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His palm slid lower.
“And this gorgeous body you’ve spent tonight using to torture me?”
Heat immediately replaced some of the emotion tightening my chest.
His mouth brushed my ear.
“All mine.”
I smiled at his reflection. “Possessive.”
“Very.”
His rough voice whispered against my ear. “Now that I’ve got the important part of the evening handled—”
I knew that tone immediately.
Lachlan reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out his phone.
I knew exactly what was on it.
Heat rushed through me all over again.
“Now,” he said, his voice dropping into the rough tone that had been tormenting me since the ride home, “about those pictures.”
Chapter forty-two
I’d put a ring on her finger, and she’d set me on fire.
Isabella stiffened against me at the mention of the pictures, but I kept my arm firm around her waist. She’d spent hours testing my control with those damn things. I wasn’t letting her slip away now—not until she understood exactly what she’d done to me.
The amount of restraint I’d shown since that first fucking picture landed on my phone at Xyst should’ve won me an award. Judging by the looks on Nik’s and Lucian’s faces when their phones went off at the same time, the whole thing had been cooked up during the girls’ spa day. We’d arranged it because we wanted to spoil our women, and somewhere between the massages and champagne, the spoiled brats had decided to turn the favor around on us.
Isabella had known exactly what she was doing. She’d sent those pictures while I was trapped in public, first at Xyst and then in the SUV with two of my security men sitting up front. She knew I wasn’t going to throw her over my shoulder in the middle of the club or start anything in the back seat with a security detail listening three feet away.
Under any other circumstances, that kind of provocation deserved an immediate response.
But I’d planned this night long before Mouse decided to make a sport of tormenting me. The flowers, the candles, the ring—I’d wanted her first real Valentine’s Day to be something she’d never forget. More than that, I’d wanted to ask her to marry me without my cock or my temper hijacking the moment.
Making her happy had mattered more than my protective fury, my raging hard-on, or the very real urge I’d had to drag her into the office at Xyst and fuck her against the one-way glass.
Now the ring was on her finger, and I had no reason left to behave.
She was still wearing the dress she’d bought with my card, her cheeks flushed from the proposal and a satisfied little smile playing around her mouth as she watched me in the reflection. She looked entirely too pleased with herself.
I opened the first photograph and brought the phone around in front of her so we could both see it.
Goddamn.
The deep red velvet chaise only made the image more obscene. Isabella lay sprawled across it in black lace, one cup of her bra pulled low enough to bare a breast while her legs were spread wide with nothing covering her pussy. One hand cupped her breast. The other rested between her thighs, one finger pressed directly to her clit.
I’d already seen the image more times than I cared to admit, and it still hit me like a fist to the chest.
“God, look at that pretty pussy,” I said, roughly.
The confidence in her expression faltered.
Not shame. Isabella had nothing to be ashamed of, and she knew it. But hearing me say it while I held the photograph inches in front of her was different from pressing send and watching me open it at Xyst as if she hadn’t a clue in the world what she’d done.
