Phantom: Her Ruthless Villain (Ruthless Triad 5)

“No,” I admit, my voice miserable. “I can deliver a breach baby in a bathtub to a mom who can’t hear. But I have no idea how to stand here while you tell me that I’m really nice, but you don’t see me that way.”

“I don’t think you’re nice,” he answered, his voice frank. “I don’t think you’re nice at all. A nice person would have let me talk already.”

I shriveled a little inside, knowing he was right. I was being unbelievably rude. Still…I canted to the left and tried to dart around him.

But he caught me around the waist before I could. “Okay, I tried. I tried to play it nice with you. Remember that.”

And that was all the warning I got before he swung me up into his arms.

“Where are you taking me?” I demanded when he started walking toward the penthouse’s other hallway.

We walked past an open door with a neat queen-sized bed and no city views.

“That’s the guest room. That’s where you would have been staying if you hadn’t kissed me and made this shit weird.”

Before I could process his words, much less react to them, he kicked open the door to a huge master with the same kind of window wall as the one in the open-plan front room.

I barely had time to register his space, though. He tossed me on the bed and loomed over me, blocking out everything beyond him in the room.

“If you had let me talk, then I would have told you, ‘Hold on, I’ve gotta set down this glass because red wine is a bitch to get out of a sheepskin rug. Maybe I would’ve done some of that consent shit. Let you eat your cupcake and drink your wine in a leisurely fashion while I made sure you were sure about starting something with me. Because guys like me—we don’t make out. It’s all or nothing when you come at us like that.”

My mind reeled, trying to catch up.

“But you didn’t let me finish, so this is your consent talk,” he continued before I could form a reply. “You kissed me like your birthday wish was for me to fuck you. So now I’m asking, is that what you want? You want me to wish your pussy happy birthday?”

I wasn’t wearing pearls—rather a diamond pendant necklace my mother had given me as a Christmas gift back in my twenties. But I clutched it. Boy, did I clutch it

He was so unbelievably crass. No one. And I mean, no one had ever spoken to me like this before.

“I’m going to need a yes or a no.”

Holy moly, he actually expected an answer. A decision….

But I couldn’t think. Everything was happening too fast for me to stitch together a proper response.

Maybe that’s why the “Yes…yes, please” slipped out of my mouth without warning.

He stilled, then crooked his head to regard me with those cold shark eyes.

“Yes, please,” he repeated, his tone mocking and cruel. “You going to be that polite when you come all over my dick?”

Was I going to be that polite when I….

I couldn’t repeat the question. Not even in my head. But the shock of it loosened my tongue, and another truthful answer dropped out of my mouth: “I don’t know.”

He smiled at me—actually, no, I wouldn’t quite call it that. Smiles are meant to be happy things, gentle and reassuring.

This was more a slight lift of his mouth and a baring of his teeth that made me wonder if he had plans to eat me alive.

“How many?” he asked.

“How many what?” I asked, my voice breathless with confusion.

“How many times do you want to come?” he asked, his own voice slow and careful. Like I was an idiot, not a grown woman with a medical degree.

“Wha—what?”

He scanned me from head to toe. And though I was still covered in pounds of evening gown, it felt like his gaze was stripping me bare as he said, “Tell me the truth. Mr. Forgetful never made you come on his dick, did he?”

My entire face burned with embarrassment. “Contrary to popular belief, penetration isn’t the only way to help someone climax. You can have quite a satisfying sex life without it.”

“How about once? Did he even take you there once without fingers and tongue?”

Just fingers, actually. No tongue. What Garrett hadn’t told Leighton about my lackluster blowjobs was that I had become considerably less enthusiastic about giving them after Garrett confessed that going down on a woman “just wasn’t his thing.”

As if refusing to give oral sex was some kind of lifestyle preference, like placing the toilet tissue up or down.

“So I’m going to say we start with three and take it from there,” the Dragon said.

“There’s no guarantee I’ll come even once,” I warned him, sitting all the way up in the bed. “We’ve only just met again, and we don’t know each other all that well.”