyes sinking into me like barbs. “You feel the need to protect yourself around me?”

“Constantly.”

His shadow swallowed me. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“You know what. Answer the question and stop dancing around it.” The way he pushed for an answer hinted he had ulterior motives to know why I barricaded myself from him. Why I would never let myself feel more for him than just physical desire.

We’d known each other a week or so. I was woman enough to admit I found him immensely attractive. I was girl enough to admit I liked the idea of instant true love. But I was realistic enough to know that would never happen for a business owner like me.

Besides, he was ruthless in his own success. Webbed in lies and hidden in half-truths, he was not a man to trust with anything breakable—especially my heart.

My body would bruise.

But it would heal.

It didn’t stop the fact that Penn wanted something from me.

If it was just sex, then our motives were in line.

But the more I spent in his company, the more I sensed that wasn’t his end game.

I narrowed my eyes, trying to see past his arrogant shields and read what he truly meant. But all he revealed was a man supreme in his ability and self-worth. A man as proud and as pompous as a peacock.

Yet...he has a son.

How could someone so cold and emotionally unavailable have a child dependent on him? Where was Stewie’s mother? Who was Larry? What the hell would happen between us once we’d slept together?

The questions built on top of his in an unstable Jenga tower. One wrong answer and the entire foundation of our so-called relationship would crumble.

Tonight was not the night to let it fall.

Tomorrow it could.

Because by tomorrow, I would’ve got what I wanted, he would’ve got what he wanted, and things would go back to the way they were. Penn and his lies would fade from my life before he caused any more damage.

“You ask why, yet I could ask you the same question.” I pushed ahead, leaving the glow of a streetlight and stepping into a pool of night. “Why do you protect yourself from me?”

He slammed to a stop. “I don’t.”

“You do.”

His jaw worked, his hands opening and closing by his sides. “I’m guarded; there’s a difference.”

“Is there?” I cocked my head. “Funny, I would say protective and guarded were the same thing.”

He stormed toward me, grabbing me by the throat and marching me backward until I hit the façade of an apartment building. The brick was hard. He was harder. I was the soft middle that didn’t stand a chance. “If you ever try to psychoanalyze me again, you’ll be sorry.”

I swallowed, forcing fear past the cage of his hand around my neck. Even now, my body hummed beneath his grip. It seemed my cells had embraced the sensation of eroticism and found any grasp appropriate.

“Why would I be sorry?” My voice barely registered audible. “What would you do? Kill me?”

I meant it flippantly, casually. A phrase tossed around far too often and never meant. But instead of either ignoring the cliché dare or admitting he ran much darker than I thought, he smiled with all the sharpness of a butcher’s arsenal. “Perhaps.”

My heart leaped out of my body, racing to borrow a telephone to call the police. But my insides burned with a different flavor than before. If lust was a color, I’d been bathed in reds and pinks for days. Now I swam in blacks and deep, deep purples, wanting nothing more than to let go and forget who I was and become who I dared never be.

Straining against his fingers, I deliberately strangled myself in his hold. “What are you going to do to me if I accept I’ll never know you and admit I don’t want to? What will you do when I admit I’m using you like you’re using me? Fuck me?”

He never looked away; never reduced the pressure on my throat. “I told you that was my intention.”

He constantly had me at a disadvantage. I was sick of it. If I wanted to hold my ground, I had to start acting more myself and not a timid little girl. Gathering my courage, I murmured, “Stop threatening, and get it over with then.”