Chapter 24
Dominic
Rayna had admitted to thinking about him, to wanting him.
And then she’d left.
She’d kissed him in a way that had scored her name on his soul.
And then she’d left.
She’d reduced him to a trembling, begging, piteous man who’d lost all sense of delicacy and clever seduction with one single touch. She’d made him spend in his trousers as if he were pathetically inexperienced for Neves’s sake.
And then she’d left.
Dominic couldn’t wrap his head around it.
No, that was a lie.
He didn’t wish to accept the clarity she felt after their breathtaking entanglement.
He refused to accept the horrified look of realisation that had cut through the glaze of satiated dizziness in her eyes as if what they’d done was wrong.
Perhaps they were forbidden. Perhaps the consequences were large.
But nothing about the way her touch had made him burn from the inside out, nor the way his touch had made her sing, was wrong.
Far from it. It couldn’t be when it had felt so natural, like their bodies had known each other in another life and recognised a deeply rooted connection.
Dominic couldn’t allow her to brand that—them—as a mistake.
It had taken an immense amount of reasoning with himself not to follow after Rayna when she’d left him. She wouldn’t have listened—he’d known that much—nonetheless, his heart had thrashed and implored and cried to convince her immediately.
Eventually, when he’d had enough of his emotions on tight leashes, he’d taken the bag and trunk she’d abandoned downstairs and left them outside her bedroom before heading to his own. Though only after he’d spent ten minutes fighting not to knock on her door.
Sleep had eluded him as he’d tossed and turned and thrown himself out of bed to pace repeatedly until finally exhaustion had snuck up on him and silenced his mind.
Come morning, Dominic went swimming in the river as he had been doing for several days, the exercise working to clear his head and tiredness. He returned to the farmhouse with determination and a touch of desperation driving his steps.
He couldn’t give her up now that he knew what she felt like in his arms, wrapped all around him. Not when her caressing fingers had struck his heart right out of his chest and into the palms of her hands. He needed to make her see that nothing about them together was improper.
Though the moment he went below for breakfast after showering and saw Rayna in the kitchen, the grating frustration and agitation that had gripped his heart the previous night smashed his carefully crafted argument like a nail through delicate porcelain.
When she uttered a flat, “Good morning,” with the quickest glance towards him, desperation crashed through him. He wanted to corner her, trap her, cage her in protest against her feigned indifference. It was ten times worse than how she’d been treating him already.
That whining restlessness only heightened as he made their morning coffee and tea while she prepped a fruit salad and sweet poor knights’ toast. And grew further as they ate breakfast in brittle silence. And further as they tidied up without her ever meeting his gaze.
Until Dominic’s teeth hurt with all the words he confined behind them, as much as his muscles ached from how tense he’d stayed to keep himself from reaching for her.
But when she tried to leave out the archway with the excuse of needing to check her emails, the wounded beast within his heart roared. The tattered pieces of how he’d pictured the morning would go scattered from his mind, and he snagged her around the wrist instead.
Rayna stuttered to a stop with a sharp inhale, and her charcoal gaze flew around to his. There was a moment, a second, where that panicked horror of the previous night returned with a flicker. But she blinked, and it was replaced by shuttered hardness.
“Let go,” she said firmly.
He tightened the circle of his fingers. “You cannot ignore me, Rayna.”
“I’m not ignoring you.”
“Then what would you call the way you are behaving at this moment?”
“I’m setting boundaries.”
He grunted sullenly, almost cruelly, by the way she stiffened. “Would you not agree it’s rather too late to set boundaries when you wear the mark of what we did on your neck?”
Rayna’s skin ignited to a hot red, nearly disguising the pink bruise just under her ear where he’d sucked a little too long and hard.
Her left arm twitched as if she were fighting not to raise a hand to the mark, but at least the shutters dropped from her irises, exposing a humiliated rage behind them.
Somewhere in Dominic’s mind, he knew angering her wasn’t going to help him win her over. But if anger was the only reaction she’d give him, then he’d take it over no reaction at all.
“I can set boundaries whenever I want, Dominic,” she bit out.
“For what purpose? When last night you were—”
“Last night was a mistake.” The sharp snap of her voice rang through the thick silence.
There it was.
The words that had been printed in her eyes. What he’d feared hearing most.
“It wasn’t,” he muttered hoarsely.
Panic made her lashes give a subtle flutter, but it was enough to make Dominic realise something.
She didn’t think it had been a mistake.
She was trying to convince herself and him that she thought it was.
But she couldn’t persuade him, nor would he let her persuade herself.
“Last night,” he said, softening his tone. “It was what we both wanted.”
He tugged her arm, trying to close the gap between them, but she stepped back on one foot, resisting his pull. “It was a mistake.”
“You kissed me.”
“I was confused.”
“You said you wanted me.”
“No, I didn’t.”
A sharp sting cut across his chest, and he tried to tug her again, but she still weighed back. “You admitted to thinking about me while with him. What else does that mean?”
“Means nothing.”
“You are lying,” he said, his voice growing rough with anguish. “And you may lie to yourself, but you cannot lie to me.” He shifted towards her. “You want me. You kissed me. You gave a part of yourself to me. You cannot now take that back. I will not let you.”
She shook her head, the mute movements rapid and jerky.
“Rayna.” Her name fell from his lips as a frustrated plea.
“You do not have to lie. I shan’t tell anyone.
I will keep what we have safe.” She reluctantly came half a step towards him when he pulled.
“No one other than us has to know. I would do everything to keep us a secret. I would never dare endanger your job at the lab. I can promise you that—”
“You can’t,” she croaked, accusing him of failing already.
“I can. I will. I swear that to you on the Norland name.” He drew her closer yet. “There isn’t anything in this world I would not do for you. Because I care immensely for you—”
“No, you don’t.”
The iciness of her tone sent him reeling back. “What?”
She snapped her wrist out of his slackened grip and created about a pace between them, though it felt more like twenty. “You don’t care about me.” She gulped slowly. “At least…you think you do. But you don’t.”
The temperature of his blood rose, and he curled his hands into fists. “Would you care to explain how I supposedly only think I care for you?”
How dare she? How dare she insinuate his feelings weren’t genuine? And why? For what—
“I was the first woman you met here,” she said, lifting her chin to a stubborn angle.
“To you, I was practically naked. You were shocked, and it was confusing, and I was different from what you knew, so how do you know you’re actually attracted to me and not just the idea of a woman from the future?
” She shook her head. “It didn’t have to be me.
It could’ve been Erin, Izzy, or Tip. But it just happened to be me.
Who’s to say you wouldn’t have felt something for them if you’d met them first?
Maybe it’s the excitement of discovering something new, and you’re confusing it for attraction?
What happens when the excitement fades? What if you find someone else exciting, like Hania? How do you know you won’t—”
“Stop,” Dominic growled.
Boiling blood splattered from the dozens of painful little holes Rayna had made in his heart. But his muscles felt like blocks of ice, covered in dripping trails of molten red, beneath his skin.
“You may kiss me and rebuff me,” he said, low and slow. “You may run from me, pretend you do not want me. You may insult me, curse me, shout at me, hurt me, and deny me.” His voice grew louder and angrier and pained. “But do not ever belittle how I care for you. Ever!”
Rayna stilled, not exactly shrinking into herself when he jerked towards her, but the guilt that twisted her expression caused her to look smaller.
“I am not a child, that I saw you as some fascinating toy, so easily replaced by the next new one waved before my face. Neither am I confusing excitement for attraction.” He paused and threw a hand out.
“I have not gazed upon another woman in my time here because I do not care to do so. Because they do not mesmerise me with their strength and beauty and intelligence the way you do. Because even if they had all the qualities you do, I would still want you!”
He shook his head. “I will not deny that you were different, that I was excited at the prospect of becoming acquainted with you. But because it was you, Rayna. Not these other women you name, who I have never met. Not Hania. You.”
He dropped his hand, losing strength in his arm and voice.
“For you to even accuse me of that…” He swallowed around the sudden tightness in his throat.
“How dare you? How could you? How do you not see my affection for what it truly is when I have not hidden it from you? Or is this merely another way of rejecting me?”
A pained frown twisted Rayna’s brows together. She started to speak, but he continued before she could say another word to bruise him.
“If after last night you still cannot bring yourself to accept you desire me, then reject me once and for all. But do not go so low as to insult how I feel.”
She shifted ever so slightly on her feet, her face crumpling further. And Dominic wanted to let out the hollow chuckle of a bleeding, broken man.
Did she even realise she was gazing upon him as if he were rejecting her, not asking her to reject him—something she claimed she wanted to do?
You lie, sweetheart.
But there was only so much battling Dominic could do before the wounds rendered him unable to fight any longer.
If Rayna was set on drawing a line between them, if she cared more for her job than she did for him, if she didn’t wish to be his, then he couldn’t go about trying to convince her any longer.
He wanted her to want him willingly.
But she wasn’t willing. At least, she didn’t want to be. And he no longer saw how he could persuade her to be.
“Say it,” he prompted. “Refuse me.”
Her lips parted. “I…”
“Say you do not want me.”
“I don’t…”
She stopped. Gritted her teeth. Curled her hands into fists. And Dominic braced himself for the blow she was soon to land.
“I don’t want you.”
It was quiet, but it was definite.
It was the end.
With an agonising burn in his chest, he flashed her a ghost of a smile. “Then that settles that.” He stepped back. “I shan’t bother you further.”
And he left with what frayed pieces of his heart were still intact.