The Ravishing

A stunned shiver coursed through me. A rush from the way he wrapped his left arm tight around my chest, unwittingly squeezing my nipples and sending a shock of pleasure into my breasts. Heady sensations caused me to falter, and I leaned back into him.

Dad had been so close to catching us and rescuing me. My heartbeat thrummed faster, as though me slowing down in here just made it worse.

The waft of Cassius’s cologne caused me to waver, riding the pleasurable feeling between my thighs.

It didn’t make any sense—outside this door was probably the man who raised me, the man who called me daughter, yet in here, it felt more real.

This man was more alluring than anything or anyone I’d ever experienced.

The thought made me wobble on my feet. Reaching behind me for balance, I clutched Cassius’s thigh, digging my fingernails into hard muscle, feeling the shifting tension in his leg.

In my lower back, his stiffness nudged me, causing my breath to hitch, and a fantasy I was in no place to want, played out in my head.

Clothes off. Skin to skin. Our naked flesh pressed together.

“This isn’t hiding.” His voice broke through my desires. Like a bucket of cold water being dumped on my head. “It’s a taunt. Delivered straight to your father, and we both know he’s too much of a pussy to rescue you.”

My tongue swept over his hand to rebel against him, to silence anything more he would say. I felt the shift of him behind me as he eased his grip and used the moment to spin me around to face him.

His dark expression met mine. Searching his face, I tried to speak, but I couldn’t. I was confused. Hot and needy.

What did it mean that I didn’t call for help.

I could scream.

I should scream, but that undeterminable look in his eyes stopped me. An unfathomable moment that stole my breath away and weaved doubt in my mind, spun what was happening between us into a complex web.

Cassius had shared that story of his mother like it was nothing—yet it was clearly everything, a clue to why he’d stolen me away.

He pinched my jaw and brought his lips toward mine, and I could have sworn he was going to kiss me. His mouth was so close that the scent of the champagne on his breath was on my lips. My body came alive again as sparks of white-hot heat made me weaken, causing me to shudder with want.

“Obey me,” he said, his tone gruff.

His dominance snapped through this thread of desire like a sharp object.

I clutched his forearm. “That’s why you kept your eyes on your watch.”

His smirk was as cruel as it was inviting. “Let’s go home.”

He peeked out and checked that the way was clear. As we scurried along toward the rear of the hotel, it crossed my mind that no one else was searching for us. There weren’t swarms of people who should have been alerted to the fact I’d been observed literally having dinner with my captor.

As we rushed out into the heated night air and moved quickly toward his SUV, those words exchanged with the valet at the beginning of the evening made sense. He’d planned all of this, including escaping out the back. The valet had parked his car a few feet from the rear door.

Back in Cassius’s SUV, I brought up my legs and hugged them, angry with myself for not trying harder to escape.

Though as the car pulled away from the hotel, I had to question if I really wanted to be found.

It was impossible to pretend what had just threaded itself between us in the closet hadn’t happened. A vivid connection. The intensity of two people needing the other to survive while hidden away together for those strained seconds.

Me protecting him from my father, because that’s what it had felt like—because surely Dad would have killed him on sight. And perhaps Cassius was guarding me against something unknown, something sinister. Our dinner conversation revolved in my mind with all its perilous undertones.

As he navigated his SUV out of the city, we left behind the bright lights of the business district until all that was left was moonlight guiding us and the fluorescent glow of headlights ahead.

I couldn’t look Cassius in the eye. Couldn’t have him see this doubt and confusion. Regret crashed against what I should have done. I should have tried to get away from him. But that delay, that split-second decision having entrapped me all over again because I’d not called out for my father. In that moment, I’d chosen to stay with him, with Cassius, the man who drove us back toward his home in silence.

The man who’d revealed the darkest part of himself tonight. Delving deeper would be just as treacherous.

It was better we never talked of it ever again.