Chapter One #3
“Ines, I will not pretend to know what has gotten into you. I suggest you leave at once, and we will simply…forget about this conversation.”
Ines squeezed her hands tight enough for her nails to dig into her flesh. She wanted to jump to her feet and yell, but she would not. She would not. She would be like him. So cool and detached and certain.
For once, she would demand what she wanted. What she deserved.
“I do not want to do that, Alexandre.”
“You married into a system,” he said viciously. “Your wants and desires ceased to matter when you pledged yourself to Alis.”
A system. A pawn. Yes, she’d known her role, but in the past year, outside of her father’s house and rigid rules and demands, Ines had slowly unfurled. Maybe not outwardly, but inside herself.
Her role no longer felt like some fixed, external cage.
It was something she got to have some say in.
Alexandre could really only blame himself for such a change.
He’d let her determine which charities she wanted a role in.
He’d given her carte blanche to plan events.
He had solicited her opinions on certain matters.
Yes, he was still in charge. Yes, because of years of training she almost always let him have his way, but he’d opened up a new world. He’d given her a small say, and now she understood the phrase Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.
Because she wanted so much more than his measly inch.
She stood and let her hands relax at her sides instead of clench into fists.
Because she had stood, and because his manners were so ingrained, he stood as well.
He was taller than her, but he’d placed his palms on his desk and leaned forward so they were nearly eye to eye, only the desk between them.
“I pledged myself to Alis, yes,” she agreed, keeping her voice quiet enough to feel like she was in control. Because she would not raise her voice to bluster. It didn’t work with him. He’d survived too many years of his father. “But I also pledged myself to you, Alexandre.”
He looked at her like she’d taken to speaking Greek. “This has nothing to do with me. Your wish to be a mother is…your own.”
She sighed. “It is. But it was part of our agreement, was it not?”
He was stubbornly silent in response.
Ines did not consider herself someone with a temper. She had never been allowed temper. Perhaps that’s why when it sparked to life now, she let it. “I want a child.”
“Well then, by all means. Let us simply get after it right now.”
He said it with such savage distaste, she felt the need to meet his disgusted tone with a challenge of her own, to take his snide comment and flip it on its head.
“You know what? Let’s. We’ve the time blocked off, after all.” She jerked off her jacket and tossed it aside, watching the muscle in his jaw tic. A strange feeling swept through her. Perhaps it was freedom? She wouldn’t know. She’d never had that. And since she hadn’t, she chased it.
She began to unbutton her blouse.
“Ines. Enough.”
But it wasn’t. Not nearly enough. She shrugged out of her shirt, quickly unzipped her skirt and stepped out of it and her shoes. She was in nothing but her underwear. In his office. And she felt…
Alive. Ridiculously, foolishly alive. In charge. In control. Not once in twenty-five years on this planet had she ever felt this. Maybe a fraction of it a few months back when she’d insisted that Alexandre must interfere with Gabriel’s thick-skulled abandonment of Evelyne.
But this…this was a freedom she’d never felt. She was a storm. Powerful. About to do damage.
So she did not cower, as she might once have done. She did not wilt at his icy, disapproving stare. At the way he could look like an imposing mountain, all broad shoulders and dark hair and eyes. So much larger than her. So much more powerful.
Except, whatever flickered in his gaze made her feel like the powerful one.
She crossed the distance between them, pressed her body to his. He held himself stiffly, even as his heat wrapped around her.
And he did not push her away, when he had all the physical power to do so. His nostrils flared, his gaze was angry, but he did not set her apart from him.
So she hooked her arm up around his neck and pulled his mouth down to hers.
And then she kissed him with all this newfound wildness, as she’d never once kissed him before.
She expected cold dismissal. Perhaps even a kind of pleasant response before carefully setting her back and telling her no. She expected so many things.
Except that he shudder out a breath when she pulled his bottom lip between her teeth.
Except that his hand clamped on her hip, strong and steadying.
Certainly not his other hand moving up her spine, the strong, hot weight of his palm a drug in and of itself.
Then his fingers were in her hair, tensing into a fist. The pressure a delightful frisson of pleasure that twisted into violent want and need when he pulled enough to get her mouth away from his.
The slight prick of pain in her scalp fused with a dark pleasure of his kiss, his body, so that her knees grew weak, her body pulsed. She thought it would take nothing at all for an orgasm to sweep through her.
She had enjoyed sex each and every time they’d engaged in it, but this? This was something else entirely. The word enjoy had no place here. It was too tame. Too small.
He held her back from his mouth, his eyes dark and wild, his breathing as ragged as hers, his hands still a fist in her hair. She watched him try to fight for some control, some sense of the usual Alexandre.
But he couldn’t find it.