Then I remembered the way he’d looked at her up at the gala, like she’d killed his dreams.
And the way she’d clung to him, like she knew and didn’t care.
“Yes,” a dark, masculine voice whispered behind me, and I twisted around to take him in. Célian stood at the elevator’s door, a shoulder leaning against the frame, playing with the electronic card between his fingers. “That’s why we do what we do. Why we can’t stop this.”
He took confident steps into the room, each of them making my heart swell a little more, until there was a monster in my chest, hungry for his touch. The look on his face alone engorged my clit. I squeezed my thighs together, my underwear damp between them.
“Whose idea was this room?”
“Mine.”
“Why?”
“Because I like beautiful, lifeless things.” His finger hovered over my face, making minimal contact with a lock of my hair and moving it behind my ear. “They can’t talk back. They can’t screw you over. They can’t fuck your future.”
“Is this where you take all your one-night stands?”
His slight smirk made my chest hurt.
“If you were a one-night stand, you wouldn’t be standing here. And no, I don’t make a habit of fucking women against these replicas. They’re worth over 300k apiece, and hard to come by. Pick a favorite,” he ordered—not asked—gesturing to the vast room.
I resumed my stroll among the marble statues, feeling his eyes burning a hole in my back, seeing through my dress and skin and bones, devouring me from the inside. I studied every sculpture carefully, like there was a wrong and right answer, before finally gesturing at David.
I turned around to face Célian.
He tsked, running his callused fingers over his jawline. “You can do better.”
“What’s more beautiful than Michelangelo’s David?” I challenged.
“Not many things. Which makes it very cliché. The first nude statue made in the Renaissance and the one sculpture every eejit knows. The Beatles aren’t your favorite band, right, Jude?”
“No,” I scoffed. “Too mainstream. Actually…” I licked my lips, snorting out a laugh. It was a ridiculous thing to say, but I didn’t mind showing Célian my weirdness. For all the bad things he was, he never judged me. “I always thought David’s penis was disproportionately small. And, um…soft.”
Yep. That just came out of my mouth.
“The original one is attached to a seventeen-foot-tall sculpture. Pretty sure you still couldn’t fit it in your smart mouth. Think harder, Humphry.”
I resumed my walk around the room. He was right. I needed to push myself harder, to pay attention and not just go with the flow. Wasn’t that what a good newsperson did? I stopped at a statue of a man sitting on a throne made of a beast standing on all fours. He was naked, sheathed by a toga over his privates, staring up to the sky. He looked like a gladiator, wounded and taut and muscled. I didn’t know this piece, but it spoke to me.
He was obviously in pain, yet his face was fierce with defiance.
He was completely unknown to me, yet his battle so familiar.
“The Warrior.” Célian spoke into my ear, and I shuddered with pleasure. I felt his body close to mine, yet he didn’t touch me. “By an anonymous artist. Special shipment from Italy. A spur of the moment purchase, but I liked the pain in his eyes. So very intimate, don’t you think?”
Of course I did. Happiness was something you were eager to share. It was pain you wanted to keep private.
“Why did I have to choose?” I asked, still staring at the statue.
“There’s a camera in the right-hand corner of this room, just behind my back. I could take you to the presidential suite and fuck you to oblivion and back, but I’d much rather do it somewhere I can send the message home to Mathias.”
“And the message is?” I turned around to face him.
“That you’re mine.”
“Yours I am not.” That was a lie I wished I could believe, about a man I wished I could forget. My body responded to him in a way I’d never experienced before.
I belonged to him, and he belonged to someone else. What did that make me?
The circumstances were pure semantics. Sins wrapped in sugar so I could swallow them more easily.
Célian cupped my cheek. “Yes,” he whispered. “You are. You’re so far gone you can’t even see me sharing a drink with my cousin without losing your shit.”
“You’re someone else’s,” I said.
He shook his head. “No one’s.”
“And Lily…?”
“Haven’t touched her in over a year.”
His words cut the rope of anxiety wrapped around my throat, and I felt like I could breathe again.
“Not going to, either. I have no plans of fucking anyone but you, but I would stay away from Lily even if she was the last proud owner of a pussy on planet Earth. I don’t do cheaters, and she is one.”