“That you were.” His reminiscent look made her want to smack him across that smug mouth. “I never thought a woman could always be that hot and ready for me.” Before she lashed out, he sighed. “I would have seduced you even if you’d been a slime-oozing monstrosity. Stomaching a mark was never a prerequisite in my search-and-seduce missions. But even based on my indiscriminate libido, as you presume, I would have still suffered the minimum of physical contact to keep you on the hook. I wouldn’t have gone to lengths you can’t imagine to create a rendezvous almost daily, and then to have sex with you as many times as could be squeezed into each encounter. Even with my ‘endowments’ I couldn’t have performed that repeatedly or that...vigorously if I wasn’t even hotter and readier for you than you were for me. And I was. None of that was an act.”
Her heart stuttered as she met the gaze that suddenly felt as if it held no barriers. As if he was telling the truth, probably for the first time.
He’d really wanted her?
But... “If you wanted me as much as you claim, and still used and discarded me like any other woman you didn’t want, that makes you an even colder bastard.”
His gaze grew inscrutable again. “I didn’t discard you. You chose Burton.”
“Is that what you call what I did? I had no choice.”
“You always have a choice.”
“Spare me the human-development slogans.”
“A choice doesn’t have to be an easy one, but it remains one. Every choice has pros and cons. Once you make one, you put up with its consequences. You don’t blame others for those.”
“I categorically disagree. I certainly blame others, namely Burton and you, for making it impossible for me to have a choice. Leaving him was out of the question.”
“You did end up leaving him.”
“I didn’t leave, I ran for my life.”
“You could have done so with me.”
“Could I? And where would I have been if you failed to destroy him, then had enough of me, as I’m sure you would have sooner or later, and discarded me then, after I made a mortal enemy of him?”
His glance was haughtiness itself. “There was no possibility I wouldn’t destroy him.” His eyes narrowed with...reproof? “And I promised you protection.”
“You dare make it my fault I ended up in mortal danger when you executed your plan? When I couldn’t have known your promise would amount to anything, when you didn’t tell me anything of your real abilities, let alone purpose?”
“You dare ask why I didn’t when you were his accomplice?”
A bitter scoff escaped her. “You promoted me from passive accessory to active accomplice in under an hour? Wonder what you’d make me by the end of this conversation.”
“Whatever you call what you did, my desire for you didn’t blind me to the probability you’d run to him if I confided in you. It would have been an opportunity to entrench yourself further in his favor, adding indebtedness to his already pathological infatuation with you. And I was right.”
She closed the mouth that had dropped open at his preposterous interpretations. “Yeah? How so?”
“When a choice was to be made, not knowing my real ‘abilities,’ you chose the man you thought more powerful. This indicates what you would have done had you thought I was a threat to your billion-dollar meal ticket.” He shrugged his massive shoulders. “Not that I blame you. You thought you made the right choice based on available information. That you were grossly misinformed and therefore made a catastrophic mistake doesn’t make you a victim.”
Protests boiled in her blood. But there was no point in voicing any. She had no proof, as he’d said.
Even if she did, to whom would she submit it? To him? The mastermind of her misery?
Her shoulders slumped as the surge of aggression he’d provoked drained. “You have everything worked out, don’t you?”
“Very much so.”
She exhaled in resignation. “So you orchestrated everything, got the result you desired, while even Fate indulged you and gave you the bonus of a mark to enjoy sexually, huh? That must have made your mission of patiently milking me for all I had more palatable.”
His shrug was indifference incarnate. “More or less.” His gaze shifted to an expression that seemed to sear her marrow. “With one amendment. It wasn’t palatable. It was phenomenal.”
“I—it was?”
“Along with a dozen superlative adjectives. Being with you was the only true and absolute pleasure I ever had.”
He’d already said he’d wanted her. But the way he’d spelled it out now... His words fell on her like a punch, jogging her brain in her skull.
It had been what had most mutilated her, had left her feeling desecrated. Thinking she’d wanted him with every fiber of her being while he’d only reviled her even as he’d used her in every way. Learning that he’d wanted her had just begun to ameliorate her humiliation. But now his claim that it had been as unprecedented to him... It felt genuine. If it was, then at least their intimacies, which had been so profound to her, among all the lies and exploitation, had been real. She could at least cleanse those intensely intimate memories and have them back.
“And that’s why I want you to say it, Isabella.”
The hunger in his voice and eyes had her heart ramming against her ribs as if unable to bear their confinement.
“I want you to say you’ve craved having again what we had all those years ago. That every time you closed your eyes, I was there, in your mind, on your tongue, all over you and inside you, giving you everything only I could ever give you.”
Every word he said, soaked in hunger, seething with demand, brought a wave of wet heat surging in her core, her body readying itself for its master doing all the things she’d never stopped yearning for.
She still had to resist. Because of what he’d done to her. Past and present. Because of what he thought of her. What he was. For every reason that existed, really.
“What if I don’t say it?”
Those incredible eyes crinkled, those lips that made her every inch ache with the memory of what they could do to her twisted.
“You want me to force you to take what you’re dying to take, so you’d have it, and the moral high ground, too? No, my exquisite siren. If I take you now, it will be because you’ll tell me in no uncertain terms that you want me to. That you’re burning for me to. It’s that...or you can go.”
And it turned out every reason under the sun to tell him to go to hell was nothing compared to the one reason she had to give him what he wanted.
That he was right.
Giving in, she reached out, wound his tie around her hand and yanked on it with all her strength.
Which didn’t say much right now. Her tug was trembling and weak like the rest of her. She was that aroused. He wouldn’t have moved if he hadn’t wanted to.
But her action was seemingly enough of an appeasement. He let her drag him down so his face was two inches from hers.
His virility-laden, madness-inducing breath flayed her lips, filled her lungs. “Now say it.”
Voice as unsteady as her legs, she did. “I want you.”
“Say it all, Isabella.”