Rapture's Edge

37

They glared at each other, neither one blinking. Fuming, she pressed her lips together and a tremor ran through her body. It took several seconds, but she seemed to garner some shred of her abandoned control. Then she said, “If your plan is to smash me to death, it’s working. I can’t breathe.”

“You seem to be doing a fine job of breathing, Ana.” D glanced down to her chest where the top of her breasts swelled invitingly over the scoop neck of her T-shirt. When he glanced back up at her, her face had gone cherry red. She turned her face aside, closed her eyes, and bit her lip.

The heat of her body against his, those beautiful breasts, her teeth sunk into that full lower lip…D couldn’t help himself. An erection sprang to rock-hard life in his pants. Because their bodies were pressed together, chest to crotch, she didn’t miss it.

“Unbelievable,” she said, outraged. “Just…unbelievable.” She squirmed beneath him, trying to get away, but the friction only served to excite him further, and she gasped, feeling him grow even harder.“You bring the animal out in me, beautiful,” he said gruffly, smiling though he knew he shouldn’t be, elated to be near her. “Always did.”

“I’m going to throw up on you now. Get off me.”

Her look was absolutely murderous—and, he decided, utterly adorable. “Not before you apologize for scratching my face and saying I have a small dick.”

She growled in exasperation and said through gritted teeth, “Small. Balls. Now. Get. Off!”

“Something you need to know first, baby girl,” he said, but she stiffened beneath him as if she’d been slapped.

“NO!” She stared up at him, and her dark eyes blazed cold fire. “You don’t get to call me that! You don’t get to call me nicknames and pretend you care and lie right to my face, not after you used me and took away everything I ever had! You took away my entire life! And I hate you for it! I! HATE! YOU!”

D felt his face harden. “I didn’t take away anything, you gave it away. You ran away without a word, without so much as even a look backward, and I’ve spent the last three years of my life in f*****g agony because of it. And your leaving like you did stirred up such an epic s**t storm I don’t know how it can be fixed. Maybe it can’t. But I’m the one thing standing between you and certain death right now, and I’m risking my own ass to keep you safe, so you’re going to be nice to me and take it back!”

They glared at each other, stalemate, until finally her lower lip quivered. Unbelievably, impossibly, her eyes filled with tears. “I wish you were dead,” she whispered miserably.

D could endure physical pain of any kind. He could take blows or cuts or falls, he could even take torture. What he couldn’t take was a woman’s tears. Especially his woman’s tears.

Like snow in the sun, his heart melted.

“No, baby girl, you don’t,” he whispered back, looking deep into her eyes. He was certain now beyond a doubt that beneath all that rage and blistering fury and wall of ice she’d erected was a tiny ember of tenderness that still burned just for him. “And I’ll prove it to you.”

He lowered his mouth to hers.

She gasped against his mouth, and he took the opportunity to slide his tongue between her lips. She made a little sound in her throat—horror or outrage, he couldn’t tell—and stiffened to the rigidity of a wooden plank and stopped breathing.

What she didn’t do was pull away.

D took that for a positive sign and deepened the kiss, still tender but seeking, tasting her, wanting her to respond instead of lie frozen, allowing him to explore her mouth with no resistance but no return, no answer to the question his lips were asking.

He pulled back and looked down at her; her eyes were squeezed shut tight. He lowered his head and gently kissed each of her eyelids, the place between her eyebrows, the tip of her nose. She made the little sound again, and this time it sounded closer to a plea. For what, he couldn’t tell.

Stop? Go on? A quick, merciful death?

Her lower lip began to quiver again. She was so beautiful, so f*****g vulnerable like this, pinned beneath him, he felt a wave of heat envelop his body, desire burning bright as the noonday sun.

Open for me, he thought, kissing first one corner of her mouth, then the other. He pressed the softest of kisses to the center of her lips, the little bow, the lower curve, a place he’d kissed in a million fevered dreams. Open your heart for me, angel. Let me in.

Then she sobbed.

He froze on a breath, his body burning and aching and his heart stuttering along in his chest like something half dead. She convulsed and sobbed again, turned her head to the side and started to bawl in earnest, great wracking sobs that shuddered them both and the bed beneath them.

“Baby girl,” D whispered, mortified. “Ana, Eliana, stop, it’s okay, I won’t kiss you again, just please…stop.”

He released her and sat up. She folded her arms across her chest and curled into a little, protective ball, her knees pulled to her nose, her face turned to the mattress. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know if there was anything he could do. Seeing her like this tore a hole in his chest big enough to drive a truck through.

“G-get out,” she sobbed into the mattress. “Get away f-from me.”

He reached for her, touched her shoulder, but the second his hand was on her she jerked as if electrocuted and kicked him, hard, in the stomach. “Get away from me!” x