My mouth curves up into something far too close to a smirk. “Now that I’ve seen what you’ve been hiding, I want more.”
Her eyes widen, chest rises and falls quickly. Her chest heaves with a breath that sounds dangerously close to a gasp, and the air between us, already charged, sparks like a live wire. I sit on the edge of the bed, not touching her yet, but close enough that the mattress dips under my weight and tilts her toward me.
My gaze drags down to her trembling hands, to the ones that were spreading her wide open just moments ago. “Icouldwalk out right now and leave you to finish what you started…”
Her throat works in a swallow.
“Or,” I continue, leaning in until my mouth is close to her ear, “you could tell me what you were thinking about. What made you so desperate that you couldn’t wait until the whole house was asleep before touching yourself.”
She jerks back to look at me. “Stop it.”
The words snap out of her like a reflex. But there’s no weight behind them. No fire. It’s not the same venom she usually spits when she wants me to back off. This is something else. She’s begging me not to look too closely at what she can’t control.
I study her carefully. “You’re not telling me to leave.”
Her breath catches, and I catch the faint tremor in her hands when she pulls the blankets up to cover her chest. She’s not afraid of me in the way most people are, and that alone fascinates me more than it should.
Rationally, I need to leave, get myself as far away from her as possible, because if I don’t, I’m going to get dragged into something I’m not going to have the willpower to resist coming back to.
And with a war potentially brewing on the horizon, that’s a dangerous thing.
I can’t help myself when I curl my fingers gently under her chin, thumb brushing her jaw. “I don’t play games. If I want something, I take it. But I’m giving you one chance right now—tell me to walk out that door, and I will.”
She stares at me for a long moment. Long enough that I almost let go of her and back off.
But then she says something I’m not at all expecting, something that shatters my resolve completely.
“I was thinking about you.”
17
IVY
My heart is pounding so hard, I’m certain the sound of it must be ricocheting off the walls.
Every pulse feels like it’s climbing up into my throat, threatening to give me away. I’m frozen. Not just physically, but emotionally, mentally, like every nerve in my body has been hijacked by panic and arousal and humiliation in equal measure.
Maksim watches me like a predator that knows exactly how fast his prey’s heart is beating and enjoys it. That’s exactly what that smirk he wears says to me.
“Drop the blanket,” he tells me after my shame-soaked confession.
I don’t move. Ican’tmove. I’m not holding on out of defiance.
The real reason I’m being this stubborn? I’m fucking mortified. Not just because he caught me touching myself—that’s already horrible enough—but because I was thinking about him when it happened and actuallyadmitted to it.
Not in some vague, hazy way, either. I was picturing him exactly as he’d been earlier today when he was ordering people around like a fucking god, barking orders at his men, commanding them to bend to his will with that intense stare, cutting through anyone foolish enough to get in his way.
In my head, I imaginedthatman grabbing me, spinning me around, bending me over the nearest flat surface while that brutal, commanding voice barked out orders directed at me instead.
Submit to me.
Obey me.
Say it, Ivy. Say who you belong to.
And now he’s here, in my room, looking at me like he knows every last one of those dirty thoughts.
“Tell me to leave,” he says again, quieter this time. Not softer—Maksim Antonov doesn’tdosoft—but there’s a slight gentleness to his tone that I’m not expecting.
