Page 19 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

“I’m not sure I’d want to change my name.”

The pause this time was shorter. “Isla Monroe-Golovin.”

I absorbed that. The hyphenation felt like a small victory, which probably said something depressing about how quickly my frame of reference had shifted.

“Would I live here, with you?”

“Naturally, yes.”

I looked at him across the breakfast table. Morning light came through the windows and did something to the planes of his face that the amber poker room lighting hadn’t—made him look slightly less constructed.

“What about—” I started, then stopped myself.

“Say it,” he prompted.

“Would you expect—” I kept my eyes on my coffee cup. “Physically. Would you—”

“No.” The answer was quick and calm. “I told you. I won’t force you.”

“But.” I looked up because I needed to see his face when he said the next part, needed to read whatever was actually there. “Yesterday. You said yes.”

He held my gaze. “I said yes.”

“So you… you want to.” The word felt strange in my mouth, applied to him, in this context. “And you’d just… what? Not act on it? Indefinitely?”

“I’ve exercised considerable restraint in considerably higher-stakes situations. It’s not a guarantee I’m making about forever. It’s a guarantee I’m making about coercion. They’re different.”

“That is an extremely fine line.”

“Most important lines are,” he answered. “I’m not going to force you. Ever. But I won’t pretend desire doesn’t exist between us, either.”

I pushed back from the table slightly and stood because sitting felt like a posture I couldn’t sustain. I needed to move, needed the physical expression of what was building in my chest, which was part rage and part something else that I refused to name before I had better information.

“You are manipulating me,” I said. Not loudly. “Right now. You know that. You’re sitting there being reasonable, and answering questions without flinching, and you’re doing it deliberately because you understand that I respond to logic and you’re using that—”

“I’m answering your questions honestly.” His voice was even. “If that constitutes manipulation, I’d be curious what you’d prefer instead.”

“I’d prefer—” I gestured, wide and frustrated, stepping toward him. “I’d prefer to not be in a position where I’m sitting across a breakfast table with the man who won me in a card game trying to work out whether his offer of marriage is actually better than the alternatives—”

“It is better. You’ve already concluded that. That’s why you’re asking logistics questions instead of simply refusing.”

I stopped moving.

He was right. I’d been asking logistics questions. I’d been building a picture of what agreeing looked like, mapping the terrain of it, questioning the possible shape of a life I’d said I would never choose. And he’d seen that. He’d sat there with his scrambled eggs and his controlled face, and he’d seen it clearly, and now he was—

“You enjoy this,” I said. The accusation from the day before, arriving again with fresh evidence. “The… the knowing. Being ten steps ahead. You look at me like I’m a puzzle you’ve already solved and you’re just waiting for me to catch up, and it is… it is infuriating, and it is not… it’s not—”

I was close to him again. I didn’t know when that had happened. I was standing at the edge of the table, and he was still seated, and somehow, the distance had collapsed again, the way it always collapsed. I was pointing at him with more intent than precision, and anger was overriding my vocabulary.

“It’s not a game,” he said quietly. He tilted his head up to hold my gaze. “I don’t enjoy your distress. I find your—” something moved behind his eyes—“your reasoning, when you allow yourself to use it, clarifying. That isn’t the same thing.”

“You find me clarifying.” I nearly laughed. “That’s… what does that even—”

I stepped back, or tried to. My foot found the seam between the rug and the marble floor, that razor-thin edge where the textures met, and my heel hit it at exactly the wrong angle, and my balance went sideways in one lurching, graceless instant.

His hands caught me before I’d finished registering the fall.

He had one arm around my waist, decisive and immediate, pulling me forward and in rather than letting me go back and down. I slammed into his chest—not gently, not gracefully, but hard and full, my hands flying out and finding the lapels of his jacket and clutching them. I realized distantly that he must have stood from his chair in the same movement, because he was upright and I was against him.