Chapter Three
“I AM!” I REPLIED, STUNG. “Who wouldn’t be afraid of a strange man in their room, no matter what he was there to do?”
I wanted to jerk back, away from him, but something stopped me. And I felt a little foolish, too. Was I really upset that my executioner was questioning my level of apprehension? I didn’t think that spoke well of my mental health, if I was honest.
Just like the fact that I couldn’t seem to stop noticing the spectacular beauty of his face, even under these circumstances.
Maybe there was something wrong with me.
I frowned. “Are you asking me if I’m…mentally challenged?”
Jovi didn’t answer. Instead, he seemed to inhale me, and he took his time doing it. And then everything in me stuttered to a halt when he reached over and took my chin in his fingers.
Stuttered, then stopped, then howled back to life.
I felt every single cell of my body burst into flame. I could feel blisteringly hot color flood my cheeks. I could feel him, was the thing. I could feel him everywhere. His fingers were hard and faintly calloused, and I did not need to test the grip he had on me.
I knew perfectly well that I would not be able to move my face unless he let me.
But that thought didn’t make me afraid. It only made me…hotter.
I was beginning to suspect that when it came to him, my challenges were not mental at all. I was beginning to understand that they were disastrously physical.
“You’re nervous,” he declared, those gleaming, unreadable, pitiless dark eyes all over my face. “But not afraid. And yet I think you know exactly who I am.”
“I think I know what you do,” I said, which wasn’t quite an agreement.
His eyes narrowed. “Those are the same thing.” He stayed there, holding my face still, and so I was still, too. “How interesting that you’re quiet now, Rux. With my hand on you. Very interesting indeed. Have you made your choice?”
“What choice?” I asked, too hot and strange inside to track what he was saying, but then I remembered. “Oh. The gag. Or you’re going to drug me.”
He made a faint noise at the back of his throat, and I willed myself to come online. The way a normal woman would have, I was sure. To be horrified. Sickened straight through. To have adrenaline storming through me because of fear.
Because of what might happen next.
And it wasn’t that I didn’t have an overload of adrenaline.
But Jovi was right. I wasn’t afraid.
He brushed a finger down the side of my neck. “I don’t need drugs to knock you out. A simple blood choke will do the trick.”
And when he kept moving that finger down the side of my neck, lazily, I learned more things about myself in that moment than anyone should have to know. Things I could never unlearn. Things I would always see in my mirror, I suspected.
Assuming I lived long enough to see my reflection again.
“But as you think about it,” he continued in that same low voice while his finger paused, then retraced its firestorm path, “why don’t you tell me why you are acting as if this is a date.”
I wanted to argue that, but I couldn’t. Because while I wouldn’t have said that was what I was doing, it was very clear to me that my reactions were…not what they ought to have been.
I swallowed, hard. “What kind of life do you think I have?”
He moved his chin in such a way as to suggest a shrug. “I have given it no thought at all. Surely you know that you are nothing but a pawn in the games your father mistakenly thinks he can play.”
“So you have given it some thought.” I might have regretted saying that.
I should have. But I was too mesmerized by Jovi himself.
By that unearthly beauty of his face, which was not to say that I couldn’t see the truth of him in the brutal symmetry of it.
In the five-o’clock shadow that had taken over his jaw.
My tragedy was that the truth didn’t make him less beautiful to me.
He inclined his head slightly. “I am aware of your position, that is all.”
“They are the same thing,” I said quietly, and I could tell he heard the echo of his own words.
“My life is being a well-behaved pawn who causes my father no trouble. He’s marrying me off.
Everyone is pretending it is not an outright sale, but it is, of course.
Unscrupulous men pretending that they can trust each other.
One of them delivers a daughter who is nothing to him but a commodity.
This makes an enemy something more like an ally, but that doesn’t make the daughter in question safe, it makes her dependent on the health of that alliance.
” I shrugged. “But they will congratulate themselves at the wedding. They will smoke cigars, share a drink. Neither one of them will think of me as a person. Or at all, if we’re honest. It’s nothing but business. ”
Only after I said all that did I realize it was the first time I ever had.
I knew better than to say such things out loud in this house.
And in the convent, where a great many men with questionable values sent the daughters they intended to use for their own purposes, we were allowed to speak only in designated areas, at designated times.
Everything else was reserved for quiet contemplation and prayer.
Which was to say, we were only allowed to talk when we were supervised. Friendships were encouraged. Confidences—perish even the thought.
If I lived long enough to look back on this night from an analytical distance, it was entirely possible that I would be sad that I was a girl who found she could only communicate her intimate thoughts and feelings to a total stranger who, even worse, had come to do her harm.
But maybe there was a kind of liberation in the fact that all of that was unlikely.
It finally occurred to me that if people were going to hurt me anyway, I might as well speak my mind first.
Either way, I didn’t stop.
“Anyway,” I said quietly. “At least you’re honest.”
His gaze snapped back to mine, and held. “Always,” he said. “Per i miei peccati.”
I knew enough Italian to understand that. He was telling me he was honest to a fault. Somehow, I believed him.
“You’re here to kill me,” I said, quietly, and I wasn’t sure where the strength came from to say that, either.
Directly to him. I couldn’t escape the strange feeling that it had something to do with him.
That he was emboldening me. “You’ll probably hurt me first. That’s how this goes, generally speaking. ”
And then I was holding my breath again, as he held my gaze for a long moment—
Until, at last, he inclined his head. Just slightly.
“Okay, then.” And despite my bravado, I could hear the shudder in me. It was right there, in my voice. “Why do we have to go somewhere else?”
“A blood choke it is,” he replied.
His fingers moved to my neck again, and he leaned even closer, and for a moment I…did nothing.
My heart was going wild in my chest, but I really couldn’t tell if that was fear coming in late, or the fact that he was hooking his other arm around me, almost as if he intended to—
“Gag,” I said. Maybe loudly, upon consideration. “I want a gag.”
He was so close now. Everything was that evergreen scent, something else like warmth beneath it, and that slow, intense way he turned his head to look straight at me.
Now he was closer to me than any other man ever had been.
Jovi stroked that finger down the length of my neck. “As you wish.”
And there was another long, wild, impossible moment that seemed to stretch out across time—
But then he moved.
This time it was even more lyrical than when he stood still. And it was faster.
He reached behind me for my pillow. And as I found myself gasping for air, the feel of his hand at my throat and his arm over my shoulders seeming to drum in me like its own pulse—even though he’d let me go—he ripped off strips of fabric from the pillowcase. With his bare hands.
Then he was moving off the bed and pulling me with him so easily it made me feel something like silly.
To have imagined that I could have talked him into anything he didn’t already wish to do. To have thought for even a moment that I could have done anything about the situation I found myself in. Anything at all.
Out of my bed, I found myself standing before him in my short-sleeve pajama set, complete with little shorts, which felt a great deal like a tactical error.
Jovi’s dark gaze was cool, assessing. But his hands when they touched my skin were so hot it took my breath away.
He turned me around, easily. So very easily that it was as if I was as light and insubstantial as one of my down pillows, and something in me braced, assuming that he would rip me apart as easily.
But instead, I felt one big hand of his wrap around both of my wrists, and then he was tying them together into the small of my back. Snugly.
When that was done, I felt him kneel behind me. I glanced down, because there was something about his position. There was something about a big, scary man, sculpted and beautiful, kneeling there beside my bed with his hands on my body—
It took me long moments to realize that what he was doing was tying my ankles together, too.
He turned me around, but I was off-balance now. I found myself slumped back against the side of my high bed. My hands were bound, but reached out and gripped onto the coverlet behind me, as if that might ground me. That last little bit of something familiar.
Because the man standing in front of me was death. I knew it. I could see it.
What I couldn’t understand was this simmering thing inside me that wanted to glory in that. In him.
Maybe it was what I’d been trying to tell him tonight—or explain to myself out loud while I was at it. All of the men my father had presented to me had death in their eyes. All of them were violent, brutal.
I didn’t have to know anything about them to know this. It was obvious at a glance.
The fact that this one was also beautiful felt like a gift.