“Honesty. Bloody, raw, jagged truth.”
Alarm bells rang louder than a tornado siren, blaring in my gut. I knew I should pull away, but with him so close, and his breath hot on my lips, I couldn’t.
I wanted that too. Oh my God, I didn’t know how much I wanted that until he said it.
I had no right.
I was an effigy of dishonesty. Lies never left my lips, but I made damn sure no one got close enough so the truth didn’t either.
His lips went to my neck; then he paused. “Did you change?” I thought for certain I was done for, found out, dead. My heart pounded faster than a jackrabbit, louder than a drum. Then Grayson pulled aside the lace of my high-collared blouse. “What is this? Fuck. I like it. I get harder not seeing all of you.”
He sucked on my neck, hard. So hard I saw stars. I knew he would leave a bruise, and a sick part of me wanted that. I dug my fingers into his side.
This moment didn’t belong to me, but I was going to steal it anyway.
“Tell me something. A secret. Anything. Something no one else knows.”
“Sometimes I watch you,” I whispered. “I know you don’t see me, and you don’t think anyone is watching.”
Brief moments when Grayson Crowne was just Grayson.
Moments where I gave in to the insanity growing inside me.
A pause stretched long enough to be counted by the crash of waves outside. Then a distorted, jagged sound fell from his lips and reverberated against my neck. My knees weakened.
“Tell me more.”
I don’t know what came over me. I wanted to tell him everything, give him everything, be everything for him. It was a darkness, a need I’d never known before.
“I want you to bite me harder.”
The tiny shred of sanity left was screaming at me to shut the fuck up. My escape door kept shrinking with each confession. When this inevitably ended, when the lights came back on, there would be no way out.
But he smiled against my flesh before he bit the skin at my neck, and that was all I could think about. All I cared to think about.
“Fuck,” he groaned. “Where has this side of you been? More,” he demanded.
“You’re my first…first…” The word I struggled to say was kiss, but he fisted the material at my thighs, and my words left me. “I—I can’t do it here. Not like this.”
Not again.
He dropped my dress, hands coming beside my head. “More.”
“Tell me something,” I dared to ask. I’d dreamed of kissing Grayson Crowne…but never had I dared to dream I could ask for admittance into his soul.
Another long, weighted pause, then he whispered, “I’m a virgin too, Lottie.”
Lottie? Was he talking about who I thought he was? Wait—too?
Oh no. He thinks I’m a virgin. But of course he does. You’re my first…
“Wait, that’s not—” Then his lips were on mine again, and I couldn’t think.
The Grayson Crowne was whispering secrets and kissing me, and he’d just confessed he was a virgin to me. What was worse, I was kissing him back. I was kissing him back even after knowing those secrets weren’t for me—these lips weren’t mine.
It made me want them more.
I’d grown up in the basement of this palatial home, and I knew soul-deep the difference between me and him: those who were born with the right to have, and those with the right to want.