The foyer was so silent, I could hear the echo of my heartbeat ricocheting off the ceilings. I slanted my chin up and cracked my eyes open, meeting his punishing gray ones. We stared at each other for a few seconds, my fingers laced together at the small of my back. He was right. Kneeling for someone did make you feel like a peasant.

The minute you willingly lowered yourself for someone else, they would never, ever look at you the same way. In or out of bed.

“I will not take you by force.” His voice was a sharp-edged knife, traveling across my nerves, nipping though not cutting all the way in.

“I offer myself willingly,” I said, my head bowed down.

“Up.”

I stood up.

“Come to me and kiss me the way you did Angelo tonight.”

I swallowed the sour bile rising in my throat. Hatred, humiliation, excitement, dread, and hope swirled in my chest. With my knees bumping into each other, I made my way back to him, pressing my lips to his as I wrapped my arms around his neck.

My body hummed with dark energy. I wanted to devour him with rage and show him that I was innocent. That I was still untarnished, and that I was his. But I was met with such passive disinterest, I couldn’t muster up the courage to do to him all the things I wanted to.

He lowered his lips to meet mine—finally—and I thought he would reciprocate, but he just grinned into my mouth. “If that’s how you kiss the man you want so desperately, I can see why Angelo didn’t put up a better fight to win you.”

That was when I lost it.

I bit down on his lower lip, hard, raking my fingernails through his hair and tugging at the same time he tore the front of my dress by the cleavage, ruining the designer number completely. My skin burned, and my back arched. I kicked out of the dress, crushed silk mounting under my heels, pulling him to me, wrapping myself around him like a deadly octopus. I was a black widow swallowing him whole. We wrestled each other furiously, stumbling toward the staircase and bumping into a hanging picture, a console table, and a statue. He hoisted me up and carried me upstairs, drowning my moans with kisses, suffocating his own groans of pleasure by biting my chin and lips and earlobes. Bruising me with punishing lust. Marking me with his envy.

Ms. Sterling was in the hallway, watering the huge plants on the marble stands against the grand crème walls. When she saw us biting and groaning at each other, me in his arms mostly-naked, she gasped, rushing toward the west wing.

He bit my upper lip and drew it into his mouth, carrying me to my bedroom. Angelo seemed a lifetime away, out of reach and as far away as the moon. Wolfe was here, in the flesh, burning me like the sun. Deadly and infuriating and—I knew, I just knew, as lost as I was in his touch. I had no idea how he was going to deal with the aftermath of what was about to happen. But I did know that he was going to be humbled when this was all over.

I was not a liar.

I was not a cheater.

I was his future wife.

I tried to warn him, but he didn’t believe me.

When we reached my room, he kicked the door open and threw me on the bed.

I laid there, staring at him with raised chin and what I hoped was confidence. I wanted to be arrogant and cold even as he took me. Even as I submitted to him. Even when I gave him my most precious and only possession. A possession he most assuredly did not earn tonight.

My virginity.

He stuffed his hands in the pockets of his cigar pants and regarded me with disdain, assessing me now that we were completely alone. I was wearing nothing but my white bra and matching panties. I knew he liked what he saw because he had that darkened look in his eyes. The one that made the room hotter, the air dense like fur.

“Take everything off but the heels,” he demanded.

“I’m not a stripper,” I hissed, narrowing my stinging eyes at him. “I’m your future wife. Strip me like you take your vows—like you mean it, Senator Keaton.”

“Vows that obviously mean nothing to you,” he said again, even more aloof. He barely looked at me as he did, making a point. “Off, Francesca.”

I grinned, gathering my courage. When my arm moved to my back, unclasping my bra, I could almost see his pulse quickening on the side of his neck. His face remained cool even when I removed my underwear, remaining in nothing but my heels in my bed.

He leaned down, still fully clothed, stared into my eyes, and brought his arm between us. He pressed the heel of his palm against my private area. I felt my wetness pushed against the dusting of hair there, damp and cool on the outside but hot from within.

“I will say this one time, Francesca, then consider my conscience clean. If you don’t tell me to leave right this minute, you will be devoured, wrecked, possessed, and owned for the entire night. I will fuck Angelo out of you, and then the rest of the idiots who were unfortunate enough to touch you and think there’d be a second time. I will not be considerate. I will not be compassionate. So if you’re used to gentle lovers and hour-long spooning, say the word, and our verbal contract will be terminated.”

“And you will still marry me?” I asked.

His nostrils flared. “I will marry you, but you’d wish I wouldn’t.”

He thought I’d been with other men. I told him I was someone else—and he took my word for it. Who I really was didn’t matter to him. Wolfe went to extreme lengths to prove that to me. What struck me as peculiar, though, wasn’t his words, but the situation. He was willing to forgive me, to honor our verbal agreement I allegedly broke, even though in his eyes, I’d slept with my former flame not once, but twice since we’d gotten engaged. He said he did not negotiate, yet he absolutely did. With me.

“Are you afraid to actually feel something if you touch me?” I taunted. “Your walls of icebergs are thawing, Senator.”

“Ten seconds to decide, Nemesis.”

“You already know the answer.”

“Say it. Eight.”

I smiled, though inside, I was crumbling. He was going to take my virginity and by force. He thought I was already compromised, and to prove how wrong he was, I needed to let him hurt me the way it hurt him to see me with another man. I knew what it looked like. Angelo did touch me. He did lean against me. He did trace my hair with his fingers. Moved his thumb across my lips. And then he snuck out of a room after having sex with someone else while I was MIA.

The evidence was there, stacked against me.

“Five.”

“Try not to fall in love with me.” I opened my thighs.

“Francesca. Three.”

“It will be a terrible inconvenience, il mio amore. To love the wife you took in vengeance.”

“One.”

“Stay,” I snapped, loud and clear.

He advanced toward me and pulled me down by my waist so I was lying underneath him. I sucked in a breath as he put his hand on my neck and scooted up, caging me with his knees locking my thighs, still fully dressed.

“Open my zipper.”

I couldn’t breathe, let alone work his zipper. So I just stared at him, hoping he would not misread my shock as defiance. But he did. Of course, he did. With a growl, he unzipped himself and pushed down his pants. I didn’t dare glance down and see what was waiting for me. My heart pounded so fast and hard I thought I was going to puke. I quickly assembled all the information I had on lovemaking and decided that I’d be okay. I was aroused, wet where I needed to be, and in the hands of the most desirable man in Chicago.

With his pants around his knees, he slid one finger into me, his face void of emotion.

I inhaled and tried to look calm even when the tears slammed into the back of my eyeballs again. It hurt. I wasn’t sure what hurt more, the physical discomfort or the way he looked past me as though I was nothing but a body.

The same way he had stared at Kristen.

He popped his finger into his mouth and sucked on it, expressionless, then dipped his finger into me again, retrieved my arousal, and pushed it between my own lips. I was forced to taste myself. Musky and sweet. I flushed red, my nipples puckering, so sensitive I wanted to rub them against his hard chest.

“He used a condom?” He wiped the remainder of my wetness on my cheek. I wanted to cry until there was nothing left of me but held back.

He was about to find out the truth in a few short moments that I was telling the truth the first three times, so I told him what he wanted to hear.

“Yes.”

“At least you had the decency to do that. I will not be using one, but a morning-after pill will be waiting on your nightstand first thing. See, having children with a leg-spreading whore is low on my to-do list. You will take the pill, no questions asked. Am I understood?”

I closed my eyes, shame dripping down my body like sweat. I was agreeing to this. To all of this. Consenting to his words, his actions, and his cruelty. I had, after all, gone down on my knees, begging for this moment to happen.

“Understood.”

“I would play with you a little, but you’ve been prepped by another, and I’m not in a generous mood.” He smirked darkly, and then, with one sudden thrust, he pressed his cock home, slamming into me with such force, my back arched, my chest meeting his, and stars exploded behind my eyelids as pain pierced through me. He tore past the natural barrier of my body and was buried so deep inside me, it felt like he was ripping me apart. The sting was so profound, I had to bite my lower lip to suppress a scream of sheer agony. My whole life, Clara and Mom warned me off tampons, bike riding, and I even had to wear thick breeches for my horse rides, to preserve that which was so sacrosanct, so holy. Only to be met with this.

Motionless, soundless, and tense under his body, the only clue that I was still conscious was the tears that began streaming down my face. I bit my lip hard so as not to make a sound.

I am a rusty barbwire, twisted together, knotted into a ball of fear.

“Tight as a fist,” he groaned, his feral voice meeting my complete silence as he thrust so hard, so fast, and so rough, I thought he was going to slash me apart into miniscule shreds. My tears slid from my cheeks down to my pillow as he pushed deeper and deeper, and I could feel the walls of my virginity coming down and bleeding out of me. But I didn’t tell him to stop, and I didn’t confess my virginity.