The Art of Marrying Your Enemy (The Richmond Brothers #2)

21. Daisy

21

DAISY

I t took me a second to register Aaron standing in the doorway to the bedroom.

Shirtless.

As in wearing nothing on his upper body.

When he was a kid, he always wore swim shirts and dark glasses on the beach, like the sun was physically painful.

Now that he was an adult, in the rare event that he was in the Hamptons with his family, it wasn’t like he was lounging around in swim trunks. He just wore a slightly more casual version of his usual suit. Sure, I’d stared, but my imagination was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

Now?

In the half-light, with his chest rising and falling, those washboard abs, the muscled torso, the broad shoulders that I wanted to rake my nails over?

Let’s just say if fourteen-year-old me were here, she’d keel over dead.

“Why,” the deep voice growled, “is there a fucking TV in here?”

“You said I could buy whatever I wanted.”

“You attached it to my wall. This isn’t your fucking house.”

“I’m your wife. So yes it is.”

“Not by my choice, especially if you’re going to buy a goddamn TV .”

Without the suit giving him the veneer of civility, he looked insane, hair dark over his forehead, a slash of an ancient white scar across his chest.

Not that I was going to roll over for him.

“Guess what, Aaron? Normal people have TVs. You’re a control freak, and you’re self-absorbed and you—”

In a sudden move, he wrenched the huge TV off the wall where I’d had it set up, making sparks fly as the electrical cords were torn out of the back panel.

I screamed, clapping my hands over my ears as he threw the TV through the window, glass spraying everywhere. Then I screamed again when the TV crashed to the slate flagstones below.

“Don’t ever bring that in here again,” he roared, the muscles on his huge chest and shoulders bunching up.

“You could have just used your words,” I yelled at him from the bed. “You could have just said, ‘I prefer not to have a TV in the bedroom,’ you know, like a normal person.”

His eyes closed tightly then reopened.

“You don’t live here. I shouldn’t have to tell you not to make modifications to my home.”

“Well, now who’s the spoiled princess?” I shot at him as I grabbed my cat, my Kindle, and my food.

“It’s my house. I can destroy it if I want to,” he bellowed.

It was like the fights we had had in school or during a particularly rough day at the coffee cart.

“You’re making extra work for people,” I shot over my shoulder as I raced out of the bedroom.

Aaron was two steps behind me, trailing me down the dark hallway with the flickering gas lights.

“Throwing a tantrum and expecting other people to clean up your mess,” I said. “Gee, I wonder where he learned that behavior from.”

“Fuck you.” The breath rushed out of me as he slammed me into a wall. The Styrofoam container creaked against me as he leaned in, crushing it to me.

“You want to find out what else I learned down there, Princess?” he sneered, a tempest in his dark eyes. “Hmm?”

I tried to turn my head away from him, but he followed me, his knee digging between my legs.

“Isn’t that what this is has always been, some sick fantasy of yours? Your life too safe, Princess? You want me to drag you by the hair, throw you on the floor, and fuck you ’til you scream.”

I could never resist baiting him, even if it was to my own detriment.

“I bet you don’t have the balls to do it,” I spat. “None of the women you go out with want a second date. Guess all the billions in the word can’t make up for bad sex.”

His fist slammed into the wall next to my head, cracking the plaster.

“You keep pushing me, you keep fucking with me?” His breath was ragged. “You’re gonna be sorry.”