Chapter 8 – Noa #2
I’m wracked with the awareness of how my body protests the loss.
My skin prickling where his hands just were, where his mouth almost touched.
Fury laces through me. My pulse roars like thunder beneath my ribs.
I hate him. I hate him for knowing exactly what he does to me.
For playing me like a game he already knows the outcome of.
He just nods toward the bathroom. There is more than a little devil in his grin. “Go. Shower,” he dismisses. He waits for me to step back, my chest wrought with a breath I can’t quite catch. Then adds: "But I doubt it’ll wash me off."
The urge to rip the glass from the hand by his side is dizzying. I want to throw that water in his face—crave watching it turn to steam, needing evidence that I’ve done to him what he’s done to me.
I turn on my heel without another word. All I’ve got is the adamance to not give him the satisfaction of looking back.
The door shuts behind me with more force than necessary, the finality of it punctuated by the sound of my ragged breath in the enclosed space.
The smell of him clings to my skin, whiskey and spice.
I squeeze my eyes shut, pressing my forehead against the cool wood.
I can still feel his callused touch. The roughness of his hands—the maddening memory of how he had touched me in the car, the merciless way he had unraveled me.
And the way he had looked at me afterward, so damn smug.
I hate him, I think, my stomach churning. I hate myself more.
I fumble for the faucet, twisting it until steam rises in thick tendrils, curling around me, wrapping me in suffocating heat.
I step under the spray, tilting my head back, letting the scalding water scorch my skin.
Maybe it will burn him off. Maybe it will strip away the filth of tonight, cleanse the shame pooling within me.
Maybe it won’t.
The first blast of water scalds my skin, but it does nothing to chase away the tension laced through my muscles. I brace my hands against the slick tile, exhaling shakily as the heat crashes over me.
It should be soothing. Purifying. A purging reprieve from the chaos twisting in my veins.
But it isn’t. Because the moment the water slides down my body, I realize something horrifying: I’m still aching.
Not just the dull, residual ache of strained muscles, nor the lingering strain from anger still simmering in my chest. No—this is different.
Deeper. It thumps low in my belly, a slow, insidious throb that refuses to be ignored.
My breath shudders past my lips, fingers curling against the tile. I squeeze my eyes shut, willing my body to relax, to let go of the tension bundled so mercilessly inside me.
Nothing helps.
The spray of the water does nothing to quench the fire.
I shift my weight, thighs pressing together instinctively—and the friction is too much. Not enough. My teeth grind, frustration mounting, and my mind is already racing, frantic, spinning in a direction I can’t fucking control.
This isn’t normal.
This isn’t fucking normal.
I just came. I should feel satisfied. I should be spent. Wrung out.
But I’m not.
I am still restless, muscles wound too tight, too aware, thrumming with a hunger that refuses to be satiated.
The water cascades down my back, my chest, my thighs. My legs still shake, my stomach aching with the knot of frustration and—more, so much more than frustration. The ache doesn’t abate. If anything, it expands, worsens, heats past the simmer of blood that’s risen to the surface of my skin.
I’ve been here before, but not like this. My body has been off for weeks. Often running too hot. Always restless. A constant, bubbling fever beneath my skin that won’t break. My breasts are more sensitive, too—just brushing against the silk of my dress earlier had been enough to make me cry.
And my period—
I squeeze my eyes shut, forcing the thought away.
The stress. I keep trying to handle it, but Matías is making a ruin of me.
My body won’t let me forget any of it. It remembers the way Matías made it feel.
The way his fingers teased and tormented, dragging me to the edge until I had no choice but to fall.
The way he made me look at him as he took control of my pleasure, as if he needed me to see—needed me to know that my body belongs to him now.
I bite my lip, feeling that boundless desire surge through me.
I should be satisfied. Surely, I should feel some kind of relief after what happened in the car, but I don’t. I only feel—hungrier. A desperate pulse throbs between my legs, insistent and needy, refusing to be ignored.
The fire only spreads. And deep down, I know—
There’s only one way to put it out.
I don’t think. I just move.
The water is still scorching as I throw the shower door open, wisps of steam chasing after me like anxious fingers reaching for my skin. I cut off the spray like an afterthought. My feet thwack against the marble floor, remnant droplets streaming over my skin.
When I throw the door open, Matías is leaned against the bedpost as if in wait. But he wasn’t waiting for this, I can tell.
His head jerks slightly, and I just know there is nothing planned about the way his gaze drags down my body, taking in the way my wet skin glistens in the dim lighting.
That lazy, taunting smirk is nowhere to be found.
His jaw drops, mouth open, probably rearing to say something smug, something that would set me on fire—
But I don’t let him. I stomp over to him, dripping all over his immaculate floor, and I shove him. Hard.
His breath leaves him in a harsh gust as his back hits the mattress.
“Noa—” he starts, and I cut him off, my mouth covering his and swallowing the rest of it.
I don’t stop. I straddle him, unconcerned by the way I’ve already drenched the expensive silk of his shirt.
I’ve nothing to lose when I crawl over him, straddling his hips, my knees pressing into the firm mattress on either side of his body.
I don’t need to look down. I can feel his hard his cock is against me…
He can’t staunch the groan I steal from him when my hips roll.
“No,” I hiss.
Matías stares up at me, the ridges of his scar stark against the light of the lamp he’d turned on at his side of the bed.
I don’t know what he sees when he looks at me now—if he sees the girl I used to be, betrothed to his elder brother, or the woman who just threw herself at him, unforgivably needy for this.
His chest rises beneath the press of mine; I can feel the way his sharp inhale fissures within him.
For the first time since I met him, Matías Castillo looks caught off guard.
Good.
“I’m not a virgin,” I spit. His brows flit halfway up his forehead at that.
That’s enough satisfaction to curl at the edges of my mind, a sweet and dangerous thing.
He hadn’t expected this. Me, naked and dripping wet, my skin flushed from the heat of the shower.
Me, climbing over him like I own him, like he belongs beneath me.
But he likes it. His cock does, at least, when I brace myself above him, thighs hugging his sides, and water pooling where my body meets his.
He watches me with blatant reverence, dark lashes low over his gaze—and his smirk twisting back into place, too, as his hands slide up my damp legs, possessive.
I see the way his fingers flex, the way his control is thinning by the second.
That’s fine. I don’t want him in control. Not this time.
“Noa.”