My stomach fell out of my body along with my ability to breath. I couldn’t orientate myself, the room twirling around me, because the foundation I had been building with Sinclair had suddenly, crudely, been pulled out from under me.
“What the fuck just happened?” I whispered, just to hear my own voice.
Oddly enough, it helped.
So, I said again, louder so that he could hear me in the bathroom. “What the fuck just happened?”
Sinclair appeared in the doorway and leaned against the frame, his pose deliberately casual as if everything was fine when it so clearly. Was. Not.
“Elle,” he said as if beginning a sentence, but then he didn’t continue.
“Yes? Are you going to explain why you just brushed me off like that?” I asked, hands on my hips in my own power pose.
“We’ve had a long day and I’m jet lagged.”
“Merde, Sin, that is a lie and not even a good one. What is going on?”
He stared at me for a long moment.
It struck me how much he looked like one of those beautifully carved marble statues that I admired so much in the musée d’Orsay; gorgeously constructed but utterly cold because it was not alive.
“Don’t go back to that cold man who treated me like shit in Mexico because he was scared,” I breathed, the flaming anger gone and replaced with the glacial chill of fear.
“I know you aren’t well-versed in relationships, but most couples don’t have sex all the time,” he explained calmly, condescendingly.
“I can’t believe you would say that to me,” I said, pressing my hands to my stomach where I felt the wound that his words had inflicted like a physical agony.
His eyes squeezed shut, woven tightly closed behind his thick russet lashes. I could see the tension in his body and realized how much he hated what he was doing to me. So why was he acting this way?
“Don’t you want to touch me?” I breathed, not in despair this time but with feminine authority.
I walked forward with slow purpose as his eyes snapped open at my tone and found me. Those blazing blues carefully cut across my skin like knives, erotic but dangerous. I could sense the tenuous hold on his restraint.
“I’ll make love to you,” he conceded, but it was enough and we both knew it.
“I want you to take me,” I said, stepping close and up on my toes so that I could drag the edge of my teeth across the sharp angle of his jaw.
His sharp breath gave me confidence.
“Please, sir, I need you to help me.”
I ran a finger between my breasts, watching his eyes follow its path as I dipped into my panty covered mound and emerged with a wet slicked finger. I tried to bring it to his lips but his eyes cut to mine with a warning that hit me like a thunder strike.
Instead, I brought it to my mouth, flicking my tongue out to taste myself. My moan was overtaken by the rumbling growl that emerged from his chest.
“I need you to tell me what to do,” I begged softly. “I need you to teach me how to make myself come.”
A vicious shudder ripped through his body but he held still. The predator in him, the part of himself that he called savage, called out to me from the cage he had locked inside him. I could practically hear the rattle of the bars, the baying howl at the moon. Each muscle and tendon was starkly delineated under his dusky skin as he strained against his primal urge to take and dominant.
Why was he resisting me?
“Sin,” I begged, an edge of desperation to my voice.
He didn’t move but his eyes burned, burned, burned, hot but suppressed like the destructive force trapped under the cap of a volcano.
Locking his eyes to mine, I back away slowly to sit in the old-fashioned armchair in the corner by the scroll desk and shed my underwear. I sat down and hooked my legs over each arm so that my pussy was completely exposed to him.
The muscle in his jaw ticked like the second hand arm of a clock.
I swallowed the minimal discomfort that my prudish former self might have felt and slid two fingers down to my core, opening myself blatantly under his scrutiny. His regard was so intense that his gaze was a physical caress against my slick folds.
“Should I touch myself here, sir?” I asked, dipping one finger, then two just inside.
His head tipped further so that he could really watch but still he didn’t move, didn’t speak. I think we both knew that if he did, he would be done. Mine.
“Or here?” I asked on a gasp as I twirled my index finger over my throbbing clit.
I set up a steady thrum across the sensitive bundle of nervous, licking my lips deliberately as I latched eyes on the erection almost comically straining the front of his pajama pants.