by Olivia Gates
His gaze fixed on her with a new kind of intensity as he put down his mug, straightened from the counter and prowled closer.
Feeling more exposed now that daylight gave her no place to hide, she forced herself to stand her ground. “If physical threats aren’t among your extreme measures, what then? If you think your previous warning of exposing me to Rose and Jeffrey stands, it doesn’t. I’m walking out of here and going straight to the practice to tell them everything.”
His ridiculing glance told her he didn’t believe her capable of doing that. Out loud he only taunted, “I’d still have dozens of ways to make you comply.”
“Why are you even asking me to do this?”
“I’m not asking you. I’m telling you.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah...I got that already. You’re the man who says ‘jump’ and everyone hops in the air and freezes there until you say down. Quit marveling at your unstoppable powers. It got old after the first dozen times. So give me a straight answer already. It’s not as if you care about going easy on me, or about me at all.”
“Bloody hell, who am I kidding.” Without seeming to move closer, he was all over her. Before she could even gasp, he buried his face in her neck and groaned, “It was I who made a catastrophic mistake, Isabella. I’m not done. I’ll never be.”
Suffocating under the feel of him, the hard heat and perfection of him, with the mess of reactions he wrenched from her depths, she started struggling. “Let me go. Now.”
He only carried her off the ground. She opened her lips to blast him and he closed them with a mind-melting kiss, tasting her as if he couldn’t stop.
It was only when she went limp in his arms that he let her lips go, barely setting her back on her feet, pouring one final groan of enjoyment inside her.
“Got that out of your system?” She glared up at him, wishing her hatred could melt his flawless face off his skull.
“I just told you there is no getting you out of my system. So let’s not waste more time in posturing and theatrics. Let’s get past what I said to you earlier.”
“Just like that, huh?”
He squeezed her tighter. “It would be more time efficient. I already admitted to being a pillock and a tosser.”
“What?”
His lips spread wider at her croak. It wasn’t right. Nature was such a random, unjust system, to endow him with such an array of assets and abundance of charisma. But then, that was what made him such an exemplary fiend.
“That means massive idiot and supreme jerk in the tongue of my people.”
“And you think calling yourself a couple of fancy British insults exonerates you and compensates me? I’m sure in your universe you consider tossing a half-assed apology at someone will wipe away any injury you’ve dealt them. Not in mine.”
His eyes sobered. “I got you here thinking I could get closure and move past you at last. I went through the motions but not only didn’t I get said closure, I no longer want it.”
Needing to poke out his eyes and wrap her legs around him at once, she pushed at him, bracing against the feel of his silk-sprinkled steel flesh. Just remembering what that chest had done to her as he’d tormented her breasts and pounded his potency inside her...
She gave a strong enough shove that he let her go at last. Because he’d decided to, she was sure.
Regaining her footing, she steadied herself. “So you’re not even apologizing. You just realized you’ve jumped the gun, that you didn’t get enough of me and want a few more rounds.”
He stroked his hands over his chest, as if tracing the imprint of her hands against it. “I want unlimited rounds. And I never thought it a possibility to have enough of you. I only wanted to be rid of my need for you. I no longer want that. I want to indulge that need, to wallow in it.” He reached for her again, slamming her against him, cupping one of the breasts he’d ravaged with pleasure. “And before I made that bloody blunder of following through with my no-longer-viable intention, you wanted nothing more than to binge on me, too.”
She pushed his hands away from her quivering flesh. “I’m actually grateful for said bloody blunder. It gave me the closure I needed, in the form of a vicious slap that jogged me out of my pathological tendencies where you’re concerned.”
He grabbed both her hands and dragged them up to his face. “Slap me back as hard as you like. Or better still...” He pulled her hands down, pressed them nails first over his chest. “Take your pound of flesh, Isabella. Claw it out of me.”
Trembling with the need to sink her nails and teeth into his chest, not to hurt but to worship him, she fisted her hands against the urge and stepped back. “Thanks, but no thanks.”
Circumventing him, the soreness of his possession and the evidence of their intimacies between her legs making her gait awkward, made her curse him and herself all over again.
His voice dipped another octave, penetrating her between the shoulder blades. “I’m rescinding my ultimatum.”
That made her turn, that mixture of rage and swooning warring inside her. “You’re no longer threatening unimaginable punishments so I’d leave and never return? How kind of you.”
He covered the distance she’d put between them, eyes boring into her as if he wanted to hypnotize her. “You only need to end your partnership.”
Before she took him up on his offer of slashing her hands open on those razor-sharp cheekbones, or breaking her nails claiming a handful of those steel pectorals, he went on, “Give the Doctors Anderson a personal excuse. If you’d rather not, I will manufacture an airtight one for you and pay the penalty for unilaterally dissolving the partnership. But you don’t have to worry about that. I’ll arrange a far more prestigious and lucrative partnership for you. Better still, I’ll establish your own private practice or even hospital.”
Head spinning at the total turnabout he’d made, but more at the sheer nerve of his standing there orchestrating her life for her, the utter insanities he was spouting, she raised her hands. “Stop. Just stop. What the hell is wrong with you? Were you always a madman and I never noticed it?”
“I am definitely mad, with wanting you. And you showed me you’re as out of your mind for me. So you’ll stay and we’ll pick up where we left off, without the restrictions of the past. I’ll acquire a new residence for you close to me, so you won’t waste time commuting. You can have anything else you want or need. You can work with anyone in the world, have access to all the funds and facilities and personnel you wish for. I will accommodate and fulfill your every desire.”
He dragged her back to him, hauling her by the buttocks against his hardness, his other hand twisting in her hair, tilting her head back, exposing her neck to the ravaging of his tongue and teeth. His growl spilled into her blood at her pulse point. “Every single one.”
Her traitorous body melting inside and out for him, she felt she was drowning again. “Richard...this is insane...”
“We’ve already established I am, for you.” He punctuated every word with a thrust, and her voracious body soaked up the pleasure of every rough grind. “I discovered I have been all these years, but my training, and everything else, held it all in check. I no longer want to hold back. And I won’t.” He took her mouth in a compulsive kiss that almost made her orgasm there and then. He ended the kiss, transferred his possession to the rest of her face. “If you ever thought Burton indulged you, that was nothing compared to what I’ll do for you.”
Lurching, feeling as if he’d slapped her, she punched her way out of his arms this time, her voice rising to a strident shout. “I don’t want anything from you, just like I never wanted anything from him. So you can take your promises and offers and shove them.”
He caressed his body where her blows had landed, licked his lips as if savoring her taste. “I’m telling you everything on offer, for full disclosure’s sake. You’re free to make use of whatever you choose.” He captured her hands again, pressing his lips in her aching palms. “But I am compensat
ing you for the termination of your partnership. That’s the one thing that’s not negotiable.”
She snatched her hands away. “Are you done?”
“I told you I could never be done with you.”
“Okay, I’ve changed my diagnosis. You’re not insane, you’re delusional. On top of having multiple personality disorder. I’m terminating nothing. And I already told you what you can do with your ‘compensations.’”
He tutted, all indulgence now. “I’m not letting you go until we get this settled. So let’s get on with it so I can leave you to get on with the rest of your day. You have new partners you have to let down easy after all.”
“‘This’ is already settled. And you’re letting me go now, Richard.”
Turning, she strode the long way back to the door. Though slower, his impossibly long strides kept him a step behind her.
At the door, he pressed himself into her back, plastering her against it, seeking all her triggers. But she was finally angry enough to resist and desperate enough to leave.
“Tell your damn pet door to open sesame, Richard.”
Taking a last suckle of her earlobe, sending fireworks all over her nervous system, he sighed. The sound poured right into her brain as he mercifully ended their body meld. But instead of murmuring the door open, he leaned on outstretched arms, bars of virility on both sides of her body, and pressed his hands against it.
So it also had palm-print sensors.
The moment the door opened, she spilled outside as if from a flooding tunnel.
Once she reached the elevator, he called out, “I’ve laid all my cards on the table. It’s your turn.”
Looking over her shoulder, she found him standing on his threshold, long legs planted apart, hands in pockets, the embodiment of magnificence and temptation. And knowing it.
She cursed under her breath. “Yeah, my turn. To tell you what I want. I want you to take your cards and go to a hell even you can’t imagine, where crazy monsters like you belong.”
He threw his head back and laughed.
She’d never heard him laugh before.
Rushing into the elevator to escape the enervating sound, she was still followed by his amusement-soaked question.
“Want me to pick you up from work, or will you finish your vital errand and come back on your own?”
She almost stomped her foot in frustration. The elevator buttons made as much sense as hieroglyphics in her condition.
She smacked every button. “I’ll willingly go to hell first.”
His dark chuckle drenched her again. “The hell for irresistible sirens is the same one for crazy monsters?”
She glowered at him in fuming silence as the elevator doors finally swished smoothly closed.
The moment she could no longer see him, she slumped against the brushed-steel wall...then shot up straight again.
The damn snake must have cameras in here. She’d dissolved all over him all night, and even just now, she wasn’t about to let him see he still messed her up, albeit remotely. She had to hold it together until she was out of his range.
By the time she was in her car, one realization had emerged from the chaos.
She’d never be out of his range. There was no place on earth he couldn’t follow her to if he felt like it. And he’d made it clear that he had nothing else on his mind right now.
There was only one way out of this. To change it for him somehow, before he took one step further into her life. And destroyed everything. Irrevocably this time.
How she would do that, she had absolutely no idea.
* * *
Richard closed the door, stood staring at it as if he could still see Isabella through it.
He could monitor her for real until she exited the building. But he preferred imagining her in his mind’s eye. As she stood there in the elevator, letting go of the act of defiance. As she walked to his private parking area where her car was, every step impeded by the soreness he’d caused her as he’d given her and taken from her unimaginable pleasure. As she drove home in an uproar, furious at him yet reliving their climactic night, her every inch throbbing, needing an encore.
Dropping his forehead against the door he’d sandwiched her against, he could almost feel her every thought and breath mingling with his, melding, tangling, wrestling. Just as her limbs had with his, as her core had yielded to him, and clasped him in a mindless inferno. His body buzzed with exquisite agony as his hardness turned to burning steel.
Pushing away from the door, he discarded his pants as he headed to the pool, his steps picking up speed until he launched himself into the air, arced down to slice into the cool water like a missile.
It was an hour before he’d expended sufficient incendiary energy and centered his thoughts enough to consider the exercise had served its purpose. Pulling himself out of the pool, he sat on its edge, staring through forty-foot-high windows at the sprawling green expanse of Central Park, seeing nothing but Isabella and everything that had happened between them.
So. For the first time in...ever, nothing had gone according to his plan. And he couldn’t be more thrilled about it.
Though he’d known she’d been his only kryptonite, he’d believed she wouldn’t retain any power over him. Even after he’d realized he still coveted her, he hadn’t thought there’d been the slightest danger she’d breach his impenetrable armor.
But every moment with her had been pleasure beyond imagining. Even more indescribable than anything he remembered sharing with her in the past. He now realized his invulnerability had only been the deep freeze he’d plunged into when he’d walked away from her, thinking he’d never have her again. He’d stored everything inside him, starting with his libido, which he’d kept behind barricades of thorns and ice. But mere re-exposure to her had pulverized them as if they were cobwebs, thawed him out as quickly as New York’s summer sun melted an ice cube.
He’d tried to fool himself into thinking he could apply brakes to the desire that had overtaken him. But even as he’d told her he was done, the thought of losing her again had made him want to take it back at once. The utter contempt that had dawned on her face had made him willing to do anything to erase it, to restore the contentment his words had wiped away.
And he had offered everything. Again. Without trying, she’d snared him again. It was a trap he’d eagerly been caught in. She remained the only person who had his secret access code. The one, in spite of every reason on earth against it, he gladly relinquished power to.
Satisfaction spread like wildfire, pulling at his lips as he jumped to his feet and headed for the shower.
Once beneath the pummeling water, he closed his eyes and relived his nightlong possession of her and her captivation of him. Next time, this was where he’d end their intimacies, soothing and refreshing her before he let her leave him. He certainly wouldn’t end another climactic night together by doing his best to alienate her.
After his contradictory behavior, she’d run away screaming monster. Crazy monster, to be exact.
She wouldn’t come back on her own. No matter how much she craved him. As he was now beyond certain she did.
So he had to pursue her. But he predicted that the harder he did, the more she’d push him away. He had no problem with that. It would only make the hunt that much more intoxicating.
He would have her at his mercy and that of the unstoppable passion they shared. This time, he wouldn’t let her go before he was glutted. If he couldn’t be, then he wasn’t letting her go at all.
Exiting the shower, he stood in front of the floor-length mirror, grimacing his displeasure with his too-short hair.
She’d loved it when it had been longer. He’d woken so many times still feeling her clinging to it as he’d ridden her, or combing through it languorously in blissful aftermaths. It had been why he’d kept it razed, thinking it would abort the phantom sensations. Not that it had.
Deciding to grow it out, he took extra care with his grooming, but didn
’t shave so he wouldn’t have a stubble by the time he saw her again. It had driven her out of her mind when his whiskers had burned her during sex. But she’d always complained afterward that he’d sandpapered her. When he hadn’t been able to meet her smooth-shaven as he had last night, he’d learned how to handle his facial hair to keep the pro of pleasuring her without the con of scraping her sensitive skin raw. By tonight, when he had her again, his current stubble would be the perfect length to give her the stimulation without the abrasion.
After dressing in clothes she’d love, he called Murdock.
As always, he answered on the second ring. “Sir.”
“I need to get into Dr. Sandoval’s home.”
“Sir?”
Annoyed that Murdock’s response wasn’t a straight “Yes, sir,” he frowned. “I want to prepare a surprise for her.”
After a beat, Murdock said, “You didn’t read my report.”
Suddenly, Richard was at the end of his tether. He was unable to bear a hint of obstacle or delay when it came to Isabella. “What is it with you and your fixation on that bloody report, Murdock? Did you even hear what I said?”
“Indeed, sir. But if you’d read my report, you would have known it wouldn’t be wise to break into Dr. Sandoval’s home.”
“Why the bloody hell not?”
“Because her family is in there.”
* * *
Two hours later Richard was driving through Isabella’s neighborhood, a sense of déjà vu overwhelming him.
He hadn’t even known such a place existed in New York. But there it was—Forest Hills Gardens, what looked like a quaint English village transplanted into the heart of Queens.
A private, tucked-away community within the Forest Hills neighborhood, it was based on the model of garden communities in England. Its streets were open to the public, but street parking was reserved for the residents of the elegant Tudor and Colonial single-family homes that flaunted towers, spires, fancy brickwork and red-tiled clay roofs. Wrought iron streetlights inspired by Old English lanterns lined the block, while the curving street grid was lined with London plane and white ash trees.