“I— I don’t know. We can’t…Oh, God!Why is this so hard?” I meet his steel-bright eyes for a half-second and look away. “Look, we can’t make this a…a…”
“Spit it out. Whatever it is. Say it.”
“A real thing.Real.That’s what I’m trying to say. I’m trying to explain that this is practical, not emotional. It’s not fuckingreal.”
My voice is too loud, the buildup so strong that it makes the ensuing silence seem all the deeper.
He says nothing. I stare at my hands. Two of my nails are chipped. They’re always chipped. Working behind a bar is why I don’t usually put on polish.
I did this week, though.
Because I knew I’d see him.
Crap. Crappity. Crap.
After a few more moments, he stands. I don’t move, but my mind’s racing as he stalks back to the kitchen. When he returns, it’s with two more beers. Good. Maybe we’ll just have another beer and I can go and we’ll pretend none of this happened.
With the kind of single-minded focus he exhibits while plating a daily special or lining up to fuck me behind my bar, he opens my beer, then takes his seat again. I still can’t look him in the eye. Not when he’s watching me like that. Not when I’m the only thing with a pulse in his vicinity and I know—I just know—how it feels to be in his sights.
“Let’s negotiate, all right, Kit? It’s all I’m asking.”
On an inhale, my gaze lifts to meet his with the kind of shock I’ve only felt when hit by something hard and solid at very high speeds. Like that softball one time in middle school. Or the time my friend’s car was T-boned by a minivan, turning our afternoon of Christmas shopping into a backache that still comes back to haunt me on rainy afternoons.
“We’ve already established that I want the lights on. Every single time I fuck you. I want to look.”
His words fizzle through me, leaving me weak and out of breath.
“We know that touching’s on the table. And I say whatever dirty shit I want while it’s happening.” He squints, watching me like he can see through the layers of skin and bone to the organs going haywire down deep. “The way your cunt clenches around me every time tells me you fucking love it. Am I wrong?” His big body hunches toward me and my brain’s got no control over theway mine cants to meet him. I’m a flower tilting toward the sun. “You got any objections to that, now’s the time.”
I want to say… I should tell him… We really shouldn’t…
My mouth is so dry I have to swallow twice before I can get my voice working again. Not that I know how to respond. I’d need brain cells for that and he’s just about fried them.
“Nothing?”
“I…” My vision’s gone a little dark at the edges—that is this man’s power over my libido. I swear he’s hypnotized my body into obeying his brain instead of mine. It’s a miracle that I finally dredge up the word, “Kissing.” I clear my throat. “No kissing.”
“Fine,” he spits out, somehow pissed that I’m working to maintain at least some healthy boundaries. “But I get to make you come whenever and however I please.”
Wait.What?
“Right now. Here. On the sofa. I make you come, hard, before I take you to bed and fuck you. Those aremyrules.”
I’m nodding. I didn’t tell my muscles to move, but like his good little puppet, they’re obeying the man pulling the strings. What I want has no bearing in the face of such certainty.
“Good. Finish that.” Those eerie blue eyes flick to my beer, like he’s making me take my medicine.
Shaking, I obey. What choice do I have? My being’s slipped from its moorings and he’s the only thing keeping my skin and flesh attached to my bones. I take the bottle and sip slowly until it’s gone, then set the empty down.
“All right.” He stands and shoves the big driftwood and iron coffee table aside, then settles onto his knees on the glossy hardwood floor right in front of me. “Stand up.”
The second I do it, he reaches under my skirt for my underwear, which he drags down.
“Good girl,” he whispers as I flop back to the sofa, aware of how ridiculous I look sitting here bare-assed on leather with mypanties hanging off one foot. He grasps my knees and spreads my legs wide and for a handful of seconds his face goes utterly blank.
“Katarina,” he whispers and, just that tortured sound is enough to send a frantic whimper spiraling up from my chest. “Fuck, baby, you’re beautiful.”
He looks up, into my face when he says this, swallows, and then drags that gaze back down again, inexorably drawn to that place.
