Page 90 of Ruthless Savior
“I didn’t hear you come in,” he says finally, and I try to respond, but all that comes out is a sound very like a squeak.
“I—” I can’t think of anything to say. Ronan looks at me for a moment longer, then walks to the closet, reaching for a robe. I feel a flash of disappointment as he turns his back to me and shrugs it on, dropping the towel once his backside is covered. When he turns around again, the robe is fully closed.
“Everything is fine in Boston,” he says, as if that’s what I’m thinking about, and not how I could clearly see the line of his cock beneath the towel. “Rocco is still pushing his boundaries,but nothing that we can’t handle. My hope is that he’ll start to back down, and then I’ll be able to decide how I want to move on my terms.”
I nod. My mouth still feels dry. “That’s… that’s good,” I manage finally, and Ronan pauses.
“How’s your mother?”
I blink, feeling as if I’ve been dashed with cold water. “She’s fine,” I manage, thinking of our conversation in the library. “She’s doing better day by day, it seems like.”
“Good.” Ronan crosses to the fireplace, reaching for a glass from the bar cart. “I’m glad to hear it.”
The conversation feels stiff, awkward. We’re ignoring the elephant in the room, but it’s infiltrating every breath, it feels like.
“She thinks you’re a good man,” I blurt out suddenly, the words forming on my lips before I can stop them. “I told her… about you. And she thinks that. I do too.”
Ronan freezes, his hand on the bottle of whiskey on the bar cart. “Neither you nor your mother know very much about me,” he says finally, his voice hardening. “Or what it means to be what I am.”
“I’ve slept with you.” I don’t know where my bravery is coming from, but suddenly I feel as if I can’t stop talking. “You took my virginity. I married you. I think I know?—”
“Enough?” he interrupts. “You think you know enough?” He turns toward me, crossing the space between us, and suddenly the air fills with the scent of pine and the warm scent of his skin. I gulp, frozen as he looms over me. “Remember, I came home with blood on my fingers. Leila. And that’s not the first or only time it’s happened. Just the first time that you were there to see.”
I can’t breathe. He’s so close to me, so physically overwhelming, so impossiblymalethat I feel as if I’m melting under his gaze. I reach up without thinking, my hand touchinghis bare chest in the open V of his robe, and I feel him flinch as if I’ve burned him.
His hand grabs my wrist before I can explore further, his eyes darkening with a warning that’s impossible to miss. “Stop,” he says, his voice hard, and I feel a quiver run through my entire body at the rasping burr of it.
“Ronan, I?—”
“You don’t know,” he says flatly. “You don’t know enough about anything. Not enough to know who I am or what you should think of me. I helped you because it was the right thing to do. I married you out of necessity. And if looking at you makes me so hard I can’t fucking think…” His jaw tightens, and he lets go of my wrist, pushing my hand away from him as he does so. “Then that’s just a problem I’ll have to learn to live with, until this marriage is over.”
He pivots on his heel, stalking away from me and back into the bathroom, the door closing hard behind him. I stare after him, my pulse hammering in my throat and my head spinning, and I know I’m supposed to leave. I know he won’t want me to still be here when he comes out of the bathroom.
I retreat, because I don’t know what else to do. He looked so angry for a moment there, and not even with me… with himself, maybe? There’s something more to this that I don’t understand.
Of course there is,I tell myself as I go to hide out in the library for a little while. There is, because he’s right. I don’t know him as well as I should. He hasn’t even told me the truth about his last wife. And I feel a quiver of fear in my stomach, wondering if that has something to do with the things Ronan said.
You don’t know enough about anything… to know who I am or what you should think of me.
I stay in the library for a long time, until I feel sure he must either have gone elsewhere in the house or to sleep. When Imake my way back to our bedroom, I see his shape under the covers, lying on his side on the very far side of the huge mattress, facing away from me.
I change in the bathroom and slide under the duvet on my side, and I swear I feel him tense as I do, even with all the space between us. But he says nothing, his breathing even and quiet, and I close my eyes as I try to force myself to sleep.
—
Ronan is upand nowhere to be seen when I wake the next morning. I don’t see him until later that afternoon, when my mom and I are in the sitting room, sipping tea and chatting idly. He walks in, and I feel every part of my body go on high alert from the simple fact of his presence.
This man completely undoes me, and there’s not a fucking thing I can do about it.
"Sorry to interrupt," he says, but his eyes are on me, not my mother. "I was wondering if you'd like to go out to dinner with me tonight, Leila. There's a pub that serves the best fish and chips I can recall having, and I thought..." He runs a hand through his hair, looking almost nervous. "I thought you might enjoy seeing the town at night. And… I’d like to make it up to you for how… terse, I was with you last night. I’m sorry."
I feel my mom’s eyes on me curiously, and I blink at him, startled to hear the apology. “I?—”
“I think that’s a lovely idea,” my mom says brightly, and I shoot her a sideways look that clearly saysyou’re not being subtle.
But the truth is, I want to say yes. I want to go. I want to spend an evening with Ronan away from the confines of whatever gorgeous home I’m cooped up in. This would be like wewere two normal people, out for dinner together, and the idea is more enticing than it should be.
We’re not normal, and we never will be, any more than this will ever be real. But I want to pretend, even though I know I shouldn’t.
