So long, it had been so very, very long.
“Look at you.” His voice was cold, and I whimpered. “So needy. So desperate.” He said it like it was wrong. Gross.
“I’m sorry,” I choked.
The hand that had been torturing my breasts came up to my throat, and he held me with my head arched back.
“For what?” he asked. “What are you sorry for?”
Wanting him so much. Being so needy.
Everything.
“I’ll leave,” I breathed. “Just let me go.”
I whimpered as one long finger slid down over my clit. Pressing hard enough to fill my body with sparks.
“No,” he groaned, and my knees gave out. He held me by my throat and the fingers inside of me. “It’s too late for that.”
“Then what do you want?” I twisted against his body. He was a silent steady pressure against my back.
“That girl at the party who was about to run off into the night. I want her. But she doesn’t exist anymore, does she?”
I whimpered in pain. My soul. My body. Everything was hurt by his words.
His fingers against my clit were rough and hard, and no one had ever touched me that way so I had no idea how much I liked it. How his hand around my neck made me feel caught. I couldn’t resist. I couldn’t refuse.
All I could do was stand there and take the pleasure he was forcing on me.
“Oh, look at you,” he said, his voice dark with disdain and desire. “Look at how you love it. What could I do to you?” he asked and licked my earlobe before sucking it into his mouth. “I could fuck you. Right here, couldn’t I? Put you on your knees and feed you my cock until you couldn’t breathe.” All of it. He could do all of it. But I didn’t have to say it. He felt it in my body. My total surrender. My breath was coming out in pants and moans, and I needed his fingers inside me. Inside. I was going to die if he didn’t put something, anything inside me.
Two fingers pushed hard inside me, and I was shuddering. Sobbing. The orgasm I needed a breath away. Two.
“I could stop,” he said, and he did. His fingers still inside me. His hand around my throat applied no pressure. I couldn’t move. Push him away even.
But I didn’t. I closed my eyes and tears rolled down my cheeks. I waited, but so did he.
“Jesus, Princess. If you want it, ask for it.”
Like he knew how hard I’d been conditioned not to. How my self-denial was so deeply ingrained. “I promise you,” he said. “I promise that girl in the ball gown cracking jokes, that if you just ask, if you just say it. I will give it to you.”
“Please.” It burst out of me with perfect manners. “Please, don’t stop. Make me come. Please.”
“There you go,” he said, like he was proud of me, and his fingers were a madness inside my body. In my throat there was a keening sound I couldn’t swallow and would embarrass me when I remembered it tomorrow. And I wanted him to pull up the back of my skirt and undo his pants. I wanted him inside my body in a way I’d never wanted anything ever before.
He wasn’t doing it, so I tried to help it along. Pulling up my skirt, reaching behind me for his pants. The hard steel length of his cock in his pants.
“No.” His hands left my body to slap my own hands against the wall. “Like this.”
And I could have fought, but he’d already said it. I was a mouse. And I let him touch me the way he wanted. Hold me the way he wanted. Against this wall, my hair falling down my face like we were strangers. Animals.
I let him make me come in a wild ecstatic explosion of pleasure and pain. I cried. I might have screamed. I was light, and I was dust. And I was so far out of my body it was relief.
But I imagined all those things he said to me. I imagined him fucking me against this door, or the desk. I imagined the taste of him on my tongue.
I imagined . . . oh god . . . I imagined that savage mouth against mine.
The sweet violence of his kiss.
And I wanted him all over again. More, even, than before. It hurt how much I wanted his kiss.
It took me a moment to realize where he’d been a living breathing blanket damp with sweat against my back, there was only cool fresh air.
He wasn’t holding my neck. His fingers were not between my legs.
Ronan wasn’t touching me at all. I couldn’t feel him even an inch away. On shaky legs I turned, my skirt falling back down to the floor, hiding the thong pulled to the side, my slick thighs. The mess he’d made of me.
He stood by the desk, his hands sweeping his dark hair away from his face. His fingers, I could see were wet from being inside my body. Wet from my come.
“Fix your dress, Poppy,” he said.
“My . . . dress?” the words didn’t make sense. Was it English? My brain had short-circuited.
He pointed at my chest, and I realized the bodice was gaping, revealing my breasts. The silk torn. “Cover yourself.”
Another unwanted memory. The senator on our wedding night standing over the bed where I lay naked.
You’re not much to look at, are you?
Shaking my head didn’t change the memory. Or what had just happened here. I tugged the bodice up as best I could, holding my hands over my skin. Wishing I could cover myself.
This dress cost ten thousand dollars, and it was ruined. I felt ruined.
“You leave first. Go straight to your car. You look like you’ve been fucked against a wall.”
I understood what was happening. The rejection. It had been inevitable, in a way. This was what I got for wanting something.
Anything.
But I was not a child on my wedding night. I was a woman who’d endured enough of a man’s disdain.
“Fuck you,” I said through gritted teeth and reached for the doorknob. He moved so fast I didn’t get it open before he was right in front of me again. His fingers cupping my face.
“Keep your blood up. You’re going to need it. Be smart. Now, go.”
I jerked my head out of his grip and was out that door like an Irish devil was on my heels. But of course, when I turned at the end of the hallway, he wasn’t there.
I had no idea where my purse was, so I left it and my phone, and I stepped out onto the windy 27th street and, like magic, there was my car. My driver. My life operating as it always had.
When I felt somehow . . . changed.
“Ma’am?” my driver said. The wind whipped his coat away from his body, lifted his pale hair off his head.
“Yes?” We stood by the open door. A storm was blowing in from someplace.
“Are you all right?” he asked. He had a nice face my driver. And he was younger than I thought.
So much sudden concern from the men in my life.
“I think so. Yes,” I said and climbed into the back seat. He slammed the door behind me and then we were pulling away from the curb. The party.
The car ride home I spent squashing the lingering fires in my body. Distancing myself from the memory of his fingers around my throat. The open-mouthed kisses on my neck. I pushed them away and framed them up like they weren’t my memories. It was exactly what I did to survive being married to Jim. They were a book I read. Or a movie I saw.
The shame of having to do it again was unwanted, so I turned it into anger.
And I seethed with that anger all the way up to Bishop’s Landing.