Page 53 of Beneath His Robes

He left to go be a fucking stripper!

I held onto my words.

The ones that blamed him for this mess, for all the feelings I never asked for. He had no idea what it did to me, what it meant to me. But I wasn’t going to say it. Not now. Not like this. He was right. Miranda was the priority right now. Not me. Not us.

The silence dragged on, more suffocating than before. My irritation was still bubbling under the surface, but I could see Ronan’s hands clenched so tightly, his short nails leaving harsh indents in his palm, and his eyes losing focus.

He was fighting a battle inside himself, which somehow made my own fight feel smaller and less important.

“Let’s just get to the hospital,” I muttered, my voice quieter now, even though I still felt the anger gnawing at me. “What’s done is done.”

Ronan didn’t respond immediately, but I saw the relief in his eyes. He didn’t want to talk about this either—not now, not with everything else weighing on him.

So, we drove in silence, the weight of what we had done hanging between us, and neither of us knew how orifwe could ever truly escape it.

The road stretched on, but my mind wasn’t on the miles ticking away beneath the tires. It was back at that damn club.

The slow, sensual music, the dimmed lights, the heat of his body so close to touching mine. I could still taste him through the ice, feel his lips parted, inviting me in despite knowing better. The memory played in my mind like a broken record—sharp, disorienting, impossible to escape.

Ronan didn’t need to say anything to know my thoughts were plagued. I could see how he gripped the door and struggled with his own memories.

I could feel it all over again.

The way he hovered above me stripped me down to where I was so exposed. The air was a cruel caress. The sudden, reckless way we’d moved toward each other in the dim light. The mirrors around us had magnified the sin in front of me in too many angles.

Those slow flashing lights on the pole in the center didn’t help. The way the colors bounced on his body as it was above me…and then, the ice…that goddamn ice.

I didn’t want to think about it. But the image of his face, the heat of his skin, the intensity of the pain of my cage, yet the insane amount of pleasure from his presence…it was everywhere now.

The warmth was still there, in the back of my throat, and thrumming from my spent cock. I hated myself for it. I wasn’t supposed to feel this way. I wasn’t supposed to let myself get lost in the moment, let my guard down, forget who I was.

But in that room…I had.

And now here we were, sitting in this car, heading toward his mother’s hospital room, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how tight his abs constricted with his effort to keep his body so close to mine but just on the cusp of keeping his loophole intact of not touching.

I couldn’t even look at Ronan. I kept my eyes on the road, pretending like it didn’t matter, but it did. My heart raced when he was near, and my chest tightened every time I thought about what we had just done.

It wasn’t just the kiss from the forest. Or the secrets in the club. It was everything that came after it. The way we’d stood there, breathless, both of us unsure whether to step away or pull each other in again.

The music from the club was still playing in my head—loud, pounding, alive. And then Ronan’s lips. His fingers had gripped my pants, ripping them off my body, and for a second, I thought I might lose myself in him. But the ice, the dance, my orgasm—it had been too much.

We both knew it.

“We shouldn’t have,” I muttered again under my breath, like somehow saying it over and over would make it true, would make it go away.

But it didn’t. It just made it worse.

Ronan’s voice cut through my spiraling thoughts. “It is what it is, remember,” he said, his words slower now, as though he were choosing them carefully. “It probably shouldn’t have. But it did. So just move the fuck on, Elias. Please.”

He wasn’t wrong.

We both knew it. We both knew that what happened at that club, what happened between us, wasn’t something we could just pretend hadn’t happened.

It had changed things.

I could feel the tension coming off him, like he was struggling with the weight of his own emotions, but I couldn’t help myself. I kept drifting back to those moments, the way his lips had felt against mine. The heat, the urgency, the need that we had both given in to. I wanted to scream at myself,

Why couldn’t you have stopped? Why didn’t you just pull away?

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