Grabbing her, I pushed her down, not hard, but purposefully. I needed her to know that she wasn’t getting out of here until she realized who she belonged to and accepted things for what they were.
A vase on the side table shattered on the ground, shards scattering across the marble.
I didn’t give a shit about the damn vase.
Zoella gasped, a brief, breathless sound.
I straddled her, one hand tightening around her wrist, holding it against the plush bedding slightly above her head. Not too tight, just tight enough to feel the fight. The resistance.
She turned, not to get away. To challenge me.
I leaned in, my voice gliding against her throat like a blade. “You enjoy pretending you despise me,” I whispered, “but your body already recognizes who I am.”
Her chest rose and fell rapidly. Too rapidly.
I let my hand drop slowly and deliberately down the curve of her hip, down her thigh, tracing the heat that I could feel churning just beneath the skin.
I was just about to slide my fingers through her wedding gown when I noticed she’d frozen, and when I glanced at her, her eyes were wild with emotion.
It wasn’t fear or the type of silence that followed after defeat. This was something else.
Rigid. Quiet. Guarded.
I caught her wincing before she could hide it.
My hand froze.
She didn’t say anything, didn’t push me away, but I heard it, nonetheless. I hadn’t expected this.
I edged back an inch, just far enough to view her face.
Her lips parted, her eyes glassy and sharp, but filled with so much more innocence than I’d ever seen in any other woman I’d been close to.
I lowered my mouth to her jaw, barely touching her skin, and my voice dropped, quiet and cold.
“No one’s ever touched you.”
She took in a breath, her entire body tensing beneath me.
It was all the confirmation I needed.
The flush that climbed to her neck. The flash of something like shame in her eyes, though she quickly covered it with that defiant glint.
But I saw it.
My hold on her wrist relaxed, but I didn’t back off. A smile spread at the corner of my mouth. “So that’s your secret,” I whispered. “All that mouth, that attitude…and no one’s ever had you?”
Her jaw tightened. Still silent. Still proud.
God, she was annoying, and completely, breathtakingly mine.
The possessiveness burned in my chest like a live wire—hot and bright and dangerously close to snapping.
She was no longer my wife only; she was untouched, and I was the one who was going to change that.
She gazed up at me, her blue eyes wide, lips parted in a combination of defiance and something she had yet to identify. Her body was rigid beneath mine, each muscle tense with anger, with humiliation…and desire. She was trembling.
I watched the rise and fall of her chest, the red blooming down her throat. The quiver in her bottom lip that she was trying so damn hard to still.