My hand moves faster, water pounding my back like a drum. Pressure builds, coiling low in my gut, my balls tightening. I imagine her clenching around me, coming undone as I fill her with hot spurts deep inside, marking her.
The release hits like a freight train, ropes of cum shooting against the tile, my groan echoing off the walls. Stars burst behind my eyelids as my body shudders through the aftershocks, her face burned into my mind.
I wash off under the cooling spray, suds rinsing away the evidence, but the thoughts linger. What the hell is this? Cassandra's no longer just a contract or a useful piece in the game.
She's under my skin.
I don't do attachments.
But here I am, funding her sister's surgery, fantasizing about more than dominance. I towel off, staring at my reflection, scars and bewilderment staring back.
At the party, I'll test her edges.
Tonight I let her sleep.
CHAPTER 14
CASSANDRA
Three days before Christmas…
Icheck my phone again.
No updates. Nothing but the last message posted in the hospital portal.
Payment received. Surgery confirmed.
There was no name on the donor note, only some charity foundation with clean paperwork.
I know whose hand is behind it.
Gratitude settles heavy and complicated in my chest. Across town, Clara is undergoing surgery, her heart stopped while they work on it.
I should be there.
But I’m not, because the man who made that payment expects me on his arm tonight. “Girlfriend,” he said in that low voice I want to bottle up and drink.
Smile. Speak only when he wants me to.I owe him. I also want him to be pleased with me.
I stand in the doorway of my suite, smoothing the dress I spent all morning altering. Christmas scandal has been remade into Christmas precision. I adjusted the straps, added a whisper of lace at the plunge so it’s audacious without becoming a wardrobe malfunction, nipped the waist a shade, let the hips breathe, and tamed the slit into something that flashes thigh on purpose.
The ribbon is still at my wrist, a neat bow that feels less like a leash these days and more like a promise I’ve chosen to keep.
Damien fills the threshold in a black tux that he looks poured into. Silver at his temples, and that short silver beard that weaponizes his jaw. Dark blue eyes that look like frosted steel.
He stops, staring.
No quip, no lecture. Just that silence that means the system is booting back up after a power surge.
“Turn,” he says at last.
I turn. The recessed lighting moves over me. When I face him again, his mouth is a thin line of control.
“You changed it.”
“I improved it,” I correct because he asked me a question, and precision is a rule. “The original neckline would have slipped when I breathed. I reinforced the mesh. Took in the waist a quarter inch, released the hips a half, shortened the straps, and added a lace insert at the slit so it reads as deliberate, not desperate.”
His eyes track the seam work. The heat in them makes me remember last night, and the night before, and the night before that. His thumb grazes the bow at my wrist.
