“Are you thanking me for kidnapping you?”
“Not in so many words.”
“Well, I’ll take whatever I can get. Even if it’s not in so many words.”
“What business do you do?” she asked. “That isn’t gambling.”
They spent the rest of the meal talking about his various investments and endeavors. He grew animated when he talked about the different restaurants and clubs he had been involved in. His mind was fascinating, filled with creative solutions to all manner of problems. Ways to get attention that she doubted anyone else would think of, methods of erasing formerly bad reputations, the process by which he managed to take an unknown location and turn it into the hottest destination for anyone with money and cachet.
She imagined that it was that darker side of his nature, the one that saw kidnapping her as a viable solution to his present problem, that made him such a brilliant businessman. He wasn’t bound by societal restrictions. Wasn’t bound by law, or really anything.
He didn’t have to work hard to think outside of the box, because he had never been in one.
She, in contrast, had spent her entire life in a little box. One that she had stepped in and stayed in of her own free will. Being around a man like Diego was electric. She wondered then if that was part of their instant connection. Or at least, the connection she felt on her end. That fascination.
After they were through with dinner, there was hot chocolate and churros, and by the end of that, Liliana felt almost content. Warm and sleepy. Something in her wanted to move closer to Diego. Curl up against him like a cat. She couldn’t figure that out.
She didn’t feel entirely motivated to figure it out.
He would ask now. For their wedding night. They just had their wedding feast, after all. And they had talked. Gotten to know each other better. She hadn’t anticipated that being part of any of this. But she wasn’t sad about it. Not at all.
She felt happy.
Like this moment between them had nourished a deficit in her soul she hadn’t even known was there.
“Are you finished, tesoro?”
Treasure. He called her his treasure, and sometimes she felt like he meant it.
The entire scene from their wedding played itself back in her mind again.
Yes. Sometimes, she felt like he meant it.
“Yes,” she said, nerves quivering in her belly.
“Good. I imagine it’s time to retire. We’ve both had a very long day.”
“Yes,” she agreed.
He stood from his chair, then reached down to help her up as well. She took his offered hand, electricity zipping from her fingertips down the rest of her body.
He lifted her hand to his lips, brushed them over her knuckles. “Good night,” he said softly. Then he lifted his head, straightened and walked out of the room, leaving her standing there. Alone.
He didn’t possibly mean to... He wasn’t...
And she certainly couldn’t be disappointed if he were. She was a prisoner. She had agreed to the physical aspect of a marriage under sufferance.
Immediate heat rolled over her. Not just because she was lying—to herself, in a bald and blatant fashion—but because just thinking of being with him made her feel hot with longing.
She went to her room, stripped her dress off and left it on the floor. Then she crawled beneath the blankets, restless and edgy. Sure he would come to her. Any moment. Any moment.
She lay there in the dark, nothing between her bare skin and the sumptuous comforter she was resting beneath, and that insubstantial underwear selected by Diego himself.
Every time she shifted beneath it, it stimulated her. Made her nipples feel sensitive. Made her breasts feel heavy. And that place between her thighs felt hollow.
She would be ashamed of her own weakness except...
He had said this would be part of the relationship. He had gotten her thinking about it. And now he wasn’t here. It wasn’t fair.
He was supposed to take the mystery out of all of this. He was finally supposed to be the one who...
It was just about sex. Not him.
She was twenty-one years old. It was past time she knew what all the fuss was about.
She flopped around like a discontented fish beneath the blankets for at least an hour. And then, it became abundantly clear he had no intention of coming to her room.
What game was he playing? And what was she supposed to do about it?
Suddenly, she felt hot. She pushed the blankets off her body and curled into a ball when the cold air hit her.
She felt goose bumps break out over her skin, and still, inside she was burning up.
She shoved the blankets down toward the bottom of the bed, pushing her feet beneath them, and finding that uncomfortable as well. She tried the reverse, shoving the covers up, and placing them over the upper half of her body while leaving the lower half exposed. Still, she was restless. Another hour had passed with her shunting the bedding down from one end of her mattress to the other, and sleep still eluded her.
She was well past the point of being jet-lagged. She’d been in Spain for nearly three weeks. It was him. Him.
He was the one who had gotten her to agree to this wretched devil’s bargain. And now he wasn’t even calling in his end of it.
He was keeping her in suspense on purpose. Torturing her.
It was two years of torture. That’s what it was.
She growled and rocketed up out of bed, pacing the length of her bedroom. She could go into the library and read. And that was what she decided on. But after an hour of that and two sentences read, she gave up.
And she found herself walking down the hall, barely conscious of the fact that she was still only wearing that white underwear.
She hadn’t been to his room before, she realized, but somehow, she was walking as if she would find it easily in this maze of rooms. But she sensed somehow that he wouldn’t have placed her too far from him, and she was gratified to find she was correct when she pushed open the door just on the other side of her library door, and found it looked inhabited.
There was a large bed back in the darkness, and she could only just make out the shape of him.
“What exactly are you playing at?” she asked, the veil of darkness provided by the room covering her near nudity and making her feel bold.
“Liliana?”
She felt like a virgin sacrifice standing on the edge of the Dragon’s cave. She could hear him beckoning from the darkness. And she was just stupid enough that she was going right toward it.
“No. It’s your other wife.”
“I wasn’t expecting you. You went to bed hours ago.”
“So did you. And you’re still awake.”
“True.”
“What game are you playing?”
“I’m not playing any game. I’m sleeping. Or rather, I was attempting to.”
“You know what I mean,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I find that I don’t. Perhaps you would care to elaborate?”
“We agreed. We agreed that physically this would be a real marriage. And this is our wedding night... And you...” She huffed out a breath. “Stop torturing me. You have me on edge. Waiting for the moment that you’re going to... Just take it.”
“I told you,” he said, his voice like dark silk, “I have no intention of taking anything from you. I intend for you to give it to me. Enthusiastically. I intend for us to give to each other.”
“I don’t... I don’t understand. You said you wanted sex. And I agreed to give it to you.”
“What sorts of sex have you had, Liliana? Because the fact that you seem to view this as a commodity that you hold, for you to take or give, mystifies me. Sex is meant to be shared between two people.”
Her blood was pounding so hard in her
face, her cheeks throbbed. “I don’t... I... If we’re going to do it, I don’t see why we can’t just do it now.”
She heard the sound of his bedclothes rustling, heard footsteps as he began to walk toward her. “I asked you a question. Is my brother such a selfish lover that your view on sex is that it’s a chore?”
“I’m a virgin,” she said, ignoring the thick shame that wrapped itself around her throat and made it nearly impossible to breathe. She hadn’t meant to announce it like that. She hadn’t meant to announce it at all. It wasn’t his business. It wasn’t anyone’s. She hadn’t wanted to make herself so vulnerable.
But she felt vulnerable. The very fact that she had gone in here to confront him about leaving her alone on their wedding night proved that.
Because it wasn’t the anticipation that had driven her. It was the fact that it had...hurt her feelings.
Good heavens. She was wounded over the fact that her kidnapper seemed to be able to resist her.
He might be crazy, but she wasn’t much better. Clearly.