Perverse as it was, his words, what they might have implied, combined with the way he was working me, had me coming in a flash, gripping around him, wondering what the hell was wrong with me even as I clenched on his thick length and got off.
I was still catching my breath when he pulled me off his dick, setting me down on the ground. On my knees.
He hadn’t finished.
He gripped my hair in both hands and dragged my face to his lap. He was still hard and throbbing. His engorged cock was slick and close enough to lick. When his tip touched me lips, I couldn’t seem to help myself. I opened up and started sucking him off like I’d been starving for it.
He didn’t last long like that.
He rasped out my name as his seed burned down my throat.
I was still licking his twitching length clean when he spoke.
“I know he spent the night.”
I moved away from him like he’d just caught fire.
My robe had been opened, but not removed, and I closed it and retied the belt with shaking hands.
For once it was my turn to pace. I didn’t look at him for a long time, and when I finally did, I wished I hadn’t.
He was still sitting, his thick, spent length hanging crudely out of his pants, but I don’t even think he noticed it.
His arms were folded across his chest, and he was staring at me in a way I couldn’t stand.
He looked wounded and vengeful all at once.
It was several pounding heartbeats later that I found my voice. And my indignation. “And just how do you know that? Did your spy girlfriend tell you that?”
He went still as stone. “What are you talking about?”
My lip curled. I could feel this getting ugly. “You know.”
Something happened to his face, something scary.
He stood, tucking himself back into his jeans and zipping them up, his eyes never leaving me.
A ruthlessness I’d never seen before had overtaken his expression. “I don’t know,” he bit out. “Explain it to me.”
“That woman you have spying on me. She told you, didn’t she?”
His whole face clenched up, and I knew something bad was happening.
He’d gone so still, but something volatile was writhing in agony under the surface of that stillness.
“How do you know about the woman spying on you?” he asked me.
I wanted to curse at him in five languages for the question, but I managed to answer civilly enough. At least he knew now that I was aware of her. It was something I’d needed to address, needed to have out in the open. “She came to see me. Didn’t you know?”
His face didn’t so much as twitch, but his shoulders started shaking.
He looked like he was about to snap, to lose it completely.
I was afraid of him, that’s how much he was losing his ever-present composure.
I’d always known he was dangerous. But my instincts, which I’d trusted before Heath, had always told me that, while he was dangerous, he was not at all dangerous to me.
I did not feel that way now.
Something dark and vile had overtaken him. He’d barely moved, but I still knew, deep in my gut, that he was incensed to a degree that I’d never seen before.
To the point of violence.
I was shaking. This was not Heath and his usual combination of mean and magnificent. This was not Heath angry = Me turned on.
This was something unmanageable. I knew it.
“She contacted you directly?” His face was fraudulently collected, but his voice hid nothing. He sounded murderous.
“She came to my house. She had all kinds of interesting things she wanted to tell me about you.”
I couldn’t speak of her without revealing my feelings, though I tried to hide it.
My jealousy was very thinly veiled, but as I studied him I realized that that didn’t matter. He’d never notice it, because he simply wasn’t looking for it.
He was much too wrapped up in his own volatile emotions then to notice mine.
“She came here? To your house?”
I didn’t answer, didn’t bother to repeat myself, just staring at him.
He cursed, fluently and savagely. “Did she lay a hand on you? Hurt you?”
I couldn’t manage an answer for several pounding heartbeats, because the way he asked it made me realize something.
This fury, this unadulterated rage he was going through was not directed at me.
It was for her. I was both relieved and as baffled as ever.
“No,” I finally got out.
That seemed to take some of the steam out of him, which was good. I could breathe again when he didn’t look so close to the brink.
“She just came here . . . to talk?” he finally managed to get out.
“Yes. She told me everything, Heath. I know everything.”
His brows drew together menacingly. “She told you everything? I don’t fucking think so. She doesn’t know everything, and I’ve worked with her for a long time, so I can guess what she did tell you. A convincing combination of lies and truth. But I see it got to you.”
“Are you saying you’ve never lied to me?”
“Not like you seem to think. Have I been completely upfront with you? No. Have I lied? Yes. But not more than I had to.”
“I know that you only approached me because of whatever was going on with your sister and Dair.”
He cursed, and it was as good as an admission of guilt. “Yes, that’s why I approached you then. But it has fuck all to do with me being here now.”
I recoiled. It was an awful thing to hear, because it made me think that— “So you only slept with me because of—”
“No! Fucking no. Stop it. I checked you out for my sister. I searched your house. I got a feel for your patterns, trying to figure out if you were seeing Dair. But, like I said, that had fuck all to do with us having sex.”
“Then why—”
“I fucked you because I couldn’t fucking help myself, okay? It was never part of the plan. It was always against the goddamn plan, okay? I’ll admit that I invaded your privacy way more than was fair. I, shit, Lourdes, I started watching you and I liked what I saw. More than liked.”
He took a very deep breath. “Listen, to understand why I became so obsessed with you so quickly, you need some background on me. I’ve done a lot of things. Terrible things. Things a man can’t come back from. You never come back. Instead, you end up owning those things, and they just become a part of who you are.
“For better or worse, I own a lot of bloody baggage that I can’t ever walk away from. I’ve survived a lot of things I can’t come back from, and hell, I know there are some still to come.”
He studied me for a moment, trying to gage my reaction, then continued, “I carry all of my burdens as best I can, but I know better than anyone that I can never lead a normal life. Even if all of my problems were solved, and my sister was safe, my life will never be peaceful.
“I wouldn’t even know where to begin to be peaceful. I am not acclimated to the rules of normal society.
“When you’re that fucked in the head, deceit becomes a way of life. Lies become a pattern.
“I don’t lie because I like it. I’ve never enjoyed the burn at the back of my throat when I open my mouth and deadpan endless falsehoods, big ones, small ones, omissive ones, day after day.
“I lie because the bottom line is: the truth is death for me, no matter how I might crave it.
“But God, I do crave the truth.
“Imagine damaged me with all of that inside of me, abhorring deceit, craving elusive honesty.
“Running into a woman like you.
“There wasn’t a thing about you I couldn’t read. Even if it was hidden a bit, no matter. You’re a piece of glass I could hold in my palm. So what if it clouded a bit, got a bit of sand on it? All I had to do was turn it this way, brush it off, and poof, shiny and transparent as ever.
“But really, I didn’t even have to do that. The beauty of you, this gorgeous creature that for some fucking reason let me have her, over and over, was that if I wanted the truth from you, all I had to do was ask, and you’d tell me. You play no games. You’re incapable of deceit.
“You’re the truth, Lourdes. So what if I couldn’t, shouldn’t have you? I craved you, and so I kept coming back.
“I’m not dead inside. Not all of me. Something remains, something that doesn’t only live for vengeance.
“That’s what you taught me.”
He’d left me speechless, breathless, without a leg to stand on.
He did care about me. I was positive of that now, at least. So many other questions remained, but that was the one that had bothered me the most.
I was such a girl.
I moved to him, laying my cheek against his chest.
He wrapped his arms around me.
We stayed like that for a long time, pressed together as I wondered what the hell I was supposed to do. Had this changed anything? It felt like it had. But feelings and reality were two different things.