Chapter 33
Dominic
Ilove you. Dammit, woman, I love you so much it pains me.
He wanted to say it. Dominic was yearning to tell Rayna.
The words were on the tip of his tongue every second of every day in the week or so that followed the heartbreaking story she’d told him of her mother.
No, heartbreaking wasn’t an adequate description.
She’d absolutely shattered the organ to pieces and then built it back up with the immense trust she’d shown she held in him by sharing the burden of her loss.
He’d wanted to go on a roaring rampage and steal every bit of happiness from all the corners of the world and lay it at her feet, even if it only comforted her the tiniest amount.
But that wasn’t why he was growing desperate to profess his love.
No, that was because ever since that night, something about Rayna had changed.
Her smiles were brighter, more tender. They branded his soul a little deeper.
Her laughter waltzed around his ears for longer, so unabashed and inviting.
She still hadn’t initiated a hug, but she let him hold her a little tighter and sank back into his arms when he bothered her instead of immediately telling him to go back to doing his chores.
She grumbled about being too hot but buried her face in his chest anyway and inhaled before melting against him.
Oh, she was still a teasing, mouthy, wicked woman who enjoyed mocking him far too much, but it was impossible to truly be offended by anything she said.
In fact, Dominic loved the way they bickered and taunted each other.
It always led to him hauling her close and her twisting and laughing until he slanted his mouth over hers and kissed her quiet.
It was perfect.
Everything about her. Everything they were becoming.
His hope was swelling by the second, making a future where they were married seem vividly possible.
Nothing could have dampened his spirit.
Or so he thought.
The two instant messages sitting in notification boxes on Rayna’s locked phone screen evidently proved otherwise.
Jake:
Thank you for arranging this
I’ll see you Monday
Suddenly, Dominic felt like his world was crumbling under his feet again. Cracking and shaking as earthquakes of anger, fear, and jealousy juddered violently through brittle bones.
He clenched his hand tightly around the small device as the screen faded to black. The pinched, pained planes of his face reflected back, so ferocious he almost didn’t recognise himself. But then again, he’d never felt such acute betrayal in his life.
He hadn’t been snooping on Rayna’s phone.
He was on the sofa facing the big TV screen in their sitting room with a bowl of popcorn on his lap, waiting for her to return from the bathroom so they could carry on watching the murder mystery movie they’d started that evening.
Her phone had been on the varnished coffee table next to his when it buzzed. He was getting better at using the device, but its functions still baffled and shocked him from time to time, so he startled at the loud sound.
He thought it’d been his own smart mobile, but when the second buzz echoed, it was Rayna’s phone that lit up around the edges of the screen. He picked it up out of curiosity.
Only to be punched in the heart.
Rayna was still communicating with Jake.
Worse yet, she’d made plans to see him. Again.
She was hiding them from Dominic. Again.
Why? How could she?
Was she truly intending to betray him so?
He dully registered the flush of the downstairs toilet over the thunder of blood in his ears as he tapped the screen to wake it up again. It went black after a dozen or so seconds. He tortured his aching heart with the truth of her actions one more time.
Soon after, the clack of a door opening and closing filtered through, followed by hurried steps.
“Okay, you can press play again,” Rayna said, entering the wide rectangular room, but she stopped short of the coffee table.
A marbled cream rug lay under it that matched the fabric of the two sofas that occupied most of the room. The curtains were drawn over the bay of windows on the right, but the light from the TV, the corridor, and two lamps placed by either sofa lit up the darkened room.
She edged a step forward. Her eyes dipped from the device in his hand up to the expression he didn’t bother hiding. “Is that my phone?”
“Why is Jake sending you messages, Rayna?” Dominic growled through his teeth.
Her brows pinched. “You read my messages?”
He was shocked by her audacity to be displeased with him when she was the one in the wrong.
Sitting forward, he dropped the phone on the cushion and placed the bowl on the table. “Is that all that concerns you? Not that I have caught you agreeing to meet Jake again?”
Her mouth went firm. “I wasn’t exactly planning to hide it.”
That sent him shooting up in fury. “When exactly were you intending to tell me, then? The day before, as you did last time?”
“Don’t fucking yell at me, Dominic. And if you’d just—”
“Just what?” His words came out rough as he forced himself to lower his voice. “Can you truly claim to be surprised by my reaction when you have betrayed me—again?”
She scrunched her face as she threw it to the side. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, I haven’t betrayed you. Maybe if you stopped jumping to conclusions, I could explain—”
“What is there to explain exactly? It is quite clear you are intent on breaking my heart by secretly meeting the man you were previously involved with.”
“Breaking your heart?” she echoed. “Can you hear yourself? Not that you actually have any reason to be upset because—”
“I have every reason to be upset. You are mine!”
Silence rang around them as Rayna’s mouth hung open.
She pressed her lips together, rage flashing in her eyes, and squared up to him. “I am not an object you can claim, you fucking bastard.”
Dominic wasn’t having this conversation with her again.
She didn’t have to accept it just yet if she didn’t want to, but she was his. Irrevocably. In every sense of the word. He’d be damned if he let Jake try to take her from him. Again.
He bent over her and spoke low and slow. “You will not see Jake on Monday. I forbid it. And you will obey me on this, or else I’ll—”
“Or else what?” she challenged. “What will you do, huh? Because I will be seeing him whether you like it or not!”
The echoing snap of his sanity reverberated through his muscles. And he lost it.
He did the unthinkable. Something wholly ungentlemanly. Something he knew Rayna wouldn’t like, that wouldn’t earn him her love. But the acid in his veins had eroded such reasoning.
Dominic bent at the knees, looped a tight arm around the back of her thighs, and hoisted her over his shoulder as he straightened.
She gasped and gripped his T-shirt across his back, her derriere shaking as he jostled her. Then he was out into the corridor and up the stairs.
It wasn’t until the third notoriously squeaky step that her flummoxed spluttering turned into all-out kicking, thumping, and screeching.
“Put me down! Put me down now. Dominic! Put me down, you stupid fucking asshole.”
He carried her into their bedroom, switched the light on, and knocked the door shut. He continued ignoring her threats as he headed for the bed.
“Dominic, I swear if you don’t put me down right now, I’ll—”
She let out a little shriek when he dropped her in the middle of the blanket. Her bare limbs went sprawling as she bounced on the mattress. Wasting no time pushing herself up on her hands, she shook her rosewood hair off her reddened face and glared ferociously.
“Don’t ever do that again,” she snarled.
He stood over her as an unmoving wall that felt no emotion, but inside, he was rattling and pulling at chains. “Then do not challenge me again.”
She shot poison-laced daggers at him. “I will kill you if you don’t move, Dominic.”
He spread his arms in invitation. “Then by all means, kill me, my love, for I will not move. And neither will you if you do not give up this insistence to see Jake.”
“And why the fuck should I listen to you when you won’t listen to me?”
“Because I command it,” he rumbled, jabbing a finger down towards the bed. “And therefore, you will listen, or so help me, Rayna, I will lock you up in here until you forget that man’s name!”
Fumes of sooty chimney smoke poured from her head as she visibly seethed. He breathed them in, coating his lungs in the thickness of her fury, and expelled his own in return.
“I dare you to fucking try.”
The moment she shifted one hand back, readying to escape, Dominic collapsed onto his palms and knees over her, trapping her in. “Stay put,” he growled.
Of course, she didn’t listen. She scrambled and smacked him and hissed like a feral cat as he fought to pin her and tame her and keep her to himself.
“You have lost your fucking mind,” she spat, digging her claws into his shoulder and chest as she tried to push him off.
“You make me lose my mind.”
But she continued cursing him and struggling and hitting until he’d had enough.
“Cease this at once, or I will take you over my knee and spank you!”
He finally snatched up both her wrists in one hand and pinned them to the bed above her head, forcing her to arch under him.
She went still, panting and scowling.
He curled over her, pushing her further into the mattress.
But something in the atmosphere shifted.
The adjustment of one singular note turned the smoke bundling around them from black and irritating to provoked and suggestive. It caressed him as if it were a physical thing teasing its way inside him.
With glassy, heated eyes, Rayna smirked. “Spank me? You? Yeah, right.”
A scorched sting sailed over his skin. “Do not test me,” he warned.
She cocked her chin. “Can’t test you when you’re only full of bullshit, can I?”
He knew the taunt was purposeful, but his pride burned in tandem with the surge of blood through his cock.
Her doubt, her mocking, her defiance. It was rousing. It was unacceptable.
It made a jest of his masculinity. He couldn’t allow that. Wouldn’t allow it.