When Villains Rise (Anti-Heroes in Love 2)

Elena didn’t flinch as I appeared in the frame.

Her eyes were pinned on mine in the reflection of the massive, ornate gilt mirror over the sink basin. They were a dense, quilted grey like rolling storm clouds, sparking with crackling lightning that threatened to eviscerate.

Even filled with wrath, Elena was pure beauty.

“Were you going to tell me you were engaged?” she asked in a low, seething voice that slunk toward me like elongating shadows.

I leaned against the door jamb insolently and crossed my arms as I contemplated the curved edge of my knife. “And you? You’ve never spoken with me about Daniel Sinclair.”

There was a sharp sound as she sucked air between her teeth. I watched as the long line of her body coiled tight with controlled rage.

I settled in, excited about the prospect of watching her rage burst free of its cage.

“Daniel isn’t relevant right now.”

“He isn’t?” I faked surprise. “The man you lived with for four years. The one you thought you’d marry and adopt a child with. The same one that you couldn’t get over until you met me?”

“You are such an arrogant bastardo,” she snapped, whirling around to face me with color high in her cheeks. “You think you just magically made everything better?”

“No,” I retorted, pushing off the frame, shutting the door with one hand before stalking across the small room toward her. “Not everything. We still have to work on some things…” I backed her into the sink until she was bent backward over the porcelain, her chest heaving with the strain of her irritation and burgeoning desire. I palmed the skin above her breasts and slid my rough palm up until it collared her neck. The kick of her mad pulse against my thumb made my cock jerk in my pants. “I still have to teach you everything there is to know about pleasing me. With your hands, with your red mouth, your sweet cunt, and your little arse.”

“M-my arse?” she parroted, her eyes as wide as silver dollars.

I laughed huskily as I gathered her hands in one of my own and pinned them behind her back so she was forced to arch against me. “Si, lottatice, your tight little arse. Has anyone ever taken you there?”

“Absolutely not,” she snapped, the flush in her cheeks deepening, spreading down her neck and chest.

I followed the path with my lips and tongue, lapping up the heat of her skin. “I think you’ll like having me there. Do you know why?”

Her breath was a harsh rasp in my ear as I used my free hand to ruck up her skirt. I palmed her silk covered pussy without foreplay. A fierce shudder rocked through her, a shocked exhale blowing in my hair as I pressed a kiss to her thrumming pulse.

She liked it when I was less than civilized, when I didn’t give her a chance to use that big, beautiful brain to overthink every nuance and expectation.

She wasn’t ready to admit she liked it, but soon, she would be.

Soon, I’d have her hot and wet, pliant as warm wax in my hands. She would tell me in detail, in the language of her people she’d once loathed, how much she wanted me inside her, against her, owning her.

For now, I was happy to do that work myself.

“You love it when I worship your body,” I breathed against her ear as I cupped her sex and ground the heel of my hand gently into her clit. “When I use every thing I am and every thing I have to make you come spectacularly for me. Did you know, cuore mia, there is nothing more beautiful to me than the sight of you breaking apart with pleasure?”

Her only response was a throaty little purr as I sucked on the hickey I’d left on her neck earlier.

“No woman before you matters to me. They are insignificante. They are dust,” I growled as I released her hands and turned her to face the mirror once more.

Together, we studied my effect on her body, the heavy-lidded eyes, the parted lips, the flush that glistened beneath her pale gold skin. I reached around her body to cup her throat in my palm. It was a collar as much as any leather or diamonds could be, one of my own flesh and blood that was infinitely more intimate.

“Just as any man before me for you was nothing,” I continued, my eyes pinned on her in the mirror. Her face was swathed in the dim light from the Moreno glass fixture above the frame, while mine was cast entirely in shadow. “I’ve told you, Elena, whatever you and I are made of, it is the same. No one exists for me, but you. No one makes you come alive, but me.”

“Yes,” she admitted, reaching back to cup my erection through my pants. She squeezed hard, her nails pin pricks of pain around my shaft. “No one for you but me.”