“I don’t understand why we can’t just—”
Alaric squeezed my hand. “Natalia,” he said. “Trust me when I tell you, if anyone knew that there was a way to get to me, then they would use it. And right now... you are the way. You... and...”
His fingers brushed over my belly.
I was overcome by the love I could feel in his touch, by the way he looked at me, so much so that I forgot my next question. His fingers traveled over my belly, almost weightlessly, and then to my breasts, where they brought my nipples to attention before abandoning them to their aching need to stroke the hollow of my throat.
The conversation, I could feel, had ended, because Alaric was staring at the places that he touched with such intensity that I knew he was thinking of nothing else. He cupped my right breast and brought my nipple inside his mouth, and I had to close my eyes in ecstasy.
From there, I let myself fall into a place where I thought of nothing else, and felt nothing else except for the touch of his fingers, light and teasing. The heat of his mouth against my inner thigh then enclosed around my clit, his tongue deep inside of me and then pulsing against the most sensitive part of my body as my limbs jerked involuntarily with the intense pleasure he wrung from me.
And then there was nothing but the fullness inside of me as he filled me again, his cock stretching me open, his hands in my hair and his mouth against mine. His hard muscles were hot on my chest as he pushed my hands to either side of us and entwined his fingers in mine, thrusting deep inside of me again. In my abdomen a fire raged until it gripped like an electric shock and my back arched, pushing me against him, my heels digging into the hard muscled small of his back. He buried his head next to mine and bit gently into my shoulder as he came, and the warmth of his cum overflowed in my pussy.
We lay next to each other, fingers intertwined, our legs tangled. I stared at his face until my eyelids were too heavy to keep open. I don’t know how long it lasted, lying there, knowing he was watching me, thinking of nothing but all the places where he was touching me.
And then, just as I was drifting to sleep, my eyes flew open, my whole body dead cold at the thought.
Alaric was still looking at me, as though he had never drifted off. His eyes widened with alarm as I drew back from him and then sat up. “So what is it with Lucy?” I asked.
“What?”
“Lucy. Eric said you should get rid of Lucy. Why? Is it because you’re paying for her hospitalization? You could just stop, right? Or... hide the money trail, can’t you? I don’t see what... you can’t, you just can’t do anything to Lucy.”
My eyes were welling up with tears.
And then, when I looked at Alaric, a new stab of pain went straight through my chest. His eyes had gone dead and cold again. What I saw in his face was frightening.
“You can’t kill Lucy,” I repeated. “It’s not her fault you’re a bad person. She doesn’t even know you. She doesn’t even... it doesn’t even make sense...”
My voice trailed off. I felt I was very close to a truth I perhaps didn’t want to hear, and I could see that Alaric was shutting down, closing the doors to the Alaric I had just found, and replacing him with the man who had kidnapped me, the bad man...
He sat up. His mouth was a straight line. “Something has to be done about Lucy,” he said coldly.
“What?” I gasped. “What?”
I was filling with rage, seeing how easily he turned back into a monster. I should never have fallen for him, I thought.
I hit him, and he didn’t even react. I started to pound on his arms and then, because he turned to face me, his chest. “You bastard!” I yelled at him. “You fucking bastard, I knew I shouldn’t have trusted you, I knew it!”
He pushed me down onto the bed and held me there, while I closed my eyes and prepared to be turned over and spanked. But the spanking never came.
He pushed himself off the bed, and when his weight pressed me down, my wrists screamed in pain. He stood up, looking over me. “I told you,” he said, his voice flat, his eyes robotic and cold. “I’m a bad man.”
“Lucy hasn’t done anything,” I sobbed, cradling my wrists. “She doesn’t even know you.”
He looked down at me, his face contorted by an emotion I could not read.
“If you kill her, you are an animal,” I seethed. “Youarea bad man, and you’ll never be anything else.”
His lips pressed together more tightly. Then he shifted his gaze to the window and nodded, as though in the inky sky there were someone out there who had confirmed something for him. “Maybe you’re right.”
He pulled on his shorts and took his gun.
I stared at him, my heart bleeding painfully into my chest.
He turned and walked out of the room.
“I hate you!” I screamed at him. “I’ll hate you forever!”
