Читать книгу My Bought Virgin Wife - CAITLIN CREWS - Страница 10

HE WAS KISSING ME.

The monster was kissing me.

And I hardly knew what to do.

His mouth was a bruising thing, powerful and hard. It should have hurt, surely. I should have wanted nothing more than to get away from all that intensity. I should have tried. But instead, I found myself pushing up on my toes and leaning toward him...

As if I wanted more.

He cradled the back of my head in one hand and moved his lips over mine.

And I wanted. I wanted...everything.

I had dreamed of kisses half my life. I had longed for a moment like this. A punishing kiss, perhaps. Or something sweet and filled with wonder. Any kind of kiss at all, if I was honest.

But nothing could have prepared me for Javier Dos Santos.

Nothing could have prepared me for this.

I felt his tongue against the seam of my lips, and couldn’t help myself from opening up and giving him entry. And then I thought I would give him anything.

And even though I understood, on some distant level, what he was doing to me—that his tongue was testing mine, dancing here, then retreating—all I could feel was the heat. The heat. Something greedy and wild and impossibly hot, thrilling to life inside me. What I had called dread had melted into something else entirely, something molten. It wound around and around inside my chest, knotted up in my belly, and dripped like honey even lower.

And still he kissed me.

His arms were a marvel. Heavy and hard, they wrapped around me, making me feel things I could hardly understand. Small, yet safe. Entirely surrounded, yet sweet, somehow.

Still Javier’s mouth moved on mine. He bent me backward, over one strong arm. His heavy chest, all steel planes and granite, pressed hard against mine, until I felt my breasts seem to swell in response.

It was like a fever.

The ache was everywhere, prickling and hot, but I knew—somehow I knew—I wasn’t ill.

He bent me back even farther and there was a glory in it. I felt weightless, too caught up in all that fire and honey to worry whether or not my feet still touched the ground.

And then I felt his fingers as they found their way beneath the hem of my dress, a scandalous caress that made my heart stutter. Yet he didn’t stop. He tracked that same sweet flame along the length of my thigh, climbing ever higher.

My brain shorted out. The world went white-hot, then red-hot, then it became nothing at all but need.

His hand was a wonder. Not soft and manicured, like the hands of the very few men whose hands I’d shaken at some point or other, but hard and calloused. Big, and brutally masculine.

He traced some kind of pattern into my skin, and then laughed against my mouth when I shuddered in response.

His taste was like wine. It washed through me in the same way, leaving me flushed, giddy.

And then his fingers toyed with the edge of my panties, until I was sure I stopped breathing.

Not that I cared when he angled his head, taking the kiss deeper. Hotter.

While at the same time, his fingers moved with bold certainty to find my soft heat.

And then, to my wonder and shame, he began to stroke me, there below.

His tongue was in my mouth. His fingers were deep between my legs, and I couldn’t remember why I had ever thought this man was a monster. Or maybe I thought he was a far greater monster than I’d ever imagined.

Either way, I surrendered. And my surrender felt like strength.

It was like some kind of dance. Parry, then retreat. His mouth and his hand, one and then the other, or both at once.

Before I knew it, that fever in me was spreading. I shook, everywhere. I could feel my own body grow stiff in his arms and I felt myself edging ever closer to crisis.

I would have pushed him away if I could. If I could make my hands do anything but grip the front of his shirt as I shook and stiffened and spun further and further off into that blazing need.

I lost myself somewhere between Javier’s hot, hard mouth and his pitiless hand between my legs. I lost myself, and I followed that shaking, and I hardly understood why I was making those greedy, shameful noises in the back of my throat—

“Come apart for me, Imogen,” he growled against my mouth, as if he owned even this. “Now.”

And there was nothing in me but heat and surrender.

I exploded on cue.

And I was only dimly aware of it when Javier set me away from him. He settled me on the lip of the table behind us, ran his hands down my arms as if he was reminding me of the limits of my own body, and even smoothed the skirt of my dress back into place.

I was tempted to find it all sweet, however strange a word that seemed when applied to a man so widely regarded as a monster. A man I still thought of in those terms. But there was a tumult inside of me.

My head spun and everything inside me followed suit. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t make sense of what had happened.

And when my breathing finally slowed enough that I could think beyond it, Javier was waiting there. He stood in the same position he’d been standing before, his hands thrust into the pockets of the trousers I knew at a glance had been crafted by hand in an atelier in a place like Milan or Paris.

His might seemed more overwhelming now. I had a vague memory of the stable boy’s dreamy blue eyes, but they seemed so insubstantial next to Javier’s relentless masculinity. I felt it like a storm. It buffeted me, battering my skin, until I felt the electricity of it—of him—as if he had left some part of himself inside me.

I told myself I hated him for it.

“You look upset, mi reina,” Javier murmured. I understood the words he used—Spanish for my queen—but stiffened at the dark current of mockery in it. “Surely not. I am certain someone must have prepared you for what goes on between a man and a woman no matter how hard your father has worked to keep you locked up in a tower.”

I was not one of the sacrificial maidens ransomed out of this place in centuries past, despite appearances. I might have lived a sheltered life, but that life came with abundant internet access.

Still, I followed an urge inside of me, a dark insistence I didn’t have it in me to resist.

“I prepared in the usual way,” I told him. “Locked towers might work in fairy tales. They are harder to manage in real life, I think.”

And when his dark gaze turned to fire and burned where it touched me, I only held it. And practiced that half smile I had seen on my sister’s face earlier.

“I will assume you mean that your preparation for marriage took place under the careful tutelage of disinterested nuns as they discussed biology.”

I channeled Celeste. “Assume what you like.”

Right there, before my eyes, Javier...changed. I had thought he was stone before, but he became something harder. Flint and granite, straight through.

I couldn’t tell if the pulse that pounded in me then—in my wrists and my ears, my breasts and between my legs—was fear or something else. Something far more dangerous.

All I knew was that I wanted whatever Celeste had appeared to have on my settee. I wanted that confidence. I even wanted her smugness.

Because it seemed to me that was some measure of power.

I didn’t want to be what they called me. The lesser Fitzalan sister. The unfortunate one. Not here. Not now.

I didn’t want this man—who had broken me wide-open in ways I didn’t know how to explain without, as far as I could tell, so much as breaking a sweat—to know how inexperienced I was. I didn’t want to give him my innocence, particularly if he thought it was his by right.

Just once, I thought defiantly, I wanted to feel sophisticated.

Just once, I wanted to be the sleek one, the graceful one.

I wasn’t sure I could fake my sister’s effortlessness. But I knew that my smirk was getting to him. I could see it in all that stone and metal that made his face so harsh.

“All the better,” Javier growled at me, though he didn’t look anything like pleased. “You should know that I am a man of a great many needs, Imogen. That I will not have to tutor you how best to meet them can only be a boon.”

I didn’t believe him. I didn’t know what it was that whispered to me that he minded a great deal more than he was saying, but I knew it all the same.

Or you want to know it, something whispered in me, leaving marks. You want to affect him, somehow, after he took your breath away like this.

I didn’t want to think such things. I found myself frowning at him instead.

“Careful,” Javier said with a soft menace that made me feel molten and shivery all over again. “If you do not want an example of the sort of appetites I mean, here and now, I’d suggest you go back wherever you came from. There is a wedding in the morning. And an entire marriage before us in which, I promise you, you will have ample time to learn what it is I want and expect. In bed and out.”

And then I felt twisted. As if there was something wrong deep within me. Because the fact he was dismissing me stung, when I knew I should have been grateful for the reprieve. I flushed again, but this time it felt more like poison than that same impossible, irresistible heat.

I was only pretending to be like Celeste—and the look on Javier’s harsh face suggested that I wasn’t doing a particularly good job. I was certain that if he touched me again, I would never be able to keep it up.

And no matter that there was a part of me that shimmered with longing. That wanted nothing more than to feel his hands on me again. And more.

So much more.

I knew I had to take the escape hatch he had offered me—or lose myself even further.

Possibly even lose myself for good.

I slid off the table to find my feet, and fought to keep my expression from betraying how tender I felt where his hand had been between my legs. It felt as if my panties were somehow too tight, as if I was swollen, and I hardly knew how to walk on my own.

Yet I did. I managed it.

I skirted around him as if he was on fire, convinced that I could feel that blistering heat of his from feet away. Convinced that he had branded me, somehow. And entirely too aware of his glittering, arrogant gaze.

But I had a long night ahead of me to fret over such things.

I only understood that I expected him to reach out and take hold of me again when he didn’t. And when I made it to the spiral stair and ran up it as fast as I could on my rubbery legs, the clatter of my heart inside my chest was so loud I was surprised he didn’t hear it and comment on it from below.

I made my way along the second-floor gallery, aware of his gaze on me like a heavy weight—or some kind of chain binding me to him already—but I didn’t turn back. I didn’t dare look back.

Maybe there was a part of me that feared if I did, I might go to him again. That I would sink into that fire of his and burn alive, until there was nothing left of me but ashes.

When I slipped back beneath the tapestry and into the servants’ walkway, there was no relief. It was like I carried Javier with me, in all the places he had touched me and, worse by far, all the places I only wished he had.

It was as if I was already half-consumed by that fire of his I both feared and longed for.

But I would die before I let him know that he had taught me more in those wild, hot moments than I had learned in a lifetime.

The reality was, I thought about what a wedding night with this man might entail and I...thought I might die, full stop.

I knew that was melodramatic, but I indulged in it anyway as I made my way through the shadowy recesses of my father’s house. Why had I gone to Javier in the first place? Why had I been so foolish? What had I imagined might happen? I wanted to sink into a bath and wash it all away, let the water soothe me and hide me. I simply wanted to be back in my rooms again, safe and protected.

Because a deep, feminine wisdom I hadn’t known resided there inside me whispered these final hours before my wedding might be the last bit of safety I would know.

I knew too much now, and none of it things I’d wanted to learn. I had found a magic and a fire, yes. But now I knew how easily I surrendered. I knew how my body betrayed me.

I knew, worst of all, that I wanted things I was terribly afraid only Javier Dos Santos could give me.

And I wasn’t paying sufficient attention when I slipped out from the servants’ hall. I was usually far more careful. I usually listened for a good few minutes, then used the carefully placed eyeholes to be certain that no one was in sight before I slipped back into the house’s main corridors.

But Javier had done something to me. He had used my own body against me, as if he knew what it could do better than I did. He had made me feel as if I belonged to him instead of to myself. Even with all this distance between us, clear on the other side of the rambling old manor house, I could feel his hands on me. Those powerful arms closed around me. His harsh, cruel mouth while it mastered mine.

That was the only excuse I could think of when I stepped out and found myself face-to-face with my father.

For a long, terrible moment, there was nothing but silence between us and the far-off sound of rain against the roof.

Dermot Fitzalan was neither tall nor particularly physically imposing, but he made up for both with the scorn he held for literally every person alive who was not him.

To say nothing of the extra helping he kept in reserve for me.

“Pray tell me that I have taken leave of my senses.” His voice was so cold it made the ancient stone house feel balmy in comparison. I felt goose bumps prickle to life down my arms. “I beg you, Imogen—tell me that I did not witness an heiress to the Fitzalan fortune emerge from the servants’ quarters like an inept housemaid I would happily dismiss on the spot.”

I had imagined myself brave, before. When I had taken off on a whim and found the man my father had chosen for me. When I had tangled with a monster and walked away—changed, perhaps, but whole.

But I realized as I stood there, the focus of my father’s withering scorn as I so often was, that when it counted I wasn’t the least bit brave at all.

“I thought I heard a noise,” I lied, desperately. “I only ducked my head in to see what it was.”

“I beg your pardon.” My father looked at me the way he always did, as if the sight of me was vaguely repulsive. “Why should a lady of this house, a daughter of the Fitzalan line, feel it is incumbent upon her to investigate strange noises? Are you unable to ring for assistance?”

“Father—”

He lifted a hand. That was all.

But that was all that was needed. It silenced me as surely as if he’d wrapped that hand around my throat and squeezed. The hard light in his dark gaze suggested it was not outside the realm of possibility.

“You are an enduring disappointment to me, Imogen.” His voice was cold. Detached. And I already knew this to be so. There was no reason it should have felt like an unexpected slap when he took every opportunity to remind me how often and comprehensively I let him down. And yet my cheeks stung red as if he’d actually struck me. “I do not understand this...willfulness.”

He meant my hair. He meant those curls that had never obeyed anyone. Not him and not me, certainly. Not the relentless nuns, not my old governesses, not the poor maids he hired to attack me with their formulas and their straight irons to no avail.

“You might almost be pretty, if distressingly rough around the edges, were it not for that mess you insist on flaunting.”

My father glared at my curls with such ferocity that I was almost surprised he didn’t reach out and try to tear them off with his hand.

“I can’t help my hair, Father,” I dared to say in a low voice.

It was a mistake.

That ferocious glare left my hair and settled on me. Hard.

“Let me make certain you are aware of how I expect this weekend to go,” he said, his voice lowering in that way of his that made my stomach drop. “In less than twenty-four hours you will be another man’s problem. He will be forced to handle these pointless rebellions of yours, and I wish him good luck. But you will exit this house, and my protection, as befits a Fitzalan.”

I didn’t need to know what, specifically, he meant by that. What I knew about my father was that whenever he began to rant on about the things that befit a member of this family, it always ended badly for me.

Still, I wasn’t the same girl who had foolishly wandered off in search of my husband-to-be. I wasn’t the silly creature who had sat on my own settee staring out at the rain and dreaming of a stable boy. She felt far away to me now, a dream I had once had.

Because Javier Dos Santos had branded me as surely as if he’d pressed hot iron against my skin, and I could still feel the shock of it. The burn.

“What do you suggest I do?” I asked, with the sort of spirit I knew my father would find offensive. I couldn’t seem to help myself. “Shave it all off?”

My father bared his teeth and I shrank back, but it was no use. My back came up hard against the wall. There was nowhere for me to go.

And in any event, it was worse if I ran.

“I suspect you are well aware that I wish no such thing, Imogen.” If possible, my father’s voice dripped with further disdain. “I take it you imagine that your marriage will provide you with some measure of freedom. Perhaps you view it as an escape. If you know what is good for you, girl, you will readjust that attitude before tomorrow morning. Your new husband might not be of the blood, but I assure you, he expects total and complete obedience in all things.”

“I never said—” I began.

My father actually smiled. It was chilling. “In fact, Dos Santos is nothing but a common, rutting creature who handles any and all conflict with the deftness you might expect from an uncivilized beast. I shudder to think how he will choose to handle these displays of yours.”