Complicate (Deliver 9)

And he didn’t come.

Today, when the men dragged him from the cell, she had him arranged on the floor, arms stretched above him, his gorgeous physique on full display.

After he’d lost so much weight in the beginning, she started feeding him high-calorie, high-protein meals. Then there was the rock hauling, the workouts in his cell, and the sex—all the thrusting and grunting and flexing. He’d regained his strength and then some.

With his back to the floor and the rise and dips of his musculature so round and defined, there were only a few points of contact where his body touched the concrete.

No man should have that many curves. God help her, she’d traced every sinuous muscle with her own hands and knew how outrageously hard and masculine he was, as if each sinew and tendon had been carved with an artist’s chisel and stacked together to form a dangerously arousing masterpiece.

The granite bricks of his ass drew his lower spine into a sexy arch, leaving a shadowed tunnel beneath. The circumference of his biceps exceeded that of her thighs, and his shoulder blades, sculpted like marble wings, supported the weight of his upper body on the floor.

His powerful legs—wide at the calves and thighs—were in remarkable proportion to the pillar of his heavy, thick cock. Striae of muscle flanked his eight-pack abdomen, the terrain of his torso like a rippling sheet of metal, hard and flat enough to bounce quarters.

Zero-percent body fat. Not an inch of softness anywhere. Utter perfection through and through.

She might’ve felt like a despicable pervert, ogling him the way she did. But his gaze, as sharp as a freshly honed blade, violated her just as rudely.

His eyes especially enjoyed the tops of her breasts as they expanded and contracted with her breath. She wore a dress he’d seen before—the black one with red cherries. Yet he stared at it as if it were the first time, feasting upon every stitch and lingering where hemlines met skin until she felt stripped and just as naked as him.

He liked what he saw, if his engorged cock were anything to go by. He never had trouble getting hard.

Each time she came to him, he didn’t fight against the rope or make demands. He didn’t gnash his teeth or shout at her.

In fact, he hadn’t spoken to her at all today.

He never said a word to the guards. Other than the fistfight three days ago, he tolerated their taunting, shoving, kicking. His endurance of pain and hardship without any display of feeling didn’t seem human.

How could a man sit in a pitch-black cell, shit in a bucket, and never voice a single protest? How could he listen to the same song on repeat for over a month and never complain? He didn’t grumble or whine or express any sign of dissatisfaction.

She’d offered him better accommodations, better food, a warm bed, sex with multiple women, anything in exchange for the location of the hard drive.

Anything but his freedom. She couldn’t give him that, and he knew it.

Any other man would’ve surrendered by now. No one had this much stoicism. Even she was starting to lose her nerve.

So what was his deal? He had the patient self-control of a robot, like an upgraded model of the Terminator.

Except when he looked at her, when it was just the two of them, she saw a human man beneath the steel. A confident, lusty, hotblooded man with so much heat in his eyes she caught fire.

Like now.

He stared at her like he wanted to eat her alive. Like she was the only thing that existed. But she wasn’t. He loved the dancer.

Maybe that was how he maintained such ironclad discipline over his orgasms. His heart wasn’t in this. Of course, it wasn’t. Nothing they did together was consensual.

Even if it was consensual, would it have changed anything? The man had been celibate for seven years because no one was good enough for him. No one but Danni Savoy.

It only made Lydia want him more, and that was fucking dangerous.

She lowered onto the floor beside him and slid her palm beneath the rope across his chest, soaking in the warmth of his skin. He was so well-built, his pectorals smooth and hairless, the crevice between them deep and inviting. She wanted him to touch her, to be free with her body as she was with his. But if she untied him, he would hurt her. Possibly kill her. She’d given him no choice but to hate her.

“Do you want to end this today?” she asked. “All I need is a name.”

One brow, higher than the other, twitched with the force of his stare.

With a sigh, she focused her attention on bathing him. But as her fingers and palms delighted in his texture, firm shape, wiry beard, soft hair, all she wanted of his hands was that they would touch her with the same burning passion as his gaze.