His jaw flexed. “Come with me.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“We get out of this fishbowl, we go somewhere I can actually think without counting how many eyes are on your bare skin. We talk. You yell. I listen. You don’t end us half-buried in rental sand under an umbrella that probably has DePout’s crest on it.”
My throat burned. “Already ended it.”
“I didn’t hear a vote.”
“This isn’t a board decision.”
“It is when it affects both of us.” His voice softened, not by much. “You matter too much to be dismissed on a bad night.”
“Don’t do this. Don’t make it harder.”
“Do what? Tell you the truth?” He huffed out a breath. “You are the only girlfriend I’ve ever had. The only sub. I didn’t have a rotation before you. I had work. Blood. Chokeholds. Cigarettes. That was it. Then you rewrote everything.”
He said it like he was reporting crime statistics.
“You trusted me with your virginity,”
Heat flashed across my cheeks. “Don’t?—”
“You let me stay inside you for a full day,” he went on. “You let me lock my body to yours and walk you through every hour. You held me when you needed to pee. You let me talk you through something that scared the shit out of you because you trusted me. Do you have any idea what that did to me?”
My eyes dropped to the overthrow. I played with the thread for a moment.
“I think about it every time you close your eyes and lean back against me. I want another day where I don’t leave your body once. Where we eat and nap and breathe with me inside you. I am desperate for it. That isn’t something I feel for someone I can walk away from.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You’re the love of my life. Please come with me. Talk to me.” he suddenly looked nervous.
I stayed on the lounger a beat too long.
He watched every stutter of my breath, like he could see the argument playing out under my skin.
“Madeline.” His voice lost some of the steel. “Come here, angel.”
When I didn’t move, he reached down, fingers sliding around my wrist.
“I’ll walk away if you tell me you don’t love me,” he murmured. Thumb stroking the inside of my wrist. “Say the words clean. No qualifiers. No ‘but.’”
My mouth stayed shut.
“That’s what I thought.” His thumb kept moving, slow stroke over my pulse. “Up, baby.”
I let him pull me.
Sand was hot under my feet when I stood. He didn’t let go of my wrist. Not even when he bent to grab my cover-up from the chair.
He shook the sheer fabric out, then wrapped it around my shoulders, fingers lingering at my collarbone. The gesture felt too gentle for the man who’d raided a penthouse last night.
“Malice has eyes,” he said quietly. “But not as many as Villain. My car’s up on the private access ramp. We’re going to walk, you’re going to pretend I’m just another Crow cousin, and then we’re going somewhere no one but us steps into without permission.”
“Another Crow cousin,” I echoed. “Right. Because you blend.”
His mouth twitched. “I shut this section of the beach when I heard you were on it.”
