Page 35 of Wicked Sinner
Bridget stares at the phone like it's a snake. "You can't be serious."
"As the grave,bellissima." I slip the phone back into my pocket. "Your friend Jenny can call whoever she wants. File all the reports she likes. They’ll pretend to look. Give her updates even, if she demands them. But it will go nowhere.”
Bridget’s face pales. "You bastard," she whispers.
“It doesn’t have to be like this.” I let out a slow breath, looking at her. She’s so beautiful, even like this. Her hair is damp, curling slightly around her face, and I want to reach out and run the wet ends of it between my fingers. “You can stop fighting me. Make me believe that I can trust you. Then you can leave this room, have your phone, see your friends. Go back to work at your garage, even. But I need to know that you’re not going to run. That you’re not going to escape and take our child with you.”
Bridget’s entire body is tense, her jaw clenched. "Get out," she spits, her voice shaking with rage.
"Not until we finish this conversation." I close the door behind me and lock it. "I understand you're angry. I understand you feel trapped. But this doesn't have to be a prison, Bridget. It can be something much better."
"Better?" She laughs, but there's no humor in it. "You kidnapped me, Caesar. You dragged me away from my life,my work, everything I care about. How could this possibly be better?"
"Because I can give you things you never imagined.” I let out a long breath, wondering how I can possibly make her understand. "Security. Luxury. A future for our child that most people can only dream of. Neither of you will ever want for anything?—"
"I don't want your money," she hisses, a startling amount of venom in her voice. "I want my freedom."
“Being here doesn’t have to mean you’re not free?—”
"Says the man who ran away from home at seventeen because he couldn't stand being told what to do." Her eyes flash as she looks straight at me, and I feel my jaw tighten as the words hit their mark.
“How do you know about that?” I ask quietly, my voice deadly calm.
Bridget snorts. “I can read. I looked you up, remember? You running off made the news. ‘Local influential Miami billionaire’s son disappears.’ The cops looked for you for months. I guess a mafia boss’s sondoesrate a first-class investigation.” The sarcasm drips from her words, so thick I can taste it. “I can guess at the rest. And the expression on your face tells me I’m right. You thought this was all too stifling, so you ran away. What a fucking hypocrite.”
Her words slice like knives, carving into all the tender places I try to keep hidden, but I force myself not to let it show. Not to let her see how she’s managed to wound me.
"That was different," I say carefully.
"Was it? Or are you just a self-absorbed asshole who thinks freedom is only important when it's yours?"
She holds her ground, breathing hard, and I can see her pulse racing at the base of her throat. The space between us is charged with tension—not just anger, but something else. Somethingthat makes the air feel thick and electric. She hates me—anyone with eyes and ears could see and hear that, but it’s as if whatever there is between us transmutes that hatred into that indefinablethingthat there is between us, an alchemy of desire.
"I was young and stupid," I admit. "I thought I could escape my responsibilities, build a different life. But I learned something important during those years away."
"What's that?" she asks, though she sounds like she doesn't really want to know.
"That you can't run from who you are forever," I say, taking another step closer. "Eventually, you have to accept your place in the world. Embrace it."
It’s not exactly true. At first, it was guilt. Then it was spite. And all of those emotions are layered with so much more, reasons and feelings and things that happened that I’m not going to begin to get into with Bridget right now. Especially when I know she’s not really hearing me.
“My place?” She snorts. “What is myplace, Caesar? Locked in here like a broodmare in a stall?”
The crude comparison makes me wince, but I press on. "I think your place is beside me. As my wife, my partner, the mother of my children. I think you could be happy here if you'd let yourself.Icould make you happy, Bridget?—"
"Happy?" She stares at me like I've lost my mind. "Caesar, you're delusional if you think any of this could make me happy."
"Couldn’t you be?" I ask, and I take a step closer to her, and then another. Close enough to see the gold flecks in her hazel eyes, close enough to catch her scent—the honey lavender soap from her shower and the warmer scent that’shers, the scent that I remember from when it was all over my skin, too. "You were happy that night in your garage. I felt it, Bridget. The way you responded to me, the way you came apart in my arms. That was real."
Her cheeks flush pink, and I know I've hit a nerve. "That was sex," she says, but her voice lacks conviction. "Physical chemistry. It doesn't mean anything. Just because I liked the way you fucked me doesn’t mean that there’s anything else between us?—"
I close the distance, moving up nearly against her, daring her to retreat. She doesn’t. She’s as stubborn and rebellious as I am, a challenge that I want to win, and I reach up, cupping my palm against the smooth, delicate skin of her cheek. “Doesn’t it?”
I feel her flinch at my touch, ever so slightly, but she refuses to pull away, only looks at me murderously with those gorgeous hazel eyes. "Then why is your heart racing right now? I can see your pulse in your throat, Bridget. Your pupils are dilated. Your nipples—” I reach up, brushing a finger against the underside of her breast below the denim of her overalls. “I imagine they’re hard as diamonds right now.”
And so am I. My cock throbs from the simple contact, from being so close to her, from her scent filling my senses. I want to throw her back on the bed and fuck her until she comes screaming around my cock, want to feel her tongue running over my piercings again, feel her exploring me like she did that night—but that won’t help anything. And right now, she’s more likely to bite my cock off than suck it.
She sucks in a sharp breath, and I feel the victory like a shot of adrenaline. Whatever she says, whatever she claims to feel, her body tells a different story.
