Chapter Twenty
M y body was splayed against Egyptian sheets in the guest room, every fiber of it attuned to the study across the hallway.
I blamed it on the margaritas. My long day. The near-death experience in the woods. Whatever the cause, I wanted to slip into Tate’s study and find out what his expert hands were capable of. Deep shame bloomed in the pit of my stomach.
I was responsible for his father’s death. More responsible than he could ever know.
My eyes drifted to my phone on the nightstand. I touched the screen to check the time. Eleven fifty-eight. I had two more minutes to change my mind. My husband was a punctual creature. He wouldn’t wait a second past midnight.
They say that the heart wants what it wants, but in the end, it was my vagina that made me slip out of the lace-trimmed linen and tread across the hallway.
My toes sank into the plush, silken carpet that drowned out my footsteps.
I stopped before his study. He left the door ajar, an open invitation for me to come in. I peeked inside, my pulse accelerating.
It was completely dark. All the lights were off. A silhouette of my husband sitting at his desk, jotting something down on a thick textbook, danced in the center of the room.
He wasn’t lying. He could see in the dark. He was writing in the dark.
Solving equations in the pitch black.
Everything clicked. That time he fetched me from my birthday and read a book…he truly read it.
Tate finished the page, flipped onto a fresh one, and continued jotting. A few seconds passed before he closed the textbook and sat back.
“It’s five seconds past midnight.”
His voice jolted me out of my reverie, and I sucked in a breath. I hadn’t realized he noticed me.
“Are you coming in or staying out?”
I stepped into the doorframe, closing the door behind me.
“Attagirl.” His words slipped through a condescending smile.
“I won’t have sex with you.”
“If you’re here for a conversation, I’m afraid I’m fresh out of patience for chitchat.”
Gulping, I shook my head. “I don’t want chitchat either.”
“What do you want then?”
“An orgasm,” I admitted. I’d never been this forward before. Not that anything was wrong with it. It just wasn’t me. “I’m in knots. I want…I want…”
You.
“I will give this to you,” he said, no hesitation, no judgment. “Come here, sweets.”
Sweets .
The word caressed my skin, spreading a delicious sensation in its wake. He’d rarely called me anything darling. Even Apricity was tainted with derision.
I advanced toward him until I reached the edge of his desk. He opened his palm. After a moment’s hesitation, I put my hand in his. Still sitting, he guided me to stand in front of him, my bum resting on the edge of his desk.
“Close your eyes.”
“I already can’t se—”
“Close them,” he repeated.
I did, a thrill of something dangerous and decadent shooting through me. I was completely at his mercy.
What a terrible place to be.
“Keep them closed. If I catch you cheating, I will bring you to the brink and deprive you of your climax. You don’t want that.”
My body was as tight as a bowstring, attuned, craving his next touch, wherever it might land.
I felt his fingers wrapping around my bracelet and sucked in a breath in surprise.
“Tell me about this one,” he murmured, his voice closer, his mouth a breath away from mine. His knee nudged my legs open, spreading me wide.
Heat rushed to my center, and my hips rolled instinctively, my inner muscles squeezing against nothing.
“I’ve never seen you without it.”
His whiskey-tinted breath fanned against my bare neck, and every cell in my body awakened with desire.
I heard a drawer open to my right, and Tate rummaged for something. My throat worked as I tried concentrating on his question.
“My father made it for me.” I licked my lips. “In Jamaica. We used to go on holidays there often. Whenever we could.”
Tate finally picked what he was looking for and closed the drawer silently. My pulse skyrocketed. His cock was now pressed between my legs, which had opened farther on their own accord sometime during our conversation, welcoming him in. It was hot and hard and thick through our clothes.
“We used to collect seashells on the beach together. We did that for hours. When I found this incredibly rare seashell, I was delighted. The Scaphella junonia only washes ashore after rough storms. Juno was queen of the Roman gods, married to Jupiter. So this shell represents her and symbolizes strength and power, grace and self-sufficiency. My dad made it into a bracelet for me. Gifted it to me on our last Christmas together. It always reminded me I could get through the hard times.”
“Where in Jamaica?” Tate kept the conversation going to distract me from what he was doing. His hands were nowhere on me, but he was grinding slowly against my core, which sparked fissures of pleasure all over my skin.
“Negril. Half Moon Beach, Green Island.”
Christ. I didn’t want to come from his penis rubbing my clit through our clothes, but I already felt my muscles quaking and tightening.
“Do you trust me?” he asked.
His mouth was now directly against my lips. I could taste his cigarette, his whiskey, his desire on my own tongue. I wanted him to kiss me. My entire body clenched in expectation.
“Y-yes,” I admitted. “I do.”
“Rookie mistake.” He chuckled. “Never trust a sociopath.”
His lips slammed against mine, and our tongues found one another.
My hands impulsively moved to his face, demanding more, begging, roaming, clutching, before he grabbed both my wrists with one hand and pressed my back against the length of his desk, pinning my arms over my head.
He climbed over me, his erection nestling against my pussy.
I wanted him with abandon I didn’t know existed in me.
His teeth bit and nipped at my mouth, and I got angry, frustrated, returning his kiss with my own boldness.
With demanding strokes, exploring every corner of his mouth.
His free hand was fumbling all around me but not actually on me, and then his lips ripped from my mouth and wrapped around my right nipple, and that was when I realized I was naked from the waist up.
What the…?
My eyes flew open, but it was too dark to see anything.
I heard the ripping sound of the fabric of my pajamas.
“I was doing you a fucking favor.” His mouth moved over my nipple, sucking it with insatiable greed. “That top was horrid .”
The dagger he’d retrieved from the drawer was so close to my pubic bone I felt it lick my skin teasingly. He was still holding the weapon he used to tear my top, I realized.
“Go on then.” I found his eyes in the dark, and they were gleaming with menace. “Kill me. I know you’re capable of it, Tate.”
He pressed the dagger—a letter opener, I realized—to the tip of my chin, nostrils flaring.
I tilted my chin up, still meeting his grinds thrust for thrust through our clothes, never breaking eye contact. “I should be on the list too,” I said.
“Shut up,” he snarled.
“If it weren’t for me, Daniel would still be alive.”
I had to push him.
I had to show him he wasn’t beyond redemption.
There was something brilliant inside me, something that deserved to be loved, and he needed to know that.
The letter opener pressed harder into my skin, not yet breaking it but enough for me to feel the pinch. I swallowed but pushed through, pressing my pussy to his cock, feeling it nestling inside.
“Kill me, Tate.”
“I’ll do you one better, Apricity. I’ll ruin you.”
He tossed the letter opener to the floor, scooping me into his arms, sucking my entire breast into his mouth.
Every nerve ending in my body concentrated in the rigid, tight bud of my nipple while he suckled and teased and bit it.
He freed my wrists, and his hands were everywhere I wanted them.
Teasing my other nipple. Caressing my stomach, my waist. Kneading my ass.
Moving farther down to my panties. The base of his palm pressed against my slit through the flimsy fabric. It was wet with my want for him.
A low groan escaped his throat.
I didn’t know if I could survive this man.
I didn’t know if I wanted to.
His mouth slid down from my nipple to the length of my rib cage and stomach, kissing and nibbling on every inch of flesh, on my sweat and my scent.
I had never been worshipped before. Splayed on an altar and ravaged so thoroughly.
Tate did not miss one cell of my upper body before his tongue teased my hip bones, kissing them softly, hooking his thumbs into the junction between my center and my thighs, spreading me open and nuzzling his nose into my slit through my knickers.
I cried out, arching, grabbing the back of his head and pressing him to my core shamelessly.
“Take off my bottoms,” I urged him between desperate pants.
He chuckled darkly into me but, being the arsehole that he was, didn’t remove my knickers. Instead, he began nibbling me through them. Teasing with pressure and heat.
He knew it wasn’t enough to hurl me over the edge but was just sufficient to drive me mental. He trailed his tongue along my labia, then sucked my entire pussy into his mouth. Flicked my clit with the tip of his tongue.
Again.
And again.
Faster.
Harder.
Until he found the rhythm that made every muscle in my body clench.
Finally, he tugged my bottoms by one leg but continued teasing me through the soaked fabric.
“Tate, Tate, Tate,” I chanted, wishing I knew his real name. The boy who came before the man I hated but couldn’t get enough of. “Please,” I choked out. “Please, let me come.”
All he needed was to move my knickers to one side. To fill the emptiness inside me.
“You want to come?” His teeth grazed my soft flesh through my underwear.
“Yes,” I panted.
“What will you give me in return?”
“I…what do you want?”
“What I want is to come inside every hole in your body, nostrils and ears included. But since this is a little premature, I’ll settle for making you promise you’ll stop running.” He growled, clutching my outer thighs, spreading me wide. “Stop avoiding me. Stop fighting this.”
Every muscle in my body quivered. I wanted him beyond reason and logic.
“I’ll stop fighting this,” I croaked.
He fisted my knickers and slashed them off my body.
“As soon as I tasted your cunt on my fingers, I knew I had to have my fucking fill.” His thumbs spread open my folds, and he plunged his tongue inside me like a feral animal, his nose massaging my clit as he devoured every drop of want I had for him. “That small sample just wasn’t enough.”
He pushed two fingers into me, the invasion sudden and rough, pumping into me gently as his mouth fastened around my clit, blowing air on the exposed little nub, a trick that made me feel full and shattered me into pieces.
I cried out, spasming. It wasn’t just the sensation that turned me on but also the way he ate me out. Like nothing more delicious in this world existed for him than me.
My muscles bunched, my toes curled, and stars detonated behind my eyelids.
It took me long seconds to come down from the high. When I allowed my eyes to flutter open, I glanced around the darkened room and realized I was… alone .
Tate slipped out of the room as soon as I climaxed, escaping like a vampire from sunlight.
I knew better than to think he went off for a wank. He was too refined for something like that, too frighteningly in control.
Carefully, I slid my tailbone off the desk and stood up. I was completely naked, my pj’s and knickers gone. He stole them, I realized, for his obsessive collection.
I gingerly made my way to the light switch and flicked it on. The scent of our sweat and my desire for him lingered in the air. Embarrassment swamped me. I let an ice-cold murderer play with my body. No, not just that—I actively sought him out.
I returned to the desk, glancing at the textbook I’d been pressed against. The one he’d been working on before I interrupted him. It was a bit smudged from the juices my body produced, some of the ink smeared, but I could still read it.
It was all complex equations. Solved in measured handwriting. And in the margins, in neat, cursive letters, so identical in size and flair they looked like a font, one word:
Nolan. Nolan. Nolan. Nolan. Nolan. Nolan. Nolan. Nolan.
Nolan. Nolan. Nolan. Nolan. Nolan. Nolan. Nolan. Nolan.
Nolan. Nolan. Nolan. Nolan. Nolan. Nolan. Nolan. Nolan.
Nolan. Nolan. Nolan. Nolan. Nolan. Nolan. Nolan. Nolan.
The name was written hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. Always identical. It looked…compulsive. Uncommonly precise.
Hypergraphia .
My heart beat faster. I rushed out to the hallway and made my way to the primary bedroom, only to find the doors closed. I rattled the door handles, unsurprised to find them locked.
“Tate!” I called.
No answer.
I slammed my fist onto the ancient wood. “Tate!”
Nothing.
This, I understood, was a statement.
My husband’s way of telling me I could have the orgasms and the private chefs, the lavish luxury of his lifestyle, his expert tongue, his thick cock.
But I could never, ever have his heart.
The question Tate left unanswered—what happened to the body in the panic room—answered itself rather promptly.
Ten hours after I found Tate leaning over him in the Hamptons, Nolan Duffy’s body appeared floating in Lake Michigan, of all places. Bloated and splotched but identifiable. Mafia deal gone wrong, the six o’clock news speculated.
Duffy had a black thorn sewn to his forehead and words engraved on his cheek with a sharp knife.
Two down.
One more to go.