Chapter 9
ALEX
After dinner, I felt Zach’s gaze on my naked backside. His undivided attention burned my skin from where he still sat at the eat-in nook. I reached for the skillet and squeezed the sponge over the cast-iron until suds foamed in the bottom.
The wheels in my mind turned with ideas. With hope.
Almost in a trance, I followed the motion of my hand as it scrubbed the pan in unhurried design.
In my mind’s eye, I hefted the skillet, whirled around, and brought it down on Zach’s skull.
The vision was so real I could actually hear it—the resulting crack blasting through my head, echoing with satisfaction.
Swallowing my nervousness, I finished rinsing and drying the pan, but when I turned around, I found Zach standing behind me, just a few inches away. I froze, gripping the handle as I eyed his height. There was no way I’d be able to whack him over the head from this vantage point.
“Let me,” he said, reaching for the skillet.
I gave him the pan, and a sense of loss hit me as he hung it on the rack above the butcher block.
Those pans were within reach, but just barely.
I’d have to stand on my tiptoes to unhook one, then hope like hell I’d use enough strength to whack him over the head so he’d go down the first time.
Because I wouldn’t get a second chance.
“Lex,” he said, voice going husky as he closed the inches between us. “I’m in the mood for dessert.”
I feared what he wanted didn’t involve bakeware. “I can make something…if you want.”
His fingers clamped around my bicep, confirming my suspicion. “I want you.” He ushered me out of the kitchen, and I stumbled along behind him, heartbeat accelerating as he stalled in the living room. He pointed to the floorboards in front of the sofa. “Knees.”
When I didn’t immediately bow to his order, he ground his molars, and the look in his cold hazel eyes was enough to make me bend. I lowered to my knees as he reached for the button of his jeans. Exposing his hard-on, he shuffled forward, fisting his cock, and then his flesh pushed between my lips.
As I watched the dazed expression on his face—a cocktail of lust and madness while he thrusted in and out of my mouth—a new kind of terror held me in its grip.
The kind of terror that made breathing impossible, because the life he had in mind for me was no longer a nebulous nightmare.
It crystalized, and my new reality became as real as the warm flesh pounding between my tonsils.
He would keep me locked away forever—like a prized classic car—only taking me out when he wanted to use me. I’d never see other people, never have any type of freedom again. I would fail to exist.
There would only be Zach and his cock to live for.
And what happened when I started showing? Would he force an abortion? Possibly even cause one himself? I shuddered at the thought.
And that was a mistake, because his eyes narrowed into a glare as he yanked his cock out of my mouth. “Your attitude needs a major adjustment, Lex.” Jaw set in determination, Zach withdrew something from the pocket of his jeans.
A tiny plastic baggie.
“What is that?” I whispered, though I feared I did know what it was.
“Just a little E to loosen you up.”
I shrank back, but he stepped forward, eliminating the space between us as he grabbed me by the hair.
“So here’s what’s gonna happen,” he said, tone a conversational lie on his tongue. “You’re going to fuck me and enjoy every moment of it, because if you don’t, I’ll stick this shit up your ass. The result is the same either way, though I’d rather have your eager and sober participation.”
A cold sweat broke out on my skin, and my heart pounded painfully in my chest as I recognized the resolution in his expression.
And the corner he’d backed me into.
I couldn’t let him drug me. But could I fuck him and get off on it? Because that’s what he wanted. He wanted the ultimate betrayal to Rafe.
Zach settled onto the couch. “You can ride me willingly, or I can dose you. Your choice.”
I gulped in shallow breaths, the hopelessness of his ultimatum strangling me. There was no choice. I couldn’t let him fill me with ecstasy again—not now that I was pregnant. And I couldn’t fight him off.
Run, Alex.
The voice of instinct and survival prodded my limbs, stiffening them in preparation to flee.
Zach didn’t know that I’d learned how to swim.
It was my only advantage, the only thing I held in my arsenal.
But I had to be strategic about it because he was bigger, faster, and stronger, and he’d have his hands on me by the time I reached the front door.
Why else would he be sitting on that couch like he belonged there, not a care in the world, complacent in the belief that he had the winning hand? He knew the odds and how they were stacked against me.
“You’ve got five seconds, baby.” His voice vibrated with a low growl. A warning. I saw myself sprinting across the room and yanking the door open.
Then my fingers brushed the collar circling my throat.
Zach had thought of everything. With Rafe gone, and Jax and Adam out of town, I was on my own to defend myself. But he’d thought of that too, because the threat of drugs ensured my cooperation, and the collar ensured my entrapment.
Before he could take this latest choice from me, I crawled onto the couch and straddled him. He took me by the chin, forcing me to lock my gaze with his, and I was incapable of hiding the tears burning my eyeballs.
“Please let me close my eyes,” I begged in a whisper. “It’s the only way I’ll be able to do this.”
“I know of another way, Lex.”
The ecstasy.
I blinked a tear down my cheek, and he swiped it away as if the sight of my despair burned a hole through his tar-black soul.
“Rub your cunt against me.” Voice softening with a hint of tenderness, he lowered his hands to my waist and waited for me to surrender. To give him the illusion he so craved.
The fantasy that I loved him back.
Inch by torturous inch, I lowered to his lap, and his cock slid between my folds. The start of a tingle went off in my nerve endings. A prick of shame. Another tear escaped down my face.
“C’mon, Lex. Work those hips.”
I drew in a breath and held. The seconds throbbed at my temples, like little hammers pounding in the reminder of how he wasn’t holding me down this time. There were no restraints, no fingers pressing my wrists to the mattress, no hand circling my throat.
Only the threat to my unborn child, and that was enough.
Moving into a steady rhythm, I dragged my pussy over his cock, cheeks flaming with unwanted arousal.
His shallow breaths drifted across my face, spreading down the column of my neck.
The friction between our bodies grew warm and slick and fucking wrong.
It didn’t matter that I didn’t want this—that I had no other choice that didn’t involve him drugging me—the self-disgust still consumed, causing rancid nausea to burn in my throat.
Back in that cabin, when he’d taken me the first time, he’d launched a campaign of psychological warfare against me.
This wasn’t much different, and I wanted to rail my rage at him.
I wanted to gouge out his pale hazel eyes and all the smug triumph in them.
I didn’t want to return his silent acknowledgement of how wet I was…
of how exposed and open sitting astride his lap made me as the head of his cock teased with every thrust of my hips.
The fact remained there was nothing he could do to make my heart accept the joining of our bodies.
Hissing a breath between clenched teeth, Zach gripped my hips and pushed inside me. I gasped as his massive girth stretched me wide. Pummeling deeper, he wound a hand in my hair and pulled me forward until our lips came near enough to touch.
“Kiss me.”
I couldn’t stomach the idea. His mouth on mine, intimate and personal. Romantic.
Like everything else, he didn’t give me a choice.
His lips claimed what didn’t belong to him, same as his cock, and his tongue darted along the seam of my mouth before plunging inside.
And for those few seconds, when I let my lids drift shut and imagined it was Rafe sitting between my thighs, that it was Rafe’s tongue tangling with my own, I found a glimmer of freedom.
Until Zach broke it by groaning against my mouth. “Your cunt is beautiful.” He stilled, dick pulsing inside me. “You will never feel him like this again. Only me.” The vow was a dark caress on my lips, spiraling its poison and tainting the air I breathed. “Only me, Lex. Say it.”
“Only you.” The promise was complete horse shit. The mothership of all lies.
Because this couldn’t be the end. I wouldn’t allow it to end like this, even if I had to claw my way out of here.
Even if sitting on his lap and fucking him with as much willful intent as I could muster gave me the smallest of advantages, a sense of cooperation on my part, another lie in the script of Zach’s fantasy.
“I’m going to make you come so fucking hard,” he said, setting a rhythm that felt too damn good.
Don’t let him take more pieces of you. Fake it, Alex.
The thought had barely formed in my mind when liquid heat flared between my legs, and a needy moan departed my lips.
His gaze bored into me, growing darker as the physical connection between us intensified.
He hit my G-spot just right, with enough skill and willpower that it wasn’t long before I lost sight of what was fake and what was real.
This felt real, too fucking real, and when he pulled me into another kiss, I gladly welcomed the distraction—the opportunity to lose myself in the only thing that didn’t feel sick and dirty and wrong.
The thought of Rafe.
I wrapped myself in the memory of my husband’s heat, the solid security of his muscles, the certainty of his punishing hand. A vision flickered through my mind, unbidden, and I saw Rafe’s palm come down on my backside, again and again until my skin reddened with pain.
“Fuck…” I groaned through gritted teeth, duplicity unnecessary as I came in a horrendous rush, like a tsunami nobody saw rushing toward the shoreline. All the while, I pretended a pair of green eyes watched me shatter.