Page 31

She’s so beautiful, and that makes it ten times worse.

“Get off me,” she spits.

She tried to run. She was letting me touch her, letting me smile at her, letting me feel like a fool, and she’d already stolen the key.

“Why should I?” I say, my voice dropping to pure ice.

She’s trapped beneath me. I can feel her testing my grip with the small, frustrated movements.

I look down at her and take my time about it.

The too-big clothes she’s been swimming in since this morning. The curve of her throat. That face, all furious dignity, like she’s the one suffering outrage here. I’ve had my hands full of her, and I’ve been keeping my eyes where they belong, but now that she’s underneath me, I’m done playing nice. I’ll look if I damn well want to.

And what a pretty sight she is.

I’m not a man women run from, but she can’t fucking wait to see the back of me. I can’t get it out of my mind that just now, in her heart, she was already gone from me while I was smiling at her and caressing her cheekbone.

“Get off me,” she says again, louder this time, in case I didn’t hear her the first time.

I heard her.

I drop my head and drag my lips slowly up the side of her throat. Over the bruises I gave her and up to her earlobe, where I sink my teeth into her soft flesh and then suck.

She pants, a sharp gasp born of fear or desire, I don’t know. “Don’t. Stop that.”

I take malicious delight in easing my hand up her shirt—my shirt, my captive printsessa—and sliding it up her ribs.

“I’ll—I’ll scream.”

“Scream all you want,” I murmur against her throat. “You think Scava will save you from me?”

My hand closes around her breast, and I squeeze, letting a heavy groan roll through my chest. My thumb draws firm circles on her hardening nipple.

“I’m married!” she gasps out.

I glare down at my hand beneath the shirt.

Married. Viktoriya’s married to a man who must be the one paying me a considerable sum of money for her return.

“So?” I say.

Her chest is heaving under my hand. “So you shouldn’t touch what isn’t yours.”

A jagged, poisonous sensation moves through me. I don’t get jealous. Jealousy requires a kind of investment I’ve never made in anyone.

I look down at her and feel it anyway, hot, ugly, and entirely without logic.

She belongs to someone. Some man somewhere has a legal right to this woman, this throat, this soft breast under my palm. The thought makes me want to put my fist through his skull. It makes me want to drag her closer and make her say my name until she forgets his.

“Not mine?” I repeat, like I’m tasting the words. I let my thumb move again, just once, across her nipple, and watch her breath catch. “Tell me something, printsessa. Do you look at your husband the way you look at me?”

Her eyes go wide and furious. “I don’t—”

“You do.” I drop my voice to a dangerous whisper. “I saw you stare at me when I got out of the shower. Just a few hours ago, your hands were all over me. If I’d let you, you would have sucked my dick right in front of Scava.”

Heat floods through me. The thought of claiming this unruly little brat in front of another man is such a turn-on, but it’s not Scava I want to fuck her hard in front of.

It’s her husband.