Hold You Against Me (Stripped 4)

A smile in the dark, the flash of white teeth. The Cheshire cat’s smile. “Careless,” he says.

Romero swears under his breath. “It won’t happen again.”

“Leave.”

“But—”

“Now.”

Romero’s embarrassment and anger bubbles in the air behind me, and I know I’ll have to deal with him later. For now I have to deal with the man in front of me. As my eyes adjust to the dark, I see a small and trembling figure in the corner, behind an antique globe. Footsteps recede as Romero follows orders.

“I’ll just get Lupo and go.” Whatever courage I felt when I corrected Giovanni left with Romero. Now I’m alone in a room—in the room—and all I want is to leave.

“Wait.” The word is soft but clearly a command.

I wait.

He stands, still holding the lighter up. One step closer. Without thinking it through, I take a step back. We move that way, one forward, one back, until the wall stops me. This was a bad idea. Everything about this is bad, from the fact that I just moved into the shadows to the way he’s looking at me. Hungry. Starving, like he needs to devour me just to survive.

“Giovanni,” I whisper. “Let me get Lupo. We’ll leave you alone.”

His dark gaze flicks down to where my camisole doesn’t cover enough of my breasts, the orange-yellow light warming my curves. “Careless,” he says again. “What had Romero so distracted?”

The way he says it, he knows. He may not know that I was teasing Romero deliberately, trying to soften him up so he’d help me. But he knows exactly what Romero was looking at when Lupo escaped.

They’re a distraction, but I need a different kind of distraction right now. “What did Romero do wrong that you assigned him to dog walking?”

“It’s more what he didn’t do.”

I can’t forget how quickly Romero spoke out against Giovanni. It’s something I might be able to use to my advantage, but it’s also dangerous for Giovanni. I suspect he knows that. It’s a little hard for Romero to plan a coup if he never leaves the mansion. “Friends close and enemies closer, is that it?”

He makes an approving sound. “You understand the life.”

Anger flashes inside me. “I understand it, but I don’t want it. You have no right to force it on me.”

“That’s just it, bella. Force gives me the right to do anything I want.”

Fear quickens my heartbeat—fear and something else. Something like anticipation. It must be muscle memory, except the muscle in question is my heart. It remembers that it loves him, even if it shouldn’t. That’s the only explanation for how I can still want a man who holds me against my will.

A flick of his thumb and the lighter shuts off, plunging us into darkness. The door is still open, drawing a prism of saturated light, but backed into the wall, it’s completely black.

“It gives me the right to keep you here,” he says, his breath soft against my forehead. Then his hands are closing around my wrists, lifting them above my head.

My breath catches. “Stop.”

“It gives me the right to touch you.”

“No.”

He places one of my wrists on top of the other, holding them both easily with one hand. His other hand lands on the curve of my hip—and it burns. I shut my eyes tight as if I can deny what’s happening that way. That only sharpens my other senses, the feel of him, the heat.

“Clara,” he murmurs. “It gives me the right to kiss you.”

My lips are trembling, and I can’t deny that I want it. And that I hate it, this wanting.

He kissed me only once before, only minutes before I left. I was breathless, a mixture of young desire and fear. Part of me believed that my love for him would conquer what we faced. The other part of me knew that I would never see him again. It turns out that I was wrong on both counts.

His lips are surprisingly soft and achingly sure. They touch mine with a deliberation that can only be possessive. He can take this much time because he owns me. Because I’m his to do whatever he wants with—and he wants my lips, over and over again. He presses his mouth over mine in a way that would almost be chaste if it weren’t for his hand on my hip or his hot length against my stomach.