Chapter 24 Conquer
Chapter Twenty-Four
Conquer
His mouth crushed hers with bruising intensity, teeth catching her lower lip, tongue invading without permission. One hand fisted in her hair, angling her head where he wanted it. The other pressed flat against the mattress beside her skull, caging her beneath the weight of his body.
Daisy’s heart slammed against her ribs. He didn’t kiss like a lover. He kissed like a conqueror.
This was nothing like the kisses she’d read about, nothing like the fumbling encounters when she was a teen. This was consumption. Devastation. A man trying to climb inside her skin and claim every inch of her.
His hips ground against hers, the rough fabric of his trousers abrading her bare thighs.
The hard length of his erection pressed into her belly through layers of wool and cotton, hot even through the barrier.
She gasped at the contact and he swallowed the sound, his tongue sweeping deeper, stroking hers with a rhythm that promised darker things.
Too fast. Too much.
She turned her head, breaking the seal of their mouths, and his lips immediately found her throat, his teeth scraping the tender skin below her jaw, his breath escaping in ragged gusts against her pulse.
“Jack, wait.” The strangled plea was barely audible, but he stilled.
For three heartbeats, neither of them moved.
His chest heaved against her bare breasts, the fine cotton of his shirt rasping her sensitive nipples. His hand remained tangled in her hair, fingers trembling against her scalp.
Then he released her.
The loss landed like a physical blow, cold air rushing into the space where his warmth had been. He shoved off the bed, body rigid, face a mask of controlled anguish, jaw clenched so tight muscles jumped beneath his skin.
“I’m sorry,” he choked, looking away. “I didn’t mean to…” He raked a hand through his hair and paced, chest heaving, hands balled into fists at his sides. The collar of his dress shirt was open and askew.
A man undone.
His eyes held the wild, hunted look of an animal caught between fight and flight.
As if he expected her to scream. To run.
To look at him the way people must have looked at him before, when the monster beneath the mask slipped free.
But she’d witnessed enough of his tenderness now to somehow counter the aggressive sides he so adamantly tried to hide.
She sat up slowly, acutely aware of her nakedness and the ridiculous black socks pooling at her ankles. The fire crackled in the hearth, painting her scratches in unforgiving light, then graceful shadows.
She should cover herself. Reach for a pillow, a blanket, anything to shield her body’s response to him. She still felt him in the heat of her cheeks and the swollen tingle of her lips.
“Jack?” His name fell softly between them. A question and an offering, but he flinched as if she’d struck him, further proving something was wrong.
He struggled for composure, fists clenching and unclenching at his sides. He silently muttered, as if berating himself.
“Jack, look at me.”
When he shook his head, a look of pained dismay twisting his otherwise beautiful face, understanding bloomed slow and terrible in her chest.
He was alone up here. Not down with the other hunters, prowling the grounds, taking their fill of willing flesh. He’d been watching from a distance all night. Observing. Judging. But never participating.
Why?
There was something wounded beneath his aggression. Something longing that he seemed only able to express through violence, as if tenderness were a language he’d never been taught.
Several times tonight, she caught him straining toward softness, only to retreat the moment he got too close.
“Jack,” she said again, softer this time, not knowing the full question pressing in her mind.
His breath caught. His grey eyes, storm-dark and fathomless, locked with hers across the firelit distance.
“I’m trying to understand what you want.”
“I don’t—” He stopped. Swallowed. Looked at her like a lost boy trapped in a man’s body. “I wish…I knew.”
“Try. Maybe if you talk to me…”
He stilled, every line of his body rigid with tension. Silence stretched between them, filled only by the pop and hiss of burning logs.
“I…” His voice emerged so quiet she had to strain to hear. “What if I want to touch you?”
The question hung in the air like smoke. Not a demand. Not a command. A query—almost a plea—from a man who clearly wasn’t accustomed to asking for anything.
Daisy’s heart clenched.
She thought of the scars she’d glimpsed in the bathroom mirror. The topography of destruction mapped across his back, raised ridges and silver furrows that would have taken years to amass. She thought of the way he’d flinched when she touched him, the haunted shadows that lived behind his eyes.
She should say no. Should demand he take her back to a world where damaged billionaires didn’t prey on women like her. She remembered, distantly, that the safe word was still hers to use.
Timber. She only needed to whisper it, and this would end.
She swallowed as he took a step closer, then stopped, as if her response held the power to determine everything that happened next.
“Never mind.”
“No…” Her brow pinched. “I just… I’m not very…”
“I know.” He glanced at what was left of the shredded files on the floor.
He saw her. Not just her picture, but her expression in the photo.
What did he see now? Fear? Curiosity? A woman on the brink of reckless ruin? “You won’t hurt me,” she said, unclear how she knew that when he obviously was capable of violence.
“No,” he agreed. “Never on purpose.”
She studied him for a long moment. “You want to touch me?”
The breath left him in a rush. He held her stare, then gave a subtle nod.
She scooted back, signaling that he had her permission.
He crossed the distance in two strides, but when he reached the bed, he froze.
He didn’t pounce. Didn’t crush her beneath him as he had a moment ago in an excited frenzy of want and claim.
He kneeled on the mattress, subtle, tentative, then paused, looking down. He took off his fine leather shoes and knelt slowly.
As he recalibrated from unhinged to calculated, Daisy felt his power shift. Control, so tight and absolute, it was as if he’d completely sent his passion away.
“How do you do that?” she asked, self-consciously arranging her body by the pillows.
“Do what?”
“Disappear in plain sight.”
He glanced down for a split second as a debate played across his eyes, then he looked at her, and all she could see was his sincerity. “It’s something I learned to do when I was very young.”
She couldn’t picture him young. He was too intimidating, too powerful, too mysterious, and damaged and beautiful all the same.
Her gaze dropped to his shirt. “I’m underdressed.”
“You’re perfect.” His words, sudden and startling, knocked something loose in her.
Daisy searched his face for any sign of mockery, but found none. She wasn’t perfect. Too thin, too pale, too tattered.
She took in his thick, chestnut hair and olive skin.
No one would guess the wreckage he hid. His charm and handsome face made it impossible to see him as flawed on first glance.
Those dove-grey eyes that could turn stormy and intense had a way of disarming a person and making them feel like the most important person in the world.
He rescued her twice tonight. Defended her honor until his hands bled. He was dangerous. An unsolvable puzzle that others could spend lifetimes trying to solve. Possibly the second cousin of Satan himself. But God help her, she was drawn to him.
“I’m nervous,” she confessed.
“Don’t be,” he said quickly. “What I mean is…in life…things happen. Sad things, happy things, big things, little things… It’s all just a collection of experiences we take with us in the end.
If all this moment ever is, is a chance for me to look at you like this, it will stay with me for the rest of my life. ”
Her gaze dropped, not in submission or shame, but because his words were the prettiest anyone had ever said to her. She never realized how easy it was to desire someone and fear them at the same time.
Lifting her lashes, she met his stare with promise. Not confidence. Not recklessness. But commitment to see this moment through. At least then, she might have one memory of this night worth holding onto.
Daisy wrung her hands nervously. “How do you want me?”
His gaze traveled her body with the reverent focus of a man studying scripture. “Natural. Just as you are.”
She didn’t know what that meant. “Should I lie back—”
He reached for her slowly, cutting off her nervous questions. His finger gently traced her lush lips, his touch feather-light as he studied her closely. His gaze lingered on the bruise darkening her cheekbone, then shifted abruptly to the cut at her hairline.
Her gaze dropped. Was he cataloging her flaws?
He lifted her chin, bringing her eyes back to his. “They take nothing away from your beauty.”
Heat rushed to her chest, traveling all the way to her cheeks. This was different from the clinical way he cleaned her injuries. Now, his inspection was indulgent. Invited.
His focus moved lower to the column of her throat. He traced the backs of his fingernails over her fluttering pulse, down to the delicate wing of her collarbones.
He traced the slope of her shoulder with aching slowness.
Down her arm to the bandage he’d wrapped around her wrist, then back up again.
Across her collarbone, one finger followed the thin scratch that marred her skin.
Into the hollow of her throat, where he paused to feel her pulse jumping against his touch.
“I didn’t think anything could be this soft.” The words emerged rough with wonder.
Her nipples tightened with every breath. Every subtle shift and change in her registered. The whisper of her breath. The tightness in her jaw.