“No?” He looks aghast. “Then what the hell was that?”
I smother the instinct to lean into him. Starve it of air.
He inches closer, encroaching until our legs brush.
It’s not him I fear. Not the person whose intelligence I covet. Whose dominance I adore. Whose attention I crave. What frightens me is how loving him, and believing he loves me in return, has the potential to ruin whatever fragile stability I’ve managed to rebuild.
I’m sure I’ll eventually overcome what my father did to me. I can also live with the trauma of Eliseo’s actions.
But there’d be no recovering if I found out all of this was Raffael playing pretend to save his family.
“I’ll never know if this is real,” I whisper, hating how thin my voice sounds.
“You’ll know,” he swears. “There won’t be a day where you’ll doubt it.”
His fingers skim along my arm, awakening riotous goose bumps.
I tense, warring with the keening sound daring to betray me.
“You still want me,” he murmurs.
“It doesn’t matter. This isn’t a good idea.” I sidestep and continue for the door, my stomach in knots as the distance between us grows and liberation comes within reach.
“Not even if I can’t exist without you?”
My breath doesn’t just catch—it claws.
“There’s no future without us together, Isla. I won’t stand for it.”
I stop at the door, my heart in my throat, and glance at him over my shoulder. “You won’t stand for it?”
He inclines his head, prowling forward.
I turn sharply toward him—as if facing my weakness head-on will make this any easier.
But he’s right there, closing in, pressing me into the door, the chill of the glass at my back, his body a mass of hard muscle and deliberate pressure.
“I had years to picture what it would be like if you broke the agreement and became mine.” He articulates the words with lethal precision. “Endless months of torture where I envisaged us married, with you in my bed and?—”
“Against my will?” I cut in.
“Would it have been?” His hands glide over my hips, controlling me.Consumingme. “Because in all the futures I imagined, none of them had you feeling anything but at home in my arms.”
Pain throbs through me, not because I doubt him—the problem is how deeply I ache to believe.
“I’ve been deprived my entire life,” he admits. “A father, a mother, the country I was born in, the freedom to disclose who I am and where I come from. And I took that loss in stride. But what I can’t endure is being without you.”
I close my eyes. Scramble to find grounding.
“I would’ve killed for you. Would’ve died.” He’s so close I can taste the whiskey on his breath, have become intoxicated by it. “Is that not enough to earn your trust?”
I wince.
“I let another man date you.” His nose skims my cheek, his mouth feathering close to my ear. “Even though it took everything in me to watch and not slit his throat.”
That shouldn’t be a turn-on.
It shouldn’t.
